By Olivia Williams
In our Rainbow Reflections series, we highlight the experiences of members of the LGBTQIA+ community in their own words. For this series, we spoke to seven people around the world about their varying experiences. For an introduction to our participants and their thoughts on the labels that they use, please read the first article in the series, here. Their takes on the familiar question “Am I queer enough?” can be found here.
Surely my parents knew that I was bisexual long before I came home from Pride Week toting a multicolored flag or started talking about plans for a hand tattoo (three simple lines: pink to represent my attraction to the same sex; blue to represent my attraction to the opposite sex; and their resultant purple). But I never experienced the moment that seems to saturate so many representations of queerness in the media: that customary seat on the couch, the camera focused on the protagonist’s face as they inhale and exhale their nerves before saying those pivotal words: “Mom, Dad, I’m gay.” In fact, that trope often way oversimplifies the experiences that members of the LGBTQIA+ community have when coming out. Firstly, there’s the fact that the concept of coming out itself is individual: some people may feel comfortable telling everyone, or just a single person, or only being out in certain spaces, such as only online.
Kat’s space includes everyone except her family. She’s sure that they suspect, but her coming out journey has not included telling them yet, as she wants to avoid the conversations she knows will ensue. “Everyone else in the world, I’m open,” Kat says. “I’ll say it loudly and proudly, but there are a lot of deeply dysfunctional parts of my family that have taught me that safety means keeping quiet about anything that truly matters to you within that space.” Obviously, Kat is just as valid as someone who is out to the entire planet. But her concerns are common. This worry – how others will react, the conversations that may follow – was common in each of the conversations with the seven LGBTQIA+ individuals in our Rainbow Reflections series. It seemed to stem mainly from a societal emphasis on heteronormativity. Several people also spoke of a lack of information or representation about their sexuality making it harder to come out.
Although Kathryn knew about same-sex attraction, “no one, not my friends, teachers, counselors, the media; literally no one told me that asexuality existed.” She said this ignorance led to harm. “Because I didn’t know it existed, I thought I was broken [and] because I was the one who wasn’t normal, that I should give my sexual partners whatever they wanted. I thought it didn’t matter because it didn’t mean anything to me. I did myself a lot of damage because I didn’t know that saying ‘no’ was an option.”
Hannah also felt her options were limited. “I would definitely say [that] I struggled with my identity,” she observes, adding, “I would panic anytime someone mentioned me being gay or asked about my sexuality. I felt like everyone could see it on my face. It just felt like I was hiding this really big thing, and it felt like a lot of pressure.”
So much of the panic and shame that Hannah experienced is also found in Kat’s experience, and the emotions presented obstacles for both women to come out. Kat’s shame specifically comes from her family. She speaks of when “it was made very clear to my mother that there will be no grandbabies or wedding plans.” “I felt like I then had to create that life my mother wanted [for me]: house, husband, kids,” she says, especially stressing her mother’s desire to be a grandmother. For Kat, the balance between her mother’s disappointment and her own desires is difficult. She explains, “[T]here’s this really strong sense that I’m the last hope of her getting that dream she’s always had, and I’m letting her down because that really isn’t a priority for me.”
The other main concern that came up in our conversations as a hindrance to coming out was the lack of information about different queer identities. Miriam seems to speak for many when she says, “I feel it would be beneficial if there [was] more conversation around LGBTQIA+ issues. I didn’t really know I could be something other than straight or gay until I started seeing bi[sexual] people in fiction. I didn’t even register so many things I was feeling, partly because I never saw them as a possibility in my environment.”
Emerson had a similar experience, sharing, “I struggled a lot with being trans. I hadn’t ever met a transperson who presented the way I did. I first came out as a transman, and later came upon the term ‘genderqueer’ and that really clicked for me.”
As LGBTQIA+ information and the experiences that accompany it changes and grows, hopefully the concept of coming out will as well. Someday, coming out may be seen as more than tense living room discussions. In fact, distilling it to one event at all is limiting. “I’m still constantly coming out,” says MK, “…in meeting new people, having different types of relationships, and discovering new, better words that I would rather use. I’m not stuck on the labels I have chosen to describe myself. I have now decided I don’t really care [that] I have multiple labels that I sometimes use and sometimes don’t…[T]hose are for me [to] describe myself but…[not for] me to justify myself to other people.”
For Edward, it was those around him who pushed him to officially define himself as a member of the LBGTQIA+ community and come out, while he was perfectly happy. “What I think I struggled with most was the pressure from other people to come out when I didn’t feel any need to come out, he remarks. “In high school, I was asked a few times, in a veiled way, if I was gay. When I started university, the trend continued, with people assuring me [that] it was okay to come out, it was okay to be gay. What was challenging was trying to understand why other people felt the need to effectively police my sexuality and identity based upon [my appearance and personality].” He agrees with MK that as your experience with your sexuality changes, the words you use and the ways that you describe those experiences should change with it. “[W]hy should it matter how society views these definitions?” Edward muses; your sexuality is your own. “But then,” he counters himself, “I think that it’s important to have some commonly understood nomenclature for the human experience, particularly in the context of something as close to our sense of identity as sexuality is for so many.” Perhaps it is not the words at all that are the problem, but the assumption that they, and coming out itself, is a singular, stagnant event. The way we talk about our sexuality can, and should, be fluid.
Embracing that fluidity is the first step, although the heteronormativity and lack of information that makes the decision difficult in the first place may always be an obstacle, even for someone as self-admittedly “open” as Kat. “So though I’ve gotten better with it,” she admits, “at times I feel as though, by living authentically, I’m letting down my family, or walking away from this intergenerational idea of how things should be.”
It is only by dismantling the ideas of “how things should be,” from the nuclear family to the experience of coming out itself, that every part of the journey becomes easier. We should all follow the examples of our seven Rainbow Reflections stars and chip away at stigmas and the lack of information surrounding queer identity so that the next generation can come out – or not – as they so choose. The final installment of the series will give each of our interviewees the opportunity to speak directly to that next generation and give advice to other members of the LGBTQIA+ community.