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Caroline Look has come out three different times. The first time, it was to their mom.

On a drive with her, they saw a sign that read Rainbow Farm with a drawing of a unicorn. When they pointed it out to their mom, she asked if they were gay, and they immediately felt defensive.

“Two weeks later, I was like, ‘hey, remember that time? Yeah, I’m gay,’” Look said.

October 11 marks the holiday celebrating Look’s experience and the thousands of others like — and unlike — it. National Coming Out Day, founded by the Human Rights Campaign in 1988, celebrates individuals who have come out as LGBTQ+ to recognize the power in being queer. The date was selected to honor 1987’s National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, which saw LGBTQ+ activists and individuals openly expressing their identity as queer.

Coming out does not look the same for everyone. Senior Zoe Glasser came out in seventh grade when she was 12 years old.​​ She said she was one of the first people in her middle school to come out, and that the process was much more organic than the coming out experience that’s frequently portrayed in entertainment media.

Since coming out, Glasser has navigated her high school and college experiences as a queer woman, traversing stigma of labeling herself as a lesbian and the difficulties of being vocal with her family and friends about her relationships. Being out, she has sometimes felt pressured to explain her identity to certain members of her family when she didn’t necessarily want to. Even so, Glasser said that coming out has been fundamental to her identity.

“It was empowering to me,” she said. “It gave my feelings a name and made me feel part of a community that I wanted to be a part of, and made me feel like I wasn’t just some random, lonely person who’s the only person who felt this way.”

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Amongst the queer community, though, the question of coming out or not is a common one, and one that Brālyn Louise experienced first-hand. In her senior year of high school, Louise decided it was important to come out to her mom. She told her mom on a car ride, and said that she has been supportive since.

But she hasn’t come out to her dad and other members of her family.

“(My mom is) one of the only family members that really knows out of my entire family,” Louise said. “It’s almost like a little secret. Like, she’ll buy me stuff and slip it under the door-kind of thing.”

Louise did feel comfortable coming out to her closest friends in high school, but only selectively told others who asked. She said that after experiencing bullying throughout high school over people assuming she was queer, she felt more comfortable keeping her sexuality private unless directly asked.

For many queer people, the concept of announcing sexuality or gender by coming out is complicated. Louise said that to her, the idea of coming out is something she doesn’t understand entirely — as society’s heteronormative culture doesn’t dictate straight, cisgender people to come out.

Junior Paxon Andino said that he wishes all people, regardless of sexuality or gender, would feel compelled to come out, if comfortable. He said that being straight and cisgender are as much a part of people’s identities as being queer or transgender, so the expectation for LGBTQ+ people to be the only ones to come out is unfair.

Similarly to Andino, Look expressed their frustration over the fact that only LGBTQ+ people are expected to come out. People also often feel pressure to present their identity as something specific, they said. Look said that assigning labels and titles to their sexuality and gender is something that they’ve grappled with in some regards, but have felt empowered by in others.

“When I came out as ace (asexual), I found a lot of solace in that because I was something I was wrestling with for a really long time. Finally putting a label on it and like being verbally okay with it … really helped me feel nice,” Look said. “But then in terms of my gender, I don’t think I’ll ever know, but I think I need to come to terms with that.”

Look said some of the pressure stems from popular LGBTQ+ media. Louise said that watching queer TV and movies when she was closeted made the event seem like the “climax” of being a part of the LGBTQ+ community — especially because characters have one part of their identity to come out as, and that’s it.

Louise said that, compared to queer media she’s seen, her life after coming out has been more climactic than the actual process of telling her friends and family about her sexuality. She said her experiences presenting her identity have not been as dramatic or flashy as the movies, and that the portrayal of coming out as a universal, unilateral experience can be harmful.

“I was watching TV shows that had queer characters, and they always made it seem like the coming out was the climax, like that was the thing about being gay — and I felt like everything that came after was my climax for me,” Louise said. “The actual like, coming out is like history, it wasn’t this big, dramatic, flashy moment.”

Another component to coming out for some LGBTQ+ people means expressing both an individual’s sexuality and gender. Andino, like Look, came out on three separate occasions the first time for his sexuality and the next two for his gender. Even though it was difficult to come out more than once, Andino has viewed his experiences as positive parts of his identity.

“It’s been stressful, and it’s been scary,” Andino said. “But after coming out, the feeling is phenomenal. You feel the world lifted off your chest.”

Part of being queer, Glasser said, means making the call every time she meets a new person of if it’s worth it to be vocal about her identity. There is no singular time to come out, she said, and there is no perfect way to tell everyone in her life about her identity at once — especially when it can be in flux.

Andino and Look experienced the same idea, each having come out three separate times for different parts of their identity, though Glasser and Louise said that they have also come out more than once, to different groups of people in their lives.

Andino originally changed his pronouns after coming out as lesbian, which he said sparked the process of realizing he was transgender. Over the course of several years, Andino experimented with different labels and came out to his friends as things changed.

His journey was not easy, and being transgender has comes with its own struggles that are not easily accepted by society, like body dysmorphia, he said. Despite the struggles though, Andino said he’s proud of how far he’s come.

For Glasser, Andino, Look and Louise, sharing their identities has not been perfectly linear or straightforward. Coming out is a constant part of being a member of the LGBTQ+ community, Glasser said.

“It’s a process that never stops. You’re always coming out to new people, you always have to make those calls and those safety judgments: ‘am I safe enough to express my identity in this space or not, is it worth it?’” Glasser said. “It’s not just a one and done type of situation, it’s something that we live pretty much every day.”

Published on October 12, 2022 at 12:47 am