Coming Out Day: Celebration and Support

When Middle School humanities teacher Melissa Dolan ’98 addressed the student body on Coming Out Day in October, she did something that, by her own admission, was “counterintuitive.”
Her speech, she said, was “directed towards those of you in the audience who identify as heterosexual, who might wonder what exactly this day has to do with you. My response to that question is: everything. This day has everything to do with you.”

National Coming Out Day is an initiative of the Human Rights Campaign. Launched in 1988, it is an awareness day that celebrates and supports coming out and living authentically as an LGBTQ person.

As a Rivers alumna and teacher who came out as gay after high school, Dolan has a special perspective on Coming Out Day. Before realizing she was gay, she told the audience, she was a participant in the casual homophobia that was part of teen culture, at Rivers and elsewhere.

Then an incident happened during her junior year. A few teammates had peppered a coach with personal questions as they traveled to campus in a school van. “Eventually,” Dolan recounted, “someone asked the coach if she had a boyfriend. The coach paused for a minute and then, just before the bus pulled up in front of Haff, answered, ‘Actually, I have a girlfriend.’ ”

“The coach then drove away,” Dolan said, “leaving the four of us to pick our jaws up off the ground and to process what had just happened. I think it’s important to note that in this moment, there were no teachers or adults around. My teammates didn’t know I was gay. What they were about to say was going to be a completely unfiltered response. And I knew that what they said next could be pretty brutal. It would have been so easy for them to have said, ‘Wow, that was weird.’ Or ‘Gross.’ Or worse. But the first person to speak up said, ‘OK. That’s cool.’ Someone else said something along the lines of, ‘I’m glad she told us that.’ And that was that. My teammates then went about the rest of their day.”

For Dolan, the moment was life-changing. “Right as I was making sense of my own identity and knowing that it came with uncertainty and risk, one of my peer groups—a group with a lot of social power on campus—had, without even knowing it, made me feel safe here.”

In one of life’s odd parallels, 11 years later, Dolan—now a Rivers faculty member—found herself the object of student curiosity, after she got engaged. The sudden appearance of a ring did not go unnoticed, and soon Middle Schoolers were asking about the wedding, her dress, and the identity of the “lucky guy.” That’s when Dolan decided to tell her students that she was marrying a woman. There was a freighted moment of awkward silence before one student recovered herself enough to say, “Sooo…what kind of cake are you having?”

The response worried Dolan, until her next advisory meeting. “Two advisees brought in a cake for the group to celebrate my engagement. In some ways, that is such an ordinary, everyday thing to do—celebrate someone’s engagement—but in this context, I found their gesture to be profoundly moving. They also taught me something that I’ve carried with me ever since. … I learned that coming out requires a leap of faith—and that sometimes you do need to have a little more faith that people will support you.” Hence, the message of Coming Out Day applies as much to heterosexual people as to those who identify as LGBTQ: Creating a safe and welcoming community is the responsibility of all.

Dolan’s speech was met with lengthy and enthusiastic applause. The student leaders of GSA, the organization behind the assembly, were pleased that Dolan chose to tell her story in front of the school. “I think it showed immense courage,” says Lucy Ton That ’22, adding, “There’s been great progress since she was a student at Rivers, but there are also things to work toward.”

“Ms. Dolan’s speech was super-powerful,” says Finn McCusker ’22. But he agrees that while much has changed since Dolan attended Rivers, some things have not; homophobic locker-room taunts, he notes, have not vanished from campus.

Both student leaders say that this year’s assembly seemed different from those of previous years. Says Ton That, “I felt a change this year. The energy in the room seemed different. There’s always a tension when there’s an assembly about something serious. But it felt easier and calmer, with fewer eyerolls.”

Dolan said later that though society is generally more supportive of the LGBTQ community, Coming Out Day continues to be important, 31 years on. “An LGBT individual never truly knows how a loved one will react until the moment that it becomes real,” she says. “And even as society becomes more welcoming, there is still a significant amount of discrimination and violence directed toward members of the LGBTQ+ community.”

Says Ton That, “Coming Out Day serves to show people they have a community of people with shared experiences and a community that supports them. It’s a day to honor those whose bravery forged the way and to celebrate our differences.”
Back
333 Winter Street Weston, MA 02493
P: 781.235.9300 F: 781.239.3614