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As much as I honor the ancestors/activists who clocked hella hours just so we *could* come out, I also want to be future-minded and work to one day place less onus on the corporatized project of "coming out."
Not to suggest we have somehow “moved past” coming out, as our rights and validity are still very much in flux in different parts of the country/world, but if we were to do some collective dreaming, what would that look like?
To me, everyone (everyone!) is at least a little gay or a little gender nonconforming, which means the performance of “coming out” creates a binary of before/after that fundamentally inhibits queer realities.
Though not always, the performance of "coming out" can sometimes fail as an expression of queerness and instead mutate (personally and pop-culturally) into a vessel for straight/cis epiphanies and we become this kind of triumph porn that is no longer ours.
And "Coming Out Day" can be much of the same thing — a flattening of queerness so companies can tout "representation" as some kind of social good, when in reality it is the bare minimum and the existence of queer people shouldn't be a bipartisan issue… (yet, here we are).
Not to mention, I truly believe the theater of "coming out" creates an unnecessary pressure that benefits the most privileged and endangers the most marginalized in queer/trans communities.
I have hope for future generations, many of whom are hardly coming out, or are creating new possibilities. I also adore the Niecy Nashes of the world who are like, "Coming out? I mean sure, but mind your damn business."
What do you think a new model for “coming out” look like? Genuinely asking. To me it could be gradual, almost unremarkable. It would be a slow dissection of our desire, our gender, and therefore our power. That to me is so much more interesting.
hm might delete this we'll see...
