This Short Series About Coming Out Is Adorable

Carolyn’s Team Pick:

Hey! Do you want to talk about femme visibility and queerness? You should watch this video:

Also she met her first girlfriend at camp, just like Dana. Here’s the transcript:

“I think to me, coming to an identity as a femme queer was a bit of a process. When I first came out I came out into a scene that really valourized masculinity and so I felt like in order to be recognized as a queer person I had to cut my hair short and dress in this particular way in order to be visible to other queer people and also to be visible as a queer person in this hetero world. There were a couple of significant female role models in my life. One was a camp counsellor I had. She was a few years older than me, and ended up being my first girlfriend, but she was extremely unapologetic and unconcerned about hat people thought of her. She sort of pushed me out and refused to let me apologize for who I was.”

The video is part of a series by Pride Toronto and Google+, and the music is somewhat adorably by Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields. There is also a video about what it was like to be gay in the military and have your kids find your book of “wrestling clippings” and encourage you to come out, which sounds sort of sweet:

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Ryan Yates

Ryan Yates was the NSFW Editor (2013–2018) and Literary Editor for Autostraddle.com, with bylines in Nylon, Refinery29, The Toast, Bitch, The Daily Beast, Jezebel, and elsewhere. They live in Los Angeles and also on twitter and instagram.

Ryan has written 1142 articles for us.

12 Comments

    • I also have this question. When google first put it out everybody apparently thought it was the death of facebook, but I don’t think it ever actually took off… isn’t it a wasteland?

  5. These are wonderful. And I really love Stephen Merrit, so it’s great on many levels.

  6. This whole pride business makes me sad. Pride Parade in my city was today and I didn’t go and I can’t decide if I should have or not. I’m just so sick of doing everything with straight friends. I mean they try, but they don’t understand anything about what its like to be gay.

  8. WHAT. whoa. okay that first one is me – no lie. but for the record i did not actually date my camp counsellor! it was edited weird. but i have dated other camp counsellors. so.

    wahh i’m actually really excited that this showed up on autostraddle. heeee.

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