Around the country, communities of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender individuals are marking today as National Coming Out Day.
But they are also marking another date -- the one-month anniversary of the deadly terrorist attacks in New York and Washington -- and are struggling to reconcile the celebratory with the somber.
The Human Rights Campaign, a political activist group for sexual minorities that runs National Coming Out Day, decided not to hold the national event on Oct. 11 as it usually does.
At Penn, the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Center will not hold a rally or vigil today as it has done in the past, though that decision was also impacted by an overflow of October activities celebrating Queer History Month.
"The decision not to hold a rally was partly impacted by that, but also by the volume of other things that are being done tomorrow and throughout the month," LGBT Center Director Bob Schoenberg said.
"In a way similar to the way NCOD was impacted three years ago by the brutal attacks on Matthew Shepard, it's being affected this year by the month's anniversary," Schoenberg added.
National Coming Out Day was founded in 1988 to commemorate the march on Washington that demanded equality for sexual minorities. The 1998 murder of University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard because of his sexual orientation, which occurred the day after NCOD, has sparked the inclusion of vigils during the day.
