pattayapus said:
wow this is a pretty powerful thread. it's made me think a lot in just a few seconds about what i've made uber-important in my life, and just how not important it is. thanks, guys, i think i really needed that wake-up call.
i'm wondering...i know this will sound really ignorant of me, and i'm sorry, but how much crap and unfairness do LGBTs still get, at least on the East and West coasts? from reading your responses, it seems like a lot...is that what makes coming out hard? i guess i just have a hard time imagining sexuality being any kind of hindering issue at all, coming from the gay capital of the world and all...
First of all, I want to thank everyone for the respectful and supportive responses, and for helping to keep this thread civil and on-topic.
Pattayapus, your question isn't an ignorant one at all, and I'm really glad you asked it. Because overt homophobia and discrimination are (thankfully) becoming less common and less socially acceptable in a lot of places, I think a lot of non-LGBT people have a hard time fully understanding why LGBT people still feel like they face so many challenges.
What makes coming out hard is that it's
never over. Sure, there's THE coming out when you build up the courage to tell your family and friends, but there are a lot of subtle, heteronormative assumptions people make every day that force queer people to make coming-out decisions constantly. These assumptions are often
so subtle that only people excluded by the assumption (i.e. LGBT people) will notice them. For example, as a lesbian who often "passes" as straight (not intentionally), I am regularly asked if I have a boyfriend. I am asked this by friends of my parents, by my hairdresser, by my doctor, by coworkers, by patients with whom I'm making small talk when volunteering in the ER, etc. For a straight female, this question is so normal and innocuous you probably just answer it and move on without a second thought, but for a queer female you have a choice: do I say "no, I don't have a boyfriend" and leave it at that, or do I come out and say "no, I have a girlfriend?" (and if you don't have a girlfriend, the question is even more complicated because you wonder whether you should say "no, I don't have a boyfriend but I wouldn't have one anyway because I'm gay..." which is always an awkward thing to say.) Each time I decide how to answer this totally innocuous question, I have to try to gauge how receptive I think the person will be and whether it's an appropriate situation in which to come out (to touch on another issue raised on this thread, I don't necessarily think it's appropriate to come out to patients in a clinical setting).
I realize this may not sound like the most awful thing in the world -- and it generally isn't. But it is a daily challenge LGBT people face, and it's difficult because you really never know how the person you come out to is going to react. In my experience I've never had anyone react in a way that's outright hostile. But there are still a lot of people who hear the word "gay" and immediately think about what you do in the bedroom. Because
they have made this cognitive leap, they assume
you are trying to flaunt your private sex life in public, and think you're being inappropriate -- or if in a professional setting, unprofessional. They may also think that because you're gay, your life must be so incomprehensibly different from theirs that you can't possibly share common concerns about family, relationships, finding a work/life balance, etc. I think the fear of psychologically alienating a colleague, supervisor, or patient by coming out is particularly anxiety-inducing in medicine, where collegiality and professionalism are so critical to your career.
The reason I'm so glad you asked this question is that it's critically important to have straight allies who will actively contribute to making medicine as open and queer-friendly as possible. It's exhausting for queer people to be the ones who call colleagues out when they make homophobic comments (like Plank mentioned in this post above) or heteronormative assumptions. It also has the potential to look self-serving. Personally, I don't want my future colleagues to think they shouldn't refer to patients using gay slurs because they might offend
me, I want them to think they shouldn't do it because it's categorically not an acceptable thing to do. Having straight allies who are equally willing to work to dispel these attitudes will go a long way.
When I'm in the lab 24/7, I inevitably become de-sexualized, thus I have to go out of my way to make time to keep up with the LGBT-specific political/social acitvities. Same deal in medical school?
