Dan Fishback: Break down the doors, and enter reality

"Coming out" isn't what it used to be. It used to be a high-society event -- rich girls would "come out" at debutante balls, making grand entrances into their elite social world. Gay men liked the idea, so, in the early 20th century, they started throwing enormous drag balls, leading around newcomers like upper-class damsels. In the words of historian George Chauncey, they "did not speak of coming out of what we call the `gay closet' but rather of coming out into what they called... the `gay world.'"

But there is no more "gay world." There is a community, yes, but it's part of the real world now. Now, if people come out "into" anything, they come out into reality.

And that's what I like about this week. It's not "Gay Coming Out Week" or "Queer Coming Out Week" -- it's just plain old Coming Out Week. And you don't have to be gay, or bisexual, or transgendered to come out into reality.

I came out of the gay closet when I was 15. I came out of the self-esteem closet when I was 16. Right now, I'm pressed against the door of another closet -- I don't yet know which one, but I will once I'm out of it. And even then, there'll be more doors to break down.

No one is out -- not completely. No one has accepted themselves for all that they are. No one can wrap their mind around their singular, cohesive soul, if such a thing even exists. And that's fine. It's worth the thrill of the out-coming -- to burst through the threshold, spin around and recognize your closet for the first time. To see what a fool you were, thinking you had anything to fear.

There is nothing to fear, honestly. If someone rejects your true self, then hey -- they're part of the closet-door conspiracy in the first place. If they leave, good riddance.

But rejection on that scale is rare for those of us already out of the more severe closets. Most of us are dealing with the more subtle negotiation of personality: How does one act? What does one say? Should I shake his hand? Should I speak up in class? We don't usually think of ourselves as closeted -- just neurotic.

Penn is a generally uptight school. We're all loaded down with expectation, frustration, anticipation, so concerned with being the Successful Penn Student with the Promising Summer Internship, that we find it increasingly difficult to just be ourselves. The anxiety is tangible. It tickles us in lecture halls and manhandles us in seminars. It's the musky pheromone of complacent, closeted living. It's unnecessary, and, in light of recent events, inexcusable.

Coming Out Day is Oct. 11 -- a month after terrorists attacked America. In the past month, we've been looking from the outside in at Afghanistan, at countless closet doors -- closets that stifle all but the faintest traces of self. But those selves are volatile, and Osama bin Laden knows it. He knows that doors are not walls, that padlocks have keys. And for all its numerous flaws, American international presence is the slowly-turning key to unleashing stifled selves all over the world.

When our "don't ask, don't tell" military fires against the Taliban, they are fighting a coming-out war. Any war fought to protect and engender freedom is a battle against closet doors.

So, with human beings already dead in this battle between silence and truth, and with more bloodshed imminent, take a look at the door before you. Are you even trying to break it down? I don't mean to sound maternal, telling you to eat your spinach because children are starving on the other side of the world, but I'd like to point out nonetheless that, across the globe, men are squelching the self-ness we all take for granted.

If we don't break down every door, scrambling closer and closer to reality, then what are we fighting for? To give Afghans the political freedom necessary to become just as complacently closeted as us? If we are going to fight for our way of life, then let's make our way of life worth fighting for.

If we all keep coming out every day, out of little closets and big closets alike, then the out-comings of the future will be more like those of the past. Let's build a society for people to come out into.

Dan Fishback is a junior English major from Olney, Md.

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