Opinion Piece, IDAHOBIT: Coming Out, Student Leadership, and the Cost of Belonging
Opinion piece
I am gay.
It still feels strange to write that as plainly as the weather. For a long time it was the one sentence I kept folded up and out of sight. Today, on IDAHOBIT — the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia, marked every 17 May — I want to say it in the open, and talk honestly about what it has cost me and what it has given me.
Monument Valley
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IDAHOBIT marks the day in 1990 the World Health Organization stopped classifying homosexuality as a mental illness. That is not ancient history. It sits well within my lifetime.
For me the day is not about flags or hashtags. It is about the quiet maths a lot of LGBTQIA+ people run every day — who is safe to tell, which room to read first, what to leave unsaid. Visibility days matter because they shrink that maths, even just for a day, and remind people they are not doing it alone.
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I have spent a fair bit of my time as a student in leadership roles. From the outside that probably looked confident. The truth is you can be organising events, chairing meetings and representing hundreds of people while still scanning the room to work out whether you can be yourself in it.
That is the part people rarely see — the energy it takes to lead and to self-edit at the same time. To carry the work and the wondering. Belonging is not just being in the room. It is being able to stop bracing once you are there.
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Homophobia is not always loud.
Sometimes it is a slur. Sometimes it is a joke you are expected to laugh along with. Sometimes it is silence where support should have been. Sometimes it is exclusion dressed up as politeness. Sometimes it is the small recalibration you make in your own voice before you have even noticed you are doing it.
The loud kind is easy to name. It is the quiet kind that wears you down, because it asks you to question whether you really felt what you know you felt.
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Student leadership comes with hard interpersonal and institutional dynamics. I carried some of that myself, and I think it is worth naming honestly rather than tidying away.
You are expected to be professional, calm and diplomatic — but you are also still a student. That balance gets harder when the people you are navigating also hold influence over your work, your opportunities and your sense of belonging.
That power gap matters. It shapes who feels safe to speak, whose concerns get heard fairly, and whether someone who raises a problem is met with support or treated as the problem for raising it.
Real inclusion is not only whether people say they value diversity. It is whether people can be honest without fear of retaliation or reputational cost — and whether the person already carrying the most pressure is not also the one expected to stay quiet to keep the peace.
That is the culture worth building.
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If you are LGBTQIA+ and finding your feet in study or leadership: you do not have to earn your place by being easy to be around. You are allowed to take up space, set boundaries and ask for things to be better.
And if you are an ally, the most useful thing you can do is make it ordinary. Normal to be out. Normal to raise a concern. Normal to be believed. Inclusion lives in those everyday moments far more than in any statement.
Stonewall, New York
A Note to Close
Coming out is not one dramatic scene. It is a series of small decisions to stop hiding, made over and over, in rooms that do not always make it easy.
Sometimes it is about safety. Sometimes it is about honesty. And sometimes it is simply about finally making room for the parts of yourself you were once made to hide.
To anyone running that quiet maths today: I see you, and you are not doing it alone.
I got you. We all got you. 🌈
