Background

“Queer” and Its Usage

Before we begin, let’s talk about being queer. To people in the queer community, it is a reclaimed slur used as an umbrella term for any non-cis and non-heterosexual or heteroromantic person.  For queer studies theorists, it’s an oppositional term used to describe people who resist the binary status quo.  The word has a fraught history, and we use it in our work as an umbrella term, but it is important to acknowledge its history as a slur and a form of abuse.  Its rise in usage from people outside of the community has come with criticism, as NPR notes in a 2019 article about its own use of the word¹.  Recorded uses of the word on live national broadcasts begin in 1972 when LGBT people describe insults lodged against them coupled with abuse.  In the 1980s, it was used in an interviews with members of an activist group called Queer Nation, which spearheaded the reclaimation of the word.  Today, it is used by broadcasters themselves as a short-form way to describe the LGBTQ community.  This development is important to note and keep in mind to respect the members of the community who have historically and even today been hurt by the usage of the word “queer.”

Given the general reclamation, especially by younger queer people, we use this word as an umbrella term throughout this project, and mean no disrespect through its usage.

Terms

Onto more words!  For those unfamiliar, the Human Rights Campaign² has a good general list of some of the more common identities, but here I will define a few of the ones prevalent to our work.

  • Trans: a short form of transgender (transsexual typically seen as outdated); applies to both binary and non-binary genders, as long as a person’s gender does not align with the one assigned at birth. 
  • Nonbinary or Genderqueer: umbrella terms describing individuals who do not fit into the gender binary. Others use more specific identifiers. 
    • Demigirl or demiboy describes a person who is femininely or masculinely aligned, but who doesn’t identify as one of the two binary genders.
  • Cis: a short-form of the word cisgender, which refers to someone who identifies with the gender assigned to them at birth
  • Gay: describes same-gender loving men or women
  • Lesbian: specifically used for women or feminine identifying people attracted to the same gender
  • Bisexual: refers to someone attracted to two genders, or a self-identifier for someone attracted to gendered traits
  • Pansexual: describes someone who feels attraction regardless of gender
  • Asexual: describes people who don’t feel sexual attraction.  This doesn’t mean that they don’t feel romantic or platonic attraction though, and ace (a common short form) people can and do have healthy relationships.

History of Coming Out

“Coming out” as it is understood today, involves a person publicly acknowledging their queer identity to friends, family, and even strangers.  Coming out can be an active or passive action, respective examples being acknowledging it directly (the oft-memed phrase: “Mom, Dad, I’m gay”) or bringing home a same-gender romantic partner.  Coming out is a process for many queer people, especially since society at large assumes heterosexuality and gender conformance, so queer people will always have people that they are “closeted” to, just because they are almost always assumed to be straight and cis.  The history of coming out though, wasn’t always a public affair– and it wasn’t even always for queer people.

The term originally came from how young well-to-do girls would “come out” to public society as available for courting and marriage.  It was co-opted by gay people to describe “coming out” to gay society.  It was at first an insulated occurrence, but as post-World War II era America cracked down on gay subculture, gay people needed to be more secretive, so that coming-out involved more of a self-realization than a public act³.

After the Stonewall Riots in 1969, coming-out took on a political flavor, in which gay people would come out in order to show solidarity, opposition, and prove their existence to heterosexual society.  Out of this came the idea that coming out was associated with a shedding of internalized self-hatred.

Today, we think that this view has changed even more.  Not only are the processes of coming out for trans folk not documented, but coming out for non-heterosexual people has also evolved depending on the contexts of childhood experiences, social circles, and even more.

We attempt to explore the nuanced process of coming out through the interviews that we collected, and also ask why coming-out stories are now more widely shared.

Sources

  1. https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2019/08/21/752330316/a-former-slur-is-reclaimed-and-listeners-have-mixed-feelings
  2. https://www.hrc.org/resources/glossary-of-terms 
  3. https://theconversation.com/the-history-of-coming-out-from-secret-gay-code-to-popular-political-protest-129609
  4. https://lgbtq.unc.edu/resources/exploring-identities/coming-out (used the linked doc)