Coming out isn’t what it used to be. Literally, “coming out” has a rich history of different meanings. Originally it referred to young women coming of age into high society. It had a derivative meaning within gay subcultures of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
But in the 1970s, “coming out” started to mean revealing yourself to the general public. “Coming out” was contrasted with “being in the closet”. In the 1970s, coming out was advocated as a form of political action. You can see this, for instance, in many speeches by Harvey Milk. Here’s a line from the Gay Freedom Day Speech in 1978:
Gay people, we will not win our rights by staying quietly in our closets…we are coming out! We are coming out to fight the lies, the myths, the distortions! We are coming out to tell the truth about gays!
The sentiment behind Harvey Milk’s speech is still recognizable today, but it’s not how we typically think about coming out any more. Today, many people think of coming out as a coming of age process. When you come out, you come out for yourself, not for anyone else. In the typical gay high school drama, coming out serves as a resolution to a personal conflict. It is a prerequisite to living a full life and a proper romantic relationship.
From here, I could argue that the old ways of thinking were correct, and the new ways of thinking are wrong. The modern gay has dulled their political edge, and capitulated to neoliberal individualism, etc. Except, I don’t think that’s right. Coming out is in fact very personally fulfilling, and I think LGBTQ folks must have realized that fairly quickly after adopting it as a political strategy. It is, in fact, very hard to maintain a romantic relationship when you or your partner is closeted. Either you can’t meet their straight friends, or you have to conceal your relationship in front of them.
Perhaps today we no longer emphasize coming out as political action, because it is not as politically effective, or not as politically urgent as it was in the 1970s. Lots of people today already have LGBTQ people in their lives. Perhaps the leftover ‘phobes of today are the ones who are resistant to such things as human empathy.
But I don’t want us to completely forget the political value of coming out. Our enemies did not reason themselves into their beliefs, and cannot be reasoned out of their beliefs. So if we cannot argue with them, what do we have left? We can simply be queer and be out, that’s something.
So let me talk a bit about coming out as it is understood in the ace community. (For further reading on this subject, I recommend these ten vignettes or this scholarly discussion.)
In the ace community, many people see coming out as optional. People in your life don’t need to know you’re ace in order to respect your permanently single status. That’s something that they really ought to respect regardless! Coming out is vaunted as a form of self-actualization, but the lived experience of coming out as ace often fails to live up. Sometimes you come out to someone, and you’re met by awkward silence. Then, a week later they seem to have willed themselves to have forgotten all about it. Lots of times we just come out as queer (or in my case, as gay), and that seems to serve our purposes well enough without the messiness of having to explain a whole new orientation to them.
So when I suggest that coming out could be seen as political action, it would appear that I’m attacking people’s personal choices. The logical implication is that some people ought to come out even if it does not personally benefit them, possibly even if it causes them harm.
But hold on. Just because there’s some political value in coming out does not mean that everyone is obligated to do so. People are welcome to make their own cost-benefit analysis. Even if coming out is a good thing, that doesn’t make it the best spoons to value ratio. There’s environmental benefit to recycling a can, but if by unusual happenstance, recycling the can will make things awkward with your mother, then maybe the can isn’t your top priority, you know what I’m saying?
I am transgender (femme-presenting), and I don’t go to any trouble to hide it, although I don’t walk down the street carrying a sign saying, “hey, I’m the village trannie!” (Should I?)
It’s partly because I’m no good at pretending to be something I’m not, but it’s also because I figure, I am fairly safe. I live in an area that’s pretty LGBT friendly, I’m not in danger of losing my job or my apartment or being harassed or threatened. So I feel I should be more or less public on behalf of those of my trans siblings who would not be safe coming out.
I think gay (and lesbian) people are as accepted as they are because so many came out during the AIDS epidemic. I had the feeling that the attitude was, “if I’m going to die anyway, I want to die as myself, not as a lie.” And that’s kind of why I came out to myself and in my community — I’m not that young any more, so if I even want to live as myself, I’d better get started.
i started presenting queer at work when fucko was being coronated, kind of as a dare. there are rules in my organization dictating the way “men” and “women” should dress, and it would take a flick of the wrist to make enforcement mandatory, just like it took the same to reverse any other protections we had that same week. also hoping any trans coworkers who are more shy than me are heartened by the sight of my old ass doing it up.
