Beyond the Bedroom Door: The Multifaceted Nature of Coming Out
What does coming out as a gay man mean? I was talking to a friend recently, someone who grew up as a gay man at the very end of the last millennium. He claimed that coming out is essentially announcing one’s sexual preferences, which deviate from the patriarchal, heterosexual norm and have been pathologized by science and criminalized by governments in the previous couple centuries, as analyzed by Michel Foucault. In Canada, Pierre-Elliott Trudeau decriminalized homosexuality in the 1970s, stating that the government had no business in the bedrooms of the nation. The evolution from the early to the late twentieth century in understanding what it means to be a gay man shifted from viewing it as a criminal pathology to regarding it as sexual practices that deviate from the norm but are tolerated so long as they occur behind closed doors. Thus, coming out has been minimized to announcing what one prefers to do behind those closed doors. Maintaining this simplicity is convenient for the orthodoxy because it requires minimal change in its values, practices, and roles. As long as what gay men do remains outside of the public eye, everything can proceed as before.
However, for the individual revealing their identity, reducing it to sexual practices creates a form of injustice, perhaps a hermeneutical injustice, as elaborated by Miranda Fricker. Being a gay man around 2020 in Canada signifies a much richer identity. It means engaging in one's community with a whole way of living, including reproduction, raising children, and potentially redefining what it means to be in a romantic relationship or marriage. Coming out signifies much more than disclosing one's sexuality; it is about adopting a way of living, a presence in the community, a being in the world that cannot be reduced to sexual activities behind closed doors. What happens behind closed doors is indeed nobody's business, and coming out should not be diminished to a mere admission. This perspective is from gay men so far, my standpoint.
But coming out for the rest of the people under the rainbow still needs to be fully understood. If the coming out of gay men could be simplified to announcing one's sexual deviation while preserving everything else as equal, this does not generalize to lesbians, trans individuals, asexuals, and the rest of the rainbow. Their identities are much richer than their sexuality and are more visible and still clash with patriarchal norms. My point, then, is that reducing a coming out to an announcement of sexuality does a form of violence by erasing identities. We can, and must, do better.
