Coming out (telling others one’s sexual orientation)
Telling other people about one’s sexual orientation. It is rarely one event: people come out again with each new job, doctor, neighbor or in-law, and many are out in some settings and not in others. How it goes depends a great deal on the setting and on who is told.
What drives it
Telling ends the work of hiding with that person and lets one be known, which the research ties to well-being. It also exposes the person to whatever the listener does next. For identification it explains why one disclosure brings relief and another leaves someone worse off, and why being out helps in one setting and costs in another.
How it shows
Work
Weighing whether to mention a partner in a job interview, or waiting until the probation period ends. Coming out to one manager and then wondering who else has been told.
Relationships
A parent who says little, then sends a long message a week later. A sibling who already knew. One partner out to everyone while the other has told two friends, and the friction that follows.
Self
Notice who you have told and who you haven’t, and what you expect each untold person to do. Notice whether those expectations come from things they have said or from fear.
What tells it apart
Concealment stress (hiding a sexual orientation): Concealment stress is the cost of hiding. Coming out is the act of telling, and it can bring its own stress where the setting is hostile. A person may carry both at once, with different people.
Family rejection and acceptance (Ryan, Family Acceptance Project): Family rejection and acceptance describe how a family responds over time. Coming out is the moment of telling, and the first reaction may change, for better or worse, in the months after.
Coming out later in life and mixed-orientation marriages (Buxton): Coming out after a straight marriage or decades of hiding brings a spouse, children and a shared history into it. The general pattern still applies, with more people touched by each disclosure.
A test
Ask the person, setting by setting, whether they are out there and whether they feel free to be themselves there. Being out may help most where both answers are yes, and being out where the second answer is no may feel no better than hiding.
Questions to carry
- When I told the last person, what did I watch for in their face?
- Who am I still not telling, and what do I expect them to do?
Go deeper
- Watch: Love, no matter what, Andrew Solomon, TEDMED, 2013. A writer who interviewed families raising children unlike themselves: deaf, dwarf, transgender, gay and more. He opens with a 1966 Time magazine line calling homosexuality a sickness, and a memory of his mother steering him away from a pink balloon. He calls traits a child learns from peers "horizontal identities", and asks where love for a child ends and acceptance begins. A writer's reading of many families, free to watch.
How strong the research is
moderate. In 161 lesbian, gay and bisexual adults (Legate, Ryan and Weinstein, Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2012), being out with friends, family, coworkers, school peers or a religious community went with less anger and depression and higher self-esteem mainly where people felt accepted and supported in that setting. In settings that felt controlling, people who were out felt no better than those who concealed. In 7,816 LGBT secondary school students in the US (Kosciw, Palmer and Kull, American Journal of Community Psychology, 2015), being out went with more victimization and also with higher self-esteem and less depression, and the extra victimization was larger for rural students. A daily diary study (Legate, Ryan and Rogge, 2017) found that feeling supported in a conversation predicted disclosing that day, which predicted better well-being that day. Most of this work is correlational.
Where it comes from
Treated as a step in the stage models of identity from the late 1970s (Vivienne Cass, 1979). Nicole Legate, Richard Ryan and Netta Weinstein, ‘Is coming out always a “good thing”? Exploring the relations of autonomy support, outness, and wellness for lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals’, Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2012, from self-determination theory