Why does it matter to ‘come out’?

What does it entail to hide?

To answer the former question, it’s relevant to consider the latter. 

Not coming out implies hiding. Hiding parts of the self at various moments— all the time and in unexpected ways.

Not coming out requires mental gymnastics— keep a running list of who knows what. Keep it straight all the time. (Pun intended!)

And of course, not coming out necessitates turning aspects of true desires or expressions of Self off. Sexuality, sensuality, attraction and self-expression are a part of life. To ‘turn down,’ if not to completely hide, these natural human components of life, there’s likely some form of numbing or suppressing involved. Or maybe the turning off has become whole and this aspect of being human has been tucked away. Possibly, this aspect of life becomes exclusively personal in order to keep the soul, heart and body safe and true. 

Deciding to come out is an act of intense bravery, and at least a little rebellion.

At least it was for me.

When you have to declare yourself as something other than the majority of other people you know in order to be able to express in your outside life what you know to be true in your inside life— that is an act of boldness that is a range of emotions from empowering to horrifying.

To be clear, I don’t come from a family or friend group where I feared being rejected, or worse, in deciding to share my truth. Also, for many of the details and references moving forward to have full context, I must also share that I am ‘straight-passing.’ I am a cis-woman with long hair and do like to wear mascara sometimes, and a shiny lip balm most days. Some things in this article would certainly be different if experienced by someone who is trans, or non-binary. I write my experience, and do not speak for all queer folx, though I stand with all. I digress.

We live in a world that requires you to other yourself, over and over, in order to be fully able to live your day to day life authentically and that can be, among a long list of other things, anxiety-inducing, challenging and strange. It is 2022— we have watches that will track not only your steps, but their length and your heart rate. We can travel to most places in the world in hours. And this world, with all of it’s advanced technology and comforts, is very heteronormative. 

This word has become normal in my life, but I don’t want to assume it’s normal everywhere— because I don’t think it is.

Heteronormative, according to my dictionary app is “noting or relating to behavior or attitudes consistent with traditional male or female gender roles and the assumption of heterosexuality as the norm.”

‘The assumption of heterosexuality as the norm’ is where the coming out becomes perpetual and ever-present. 

If you’ve never personally experienced coming out, picture this:

Imagine you’re at work. You work in any public facing job, where ‘small talk’ is relatively normal. A customer at said job shares an anecdote about their family and partner. General conversational flow implies that you acknowledge what they said and then either share a bit about your life in order to connect and move the conversation forward, or ask a follow up question in order to keep the connection and move the conversation forward. Here come the mental gymnastics and the perpetual coming out.

The first calculation you must make is a guess around the question, “Will this person change in their demeanor towards me if I share my partner is of the same sex?” Or maybe you don’t have the bandwidth that day to do the calculation. Or, your calculations— rightly or wrongly is irrelevant in many ways, lead you to decide it is not a good idea to share about your same-sex partner, and you stay in the ‘closet’ and instead ask a follow up question or share something else, unrelated to your partner. This gymnastics may or may not be ‘required’ depending on safety and openness in each situation, but let me tell you, its constantly exhausting and disconnecting. 

While this example of a small moment is likely not one that would change anyone’s life, it is an example of how queer people must other and out ourselves constantly, or hide, and ultimately live less-than-authentic lives by excluding information or outrightly withholding information, in order to just exist and have a conversation in a heteronormative society. 

There is also work to be done, or rather, undone. Interacting in a primarily heteronormative society, and living as a child of the 90’s, there is no shortage of homophobia that as kids we often didn’t get to ‘just turn off’ or not see. In my little neck of the woods, a particularly traumatic event I remember happening was the murder of Matthew Shepard. If you don’t remember or didn’t hear about it, Google will elaborate for you. It was awful. A hate crime directed at a man that lived less than an hour away from where I was growing up. Thats a serious lesson in personal safety as a young person— if you’re gay, you may be brutally killed for it. 

I started writing this on the first day of June, aka Pride Month, 2022. It is now being put into the world in honor of Coming Out Day 2022 and a significant anecdote must be added. In his concurring opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (the SCOTUS decision that overturned Roe v. Wade), Justice Thomas specifically names Obergefell v. Hodges, which is the 2015 case that established Marriage Equality across the US. The ruling in this case was decided using similar legal theory as Roe. This could of course get very in the weeds regarding legal theory here, and I am not a legal scholar. What I can gather and boil it down for us here is that there is no black and white outline of many of the rights that we enjoy and consider basic Human Rights in 2022. The Right to Privacy, for example, is not explicit in the Constitution. It is this implied right that the right to marry and the right to bodily autonomy comes from. And in this Concurring opinion, Justice Thomas says outrightly, that while he is not overruling this “incorrect application” of legal theory, he feels it is his duty to “correct the error” established in such precedents. 

Coming out has been the most liberating truth I’ve learned about myself in these 30-ish years of my life. It is one that I hid from myself and others. But now that I know what it is to be a person who is out and queer, I want to share. I want to both create dialogue and listen to other’s experiences, because I know that while my story and life are my own, I have learned through seeing other people like me exist. Our stories are valuable and relatable. They are full of opportunities to learn and gain a sense of kinship. The rights that we have right now are not guaranteed, and this conversation must stay present and relevant, and we must still speak and show up, if we are safe and able to. 

If you are queer, out or not, questioning, or an ally, we all have experiences that can be shared to help normalize a much more queer narrative— and the more queer the narrative, the less queer folks must other and out themselves. The less the automatic assumption of others’ relationships is straight partnership, the safer queer folks will be. 

Coming out, safely, and in your own way, matters. If you are out to yourself, that matters. If you are out to your pet, or one person, that matters. If you are out and proud, that matters. Coming out matters. Cheers to Coming Out Day 2022, queers + friends.