Coming out all over again, and again, and again...

I have a pretty large confession to make. I don't really understand what "Coming out" means any more. Not that I haven't gone through it: the realization, the telling, the many tellings, the personal demarcation. My issue with it is more the illusion of closure that "coming out" encourages. I don't buy it any more.

Sure, I've seen plenty of times the shades of the coming out experience based upon who one is informing: you come out to yourself, you come out to your friends, you come out to your mom, etc. These distinctions denote that this is a process and that it unfolds in a fashion that suits the individual's comfort levels and stage of personal acknowledgment. However, it always pre-supposes the following:

- There's only one core item to be communicated.
- The piece of information is exactly that, a discrete self-contained nugget of fact about the self that grows to a "mature" state in the mind before it is ready to be revealed to appropriate parties (i.e. the man behind the Wizard).
- There is the pre-coming out world and the post-coming out world. Those in your life may exist in both stages but they invariably view you/know you differently in the post-coming out world, generally with the assumption that they now have a greater, more accurate understanding of your person. They finally now know the "real you."

It isn't really my job (or more like I don't really have the personal energy, and rather focus on something else) to fully debunk each of these points. I do know though that they basically go against certain core tenets I've formed for myself (or continue to form...) and my understanding of the world and people:

- We are multi-faceted.
- Knowing differentiates from knowledge, and we use the convention of encapsulating knowledge in order to develop knowing within the confines of how our brains work.
- For the third point: The "realization" and process of informing others frames it as an undoing of a false sense of self, that all things previous to this realization are tainted with misconception and mis-information and that the new corrected version of the individual will reveal a larger and greater sense of truth and happiness.

I reject the third notion because it robs our past of its legitimacy, even though it has everything to do with who we are and continue to be. It eliminates the capacity for further growth, change and conscientious alteration. It also makes it seem like all the hard work is now done and life will have everything fall into place.

I don't honestly think most gay people actually believe this (and if they've lived as much as a week after being "done" coming out, know it to be so very false), but I would put money on the notion that plenty of straight people are convinced this is how it works, and that's largely due to how the conversation is framed:

It's such a huge obstacle to -tell-, to reveal to co-workers and parents and friends; that immediate consequences could crush you, you could lose your job, risk being kicked out of your house, public violence, and the other general tidings of ubiquitous oppression. But once you get past this "obstacle," embrace it, find a "welcoming" place of employment, and accepting friends and get your parents to a "tolerant" point, life is damn good.


Fucking bogus. And I'm not here claiming that my concern would be that life didn't turn out as easy as I would have liked. I'm ridiculously happy, and satisfied, and focused, and hungry for life and experience. But the notion that the moment I got over my happiness' largest obstacle when I told my parents and friends would deny the work I've done for myself since then. It would deprive the important moments when I was 15, and closeted, and sprawled out on my bed til 5 am listening to endless hours of records lost in messy, crucial thought. It would privilege my sexual self over my intellectual self. It would mask the long, drawn out, ongoing and multi-pronged experience that is understanding your desires. It would do an immense disservice to everything and anything Carl Jung's works consider.

And it has a lot to do with my shyness with labels. Narratives are useful models for understanding our experiences, but as people we don't have a single, poignant climax in the form of epiphany. So the establishment of the self as something, anything isn't your one blown chance to finally make that "turn" in your life (so relax). It goes on and on and on, and when it doesn't any more, you're dead.