I remember playing hide-andseek as a kid, and the closet was a good place to hide if you could get yourself behind all the clothes to avoid the seeker’s eye. Sometimes, though, it was such a good hiding place that I began to get a little suffocated before I’d finally give up my position.

You might be wondering if I am going to write an entire column about a childhood game. Let me set your mind at ease by saying I’m not referring to the closet as a place where you put clothes or play games — rather, a place where you hide things you don’t want public. In modern society, gay individuals who are not public about their sexuality are termed “in the closet.”

It’s a fitting description and a reasonable analogy. From the outsider’s perspective, the idea of someone else being in the closet isn’t significant. An outsider passing by wouldn’t think to peek in and see who’s there. Life isn’t a game, after all, and we don’t go around peeking into every closet we see. That must be why it’s such a good place to hide things.

Although, for someone in the closet, it is a very dark, cramped, lonely and scary place. The longer you stay there, the more it begins to suffocate you. Unfortunately for a lot of people, it isn’t a game that you can escape from whenever you want.

To be blunt, the closet sucks. It can invade every aspect of your life, from defining what activities you’re involved in to whom you hang out with. I remember how every day I worried about how I acted and behaved so as to keep people from suspecting my secret.

I considered myself a good student, at least in terms of my grades. The fact that I’ll be graduating in December makes me confident enough to say that I am reasonably intelligent. So why, during one period in my life, was I receiving grades little better than C’s and D’s?

Hindsight is 20/20, they say, and I would argue that my poor performance in school is directly correlated with the time I spent in the closet. Is it really that surprising? When every day is a struggle to hide who you are — even laughing at and making homophobic jokes — you tend to forget about the other challenges in life.

This is not to claim that the closet is any better or worse than any of the other five million other challenges that people deal with on a daily basis, but it is to say that it’s one that doesn’t have to exist.

The challenge is that society doesn’t make it very easy to pull out of a reinforcing barrier of fear and mistrust. Anyone who doesn’t think so needs to read responses to same-sex marriage arguments or any argument for fair and dignified treatment on a governmental or social level for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered Americans. What you’ll find is that merely admitting to the world your sexuality is a political issue with real consequences.

I’ve talked with people who are in the closet at Iowa State, so I know they exist. That’s why advocating for equal rights is not just about my own personal gain. It’s about moving toward a society where my coming-of-age problems could have been those of any young adult — what clothes I wore, who I thought was cute and what grades I received.

That’s not a possibility at this point, since I am, in fact, out of the closet and graduating from Iowa State, but there will be other generations of kids growing up with the same feelings I had. There will continue to be closeted adults and students who are too afraid or, worse, convinced that it’s morally wrong to come out of the closet.

A society that encourages dishonesty through fear to reinforce a biblical moral is at best misguided and at worst unethical. There is more to family values than biology, and there is more to the closet than imaginary difficulty. It exists because our priorities in society are skewed toward the illusion of a perfect family defined by biology and morals rather than responsible parenting and love.

This is a reality that the anti-gay rhetoric of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and the 2004 Republican Party platform does nothing to correct.