The untold story behind the first National Coming Out Day

Coming home to West Hollywood in late 1988 after Wallis Annenberg ended our two-year affair was both a relief at no longer being constrained by Beverly Hills expectations and frightening since I was virtually homeless.

Sitting alone with my coffee at the French Market Place counter, I suddenly felt tags of friendship and offers to “come join us” as a wave of 12-steppers poured through the doors, laughing, jostling, weaving like schools of curious fish enjoying the swim.

I felt too embarrassed, too shell-shocked to respond. And then Craig Hume, a fellow journalist, asked in his always polite way if I needed anything. He had an extra bedroom.

Craig saved my life that day. He gave me the space, time and kindness to fall apart and find my new footing. Out of the blue, WeHo City Councilmember John Heilman asked me to cohost a cable show called Out & About: Lesbian and Gay West Hollywood for their new city channel.

That sounded great. But there was a hitch: I was still in the closet. No one else thought I was. I didn’t understand the “glass closet” concept. I thought I was just a leftover “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll” hippie.

I woke up when my childhood friend Chris Schott called. For decades his father was an Air Force major general to my father’s colonel. His parents were my godparents and everyone — except us — thought we’d get married one day.

Chris SchorrKaren Ocamb

We chuckled when we found out we were both gay.

But Chris called now because he was afraid. He was a public administrator in Santa Barbara and deeply ashamed that he was closeted in a bad gay domestic violence relationship —and he had AIDS.

I tried to help. But he was stuck.

One day I got a call from Cedars-Sinai Hospital — I was Chris’s emergency contact. He was in the ICU, beaten up and clinging to life. I told them that he had AIDS but they already knew. I rushed to see him. He was unconscious, hooked up to everything. The nurse told me to contact his family fast.

Maj. Gen. Wesley Schott and my godmother were living at March Air Force Base in Riverside, California. My mother quaked when Aunt Bobbie came over wearing white gloves and casually wiped a finger over the top of a lampshade.

I didn’t know what to expect. Neither of our mothers were brimming with compassion.

I told Aunt Bobbie to sit down. “Chris is gay and he’s dying of AIDS. You need to go to Cedars right now and tell him you love him before it’s too late.”

She collapsed. In the frazzled silence, I met my moment. AIDS had outed my friend. I had no integrity if I cowardly let him take her wrath alone. “I’m gay too,” I said with modest force. She already knew.

She told me to meet her at Cedars. I went home to call my mother.

This was the call I’d driven 2,776 miles to avoid. I didn’t want to lose my family. But that’s what happened. I told her about Chris — then I came out. She couldn’t handle it and hung up. I went to Cedars to be with Chris and help Aunt Bobbie say goodbye. I made her tell Chris she loved him.

I didn’t go to Chris’s funeral, if there was one. When Uncle Wes died, Chris was not in his obit. My mother and I separated long before she died.

I was on my own. But after several 12-step meetings, I recognized and became grateful for this gift of having a “family of choice.”

I accepted the cable show offer and started learning everything I could. It was during the cable show that I met Frontiers publisher Bob Craig and started freelancing for the “gay press.” The second wave of AIDS was exploding and it seemed the best way I could contribute was by getting back into journalism.

From left: Richard Rouillard, Jackie Collins, and Barry KrostKaren Ocamb

I met Jean O’Leary through Richard Rouillard, editor in chief of The Advocate. Richard was wickedly smart, incredibly connected, and brazenly gay. He’d come to The Advocate from the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, where he was the Style section editor and sometimes wrote under the pen name “Bunny Mars.”

Richard knew Jean through National Gay Rights Advocates in San Francisco, which he cofounded in 1979 to fight gay rights cases through impact litigation. Jean had been the longtime executive director.

Related: 17 Women Who Changed the Course of LGBTQ+ History

From left: Tammy Baldwin and Jean O’LearyKaren Ocamb

When I met her, Jean already had a storied history of activism. She was a fixture in Democratic Party politics and was co-executive director of the National Gay Task Force with Bruce Voeller.

It was during that time that she used her clandestine relationship with Midge Costanza — the first female director of the Office of Public Liaison, in President Jimmy Carter’s White House — to hold a three-hour policy conference with 12 selected gay and lesbian leaders inside the White House on March 26, 1977.

“So we chose 12 issue areas that we thought would be pertinent to White House action and that they could help us with in some way or another. And then I called up 12 leaders around the country and asked them to prepare white papers on everything from immigration to the Civil Rights Commission to prisons, Federal Bureau of Prisons. We flew everybody in,” Jean told gay journalist Eric Marcus for his excellent Making Gay History podcast.

