THOUGHTS ON "COMING OUT" – BOB NOWLAN
One day very early in the history of the Lesbian and Gay
Graduate Collective at Syracuse University a comrade proposed that we each
share our "coming out" stories. We agreed. As people started
to recount their tales of the seemingly always singular point in time in
which they "came out" and from which point they finally felt fully "free"
to be "who they were" I experienced a steadily increasing sense of unease
about what was happening. When my turn came, I indicated that I would
not tell "my coming out story" because I rejected the way in which we were
making sense of this process. Instead, I proposed that we should recognize
that "coming out" is a process, not an instant or event, and one that continues,
of necessity, throughout our lives. What's more, I contended, for all
of its liberating potential, coming out is by no means, in and of itself,
the solution to our oppression, contrary to what my comrades' stories tended
to suggest. In fact, I declared, the necessity to come out – and to
keep doing so, again and again – remains a mark of our oppression, as, after
all, straight people almost never need to "come out" as straight, yet we,
in contrast, continually have to identify, explain, and justify our existence.
Beyond this, I added, to come out only begins to challenge this oppression,
as we need to proceed beyond merely coming out to challenge heterosexist
and homophobic understandings of what it means to identify one's self as
gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender. In short, I asked, as what,
precisely, are we coming out, and, even more important than this, for what
are we coming out when we do come out?
At the same time as I voiced my objection to what we had
been doing up to that point in our meeting, my comrades well knew that I
by no means supported staying in, or returning to, the closet, as I was clearly
one of the most visibly "out" people in the group. My point was, rather,
that we should settle neither for an overly simplistic understanding of what
it means to "come out" nor for a romantic idealization of what the sheer
act of "coming out" alone can achieve. Moreover, an overemphasis upon
coming out as the pivotal strategy, as the end-all and be-all of what we
do to combat heterosexism and homophobia, can result in two dangerous tendencies
for lgbt politics: 1. it can suggest a false homogeneity among diversely
different ways of living as gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (including
by implying that there is one "best" – fully "out" – way to do this), and
2. it can cause some activists to focus their activism upon blaming closeted
lgbt people for their supposed "immoral" "cowardice" rather than upon targeting
the larger social forces, conditions, and interests that make it often extremely
difficult to live, in an overwhelmingly heterosexist and homophobic society
and culture, as an openly gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender person.
Nonetheless, I believe that the individual act of coming
out can prove not only personally enabling but also socially and politically
inspiring. From the moment I first accepted the fact that I was gay
I also accepted the responsibility to strive to be "out" as far and as wide,
in public, as possible, in order to fight the widespread conviction that
being gay is either, on the one hand, something trivial and inconsequential,
or, on the other hand, something shameful and embarrassing. I refused
to bear the burden of having to hide, and of struggling to keep a strict
division between private and public, because I recognized how painful such
an existence so often has been and can be for so many. I was
proud of whom I was, as a man who loved other men, and who refused to conform
to the dictates of heteronormative standards of "proper masculinity."
I was proud of my friends, and my comrades, brave and beautiful people who
struggled to live and love in similar opposition to narrow and repressive
definitions of "correct" gender identity and sexual behavior. I felt
that, even in a limited way, if I could stand up, and stand forth, as one
who was ready, without apology, to identify himself as gay, even in the face
of considerable hostility, that it might prove helpful to at least a few
of those who had to interact with me as an openly, and proudly, gay person.
Looking back on the past fifteen+ years, I am sure that
being open about my gayness has proven so useful, and yet coming out as gay,
and, more than this, as a gay activist, and as a gay teacher and gay writer
working in gay studies, has not been without its costs. I have received
death threats and I have been physically attacked, I have been fired and
I have not been hired, I have been ridiculed and I have been ignored, I have
been ostracized and I have been forgotten. Many, many friends
of mine have suffered the same, and much worse. Today it would often
appear that things are getting steadily better for lgbt people in the United
States, yet what tolerance and acceptance has been achieved is often quite
precarious, and support for lgbt equality is still often quite limited.
We need to remember, moreover, that it is much easier to come and be out
for those in relatively privileged class positions, and that throughout much
of the world outside of the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand,
and Western Europe, it often remains extremely difficult to lead even largely
closeted kinds of gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender lives. Coming
out can make a real positive difference for the better, and yet primarily
as a place to begin, and only if we are self-reflexively self-critical about
what we mean when we come out, and what we seek to be and to do as we are
out.
First Published in Catalyst, October 2000.
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