With no script and no prompts, 12 current and former Penn students volunteered to share their most personal coming-out stories for the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Center’s video, “Closet Confessionals”.
The video’s first segment is slated for release on the LGBT Center’s web site in October, which is also LGBT History Month. It is filmed in the style of a video-diary.
Not all participants self-identified as LGBT — those who didn’t recounted their experiences having LGBT friends and family.
“It was phenomenal to see individuals open up,” said LGBT Center Building Coordinator Ninah Harris, who filmed “Closet Confessionals”.
According to Harris, the videos are particularly geared toward people who are closeted or questioning their sexuality, a population that is “difficult for [the center] to reach out to.”
“We wanted to create a space where people felt that they could share their experiences,” she added.
Engineering senior Matt Feczko, who founded Queer Undergraduates in Engineering, Science and Technology last year and is featured in the video, has talked about coming out many times on various LGBT-related panels. As a result, he said, his story has evolved, but when he was speaking into the camera, he “told it the way [he] had told it the first time, which was kind of emotional.”
“I don’t remember ever having told my story on the same emotional level,” he added.
College junior Jason Goodman, who also participated, said his segment was a “stream of consciousness about what it was like to come out.”
He added that while filming, he wasn’t really thinking about how it was going to be broadcast to campus, but just spoke naturally about coming out.
Goodman and Fezkco both believe the film isn’t a promotional technique aimed to recruit prospective LGBT students, but instead an effort to relate to LGBT or ally communities around the world.
“This is new media that is personal and out there, and people can access it from anywhere,” Goodman said.
College senior Marianne Mondt, a member of Penn’s LGBT community who participated in the project, said she mostly talked about how even though she came out in high school, she didn’t come out at Penn for a long time.
Mondt, who is half-Filipino, said she also discussed racial and religious stereotypes relating to the LGBT community. She explained that it is particularly important for ethnic minorities and religious people to come out in order to break any stereotype that LGBT people are religiously immoral.
“Anyone questioning can, from the privacy of their own computer, listen to what other people went through,” she said, “and understand that they’re not the only ones going through it.”
