Coming-out stage models (Cass and others)
Models that describe coming to a gay or lesbian identity as a series of stages, from first confusion to a settled identity that is one part of the self among others. They are often taught in counseling courses and passed around online as a map. Research supports parts of the content and finds that the order, and the stages themselves, vary a great deal between people.
What drives it
A stage map can make a messy time feel normal (‘this is the tolerance stage’) and promise an end. The risk is reading one’s own path as late or wrong when it doesn’t match. For identification the stages work better as a list of common experiences than as a ladder, since people reach them in different orders, or skip some.
How it shows
Work
Deciding that a colleague who isn’t out is ‘not there yet’. A diversity trainer presenting six stages as the path everyone takes.
Relationships
A partner told they are ‘still in the pride phase’. Friends who came out at 15 treating a friend who came out at 40 as behind.
Self
Notice whether you measure yourself against a timeline, and where that timeline came from.
What tells it apart
Five stages of grief (Kübler-Ross): The five stages of grief and the coming-out stages share the same appeal and the same weakness, a tidy order laid over a messy process. Both hold up better as lists of common reactions than as a fixed sequence.
Erikson's psychosocial stages: Erikson’s stages cover the whole lifespan and identity in general. Coming-out models cover one strand of identity, and a person may be settled in one and still forming the other.
Sexual fluidity (Diamond): Stage models assume a path toward one settled identity. Fluidity research describes attractions and labels that keep shifting in some people, with no end point assumed.
A test
Ask the person whether they recognize the experiences in the model, and separately whether they went through them in that order. Recognizing them in a different order is common, and the model may serve better as a vocabulary than as a timeline.
Questions to carry
- Which step on someone else’s map have I been waiting to reach?
- What does my own path look like when I tell it in my own order?
Go deeper
- Read: The Velvet Rage, Alan Downs, 2005, second edition 2012. Written for gay men by a clinical psychologist, from his practice and his own life. He traces adult shame back to a boyhood of feeling different and sets out three stages of moving out of it. It is widely read and many readers say it named something for them. The stages come from his clinical work and haven't been tested in studies that we found. A related idea, that some gay men make up for stigma by achieving, was tested later by Pachankis and Hatzenbuehler (2013). It says little about women, bisexual or trans people.
How strong the research is
weak. Vivienne Cass’s own test (Journal of Sex Research, 1984) partly supported her descriptions and their order, and found the data fitted four stages better than six. Later work found far more variety. In 1,260 lesbian, gay and bisexual Californians aged 18 to 84 (Calzo and colleagues, Developmental Psychology, 2011), people recalled early, middle and late patterns of reaching milestones, and many named themselves before any same-sex sexual experience, the reverse of the order older models assumed. Among 156 young people followed over time (Rosario and colleagues, Journal of Sex Research, 2006), 57% kept a gay or lesbian identity, 18% moved from bisexual to gay or lesbian and 15% stayed bisexual, and those who moved were still integrating the identity after taking the label. Mary Eliason (1996) faulted the models for narrow samples, a narrow focus on sexuality and a straight-line shape.
Where it comes from
Vivienne Cass, ‘Homosexual identity formation: a theoretical model’, Journal of Homosexuality, 1979, with six stages: identity confusion, comparison, tolerance, acceptance, pride and synthesis. Richard Troiden’s four-stage model, Journal of Homosexuality, 1989