Coming Out as Politics

Sociological meanderings towards collective well-being.

In Honor of National Coming Out Day (October 11, 2024):

I could say that I came out in 1989.

I could say that I came out in 1995.

I could say that I came out in 2010.

I could say that I came out thirty seconds ago when I told you that I came out in 1989.

Coming out is not a singular moment in time; it is a process, not a singular accomplishment. It is personal, intimate, and also inherently social, public, and political.

There are lots of reasons to come out, but it’s also important to note that there are also lots of really good reasons to not come out. If at a given moment in time, I choose not to come out, that does not mean that I am in the closet. Being out, or in, is not a binary — binaries, as most of us in the LGBTQ community know, are often false choices — and as such, I can be both out and in at the same time.

Not being out — or, being in the closet, for however long or short a time — is sometimes necessary: it’s about preserving important relationships, maintaining housing or employment, it’s about staying alive, and it’s about having the right to privacy.

We can be psychologically healthy and choose not to tell some people, certain people. The binary of the closet — we are either out or we or in the closet — posits that if we are in the closet we are not being honest (with ourselves or with others), that we are lying, being deceitful, and that to come into a full, psychologically healthy version of ourselves we must come out. Now, since I’ve been out for 30 years, or 24 years, or 9 years, or 2 minutes now, I can attest to the fact that being out has sent me to my therapist’s office more often than the closet did.

Here I must note: this is my story. There’s power in telling our stories — more on that — but it’s uniquely mine. And that’s the point — we can’t universalize any notion of a necessary trajectory of coming out or staying in. My story is about being a lesbian. It’s about being a white lesbian operating in predominantly white spaces. A lesbian with a PhD working in a college. A lesbian with a guitar in the 1990’s. About a lesbian with long hair who regularly gets asked what my husband does for a living. Coming out is a moment-by-moment negotiation with no one right path, and that must take into consideration many aspects of a person’s social positionality and well-being.

When I came out to myself — one of the moments on my path — a process that started in 1989 and culminated in 1994 — I knew no out people. Ellen, just for context, didn’t come out until 1996. I had no out members of my family, no one at my school was out, no one in my youth group, no GSA’s in sight. No teachers at my schools were out. But I had music — I started playing the guitar in 1989 — and I had books. So I had Janis Joplin and Bessie Smith and their blues and their turbulent love affairs with women. And in the early 1990s, slowly but surely, more musicians started coming out: k.d. lang, Melissa Etheridge, the Indigo Girls, and Ani DiFranco. I listened to their music, played their songs on the guitar, and read all their interviews. They were my community.

Yes, coming out might be personal, but ultimately its import lies in the sociality (as a sociologist, I think I’m obligated to say that).

Coming out is about building community, about connecting to a community. It’s about saying “I am a part of this community, this collective.” And thank God for the 90s and all the lesbians and their guitars, for I found my community.

Coming out is, and has always been — and this point can’t be stressed enough — a political act. Coming out facilitates the necessary political work of solidarity building. It is hard to advocate on behalf of a group of people when those people are invisible; rendered invisible and dehumanized by language, by social policy, by media representations. In the face of this pressure to remain hidden — and there is political risk here because to be hidden is a kind of safety, and to become visible means being vulnerable to criticism, to vitriol — we must push against this through visibility.

As James Baldwin wrote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

Coming out, then, means we are showing up to face what needs to be changed, with our very own faces, entering into and supported by a community of others. It is about self-care, yes, but more so it is about community care.

Brief nerd moment here: after WWII there was a growth of people (mostly white men) who moved into cities, with incomes sufficient to remain independent, and who started living their lives openly as gay men (and some lesbians). This was in large part about economic independence and the growing consumer society, and it was met with resistance. In the 50s and 60’s, there was a ratcheting up of the criminalization and pathologizing of homosexuality; it was illegal as well as considered an illness. This culminated in the (in)famous Stonewall Riots, which is often considered the start of the modern LGBT rights movement.

Then the 80s happened: people started getting sick, doctors first named it GRID — Gay Related Immune Deficiency — and Ronald Reagan wouldn’t talk about AIDS in public until 1986.

The AIDS crisis and the way it was handled by the Federal Government and reported on in the media, fueled the pathologizing of homosexuality and pushed people into shame and silence and stigmatization. The community shrunk, from the disease itself and from the silencing that ensued.

From here, the process of politicizing, of advocating for rights for the LGBTQ community, required a rebuilding and coming out became the first political step in this rebuilding process. We have to be able to find each other, to care for each other.

The 1990’s was the beginning of a wave of public figures who came out — authors and musicians and actors, politicians and athletes — so that by the time Google came into existence in the late 1990s, you could search out plenty of gay folks via the web.

Famous people coming out became so commonplace that the New York Times wrote in 2010 that:

“The love that dare not speak its name has been speaking up an awful lot lately. So much, in fact, that people are starting not to notice when it happens.”

The article goes on to say that:

“Once seen as a defiant and courageous act of such social and political significance that gay rights activists created a holiday for it and recruited prominent gay people to take part, coming out has lost some of its potency.”

Oh, how I beg to differ.

Now, who knows what the author of that article would say now, in 2024, as the current Supreme Court is a risk to same-sex marriage rights. When the few protections that have existed for the LGBTQ community — particularly for the trans community — are eroding. When more anti-LGBTQ laws are being passed. When local libraries, like the one in the community where I live, receive bomb threats for trying to organize Drag Queen Bingo events.

Activism requires solidarity and a mass collective: coming out is the means to that end. As I said, coming out is about establishing a relationship with a community, and it’s also about building a visible enough community to engage in activism. Being able to go out into the world and say, “This is who we are, this is what we are fighting for, our bodies are real, they bleed, they shed tears, they share meals, they dance, they hug, we are worthy.”

Think about these numbers. A recent study reported that approximately 5% of high school students in the U.S. either identify themselves as transgender or are questioning their gender identity. That might seem like a small number, but in raw data, it’s around 500,000 kids.

Imagine one person walking up to a microphone to speak. Now imagine 499,999 other people standing behind them.

Money might be powerful, but as dock workers and teachers and auto workers repeatedly highlight when they advocate for better working conditions, there’s power in numbers. Part of that power is in working to abolish the sometimes debilitating alienation that comes with the closet. Community heals us.

Sometimes, I’m too tired to be out — to do the activism. As Audre Lorde astutely pointed out, self-care is an act of political warfare. No one can tell you when to be out; no one can tell you what’s right for you and when except yourself. Protect yourself, always.

I’m out, here, now because of my community. Because we need each other, and we need to know who we are and where we are. Being out for me, here, now, is about making it clear that there is an LGBTQ community on this campus and that we are strong, and that we care about each other. That we are loved.

And, when necessary, we will take action.