Students Promote Coming Out Day

Celebrating visibility and openness about sexual orientation in the gay community on National Coming Out Day, the Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender and Supporters' Alliance (BGLTSA) will canvas the campus with posters today and hand out information and materials.

To publicize National Coming Out Day, BGLTSA will hand out flyers, stickers, pins and condoms in front of Widener from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and in dining halls during dinner hours.

BGLTSA Co-chair Michael K. T. Tan '01 emphasizes that today's celebration is one of "queer life and queer visibility."

At the tables in the Houses, in Annenberg and in the Yard, students will hand out information on BGLTSA and resources on coming out at Harvard.

The group will also hand out signs reading "BGLT Safe Space" that are designed to be placed on dorm room doors, an act in response to homophobic vandalism in Mather, Winthrop and Adams last month. Those events also prompted BGLTSA to start tabling in the Houses this year on National Coming Out Day.

The group will also put up posters made by their members and supporters last week. The group provided the materials and let individuals who participated create any kind of poster they chose.

BGLTSA Treasurer Jeffrey P. Morgan '02 said that some of the posters "may be a little more controversial that we'd like."

But not all posters are so contentious, according to Tan. One such poster states simply, "Closets are for Clothes."

"They [the posters] are representative of the very, very broad political view of gay people in the BGLT population at Harvard," Tan said.