For a queer "coming out" is a significant event in one's life. However, it is not just a single event, for one comes out many times in one's life. Coming out thus is an ongoing process during the life-careers of queers. Below is pictured a tattoo Dr. Suppe got in 1995 to celebrate 32 years of comings out.
The tattoo was unveiled publicly on National Coming-Out Day, October 11, 1995. On that day Dr. Suppe sent a message to subscribers to his "Gay & Lesbian Philosophy" course Listserv:
Coming out is a major (recurring) event in the lives of Queer people, and today we celebrate the importance of "Coming Out" and of our Visibility by, of all things, "Coming Out" even more than normally.As I shared with you in class yesterday, coming out can be risky, traumatic, dangerous - and profoundly rewarding. I have no regrets about any of my comings out. The costs have been more than compensated for by the chance to discover and be whom I am. I came out as a gay 32 years ago, and out as an openly gay academic 26 years ago. I taught the first gay studies course on this campus about 21 years ago. There have been other comings out - coming to accept a preference for promiscuous sex and non-eclusive lover relationships, as a Leatherfag, to family, to the UMCP community in a half-page Diamondback column pleading for Human Relations Code protection on Campus years before that dream became a reality, on the national arena debating the head of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM III) "Statistics & Nomenclature Committee" over its biased diagneses of sexual disorders including ego-dystonic homosexuality, being on the first-ever session on homosexuality research at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (America's largest scientific association), as a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Homosexuality, starting the first CORE Diversity course on queers (our course) and the attendant commitment to spend part of my professional life in Queer Studies, as a sexually active practicing Gay Catholic, coming to accept and embrace some of the kinkier aspects of my queer sexuality, recovering from a failed 20 year lover relationship and relearning how to be in a trusting gay relationship and finding a wonderful 21 year-old man to do it with and helping him along the paths of his many comings out and joining with him in them, [and subsequently moving on to another relationship].
The most important episodes in my life, both personally and publicly, are connected with coming out episodes. All in all it has been a very happy and rewarding life - in large part because I had the courage to come out when it was the authentic, self-affirming thing to do.
On my left arm I have a large tattoo [shown above] that commemorates all my various queer comings out. It serves to remind me that coming out is a perminant part of my life, and to mark me perminantly as queer so that I never can go back in the closet. I had it inked three and a half weeks ago so that I could wear it proudly today on National Coming Out Day.
. . . . .
Fred Suppe
To Learn more about my "Comings Out" tattoo and its sources, click here.
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