By Jordan Varney
DAVIS — This weekend, local LGBTQ candidates and student leaders hosted Out, Proud, & Leading: A National Coming Out Day Conversation, where they told their coming out stories, discussed their joy at being able to be out and also pushback and harassment they have experienced on their journeys.
Dillan Horton, Davis City Council candidate for District 2, hosted the event with panelists Linda Deos, Yolo County Board of Supervisors candidate, Yesenia Valencia, Director of Finance for Davis College Democrats and Chris McGann from the Davis LGBTQ+ Youth Group.
At the beginning of the event, Horton explained the three stages of coming out, “You start off coming out to yourself,” then “close friends and family, people who you are interacting with on a regular basis” and lastly “there’s this complicated last stage of coming out where you are out on a daily basis to people who you don’t even know.
“You’re out at the grocery store, you’re out walking down the street, you’re out when you’re going to pick up some new tires for the car,” he said. “And that visibility and representation in the community, normalizing us, hopefully gradually reduces and eventually eliminates the homophobia, transphobia, all of the bigotry that our community has faced for many generations, really too long.”
When telling his coming out story, Horton mentioned the impact a fellow queer student had on him.
“There is a person who I think will still never really know the degree of impact that he had on my life,” Horton said, highlighting the importance of representation not just to normalize LGBTQ existence for non-queer people but also for queer people who are at different stages of their journey.
The student Horton mentioned came out while on a high school trip with Horton and “that experience there was one of the most impactful I had had.” When Horton eventually was ready to come out, he met up with the student and over the course of a long conversation, came out to him. 
Horton said he was ready at that moment in time to “stop paying attention to the sort of ridiculous stereotypes or preconceived notions that other people would have about me” and “try my best to live honestly as myself in all areas of my life going forward.”
In her coming out story, Deos discussed the impact that discrimination had on her mental health. On her 15th birthday, Harvey Milk, former, openly gay member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, was assassinated.
“That put me way back,” she said. “Any of those inklings I had I was like ‘oh shit,’ people get killed over this.” When she moved to California for college, Deos felt similarly to Horton in that she could get away from “expectations from family and friends that you grew up with” and she could “reinvent yourself.”
After college, Deos was on the path to becoming a foreign diplomat. “I had lived abroad… learned German, learned Turkish…I get in, passed the test.” One of the final questions the interviewers during her foreign diplomat application process asked her was if she ever had any homosexual tendencies.
Deos replied, “Yep, I’ve got a girlfriend,” and, “The next thing was ‘there’s the door.’” Deos described in the aftermath how she was “really hurt by that, how my country and how people responded to me.” She “contemplated not seeing the next day.” Deos got through that period with “good friends and counseling.”
The students compared and contrasted their coming out stories with Deos’. Valencia mentioned in her family, “There would be a movie on TV and two girls would kiss, my mom would be like ‘close your eyes’…and when a man and woman kissed no you don’t have to close your eyes.” McGann mentioned that he was adopted by his two moms and is growing up in a “very LGBTQ friendly family” which is “probably different from a lot of people.”
A commenter asked the panel to discuss intersectionality in the queer community. Horton responded, “There’s this idea that persecuted communities understand what being persecuted is like so they won’t persecute other communities and if you dig a little bit into this it is obviously untrue.” Horton mentioned racism and anti-Blackness as issues he has experienced in the queer community.
Deos mentioned the privilege she has being white and cisgender. She also described experiencing misogyny from gay men and that the AIDS crisis when “we [the lesbian community] were the caretakers and stepping up to take care of folks, that was the first time that really broke down many of the barriers between our communities.” Deos noted the positive changes that have happened over time, “I really applaud how much we work together now.”
Valencia talked about being a gay woman of color and being marginalized in multiple ways. “In every aspect I have other people making decisions for me and about me,” she said, “and that’s something I’m going to have to grapple with for a long time.”
She talked about her presentation in terms of the femme to butch scale and that, “a lot of the spaces I don’t look like I belong there…it’s unfortunate but it’s what a lot of femme presenting gay women deal with.” Valencia summed up her thoughts by saying, “We have come a long way as a society in accepting sexuality but there’s still so much progress to be made.”
Horton talked about homophobia that can be present in African-American communities and racism in the white queer community saying, “I heard this experience reflected in a lot of other queer people of color in just not feeling welcome anywhere.”
The last question of the event was about impactful media and figures during the panelists’ coming out processes. Horton talked about watching a video of queer employees at Pixar as part of the It Gets Better project and that “there’s just something about being a young person contemplating coming out and seeing middle aged queer people saying ‘hey I did it and I’m not dead…’ that just sort of helps you move forward.”
Horton ended the event by saying that everyone should “be aware of how big of an impact they can have in someone’s life. That joke you think is casual, it’s not, someone is listening.” He also stated, “this is such a great moment in queer life for us to celebrate as a community…this is us deciding that there’s nothing wrong with who we are.”
The Trevor Project has a 24 hour hotline service for those struggling with self-harm or suicide. They can be reached at 1-866-488-7386.
Support our work – to become a sustaining at $5 – $10- $25 per month hit the link:
Remember, as we learned from the ACB SCOTUS confirmation hearings the term “sexual preference” is now considered offensive.
Cool that ACB doesn’t like the term… shouldn’t matter in terms of Constitutional Law… progress… particularly from a ‘conservative’ perspective…
Obviously you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Nor, do you, obviously…
What’s this “we”
Okay David, how do you feel about the use of the term “sexual preference”?
I think it is not an accurate term and considered offensive by many in various LGBTQ communities. The term that has been used at least since the 80s (and probably before) is sexual orientation meaning: “An inherent or immutable enduring emotional, romantic or sexual attraction to other people.” Preference suggests conscientious choice, whereas in my understanding, orientation is a trait present at birth or developed through trauma-based responses to environmental factors.
After a few Democrat Senators tried to slam ACB for using the term I saw a video on the news last night of Biden using the term in several clips.
I appreciate that Dillan especially discussed the jerkiness that exists between groups. So true that even those who are treated poorly can also be people that treat others poorly. Also was eye-opening that ‘coming out’ is still a ‘thing’. I realized that I had subconsciously assumed that being gay in California had become so normalized that it wasn’t really a big deal these days, but clearly ‘coming out’ has deep emotional meaning to those experiencing it.