National Coming Out Day Annual Storytime

I'm such a gay old softie. *sniff, sniff* Eleven years ago today, I was already a way-out bidykelet in suburbia, so the real and true outing was the birth of my then-high school's first gay/straight alliance.
Here's the story, which I've been told is recounted in the official Massachusetts 'how to start a gay/straight alliance' handbooks (as cautionary tale or celebratory 'fuck, yeah!' I can't say), and I try to recount every year.
Myself, my Tintin-coiffed dykebestfriend and cohort (no, we never U-Hauled it, never even kissed), and our army of punk rock anime gay boys created a pink triangle for every student in the school, and on the night before National Coming Out Day, we hung them on every locker along with big posters talking about the history of the pink triangle and explaining to students that they could wear a pink triangle in solidarity with our history and our call for rights. (It was 1995, and we were teenagers -- the black triangle for queer women & prostitutes got left out.) Even though we were a very young and very marginalized student organization, and our posters were almost always defaced (with people misspelling 'faggot' as 'faget' and the like) and even with the closeted queer teachers telling us we were nuts for being so brazen as to put the word 'bisexual' on a meeting sign, we somehow got permission to read an announcement during homeroom about gay history, but were told by our principal at the last minute we couldn't, as we mentioned the Holocaust and "since the German exchange students are in town right now, that would upset them."
That's roughly when all hell broke loose.
Some teachers and students, not having any context for the triangles and thinking we meant that every locker beaing a triangle belonged toa queer student, or that all students were queer, were apparently so infuriated that they came out of their homerooms and tore down the triangles. Some students actually used the triangles to assault other students by slapping and punching them with them to get them to stick to their bodies. About 5 minutes after one homeroom teacher took his whole class into the hall with trash cans to rip down every triangle they could, I was already being escorted to the vice principal's office to explain myself.
My boys were getting beat up. My girls were being forced to out themselves (even the rilly girly AP-types, who always showed up as 'allies' and that was beautiful). My amazing, diplomatic friend/comrade/secretagentloverman at the time gave little moving speeches about how 'the Alliance' had taken on 'the Empire' and won.
Won?
School was torn, literally, upside down. Little shreds of pink construction paper littered the floors. Every class was at a standstill, students in a combination uproar/hormone surge.
No one could ignore the homphobia in the school any longer. No one could say 'we don't have any of those people here!'. No teacher or administrator or even parents' group ever denied us the right to meet again. And just a few months later, right before graduation, we were granted permission to hold a mandatory teacher in-service on how to support queer high school students.
Happy anniversary, you little bit of victory in a tiny corner of Massachusetts I am still so fucking proud of all of us for.
What did I do this year? I didn't even get the date-connection, but last night, I was invited to the general Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence meeting to accept a check for St. James Infirmary, and ended up staying for a few more hours, just soaking up all the truly good works done in the name of universal joy (and 'the expiation of stigmatic guilt'). Maybe it was just my glow from really, really good sex lately (as queer as it gets, and my inner fag is pleasantly stroked), but I could not stop from beaming at everyone, never felt so at home in a circle of near-strangers. So as I mused later to the new sweet boy, 'I'm going to be a nun!' it was premature, true.
But, yes, I'll be introduced as an Aspirant officially next month!


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