Sep 08, 2006  |  By: JULIE ENSZNE  | COMMENTS     

IT’S BEEN A hard conclusion for me to embrace. I organized “Speak Outs” for National Coming Out Day in the 1990s. I advocated coming out as critical to our liberation.

I’ve come out to everyone and reveled it in. When I ran out of family members, I moved on to dry cleaners and grocery baggers and state senators and plumbers and metro passengers. I can’t think of a person I haven’t told.

Even still, it’s come time for me to admit that coming out is a flawed strategy. In fact, coming out is the wrong strategy for queer liberation.

Our focus on coming out as the means to our equality has resulted in a generation of narcissistic queer people. Sticking to the present course will prevent us from ever achieving our full vision.

That’s why I’m not celebrating National Coming Out Day this year.

NATIONAL COMING OUT DAY was instigated as a project on the first anniversary of the 1987 March on Washington. In the midst of the AIDS crisis and seven years into a Reagan presidency we knew was reshaping America, coming out was embraced by gay and lesbian and bisexual people (trans-visibility was yet to be debated).

Polls in the mid-1990s showed that coming out was working. People who knew GLB people were more likely to support equal rights for GLB people. Primarily, they supported ending employment discrimination.

Coming out, however, relies on personal action — naming our sexual orientation — as a way to address a societal problem, homophobia and heterosexism.

Seen positively, it is an extension of feminist consciousness-raising, but in reality, it displaces collective action and community solutions by putting the onus of individual responsibility for a societal problem. Ultimately, I don’t believe that we can solve societal problems without societal actions.

Now almost 20 years into celebrating coming out as the way to win equality — and it was embraced well-before to 1988 — we should ask: Is coming out sustainable as a strategy over the next 20 years? I think not.

Besides new people coming out, young people or late bloomers, I think we have exhausted the potential and promise of coming out. Certainly, people will continue to do it, but as of right now the closeted people are so committed to hiding that they may remain so until they die.

Moreover, it seems foolhardy to rely on new people coming out as our strategy for liberation. What about the rest of us? When we have exhausted coming out possibilities, how are we to contribute to our movement for liberation?

Knowing a GLBT person personally does not guarantee an individual’s support for marriage equality as much as it did for non-discrimination policies in the workplace.

MOST IMPORTANTLY, THOUGH, coming out was a misguided strategy from the very beginning. I read everywhere profiles of gay people who say, “The greatest thing I have done is come out.” Frankly, I roll my eyes.

I want to ask them, “OK, coming out is what you are doing for you, in order to live openly and freely. Now what are you doing for the world?”

Coming out is about “me.” What I do. What I say. What I share. I, I, I. What about you and us and others?

Homophobia and heterosexism are societal problems. They need societal solutions. Societal solutions come not from the words of one person but from the deeds and commitments of communities of people.

Coming out may make us more comfortable; we may feel proud about telling the truth. But to achieve liberation, to end homophobia and heterosexism, we’re going to need to act collectively.

We need to do something greater for the world than tell our own stories. We are going to have to be responsible for our communal well-being. We are going to have to start living our lives as though we are not only for ourselves but for others as well.