…I feel it is my duty to arbit this Time article about coming out on facebook:

Coming out used to be an exhausting process. You had to come out again and again and again to all your friends at different times. Nowadays, even with social networking, gays still have to come out, but one of the key differences between our pre-profile selves and our new online presentations is that now (finally!) the burden is also on our friends to discover and digest our identities. For the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community, Facebook et al have finally leveled the identity field, and it’s kinda nice.

This article makes several things clear.  The first clear thing is that the author of this article clearly got the idea for the article from my blog. Second, it is clear that this article was written for a middle-aged audience, what with the adjective “new” being employed to describe facebook. Third, as a result of reading this article and also my best friend getting engaged (Hey Em! Congrats again!), it is clear that the etiquette of coming out and getting engaged are eerily similar – the order of people that you tell basically tells them how you rank them numerically as friends, if you find out via facebook you don’t really matter, and it allows for a lot more social laziness.  Cuz seriously, in both situations, after the first three times, it gets boring telling the same story over and over.  “Yeah, he did get down on one knee; yes, it is indeed a 1.8 karat diamond” = “Yeah, I’ve always been into dudes; yes, that is why I like Shakira so much.”