Love Expanded

2

Not the Only Story

Reconsidering the Coming-Out Narrative

We all know how the coming-out story goes. A young person realizes that they aren't straight or cisgender. They make the announcement, perhaps standing up in front of their family, perhaps telling their friends at school. They wait for the reaction, and it comes: acceptance, or rejection. Whatever the response, the teen is now officially Out, their rite of passage completed. Their time of hiding is over; they have passed the greatest milestone on the road to becoming a queer adult.

These were the stories I grew up with, and I knew I was lucky to have them; lucky to live in a time and a part of the world where coming out was an option. When I reached the point of, belatedly, being certain that I was ace (knowing that I was aromantic took a little longer), I knew what needed to follow: the declaration.

I tried the script on my brother, hoping that he would be the most receptive of my family members. He mentioned, offhandedly, that university was so full of relationship drama that it was like a sitcom, and I pounced. 'Everyone? You have to know someone who's not interested in that kind of thing.'

'I guess there are people who haven't clicked with anyone yet.'

'But some people aren't interested in relationships, full stop. Or sex. Any of it.'

He considered this. Then shrugged. 'I think anyone who says they're not interested is just making an excuse for why they can't get a relationship. Or there's something medically wrong with them. I mean - sex is such a natural human instinct. Anyone who doesn't want it probably has some kind of disorder.'

I stopped, the words I'd been planning to say sticking behind my teeth. This wasn't how it was supposed to go. This wasn't what happened in the books and films. Those had taught me that the responses to coming out were I accept you or I don't. Nothing had prepared me for the possibility of someone saying I don't believe you.

With my mother, I tried a different approach. I started with hints that I didn't want to get married or have a relationship. I showed her an article in a newspaper by a closeted asexual. I came out by degrees, gradually building towards explaining that I didn't fantasize about sex, or factor it into my daily life, or picture it a part of my future. The difference between asexuality and aromanticism felt too complicated to explain, but I told her I had never been interested in anyone - that I wasn't interested in being interested.

'That doesn't mean you'll never feel that way,' she said. 'You might just not have met the right person yet.'

I set my teeth together. 'If I'd told you I was a lesbian, you wouldn't tell me I just hadn't met the right man.'

'The right person,' she insisted, in a tone that implied this made a difference.

So I typed up and printed out a list of frequently asked questions about asexuality, and went to try my dad. This time, I was ready for you haven't met the right person yet and this sounds like a disorder. I had answers for you're too young to know and that isn't a real identity. What I wasn't prepared for was what he said.

'All right. As long as you understand that it may change in the future.'

The speech, the rehearsals, the FAQs - they were all suddenly worthless. I flailed for the crucial question. 'But you believe me?'

'Of course.'

All right. This was good. This meant it was going well. 'Okay. That's great. I was - I don't know, I was worried you wouldn't think it was a real orientation.'

'Well, it's not. It's a lack of orientation.'

'Dad. I just want you to give my identity the same respect you'd give it if I'd come out as gay.'

And he agreed. That went well, I told myself. That went really well.

A month or two later, when I brought the topic up in conversation, he frowned at me. 'Right, because you. you consider yourself to be one of those people without a gender?'

It wouldn't be long before I realized that he was, in fact, right. I am indeed nonbinary. At the time, though, I wanted to scream. I had expected my family to accept my asexuality or not accept it, I had prepared for it - but not for them to fail to believe me, or to misunderstand what I was saying, or for them to appear uncomfortable whenever I brought it up. I was out; didn't that mean I got to talk about it now? Didn't that mean I was open, able to live my queer existence to the full? Because I wasn't doing that.

I turned nineteen. University, I knew, would offer a place where no one had expectations about who I was and who I was going to be. My mum drove me to the station. As we crawled up the motorway, she said, abruptly, 'I know you think you're asexual-'

My excitement crashed somewhere on the road behind us.

'-but please don't tell anyone. I don't want you to miss out on opportunities. There are so many wonderful experiences you can have at university.'

Words seethed behind my lips. I wanted to tell her that she was wrong, that the real opportunity was the chance to finally be seen as an aroace person and not as the person my family thought I was, a straight woman who just had to get over my fear of the unknown. I wanted to tell her that I was sick of living in limbo, somehow both out and not.

I stared at the streetlights sliding by, and said nothing.

*

The coming-out story does not work for everyone.

Coming out, as we currently understand it, does not mean what it did when the term was coined. When queer subculture existed underground, a queer person 'came out' when they introduced themselves to that subculture. It was to other queer folks, not to straight and cis people, that they came out - a truth reflected in the phrase itself. Coming out was the term once used for a young woman's debut into society when she reached marriageable age; queer people were, like those young aristocratic women, joining their peers and starting their romantic lives.

By this definition - joining a circle of peers - I had come out long before I said a word to my parents. I was openly aroace online, the only place I interacted with other queer people, and had aspec friends through the internet. I might only have dipped a toe into the queer world, but I was definitely not standing on the shore anymore. But in my head, coming out meant telling the allo people around me. That was what happened in coming-out stories, and it was what I thought my story had to be.

But for many aro and ace people, coming out is rarely so simple as those stories. When a person says I'm gay, at least everyone knows what they mean; saying I'm asexual or I'm aromantic to an unfamiliar allo person can lead to them having visions of sad, closed-off loners. By the modern definition, I never came out to my family as aroace. There was no transition from before or after, from dark into light, from hiding to transparency. My parents' lack of understanding made that impossible. I never underwent that rite of passage - and given how much the coming-out story is presented as the major queer milestone, I was left feeling like I had failed. I was neither out nor in; I was not fully adult. Not authentically queer.

Queer people have long since questioned the coming-out story's accuracy and usefulness. As many have pointed out, the idea that one big declaration brings you from 'closeted' to 'open' is erroneous. We come out all through our lives: any time someone makes an assumption about our sexuality or gender that we have to correct; any time a doctor's form asks for our sexuality; any time a woman mentions her girlfriend, or a polyamorous person wants to talk about 'my partners'. And as I found out, coming out as belonging to one identity is not necessarily the end of the story. I came out, in my staggered, blurry way as ace, then later introduced being aro into the mix, and spent a year or two thinking I was done with the whole exhausting business before realizing I was nonbinary as well. I have more than one friend who identified as gay, and came out as such, before realizing they were in fact a straight trans person.

Coming out itself is not the problem. When being queer was an offence, something that had to exist underground, being out and open was a radical thing, a tectonic shift that forced society to acknowledge the presence of gay, bi and trans people in their lives and society. It was - and still is - a refusal to live in shame or concealment. It can still be these things for many people, and there is value in many coming-out stories. The problem arises when it becomes the dominant story we tell about queer people - sometimes, indeed, the only one.

For aspec people, part of the issue is that we very seldom get any kind of linear coming-out story. In my initial research survey, one of the questions I posed was about people's coming-out experiences, and I was struck, though not surprised, by how many people said that they had never come out at all; or that they had started to come out to their loved ones, and...