Castilleja celebrated National Coming Out Day Wednesday to acknowledge and celebrate the coming out of LGBTQ+ people.
The activities were planned by the Questioning, Queer and Here (QQH) affinity group. Decorations included pride flags hung on the balcony of Rhoades Hall and strings of mini flags hung across the trees of the pool patio. Students were able to dress in rainbow clothing and pride gear. At break, there was face paint and “free gay swag” according to the QQH leads.
Noelle Madden ‘25, a Leader in Training (LIT) of QQH said “The main reason why we celebrate Coming Out Day, specifically on a large scale, is because we’re not in school during pride month, so this is our pride celebration that we can have.”
Coming Out Day is an important day for many LGBTQ+ people in the United States and at Castilleja. The holiday highlights the courage and bravery it takes for people to come out, and also calls attention to the struggles LGBTQ+ people face while out or still “in the closet.”
“We [at Castilleja] do have a large LGBT+ presence, and it’s truly great to see even people who aren’t LGBTQ supporting and [to see] teachers wearing the stickers,” Madden, who uses they/them pronouns, said. They continued by saying the holiday is important “For new nines and new people who come to Casti, I think it’s great to see that like, oh, everyone is sort of celebrating this thing.”
“It’s a way to just show support for the queer community, have fun and really show our vibrant, proud community of both queer folks and allies and everything in between,” QQH Lead, Reece Sharp said.
According to Cecilia Smit ‘27, Coming Out Day is important to Casti students because it provides “the time and space to come out, [and] deciding a day can be really difficult.” She also said this holiday can provide a sense of community and belonging among students.
A particular highlight of the celebration on Wednesday was the student engagement. “Everyone was coming in, a lot of middle schoolers, high schoolers and underclassmen just coming to the pool patio where we had our stickers and our gems and people were decorating like their clothes, getting pins and it’s just really cute,” Sharp said.
Castilleja and QQH plan on expanding and continuing the celebration of coming out day and other pride events. “We want to engage more with our school community and do more events and do more awareness and we’re hoping to do that this year. When it comes to events in the future, particularly second semester, we have a list of different queer days and weeks that we want to celebrate.” Sharp said.
Madden talked about wanting to expand pride celebration to different grades: “I think they were expecting to celebrate National Coming out day, hopefully to even larger scale, me and [Stella Tenta ’25] will be [QQH] leads next year and I know we plan to try to make it almost larger and more fun and have more grade wide activities.”
QQH is also working on talking more about education and queer history in the future. Madden said that National Coming Out day is “not just [about] coming out but also represents gay rights.”
