HomeAboutProgramsResourcesTrans & NB HubAutism & AuDHDAutism & AuDHDAutism & AuDHDEventsStoriesEducationGet InvolvedContactTeamPride 2026Donate
This Sunday, October 11, is National Coming Out Day, and you’ve probably already seen the rainbow posts starting to pile up. If you’ve wondered whether you’re supposed to be doing something about it, the honest answer is only if you want to. We’d rather say the most important thing first, since it’s the one people need to hear most: you don’t owe anybody a coming out, on Sunday or on any other day. The when and the who of it belong to you and nobody else.
That might sound like a funny way for an LGBTQ+ organization to open a post about this particular day, but it’s the truest thing we know about it. The people who started the day understood it better than anyone, too.
On October 11, 1987, hundreds of thousands of people filled Washington, D.C. for the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, only the second march of its kind. It came in the middle of an AIDS crisis that had already taken tens of thousands of American lives. A year later, on the march’s first anniversary, Robert Eichberg and Jean O’Leary held the very first National Coming Out Day. Eichberg was a psychologist from New Mexico, and O’Leary was a lesbian activist from New York who was running National Gay Rights Advocates out in Los Angeles.
Their idea was simple enough to fit on a button, because they believed prejudice does its best work in silence. People have a much harder time holding onto an ugly idea about gay people, they figured, once they find out they already love one. That idea has held up well enough that the day is still going almost forty years later, and it’s why so many people pick this weekend for the conversation they’ve been putting off.
A few months before that march, over Memorial Day weekend in 1987, Barney Frank told the Boston Globe he was gay. That made him the first member of Congress ever to come out by his own choice. He was forty-seven at the time, and he’d already been in Congress since 1981, so he had plenty to lose and did it anyway.
Frank went on to represent a district that ran from Newton and Brookline all the way down through Taunton, Dighton, Fall River, New Bedford, Dartmouth and Westport. For a whole generation of people around here, that means the openly gay man in Congress was simply their congressman. He kept winning here, election after election, until he retired in 2013. In 2012 he also became the first member of Congress to marry someone of the same sex, when he married Jim Ready.
He died this past May at eighty-six, at his home in Ogunquit, Maine. When he was asked late in life whether there was any part of his career he’d do over, he said he would have come out earlier. His advice to other lawmakers was to do it once they were at that stage, because being able to live “as an integrated human personality” mattered more than anything else. We keep coming back to that phrase, since it says what coming out is actually for better than anything we could write ourselves.
Even the first congressman to come out by choice told people to do it when they were ready, and not a day before.
The Pew Research Center surveyed LGBT adults across the country in 2013 and asked them about these milestones. The typical person said they first felt they might be something other than straight at about twelve, and knew for sure at around seventeen. They first told a family member or close friend at about twenty. That works out to roughly eight years of carrying something around without saying it out loud, and most of those years get spent in a middle school or a high school.
The same survey found that 56 percent had told their mother, while only 39 percent had told their father. Among bisexual adults, just 28 percent said all or most of the important people in their lives knew. When we say people come out on their own clock, then, we’re describing how it actually goes for most of them, which is slowly and in pieces, one person at a time.
The picture most people carry around is one big moment at the kitchen table. For most LGBTQ+ people, though, it’s something you end up doing again with each new job and each new doctor, with landlords, and on intake forms that only have two boxes on them. Every one of those is a fresh decision about whether this particular room is safe, and nobody has the right to make that call for somebody else.
Picture a sixteen-year-old in Fall River who’s out to two friends and to the kids at the After School Diversity Club, and to nobody at home yet, because home isn’t ready, and that kid is doing it exactly right. Then picture a man in Dartmouth in his seventies, out for forty years and widowed last winter, who’s deciding whether to mention his late husband on his first day at an assisted living facility.
AARP asked LGBT adults over forty-five about that exact worry in 2018, and more than six in ten said they feared a long-term care facility might refuse them or limit their care. About a third worried they’d have to hide who they are just to find decent housing. Both of the people in those pictures deserve the same answer from us, which is that they get to decide. Whatever they decide, there’s a place on the South Coast where they won’t have to explain themselves before they’re allowed to sit down.
Chances are good that somebody reading this will be on the receiving end of a coming out this weekend, maybe from a grandkid, a coworker, or the friend you’ve known since second grade, and the first thirty seconds matter more than most people realize.
Start by thanking them, because they just handed you something they’ve probably rehearsed for months. Then ask who else knows, so you don’t accidentally out them to your sister on the drive home. You don’t need the right vocabulary or a full understanding on the spot, and your questions can wait until you’ve done a little reading on your own. That way they aren’t stuck teaching you the basics on the hardest night of their year. Try hard to keep it from turning into a conversation about you, which means no “are you sure,” no “how long have you known,” and no story about your cousin, at least not that night.
It’s worth getting right, because the Trevor Project found that LGBTQ+ young people with at least one accepting adult in their lives were 40 percent less likely to report a suicide attempt in the past year. The bar in that research was a single adult, and on Sunday that adult could easily be you.
If you’re turning this over yourself, whether you’re twelve or seventy, you’re allowed to take as long as you need. You can tell one person and stop there for a while, or wait until you’re somewhere safe, whether that’s a new town or just a door that locks. You can do it the way Barney Frank did, all at once in the newspaper, or tell one friend over coffee and leave it there for a year, and both of those count every bit as much.
If you’re young and you’re reading this on a computer the whole family shares, our website has a Quick Exit button that’ll take you straight off the page. If things at home aren’t safe right now, the Trevor Project answers around the clock at 1-866-488-7386.
The Network doesn’t run a coming-out program, and honestly we don’t think anybody needs one. What we do have is a lot of rooms around the South Coast full of people who’ve already lived some version of this. That runs from the After School Diversity Club for young people to our 60+ programs for the folks who came out back when it could cost you your job. You’re welcome in every one of them, whether you’re out to everybody or to nobody at all.
We leave days and times off our posts on purpose because the schedule changes so often, so check the calendar at sclgbtqnetwork.org/events. You can also call or text us at (774) 775-2656, and somebody will tell you what’s coming up.
Happy National Coming Out Day, whether you’re out to the whole world or still working out what you’d even say, and we’ll be right here on Monday too.