Coming Out Essay ⋆ Sociology Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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The term “coming out” and the metaphor of the closet are closely connected. Both concepts have played a significant role in sexual politics since the 1950s. The idea of coming out was popularized in the radical politics of gay liberation movements throughout the 1960s and 1970s. On its most basic level, coming-out refers to a person s public disclosure of his or her gay male, lesbian, bisexual, or any other non-heterosexual identity. Gay liberationists considered coming out to be a political act, since heterosexist oppression aims at the erasure of same-sex desire. Gay liberationists mapped the interplay of various modes of oppression through the concept of the closet: criminalization, pathologization, police violence, bullying and queer-bashing, and the circulation of distorted images in media, education, and political discourse. The closet stands for the imposition of a psychic and socio-cultural reality reigned by secrecy, shame, lack of recognition, and isolation. In a book that became very influential during the 1990s, Sedgwick (1990) suggested that the closet should be understood more broadly. Putting forward the notion of the epistemology of the closet, Sedgwick argued that all forms of desire are organized around the alternatives of disclosure or secrecy and all social institutions are interested in regulating what can or should be known. Her work explored how cultural anxieties around the heterosexual/homosexual binary shaped the conceptualization of truth, secrecy, and personhood in western culture far beyond the policing of homosexuality.

As a political strategy, coming out involved various levels of reference, including self-acceptance, the sharing of one s identification with others (friends, family, colleagues, and so on) and coming out to society (for example through the participation at Gay Pride events). The gay liberationist slogan ”Out of the closets and into the streets shows that the ultimate aim was full participation in society. The street is not only a site of heightened visibility. It describes an integral element of the wider public sphere. In the liberationist approach, coming out was embedded in a collective strategy of community building. It allowed for the organization of political and self-help groups, the creation of gay neighborhoods in larger cities and laid the base for the emergence of a pink economy. This in turn provided the resources for survival in a hostile society and the continuation of an ongoing struggle for transformation. The consolidation of identity politics in subsequent generations of activism reinforced (often essentialist) notions of globally universal gay and lesbian identities. The emergence of gay and lesbian public spheres provides the backdrop to Herdt’s (1992) analysis of coming out as a rite-of-passage. His study of a youth coming-out group in Chicago defines coming out as a ritualistic process of re-socialization, in which young men and women shun values derived from an older homosexual epistemological framework (governed by secrecy, shame, pathology, and stereotype) through a shift towards a gay (liberationist) paradigm (based on self-assertion and the recognition of gayness as a valid cultural force). Research since the 1990s emphasized that coming out is an ongoing multi-layered (and not necessarily linear) process throughout which people manage knowledge regarding their identities or sexual practices across fragmented cultural terrains. Moreover, the metaphor of coming out has been adapted in various fields of sexual and gender politics. There have been discussions about coming out, for example, in queer, bisexual, SM, polyamory, and transgender movements. Coming out entails different challenges in each context. Moreover, since the constituencies of these groups are not mutually exclusive, many people negotiate multiply stigmatized identifications in their coming-out processes.

US research indicates that at the turn of the millennium not all gay men and lesbians consider coming out to be a major issue in their lives any more. This ”routinization and ”normalization of some non-heterosexual cultural forms has given rise to the speculation about ”the end of the closet . Yet as we have seen, there are multiple closets. Moreover, heterosexism has always been uneven across different spheres of society. Social location in terms of class, gender, race/ethnicity, and religious affiliation plays a significant role in mediating the nature and severity of the repercussions, which may follow the revelation of stigmatized erotic, sexual, or gender identifications. Black and ethnic minority activists have criticized the generalized demand to come out. They argued that many black non-heterosexuals need and value family and community support against racism. Coming out may endanger this support, so that coming out may feel too risky for many black non-heterosexuals in the face of enduring racism within heterosexual and non-heterosexual communities. For others, coming out may be irrelevant, if gay, lesbian or bisexual identities do not resonate with their salient cultural identifications. Same-sex desire carries different meanings in different cultural contexts.

Bibliography:

Herdt, G. (1992) (ed.) Gay Culture in America. Beacon Press, Boston, MA.
Sedgwick, E. K. (1990) The Epistemology ofthe Closet. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA.
Weeks, J. (1990) Coming Out, 2nd edn. Quartet Books, New York.