In print | November 2, 2006

To the Editor:

As a gay rights activist and a queer person, I find the overtly sexual (some would say pornographic) chalkings done for Coming Out Week on Sunday and in years past to be offensive and counterproductive. There are several thoughtful or witty and non-offensive chalkings to be found, but the majority of them are concerned solely with sex. They seem to suggest that the chief concern of queer people is to be sexual in an incredibly public way. The sexual chalkings don’t address issues of religious or legal acceptance, alienation or suicide of queer teens or any number of other issues that would be appropriate to raise during Coming Out Week.

Before I came to Swarthmore I lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with one of the largest Christian ex-gay “treatment centers” less than 15 miles from my house. Although I went to my fair share of risqué drag shows at a youth center for queer and questioning youth, I also worked with other teens starting Gay-straight Alliances at their high school or confronting religious bodies about their hurtful and harmful beliefs about GLBTQ people. Many of the other teens I worked with had to worry about being thrown out of their house by their parents, or getting kicked out of their church or getting beaten up at school. And for us having lots of sex or being very public about the sex we had was the last issue on our mind. We wanted to be accepted as human beings irrespective of the form our love took.

The most common prejudice that I encountered while doing my work in Oklahoma, after the belief that being gay was innately sinful, was that all gay people were hypersexual. Many people were worried about letting their children be around gay people, not because their sexuality was innately bad but because of the way gay people expressed their sexuality. These chalkings just reinforce that common misconception.

I know that many of the events of Coming Out Week touched on important issues facing the queer community, although I find it sad and troubling that all of these issues (and events) are overshadowed by people forgetting the real problems facing the queer community while choosing to emphasize a small part of many queer people’s identities: graphic descriptions or representations of the sex we have.

Mark Kharas ’08

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