Coming Out 2.0 (Staying Out)
I’m taking a risk here, friends. I’m banking on the fact that somehow…maybe, just maybe somehow you’ll manage to read my words, despite strict executive orders that you not acknowledge my existence.
But before I go plowing full speed ahead, I ought to take a moment to fill you in. Just in case you’ve sworn off the news right now (and if you have, good for you…and/but also, content warning: I’m about to discuss news, albeit through my filter, which is…well, my filter).
Here’s the deal. Word on Pennsylvania Avenue has it that I imagined, then invented, myself into being (picture me as a twofer: Dr. Frankenstein and his monster rolled into one). At least I’m not alone. We trans, nonbinary and gender nonconforming folks have all conjured ourselves into existence. Not because we are an exceptionally creative and innovative bunch (which we absolutely are), but because we’re dangerous, delusional, and most likely witches. And if you were to legitimize our existence by acknowledging us, well…that might just mean you’re dangerous and delusional, too.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
In fact, the Oval Office, in an effort to eliminate any possibility that Americans could be duped by woke-speak into believing that trans, non-binary and GNC identities are real, has ordered that misleading terms like “transgender,” “nonbinary,” “queer,” and “intersex” be immediately scrubbed from every inch of every federal surface. Preferably with a solution of at least 3% hydrogen peroxide.
Also, for extra beefy protection, the acronym formerly known as “LGBTQIA+” has been right-sized to its more deferential diminutive, “LGB.” This truncation happens to dovetail nicely with DOGE’s mission to streamline America back into greatness. I hope that’s every bit as much of a relief for you as it is for me.
“When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” [Quote by James Waterman Wise; Photo by Boston Public Library on Unsplash]
But to be honest, so far I haven’t yet spotted much of a bright side to being bleached out of verifiable existence. You’d think that at the very least, as a figment of my own imagination, I’d be free of the vicissitudes of needing to deal with the daily maintenance of a physical body. You know…food, shelter, safety, financing it all. No such luck.
So, as I care for these phantasmic needs of mine, I ponder things. All sorts of things, really. Today I happen to be thinking about the concept of “coming out.” I’m probably not telling you anything you don’t already know, but “coming out” isn’t the exclusive domain of the community formerly known as LGBTQIA+. In fact the term began when young and ostensibly (you can never be sure, really) straight, cisgender ladies from elite white families emerged as debutantes into high society.
The queering of the term happened nearly a century ago, when an article in the Baltimore Afro-American, titled “1931 Debutantes Bow at Local ‘Pansy’ Ball” referred to “new debutantes coming out into homosexual society.” After the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion, coming out of the proverbial queer closet took on a more political meaning. Especially in 1978, when Harvey Milk urged closeted gay folks to “Come out, come out, wherever you are” to defeat a California initiative that would have banned gay teachers from working in state public schools.1
During the Harvey Milk era, the mainstream media had already begun expanding the term beyond sexual orientation to describe openly embracing parts of one’s identity that traversed social convention of any kind. And so it is that the following thought recently crystallized for me:
Coming out isn’t an exclusively queer thing. It’s a human thing we sometimes do after a period of internal excavation uncovers more of who we really are.
To put an even finer point on it, coming out is a process. And it goes something like this:
Perhaps prompted by the push of some painful external circumstance, we turn inward and descend into our depths, searchlight in hand.
As we plumb our depths, we discover parts we buried alive when they didn’t fit the prototype we were told to follow.
We muster as much courage and self love as we can, then bundle these exiled parts in warm blankets, reconstitute them with a hefty dose of TLC, and bring them out into the fresh air of life.
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” [Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson; Photo by Jill Sauve on Unsplash]
Now, I’ve come out several times over the past 25 or so years. Two of those times did involve walking out of the queer closet, first as gay, then as trans. But most of these outings — which include identifying myself an alcoholic and addict, as someone living with CPTSD and SPS, and someone who leans progressive — have only been tangentially related, if at all, to my queer identity.
Each of my coming out processes has been fairly mind-blowing. Maybe even miraculous. Because suddenly I found myself embracing, with relative ease, some part of my identity that had previously been absolutely off-limits. And each of these outings only happened when I reached the same sacred spot inside myself. A spot where the fulcrum tipped from the paralyzing fear of social sanction into the freedom of self-acceptance.
I’ve come to believe that the point at which each of us tips is a complexity that must be organically identified from within, rather than plotted from without. I suspect this owes to the fact that the social self we so often present to the world springs from the soil of social, cultural and family pressures and supports unique to our particular life circumstances. Behaviors and identities that might be anathema to me might seem run-of-the-mill to you. And vice versa.
Personally, I sprang up in a very conservative, American rust belt soil that yielded a uniformly homogenous crop of white, Christian, working class folks imbued with conservative values. Anything outside that paradigm was regarded as an anomaly. So, in order to fit in, I chiseled off all the anomalous parts of my authentic self.
There were a lot of those parts to chisel off, and they made quite a pile of rubble inside of me. Thanks to some very robust defense mechanisms, I roped the whole heap of it off and locked it down tight. I did this by carefully crafting a persona that diametrically opposed my true feelings and authentic longings.
What did this look like? I experienced myself as trans and queer, so I made homophobic jokes and jabs and dove into the roles of wife and mother. Because my politics pulled inherently to the left, I voted for George Bush. My heart longed for creativity and connection, so I built a career as a corporate paralegal and spent my days hunched and poring over mutual fund and mortgage documentation, alone in my tiny office, door closed.
“We are the zanies of sorrow. We are the clowns whose hearts are broken.” [Quote by Oscar Wilde; Photo by Louise Patterton on Unsplash]
Did I realize what I was doing? No. These sorts of reaction formations coalesce deep down in the war room of self and execute themselves with incredible stealth. I wasn’t deliberately deceiving anyone around me; I was deceiving myself, then telling everyone else the “truth” from that place.
Reminding myself of my own history has been intermittently helpful lately when I hear so much over-the-top bloviating coming from the White House. I strongly suspect that much of the virulently anti-trans, anti-immigrant, anti-anything-but-white-Christian-Nationalism rhetoric might just be an outcrop of robust reaction formations.
Sensing a deep disconnect between our authentic self and who we’re being to meet the expectations of our tribe can lead us to go to just about any lengths to deny and defend that disconnect. And as the saying goes, the best defense is a good offense.
To be fair, obfuscation by way of reaction formation is a very human thing to do. After all, we’re pack animals, and our animal selves know that to fall off that pack could be fatal. Likewise, that animal instinct can make it incredibly hard not only to come out of our closets as some version of different, but to stay out. Especially when powerful figures are ordering us back into our closets.
So what do we do when we’re under such heavy duress to self-abandon? Well, we each have to answer that for ourselves. As for me, I plan to keep reminding myself of how grim and grey everything looked and felt inside my various closets. Because as disheartening as erasure from the outside feels for me right now, it’s nowhere near as devastating as erasure from the inside was.
So here’s my parting wish, friends — for you, for me, for all of us. If you’ve come out, may you stay out, with good, supportive community around you.
And if you’re feeling pulled to come out? In that case, may you find the courage and self love to emerge like the intrepid crocus pushes through the snow (and then find good, supportive crocus community, too).
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