How to Come Out: A Syllabus

By Kat Setzer, on October 1st, 2010

The first time I read Stone Butch Blues, a seminal work in gay literature, the writing was so bad I wanted to gouge my eyes out in pain. I’d recently started dating women, and two of my best friends decided to make up a syllabus of lesbian media so I could get caught up on all the gay culture I missed during the first twenty-three years of my life. Purists at heart, they wanted me to read the literature in chronological order, so I had to trudge through pseudo-classics like Stone Butch Blues and Rubyfruit Jungle before being allowed to read novels by, say, Sarah Waters, who managed to be short-listed for the Booker award.

I had just begun my second year of grad school. Coming out so late in the game—after a long-term relationship with a man and numerous other boyfriends over the years—seemed quite different from the coming-out processes of my friends, who all had a pretty strong grasp on their sexual orientation by the age of fourteen. When you’ve already created an identity for yourself, it’s hard to restructure it to include a facet that so many have entirely integrated into their person. I wasn’t going to start visiting lesbian bars or watching gay performance art or taking part in lesbian book clubs if I wasn’t into bars or performance art or book clubs before. Oftentimes, the only unifying factor in the lesbian social groups I saw was the member’s sexual orientation—which left me wondering, if I didn’t explicitly become friends with people because they were straight, why should I explicitly become friends with people because they were gay?

So instead, I just tried to get caught up on the culture. …
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I Loved This Book When…, Part 12: To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

By Kat Setzer, on August 30th, 2010

[A new entry in our "I Loved This Book When..." series will appear every Monday through September. To keep up with this series or any other, check out our Special Features page.]

I loved To Kill a Mockingbird when I was twelve years old. I read it for the same reason most twelve-year-olds do: it’s standard fare in middle-school literature classes. A compelling look at the south pre-Civil-Rights, it focused enough on outsiderness to trick my nerdy twelve-year-old self into believing it was just as interesting as the X-Men comics filling my bookshelves. Because, you know, they were the bar for judgment, not that silly Pulitzer Prize nonsense.

I just plain skipped school for most of seventh grade, feigning migraines to get out of going to the mid-sized North Georgian junior high that I despised. As a result, I was “homeschooled” for eighth, which generally meant my parents left me alone in the house with an Algebra 2 textbook and a mail-order encyclopedia on world history. My father would suggest books for me to read, ranging from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to The Stranger. We didn’t really have a system in place for judging my reading comprehension; instead, my parents, both math types, liked to regale me with stories of their own high school English classes, where they read the first and last chapters of books and nothing else. (Note that I believe these tactics are generally frowned upon by serious homeschoolers.) …
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