Coming out at the CIT
Intro
A small minority of freshers arrive at the CIT and instantly start or resume living an openly queer lifestyle. Blessed with thick skins, they don’t care what others think and have decided that they have no reason to hide their sexuality. For most of us, however, the decision to come out is less straightforward. Cork is a small city and the CIT is a relatively small college. It’s all too easy to envisage a scenario where coming out leads to being ostracized and ridiculed. Fear of the unknown prevents many students from coming out, but it is a fear which is often unjustified.
Put simply, college is one of the best environments in which to come out,
or experiment with your sexuality. In your lifetime you will probably never
again have the same opportunity to meet such a variety of people in an atmosphere
so conducive to forming friendships. In a climate which is so much more pluralistic
than secondary school, everyone becomes a little more liberal. Chances are
you will also be living away from home, and a world of new possibilities open
up. It’s for all these reasons that many people decide college is the
right time to come out.
Acceptance and Discrimination
But when it comes to peer acceptance, it’s really not possible to speak of the CIT as one institution. Being gay is a hell of a lot easier in some departments than others. If you’re studying design, quite honestly noone will give a fuck. You could go to class in drag and get no more than a few laughs. But if you’re studying mechanical engineering or somesuch ‘macho’ course, you might get a frostier reception, whether you’re male or female. When one CIT mech. eng. student told his class he was gay, only two people in the class of thirty would subsequently talk to him, despite his previous popularity. Blind bigotry is a painful reality in some CIT departments.
Being excluded socially isn’t easy to deal with, but whatever course
you’re doing, there will always be some enlightened folk around. The
LGB Soc can also offer support. If you’re being more actively discriminated
against, however, you don't have to put up with it. The college has anti-discrimination
policies in place, and any anti-gay activity will not be tolerated. If homophobia
becomes a problem contact the Welfare Officer (suwelfare@cit.ie),
who will help you set the wheels of retribution in motion. The offenders may
face suspension or exclusion in extreme cases. Whatever you do, don’t
suffer in silence. Noone has the right to make your college experience an
unhappy one.
Approaches to Coming Out
With these issues in mind, different people decide to come out in different ways. If you’re fully confident that you want to be openly queer, you could simply tell people when you’re introduced, or soon after. A more subtle technique is to just casually mention it in conversation, “Yeah, I went to the Savoy with my boy/girlfriend last night”. If you’re more cautious, wait till you know your new friends a little better, and after you have guaged their likely reactions, you can then tell them. Al opted for another approach: “I never really went around telling everyone - but I've come to the point where if someone asks me if I'm gay, I just say yeah”. However you go about it, remember one thing - once you’ve told a few people, it probably won’t be long until everyone in your class knows. To many there is no juicier form of gossip than the revelation of an acquaintance’s homosexuality.
You might decide that you don’t want to tell your straight friends and classmates, but would like to find some new gay friends. Many, many CIT students are in this position. To pull it off, you'll have to lead something of a double life, but it’s entirely manageable. You can make gay friends through many channels—social groups, the scene, contact sites/magazines—but whichever route you choose, you can be sure there will be plenty of people in the same boat. When the society was active, some CIT students in this position felt the LGB Soc was too close to home and were anxious that classmates would find out if they got involved. For them. the resource groups in town (see the resources page for details) and the UCC LGB Society were often more comfortable options.
A more popular alternative is the gay scene.
A first visit to a gay pub or club is often an occasion fraught with apprehension,
but rest assured that gay venues really don’t differ that much from their
straight counterparts, gay bingo and drag queens notwithstanding. You might
even be a little disappointed at their general mundanity. Rick has this to
say: “When I first went into Loafers, I was expecting pink leopard-print
sofas and nude statues. I couldn't believe how normal it was”.
Staying in the Closet
Having weighed up the options, some decide that coming out isn’t going to work for them, and the closet remains the only conceivable option. Even in this position, it’s still possible to have some contact with the gay world, whether purely sexual or not. This is often achieved through visiting cruising areas, or increasingly through contact websites such as www.gaydar.ie and in the chatrooms of sites like www.gay.com. This lifestyle suits some, but the closet is more frequently a hugely frustrating and unpleasant place to be.
Revealing your true sexual identity is often painful, but staying in the closet is typically worse. Would coming out at college improve the quality of your life? Ultimately, that question can only be answered by you.