The end of "coming out."

It's time for a reframing, I think.

1997 was a pretty big year for queer comings out. Most importantly, I came out as bi that year. But it was also the year a comedian and sitcom star named Ellen DeGeneres came out as a lesbian, which I guess was pretty significant too.

All kidding aside: if you don’t remember 1997, it may be hard for you to understand what a major deal Ellen coming out as a lesbian was. It was a Time cover story, back in an era when Time actually mattered. And it helped normalize queerness for many people for whom the concept was utterly foreign. It was, on many levels, a seismic shift.

But nearly twenty-six years later, I’m starting to wonder if the “coming out” — and specifically the celebrity coming out — has outlived its usefulness; if our fixation on this framing, our insistence on routinely running “coming out” headlines any time a celebrity gestures towards a queer identity, is perhaps doing more harm than good.

A couple caveats here before I go further though: there are comings out that I think are still meaningful and important. Every trans coming out is worth recognition, both because of the tremendous violence waged against trans people every day and because, you know, the logistics involved in transitioning genders. And there are some recent queer comings out that have felt like they carried some weight — Lil Nas X is not just a major queer star, but also a queer Black man who grew up Christian, and its clear that his public acknowledgment of his queerness has been a powerful force for good. Kal Penn’s coming out also sticks with me — though less because Penn himself being gay felt like some huge revelation than because the fact that he’d felt the need to publicly hide his queerness, even as a member of the Obama administration, just felt, well… a little sad.

But so many of the headlines I see about celebrities “coming out” — headlines I routinely complain about here — are not actually about momentous queer awakenings. A lot of the time they’re just… somebody making an offhand comment that references their queer experiences, which then gets turned into an Out.com story and just… why.

There’s a difference, I think, between being openly queer — something I will always support! — and “coming out,” and I think many of us confuse the two. The problem I have with the whole idea of “coming out” is rooted in its very origin as a term. Though it’s not often used anymore, the full phrase is actually “coming out of the closet,” which is to say that in order to “come out,” you necessarily have to have been closeted. The entire framing of “coming out” implies a time when you lived life in secret. It starts from a premise that everyone is assumed to be cishet from birth and must differentiate themselves if they are not, it positions being a cis straight person as the default and insists that everyone else must turn their announcement of not being straight into some major event.

Do you see where I’m going with this?

When Susan Sarandon or Alison Brie or Emily Ratajkowski or Madonna or whoever makes an offhand comment about being bisexual and it’s suddenly a headline about their Coming Out™️ — in a backhand way, it pathologizes queerness. It robs us of the ability to be chill; it insists that we have been living in hiding until we make a grand public statement about being queer. Indeed, it forces the grand public statement on us even when we don’t ever want to make one, it refuses to let being bi or gay or whatever just be the kind of thing you can casually mention and have it be no big deal.

That bothers me a lot!

It bothers me because it feels counterproductive: if we’re still treating every queer celebrity like some major news item then did Ellen’s coming out actually achieve what it was supposed to? If we’re still treating queerness as novel and noteworthy then… aren’t we getting further from the intended goal of, uh, normalizing being queer? Then there’s also the fact that the fixating on the celebrity coming out binds queer progress to wealthy people publicly disclosing their private lives — and while I can absolutely agree that celebrities being afraid to be out is bad, I don’t know that, I dunno, Billy Eichner being a big public gay is actually doing a ton to provide resources for homeless queer kids or bi single moms or any of the people most impacted by societal queerphobia and transphobia. (See again, the difference between being “openly queer” and “coming out.”)

And like I said, I remember very well the sheer political power coming out has had over time. I don’t want to dismiss the major, transformative work that has been done thanks to brave people being willing to publicly identify as queer. But at the same time: in 2023, do we really want to reinforce the message that saying you’re queer is #SoBrave? In 2023, do we really want to continually amplify the message that who celebrities are fucking or attracted to is any of our business?

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