Contra Queer: The Metaphoric Incommensurability between Queer Politics and Coming Out

IntroductionEvoking Andrew Holleran's observation that "every new friendship in the gay life entailed an explanation of How I Got Here," Patrick Merla concludes that "coming out" has become a central event in a gay man's life, and "the way in which the man comes out reverberates throughout his life" (Merla, 1996). Coming out, that is, the act of enunciation of an individual's non-heteronormative sexuality, is key to the social narrative of being gay in America. This "event" is central also to a lesbian's life and within lesbian identity. As in Weiss's discussion, the coming-out narrative is reflected in lesbian independent films (Weiss, 2004) as well as other cultural contexts. In the genre of lesbian feminist fiction, moreover, the coming-out narrative has been the paradigmatic model of writing since the 1970s (Wilson, 1996; Jolly, 2001). To broaden the scope still, those who are bisexual, transsexual, and even those with disabilities and cancer, those who are rape victims, straight spouses of homosexual partners, and non-racially marked ethnicities all need to come out (Field, 1993; Buxton, 1994; Carbado, 2000; Arnold, 2000; Lesbian and Breast Cancer Project Team, 2004; Lo, 2006). Indeed, the "coming out" narrative is pervasive and central in the conceptualization of non-heteronormative identity formation and community development and has been adopted in different venues and contexts that are not directly related to sexuality. There is something about the coming out experience that is conformatory, that confers an acceptable identity onto someone, that assures the subject group support and inclusion.Yet, "coming out" is not a definitive or fixed event or process as the term itself might imply, but rather an individually variable experience(s) whose meaning is contextually and historically dependent. By demonstrating the heterogeneous use of the term "coming out," I hope to problematicize the naturalization of "coming out" as an inevitable process in identity formation and a narrative in identity expression. Contrary to its "naturalness," the term "coming out" has been deployed as a trope to frame our conceptualization of nonheteronormative identity and expression. The exact time when sexuality becomes, if at all, a constitutive part of one's identity may vary across culture and history. Foucault notes, in the Western culture, the discursive explosion of the eighteenth and nineteenth century caused a centrifugal movement with respect to heterosexual monogamy and scrutiny of the sexuality of those who did not like the opposite sex and for these people to make the difficult confession of what they were (Foucault, 1990, 38-39).Adoption and Transformation of the Coming Out Metaphor in Post-Stonewall U.S. History"Coming out" of non-heteronormative individuals is a relatively recent phenomenon in Western culture. In fact, research on the historical discourse of gay culture indicates that "coming out" gained its social significance as a strategic practice and a rhetoric after the 1969 Stonewall riots and the subsequent Gay Liberation movement in the 1970s and 1980s (Merla, 1996; Warren, 1997). As a political activist movement, the Gay Liberation Front mobilized many individuals to claim a certain "collective identity" on the basis of their sexualities. And the rest is history; for over three decades, the trope of "coming out" has enjoyed a status in cultural capitalism. Because of the rapid and increased media circulation and gay liberationists' political strategy, this phrase, "coming out of the closet," was thus coined for the discussions of personal experience and social/cultural/political identity. In pre-Stonewall years, according to Delany, queer subjects deployed the term "coming out" to describe their same-sex sexual experience as coming out into a queer culture and community. Post-Stonewall, however, the new meaning of the "coming out" metaphor redefines the coming-out subjects from the perspective of the heterosexist majority, and thus structures our conceptualization not only of sexualities and identities, but also of power relations between normative and non-normative. …