Do we still need to come Out?
Apple CEO Tim Cook came out last week and it has generated a great deal of celebration, but there has also been a bit of grumbling: why the need to come out at all? Aren’t we now in a society where it doesn’t matter?
Well, the Tim Cook example isn’t a good one to argue that point. There are other CEOs and top flight business people that are LGBT, true, but they are relatively few, and so Tim Cook’s much talked about essay for Bloomberg has been called important because it helps to chip away at the glass ceiling that has kept people at the very top of the business world from publicly coming out even as society becomes more accepting about LGBTs.
I would also argue that coming out will be necessary in some sense for a long while to come. Sadly, in striving for equality, there is a need to highlight how we are different so that LGBT-rights issues are not eclipsed and forgotten about. At the moment, this is particularly important for trans people who are still battling against invisibility in the media sphere and a lack of basic government recognition and protection.
Coming out is also important for many young people who, without labels to identify with, could be left feeling they are alone or, if they have been brought up in an antagonistic religious setting, are sinful or broken. Coming out creates a community of sorts, a tie that binds us together and leaves us feeling hopefully less isolated, and that is important. These labels are the way we find each other and coming out, to ourselves and to others, is a way of communicating that part of our identity.
Indeed, identifying as LGBT and coming out are important processes for many reasons and yet, in a private sense, it seems like there is an appetite to move beyond coming out. We have the notion of the post-gay era, that we can envision a not too distant future where we will stop thinking in terms of gay, lesbian, bisexual, or asexual, trans or birth gender, but simply view people as they are.
Unfortunately, we’ve not arrived at that yet. Still, we are now living in a more accepting age, and that raises the question of whether there is a more appropriate way of dealing with this issue in our day to day lives quite apart from the political scene. I’d argue yes, but it first takes recognizing why coming out is oddly problematic.
Coming out puts the pressure on the LGBT person to reveal that they are not heterosexual, gender-conforming or do not feel they align with their birth-assigned sex, as though heterosexuality and gender/sex conformity should be considered the default. This is an outdated idea, though.
I’m reminded of short story writer and poet Dorothy Parker’s often attributed and used sparkling line “Heterosexuality is not normal, it’s just common,” and perhaps that puts the future we are trying to achieve more clearly in mind: a recognition that heterosexuality might have been considered the norm but that doesn’t mean it is actually the default condition for the human race and one that we should assume everyone will share. And, it is that assumption that actually forces people into closets to begin with.
The key then is to stop assuming this as being a fact and treat every person as just that: a person. There would be no need for coming out in the private (as opposed to political) sense then and instead sexuality and gender identity would be one among the many things that we find as we talk to and get to know people.
At the moment, coming out does still matter and perhaps in terms of visibility it will always matter in some senses, such as recording sexuality and gender identity on official documents so as to ensure that LGBT issues are not overlooked. But it’s not unreasonable to hope and actively work towards a time when coming out is entirely unnecessary. Given that Russian officials are now tearing down a Steve Jobs memorial because Tim Cook came out – they seem to be worried about gay propaganda by proxy — we can safely say the world isn’t quite there yet.
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about Steve Williams
Steve Williams is a passionate supporter of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans (LGBT) rights, human rights, animal welfare and health care reform. He is a published novelist, poet and citizen journalist, and a scriptwriter for computer games, film and web serials.
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