A peek into my closet

Tomorrow, Duke celebrates National Coming Out Day with a plaza party and the famous “Love = Love” shirts. It’s also a chance to publicly declare your sexual orientation and gender identity. In order to begin discovering that I'm gay, I had to ask: what is my closet? What did it look like, and what does it look like now? For all of us out there that might be in some way “closeted,” this day is for you.

I want to invite you to take a peek inside my closet. I lived my life as a “closeted gay" for a year and half at Duke. I went to my engineering classes. I went to SLG parties. I made amazing friends and felt like I had a community in Randolph, but I still felt separate, like I was always guarding something. My freshman year, I heard stories about a guy getting punched in the face on the Shooters dance floor for kissing another guy. I heard about another freshman getting “fag” vandalized across his door. I was so terrified of being seen in public with my boyfriend that we spent Valentine’s Day on the floor of the Randolph guest bathroom. Instead of a dining table, we had a toilet. Instead of a bed, we laid on the tile floor. This was the physical manifestation of my closet: sufficient for some activities but definitely not for truly expressing love.

These feelings were real. There are others, both at Duke and in the stories on the news, who experience acute survival threats and fears from coming out of their closets—being financially cut off from parents, banishment and shunning from religious community, being misgendered on a daily basis or being stereotyped and targeted by police. There are many dangerous and painful realities that keep people in closets.

While I consider myself "out," there is definitely still baggage left inside my closet. However, that baggage helps me remember that there are other people out there who are experiencing what I felt on the floor of Randolph’s guest bathroom. For the woman who’s too afraid to explain to the world that she’s asexual. To the boy with the stiletto heels in the back of his dorm room closet. To the closeted queer woman whose parents made it clear that her “coming out” would equate to her “moving out.” To the people that my background as a white, upper-class, cis-male doesn't represent who feel isolated here at Duke. This day is for you.

So for anyone who’s feeling isolated, know that you're not the only one carrying the weight of a closet. I’m writing this article not to add pressure for you to “come out” but to let you know that you’re not alone. To know that I feel for you, even if I have to do it from a distance. You know your closet better than anyone, and while that space might be small, remember that it is yours.

Because for me, I didn’t just walk through one door and magically become “comfortable with myself.” I’m still not completely “comfortable with myself,” but today I want to celebrate the steps I took to get where I am. It was getting myself to say the words “I am gay” into a mirror for the first time. It was telling my parents that they’d hear me say “I do” to a man one day, not a woman. It was watching YouTube “Coming Out” videos on my iPad every night for two years. It was realizing that other queer people came before me, that I wasn’t the only one going through this.

I’m so thankful for my mentors—M.C. Bousquette, Ronnie Wimberly and Matt Barnett to name a few—who were willing to sit down and talk with me, care for me and challenge me. When I would explain that “it's only a small percentage of my identity,” you met me where I was at and posed that our identities aren’t numbers; they’re intersectional works of art that are continually being painted.

I’m thinking now about the moments I've been able to celebrate "the authentic me.” How amazing did it feel to first kiss my boyfriend in public? How free did it feel to dance at Pinhook for the first time, surrounded by some of my best friends? How empowering is it to be able to finally have the words to explain myself to people, without the moment of panic that came every time someone used the word “gay?"