How a psychologist & an activist created Coming Out Day decades ago

Keith Haring poster for the first National Coming Out Day
Photo: Keith Haring

While National Coming Out Day (NCOD) celebrates LGBTQ culture and the power of living authentically, both were much harder to come by when the day was first celebrated 33 years ago.

Before the holiday was first observed in 1988, its creators — Dr. Robert H. Eichberg, a then-43-year-old psychologist, and Jean O’Leary, the then-40-year-old lesbian activist founder — wanted a positive community celebration to counter all the negativity and hatred directed at gays and lesbians.

Related: This ABC News journalist’s Coming Out Day letter gives advice to his younger, closeted self

They chose October 11, 1988 as the celebration’s inaugural date because it marked the one-year anniversary of the 1987 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights.

The march drew a crowd estimated from 500,000 to 750,000 marchers (including a contingent of bisexuals) in opposition to President Ronald Reagan’s neglect of the HIV epidemic and the Supreme Court’s 1986 ruling against consensual gay sex in the Bowers v. Hardwick case.

Though the march was the second gay and lesbian march on the Capitol, after the first on October 14, 1979, it was perhaps the largest queer protest of the decade.

The six-day event included demonstrations outside of the IRS and Supreme Court buildings, a mass marriage, the first public display of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, and speeches by actress Whoopi Goldberg and then-Democratic presidential candidate Jesse Jackson.

The marchers demanded an end to…

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