LGBTQ Coming Out Stories

These are a collection of coming-out stories shared by members of the MVCC community.
https://www.mvcc.edu/lgbtq/coming-out-stories/index.php

The Fourth Leg

The Fourth Leg is a collection of personal stories written by somewhere around 300 students from thirteen different sections of Erin Severs’ Ideas and Values in Literature course spread across five different semesters. There are currently five editions of this little in-house publication. Students wrote these stories as an assignment responding to The Freedom Writers Diary: How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them. It was particularly inspired by the following quote from the Epilogue of the book:

The Freedom Writers see this book as the third leg of a relay race. Anne’s [Anne Frank: The Diary of Young Girl] inspired Zlata [Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Wartime Sarajevo] who has been hailed as the modern-day, Anne Frank. Zlata then reciprocated by passing the baton to the Freedom Writers. We hope this book will inspire you to be the fourth leg of the race by encouraging you to pick up a pen and be a catalyst for change.

These stories are the voices of our community and cover a wide breadth of topics including immigration, study habits, domestic violence, racism, LGBTQ issues, entrepreneurship, a wide variety of professional goals, discrimination, assault, cultural traditions, abuse, addiction, the education system, alcoholism, a wide variety of accomplishments, anxiety, religious belief, finding employment, poverty, a wide variety of medical issues, bullying, being a refugee, war, PTSD, the criminal justice system, becoming an adult, pregnancy, divorce, mental illness, family, and so much more.

The Fourth Leg (anthology)

As an aside about The Fourth Leg, there was a class “Topics in Humanities (HU292): The Voices of MVCC” I ran in the fall of 2020 which focused on reading, discussing, arranging, and editing these five editions to create a collection for which we plan to seek publication. This is a very exciting project and one which Erin Gruwell (author of The Freedom Writers Diary) is supportive of. She visited our class twice, and she will be writing a Preface for our book which will be titled The Fourth Leg: Voices of MVCC. When this collection is published (and I am confident that with Erin Gruwell’s help, this will happen here in the next few years), the 300+ student contributors and the participants in this class (my editing team) will all be published, authors!

Faculty and Student Stories

This is a space where members of the MVCC Community can share their experiences regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion (including experiences where these important ideas are not celebrated or respected). If you would like to publish your experience, please email it to Erin Severs (esevers@mvcc.edu). Stories can be published anonymously or with your name - just let me know. This Resource Room has a lot of great materials, and we’d love to include your experiences as part of them!

Submission Form

College Disclaimer:

Stories published here are representative of the individuals who wrote them and not the college as a whole. Also, all submissions will be reviewed for appropriateness and revised/proofread for effectiveness and grammatical correctness. This process will be a team effort between Erin Severs and the contributor.

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