The problem with “coming out”: The flawed cultural expectations of gay life in America

"Coming out" has become the defining narrative of gay life in popular culture. Here's what that narrative misses

SUZANNA DANUTA WALTERS

Reprinted with permission from the book "The Tolerance Trap: How God, Genes, and Good Intentions are Sabotaging Gay Equality."

My coming out story is personal and idiosyncratic yet also so mundane. For me, and for others of my generation and those of earlier eras, this story figures mightily in our larger narratives of self and identity.

As Joan Didion famously wrote, “we tell ourselves stories in order to live.” A simple and uncontested truism is that all lives are narrated—by ourselves and by others eager to impose some coherence on the chaos of individual trajectory. For minority groups in particular, narratives are constructed as lifelines to each other and as insinuation into the larger stories of national identity and personal triumph. Often quite singular storylines are offered up as both the explanation and the antidote for marginalization and disenfranchisement. The larger social message now, however, is that coming out will promote tolerance. So the tolerance framework depends on coming out but insists that it be done quietly and correctly so as not to stir up or upset heterosexual equanimity. At the same time, and contradictorily, the fantasy of a newly tolerant world downplays the persistence of the closet and therefore conceals the continued strength of homophobia.

So one must be “known” to be tolerated. But not all ways of being out are equally validated, nor are all motivations for coming out similarly situated. In truth, we have different expectations of the people we come out to. Sometimes all we want is to be heard. Sometimes we want to be known. Sometimes we want affirmation of continued love. Sometimes we want to challenge what we understand to be the homophobia of the listener. Sometimes we want to cultivate a new ally. Coming out can be a confession or an assertion, a bold declaration of substantive difference or a quiet acknowledgment that nothing has changed. It can be a nod to the already known and a head-turning about-face. It can—especially in the media-saturated, nanosecond world of Twitter and Facebook and “TMZ”—be a way of heading off the inevitable outing by gossip columnists and bloggers. People can “receive” the coming out of a friend or family member as life altering, or they can hear it for a moment and then seemingly ignore its salience. Certainly, many gays report this response with their parents, when the utterance has only temporary meaning as it is actively disavowed in subsequent familial interactions or when admonitions not to come out to others (grandparents, relatives) are the immediate response.

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http://www.salon.com/2014/07/13/the_problem_with_coming_out_the_flawed_cultural_expectations_of_gay_life_in_america/