We are concerned about what messages the illustration accompanying Chris Bell’s guest column in Wednesday’s Daily Orange (Oct. 8th) sends students of the SU/ESF community about the LBGT community and feel compelled to offer some perspectives. The illustration doesn’t sit well. It paints a picture of the coming out process as something ‘easy’ and as a finite, definite thing.

In reality, this process is often filled with turmoil, stress, fear and uncertainty for many LGBT folks, who in fact must replicate and repeat this process over and over again in the presence of co-workers, friends and family members, or perhaps not at all as the case may be.

The illustration also does not expose the many reasons why members of the LGBT community don’t come out of the closet in the first place, the rampant heterosexist, homophobic attitudes many on this campus and in the broader context of society choose to carry out on a daily basis, with phrases like ‘that’s so gay,’ ‘you’re a fag,’ and the seemingly catch-all, ‘no homo,’ when a heterosexual man feels compelled to point out after an action (‘outside of the masculine norm,’ such as a hug given to another man,) that he’s still a straight, dominant, masculine guy; lest you confuse him with someone he deems inferior, an LGBT man.

The fact that many young male, female and trans students ‘come out’ of the closet in a societal environment where the ‘average high-school student hears an anti-gay slur over 25 times daily’ (‘Gay Slurs Abound,’ The Des Moines Register, March 7, 1997) should not be taken lightly and portrayed in a patronizing manner in which The Daily Orange chose to with the illustration.

Furthermore, by choosing, whether intentionally or not, to have the students portrayed as LGBT in the cartoon to have ‘light skinned, white defining features,’ the illustration serves to categorize LGBT identity as analogous to being a white, European American, a trend that continues in nationwide media, where 79 percent of the over 600 LGBT characters portrayed on the 2008-2009 broadcast television scheduled show lineup are cast as white.

The illustration also does not represent a person who can be identified or perceived through the umbrella of transgender, gender neutral or gender non-conforming. Next time, the gender of one of the characters should be presented androgynously. The LGBT community on this campus is incredibly diverse, and this illustration fails to do justice to that fact.

While intent is no excuse for ignorance, The Daily Orange would better serve its audience by becoming more aware of the critical and social issues it covers, particularly those within the LGBT community, and consider if their material contributes to perpetuating heterosexism within our campus community at large.

Alexander Vessels, Junior, Communications and Rhetorical Studies majorJacob Bartholomew, Masters Student, Cultural Foundations of Education

Published on October 12, 2008 at 12:00 pm