October 11th is National Coming Out Day, a day to celebrate gay pride and promote civil rights for individuals who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. Many people choose this day to come out to family, friends, and co-workers.
But for some people, the idea of coming out can be exhausting and can create tremendous anxiety.
So, Tanya Tsikanovsky, director of Jewish student life at University of Hartford Hillel and a member of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or questioning (LGBTQ) community, has created a new app — together with graphic designer and app developer Tommy Sondgroth — that she hopes will revolutionize the way that people come out to their loved ones. The app allows people to make 45-second videos in which they can come out to everyone in their lives at once, in their own way. In addition, individuals who are straight can join the site as “allies” and make videos supporting friends and family members who are members of the LGBTQ community.
The app is currently called OUT!, but will soon be called VISIBL. It is available for iPhone and iPad, and will eventually be available for Android devices as well.
As of right now, more than 1,300 people have downloaded the app, from as far away as Venezuela, Chile, England, and Israel.
“Instead of having to go through the exhausting process of coming out multiple times to multiple people, create a video where you say exactly what you want, one time, for everyone to see,” Tsikanovsky wrote in a July 2013 blog post in The Huffington Post.
“Not only do you make the final step of the coming-out process easier on yourself, but you also make yourself visible to the world, visible to the people who live in the places that claim to not have any LGBTQ people there,” Tsikanovsky wrote. “Well, here we are. We are visible.”
Information courtesy of University of Hartford UNotes