Famous 1977 White House meeting, clockwise from center: Midge Costanza, Robert Maulsom, Jean O’Leary, William Kelley, Betty Powell, Charles Brydon, Charlotte Spitzer, Myra Riddell, Cooki Lutkefedder, Ray Hartman, Pokey Anderson, George Raya, Frank Kameny, Rev. Troy Perry, Charlotte Bunch, Elaine Noble, Bruce Voeller, and Marilyn Haft.

Jean and Midge — who remained in the glass closet until her death — used to talk about how different the world might be if Jimmy Carter had been reelected in 1980 instead of antigay Ronald Reagan being elected. In addition to paying early attention to the new disease killing gay men, some of the federal policies discussed in the Roosevelt Room that day might have been enacted.

Related: President Jimmy Carter dead at 100 — here’s his history as an LGBTQ+ ally

“Thirty years ago,” Midge said during a March 2007 NGLTF news conference, “I received a phone call from Jean O’Leary and Bruce Voeller, the co-executive directors of the National Gay [and Lesbian] Task Force, and what they said was, ‘It is time. It is time that a government we helped choose and a government we help pay no longer discriminate against us. We want to talk — and we want to talk in the White House,’ and I agreed that certainly the Constitution demanded that everyone be represented under those laws, and that would include gays and lesbians.”

“Coming out is a political act of courage.” — National Coming Out Day cofounder Jean O’Leary in 1988 video with Rob EichbergKaren Ocamb

On October 11, 1987, Jean joined about 200,000 for a March on Washington seeking gay rights and money for AIDS. Rev. Jesse Jackson, Cesar Chavez, and Whoopi Goldberg were among the allies who showed up that day.

After the march, Jean talked with prominent gay psychologist Rob Eichberg — who created the EST-style self-awareness program The Advocate Experience with The Advocate’s David Goldstein — about what they could do next. They decided to go big on October 11, 1988, the one-year anniversary of the second March on Washington.

“One of the things Jean was so passionate about was she felt that, unless we were seen and people knew their next-door neighbor was gay, we would always be portrayed by what the right wing wanted to portray us — parades in San Francisco,” Jean’s close friend Ginny Foat, then-executive director of Caring for Babies With AIDS and co-owner of the Rose Tattoo in West Hollywood, told me.

“Jean and Rob talked a lot about it and Rob was always so spiritual and they decided the best thing to do would be to talk to everybody and tell them on one particular day, we would all come out and tell everyone,” she said.

They discussed the idea at lunch at the Rose Tattoo. “Jean said, ‘I want you to help us.’ I said, ‘This is the silliest idea I ever heard. Do you think that everybody who’s been in the closet is just all of a sudden going to one day come out because you said to come out?’ And she said, ‘Yes!’ So they went on to plan it and I helped them,” Ginny said.

“And lo and behold — the first National Coming Out Day — people came out! I said to Jean, ‘I take back everything I said! I always underestimate you.’ But she did it. They did it together. Now it’s almost passé. But at the time, it was a major commitment. People really felt emotional about it. They talked with their friends about whether to do it or not. Now it’s so much easier than it was then,” Ginny recalled.

Jean approached me about the idea and I wrote a story for Frontiers. With help from NCOD/LA’s Peter Mackler and Honey Ward, my cameraman friend Tad Feldman and I shot and produced a launch video. It was very 1980s. Rob gave us an original gay men’s chorus song, which we covered with photos and video clips featuring many who died of AIDS.

Jean’s key message: “Coming out is a political act of courage.”

On November 4, 2003, the night Ginny Foat, Ron Oden, and Steve Pougnet made Palm Springs history as the city’s first Black gay mayor and two gay City Council members – nonsmoker Jean O’Leary told me she had stage 4 lung cancer and had 14 months to live.

Not wanting to spoil lavender history, Jean compartmentalized her pain. On June 4, 2005, Jean O’Leary died at the age of 57. Dr. Rob Eichberg succumbed to AIDS on August 11, 1995. He was 50. The first protease inhibitor was approved by the Food and Drug Administration on December. 6, 1995.

As you watch this video, please realize that we LGBTQ+ people have a history that is being erased. We are being erased. And please ask what you can contribute. Maybe it’s just unshackling yourself by coming out. Maybe it’s joining or creating community. We all have a story. What’s yours?

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We send you all our love and support on this special day.

— Karen & Max

This post first appeared on Karen Ocamb: LGBTQ+ Freedom Fighters!

This article originally appeared on Advocate: The untold story behind the first National Coming Out Day