Siggy, Thanks for this post. I especially want to focus on your point about making your own personal analysis about coming out. I think coming out can be a good decision for many people, but only if it passes one’s own personal analysis. For example, if you are hoping for educational funding from your family, then don’t risk coming out unless you’re confident that the support will remain. While rare, there are cases of people who lived with their parents, came out, and found all of their possessions out on the lawn and the locks changed.
Many people making suggestions are assuming that the reader is financially independent already, but that might not yet be the case. So I say that everyone has permission to wait and do their own personal analysis about their own situation and they don’t have to explain their timing. People should stay safe. And you can tell yourself that you WILL come out the day after you stop needing help from your family members and so on. Or the year after that. Nobody has to meet any artificial timing.
So I am glad people are highlighting that a personal analysis is needed.
As a halfway point, one could find an LGBTQ resource center and come out to them now, and discuss with them that it doesn’t yet look wise to come out in the wider community yet.
Good luck to everyone!
I might add that the personal can be political, but it can also be both political AND personal. The political dimension is real, but it doesn’t erase the personal considerations. It’s often best for people to gather their own strength safely, before they start being activists in the wider world when they figure it is safe for them.
Upfront: I’m straight. I have friends and relatives who are gay and I have friends and relatives who are trans, but obviously my opinion on this is somewhat second had. That having been said:
Perhaps… you won? Perhaps it’s not “politically effective” because today, in 2025 in civlised society (important caveat) announcing you’re gay or ace feels to the person on the receiving end like announcing you’re gluten-intolerant. The response you get from most people I know would be “…OK.”, or that awkward silence, because they honestly don’t give a shit, and yes a week later they’ve forgotten not because they’ve willed themselves to, but because it’s not important to them. You are not the main character in their life, and that aspect of your life has absolutely zero impact on theirs. Complaining they’ve forgotten sounds like you want them to make a bigger deal of it.
This complete indifference is surely the aspiration, isn’t it? We’re obviously not there yet, but we’re surely well on the way if there are people whose response to your coming out is such clear apathy. It would be a better world if your orientation was just… irrelevant. (Note: a better world for the vast majority, of course. There would remain a tiny cohort of narcissists who’d be offended that I’m not really interested in every detail of their lives. Got one of those in my family too…)
@sonofrojblake,
Apathy isn’t my end goal. My primary activist focus has been on surveys, and a major interest is in health disparities. And before the Trump administration cancelled the grants, the research group I was collaborating with was in the field of public health. Public health issues positively demand caring, not apathy.
Granted, as far as coming out goes, apathy may be the ultimate endpoint there, beyond which coming out is no longer effective as political action.
(Also, when I talk about awkward silence reactions or willful forgetting, that is not what “not giving a shit” looks like. You’re imposing a false interpretation on a set of experiences that has been incompletely described to you.)
Absolutely.
Fair enough.
Coming out as gay may no longer make much political impact, but under present circumstances I think there may still be a big political impact to coming out as trans.
Our enemies did not reason themselves into their beliefs, and cannot be reasoned out of their beliefs.
Apologies for being obnoxious and kinda changing the subject here, but I really think we should stop saying this — it’s a non-sequitur, and it’s demonstrably false to boot. Also it’s rather dangerous and self-defeating insofar as it reinforces bad ideas about how “we can’t talk to those people” or “we’ll never be able to persuade them.” People get “reasoned out” of unreasonable beliefs all the time; and that’s what LGBTQ people do when they come out: present themselves as evidence that prejudice against them is wrong. That’s why Harvey Milk advised queer people to come out, and why it was an effective tactic against prejudice: suddenly people who hated queers found out someone they loved was queer, and thus they got “reasoned out” of their irrational beliefs.
Perhaps it’s not “politically effective” because today, in 2025 in civlised society (important caveat) announcing you’re gay or ace feels to the person on the receiving end like announcing you’re gluten-intolerant.
This is indeed a sign of progress and improvement. But if reactionary bigots succeed in driving LGBTQ people back into closets for another generation or two, then a subsequent generation of LGBTQ people will go back to coming out as a political action, for the same reasons Milk advocated it before. And hopefully it will be at least as effective then as it was before.
@Sylvia,
Yep! I think there’s more to say about trans coming out experiences and practices, and how they differ from LGB coming out, but perhaps I am not the best person to say it.
@Raging Bee,
“Apologies for being obnoxious and kinda changing the subject here, but I really think we should stop saying this”
Fair enough. It’s subject to questioning. Personally I live in a fairly liberal bubble and the very few conservatives in my life have already withstood the liberal political environment, so persuading them seems futile.