On National Coming Out Day

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.