I
came out to my friends aged fifteen via the then near-universal
medium of a chain email personality quiz.
'Do
you like girls or boys? asked one of about fifty questions. 'GIRLS' I
put, alongside answers about my favourite colour, what I wanted to do
when I left school, and how many pets I had. Then I sent it to
everyone I knew.
My
thought process was basically to act as though everyone already knew
about my romantic and/or sexual preferences and to carry on with
exactly the same attitude as before. I was hoping that people would
take their cue from my behaviour, and also decide to carry on as if
nothing had changed. Because, fundamentally, nothing had changed.
I was who I had always been: a fat, opinionated, nerdy teenage girl
who harboured both a deep love of science fiction and the loathing of
a thousand firey suns for PE.
And
I was nervous when I arrived in school the next day, after the
sending of the fateful quiz, but for the most part... it became clear
that everyone kind of had already known, much to my relief.
For the first (and, frankly, last) time during the emotional cesspit
of my teenage years, my mouthyness had done me a favour. I'd never
exactly been subtle with my outspoken fascination with female
characters in the Canadian sci-fi shows I was obsessed with (oh,
Trance Gemini, you were purple, and you had a tail, and I thought you
were sexy as hell).
In
fact I'm fairly certain that a couple of my mates had worked out that
I was gay before I had.
Still.
The older I get the more I resent the idea of 'coming out' to begin
with. You never 'come out' once and get to be done – it's a
conversation you have over and over again, in every new situation you
come into. Straight people will absolutely insist on believing that
everyone around them is heterosexual until told otherwise, much to my
continued chagrin, and, like most people in the LGBTQIA community,
I've lost track of the number of conversations I've been forced to
make faintly awkward and uncomfortable by correcting some casual
acquaintance's assumptions about me.
A
straight friend once opined to me his well-intended presumption that
if all the 'gay people' in Hollywood would just come out it would
essentially cure homophobia in one fell swoop – erase the stigma,
set a shining example. I thought his naivete was adorable, and also
that he was entirely missing the point.
Homophobia
is not a problem that it should be up to the LGBTQIA community to
solve, for the simple reason that there aren't enough of us to be
somehow perpetuating our own discrimination. The idea that we can
really change anything, long-term, by coming out is sort of baffling.
It's notable, for instance, that in the wake of equal marriage laws
being passed in New York, the number of homeless LGBT youth on the
streets there swelled by 40%*. Tragically, in the wake of this
supposedly accepting atmosphere, hundreds of queer young people had
'come out' to their families – and were thrown out by heterosexual
parents whose attitudes had not somehow been magically altered by
their child coming out at all. Coming out didn't save them, equal
marriage laws didn't save them – famous queer people in Hollywood
didn't save them.
Yes,
it's great – admirable – when someone famous makes the decision
to be open about their sexuality. (I may have cried when Ellen Page
did it). But famous queer people are under no obligation to be open.
Certainly, they are under far, far less of an obligation to be 'out'
than any straight person, famous or not, is under to not be
homophobic. And one of the major
ways in which straight people can stop being homophobic is to remove
the necessity of 'coming out' in the first place, by ceasing to
assume that everyone around them is also straight.
It
shouldn't be up to us queers to tell heterosexual people who we are –
what label they should be applying to us. Straight people just need
to stop assuming that we don't exist all around them, within every
community, every environment. They need to make room for us, need to
allow, within their mindsets, the possibility that we are there,
whether they know it or not.
I
mean, none of us are entirely 'out' the entirety of the time – I
don't walk into a coffee shop and tell the barrista that I'm a
lesbian when I order a latte. I don't introduce myself to a new tutor
at filmschool with my name, speciality and sexual orientation. And
yet when I mention to this same tutor that my subject matter is often
'queer' in its content, I always get the same faint look of surprise
as I am re-evaluated, re-categorized in their heads – as a question
they're probably too polite to ask comes up in their minds, about
what I am, anyway.
Because
they always, always assume that I'm straight and the hint that I
might not be always jars them.
Do
I blame these individuals? Not especially, because we live in a media
culture that is absolutely saturated with heteronormativity, so, you
know, of course most straight people – barring some obvious visible
marker of queerness, which I tend not to have – assume that
everyone is as cis!het as they are. When we exist in the simulacrum
of media narratives that permeate our world we are, at best, 'special
interest' – faintly (or not so faintly) 'other', odd, edgy, unusual
enough to constitute a talking point or a notable extreme. But not
main characters in dramas that aren't specifically about queerness,
not human enough, in that respect, to simply exist in stories where
being queer isn't our biggest problem. We are constantly positioned
in opposition to a 'straight' default.
Straight
people are taught early that they are the norm and we are not –
that they are the rule and we the exception – and this is the
foundation upon which homophobia rests on both an institutional and a
personal scale. That there is any 'norm' at all from which to deviate
is the idea that straight people need to start deconstructing – for
themselves as well as in the name of making the world safer for the
queer community. Because ideas about normative sexuality also tend to
form the neck from which a hydra of other evils spring: rape culture,
toxic masculinity, that especially virulent form of able-ism which
loves to assign arbitrary value to people in order of how fuckable
they are – to name a few.
This
is why 'coming out' is not something queer people should feel
obligated to do. Straight people might instead choose to celebrate
national coming out day by rethinking their personal assumptions, by
challenging heteronormativity by themselves – by calling out
homophobic behaviour from those around them, by making it safe for
queer people to live openly and comfortably.
*For
this statistic and other depressing facts about homeless LGBT youth
rates, see this article in the Rolling Stone.
