Ten Years Out

I'd forgotten until today, but this year actually marks ten years since I came out in high school. That was a ghastly experience: I was ashamed and scared, spoke clumsily, and was reprimanded for it and told to keep silent on the subject thereafter. It was later on, in college, that I started to feel safe and confident enough to just tell people, and ultimately to simply live outside the closet.

Coming out is still a contentious subject among Catholics. Courage, which is thus far the only Catholic ministry to homosexually attracted people that has the Church's full endorsement, has been emphatically hostile to the idea of any public acknowledgement of non-heterosexual attractions.* It's probably obvious from my writing that I do not share their reticence, and I'd like to analyze the question a bit.

The author of the blog Letters to Christopher (whom I know very slightly, and rather like, our disagreements notwithstanding)** wrote a post opposing coming out just recently, in which he has the following to say:

The wisest decision I ever made about living with an attraction to men was never broadcasting it to the world by following the ritual of 'coming out.' As time passes I become more convinced that the wisest course of action for anyone who lives with same-sex attraction is to keep this information limited to a very small number of close confidants. Unless someone likes boxes placed around them which have very little to do with reality. ... [He then writes of a friend finding some of his writing online, and going aside from a bonfire they were attending, to explain to this friend that he doesn't pass judgment on him or anyone else for not being celibate.] It was a good conversation, and we eventually meandered back to the bonfire. Later I heard that when we left the bonfire there was joking that took place among some who were there that "Oh, I bet they're going out there to make out/mess around/do something." Really?

The rest of the post is in the same vein, complaining -- legitimately enough -- about the confining and often crass stereotypes of gay people that still prevail in our culture. In order to avoid being tarred with this brush, he says, he preferred not to come out.

The thing is, that's exactly the kind of thing that coming out of the closet is designed to fight. Can demeaning stereotypes be fought without coming out, in principle? Yes. Should they be fought, whether they affect you personally or not? Certainly. But principled objections, however necessary and important, don't have anything like the power of being confronted with a person whom you suddenly realize you have been treating with disrespect, and who won't fit into your preconceived categories.

Too easy.

I'll admit, too, that the post falls rather flat for me, in that the things the author describes having avoided up to that point by not coming out all seem, to me, to have rather the character of tasteless annoyances, essentially trivial in themselves, if maybe symptomatic of something more serious -- as opposed to an affliction which it was his wisest decision ever made to have hitherto avoided. However, there's no accounting for taste, and one man may be driven past all endurance by something another brushes off easily.

Most of the sources that I've read that oppose coming out don't seem to have the faintest notion of why people come out in the first place; the only explanation that I've ever seen given is that the gay movement uses coming out to lock people into a false identity and gain political support. In support of this, it's been asserted, guides for coming school people to hear only two responses: absolute acceptance or unconditional rejection.*** The only thing to be said about this is that it is not true, as a perusal of such guides will show; and that I find this view a little hysterical in the first place, in that it evaluates LGBT people only as enemies of Catholicism (which plenty of us aren't), and not as human beings with human motivations. I would have hoped that the Catholics who rightly speak so much of not reducing ourselves to our sexuality, would not do such reducing for us.

Now, I'm sure there are people who have come out for Machiavellian reasons, and that is worth addressing. But to suppose that no one comes out for any other reasons appears to me to be, even in the restricted sense I give the word, homophobic. Being gay does not make you crazy or evil; neither does disagreeing with the Catholic Church; and frankly, as someone who used to be active in LGBT advocacy, we spent more time making fun of Christian paranoia than of Christian morals.

So why would somebody come out? And, more particularly, why would a Catholic Christian come out? The USCCB (from whom I do not lightly differ) gently discourages it; to say the least, I should surely have a reason to be out of the closet. And it's worth pointing out, in an essay defending coming out, that there are perfectly legitimate reasons to stay in. It's nobody else's business if you don't want it to be, and "I don't want to" is therefore an adequate reply to any urging to come out.****

For me, the question was academic, in that I was already out before I became a Catholic. But why continue to be out, as it were? For several reasons; the chief of them being that when I was processing all this as an adolescent, I was terribly alone and frightened. I had no one. Whom could I know was safe and wouldn't reject or expose me, perhaps cruelly? Whom could I trust to know what they were talking about? Moreover, if the Catholic doctrine of homosexuality is true, then shouldn't it be open to those to whom it most urgently pertains to talk about it? If it isn't, if they're keeping secrets, how can I trust them? I don't want anybody to have to feel alone like I did; and my e-mail over the past year and a half suggests to me that being out has been worth it for that.

Another reason is the one I've already cited, homophobia. This, I am sorry to say, is largely the preserve of religious people nowadays (in this country, anyway). That prejudice wants correcting. And it can be corrected, without any dilution of Catholic teaching; I was told by a guy I went to college with that he had been kind of homophobic into the beginning of college, but that the example of a classmate who was gay and also a practicing Catholic changed his mind and convicted him of his unfairness in that regard. And Christian leaders can talk about avoiding discrimination all they like, but people can usually only come to recognize and repent of discriminatory tendencies by being confronted with a person; and as long as Christians oppose and condemn coming out, assurances that they aren't prejudiced are going to ring hollow.

Which brings me to a third reason. I believe that the discouragement of coming out, whether gentle or hostile, is a source of scandal to those outside the Church. Fifty years ago this may not have been the case, since the dispositions of society were much more in accord with Christian sexual mores, and for people to come out looked like shamelessness and an attempt to normalize perversion. Well, in a world where "Two Girls One Cup" is a thing,***** I'd say the normalization ship has kinda sailed, and as for shamelessness, I don't think it's either reasonable or healthy to be ashamed of something you didn't choose. Today, the only thing that discouraging coming out looks like, to those outside the faith, is discomfort with knowing that someone is gay, because gay people are icky and you don't want to get any on you.

And for people to believe that the Catholic Church is homophobic is a terrible stumbling block. There are people who will believe that regardless, because they classify all opposition to gay sex as homophobia. But others will test Christians against whether we not only take this view of gay sex, but treat LGBT people as second-class citizens. And if we are serious about making the distinction between disapproving of gay sex and being bigoted against gay people, we have to go above and beyond to prove that we sincerely love gay people; and that means -- it is an embarrassment to have to say this in so many words -- that we have to be okay with knowing that somebody's queer.

Admittedly some people are more obvious about it than others.

But for me personally, and I think for many of us, one of the deepest reasons for coming out of the closet can be put in a single word: authenticity. As I said before, being gay is a very personal thing, and no one is obliged to share that information with the world. But conversely, being gay is a very personal thing, and life consists entirely in being a person interacting with other persons. The doctrine of the Trinity means that relations between persons -- that is, Love -- is the fundamental nature of all reality. 

And being gay affects how you relate to people. Not always in the same way -- LGBT people aren't stereotypical any more than straight people are stereotypical. But it always does: "Sexuality affects all aspects of the human person in his body and soul. It especially concerns affectivity, the capacity to love and to procreate, and in a more general way the aptitude for forming bonds of communion with others."****** Everyone wants to know and be known for who they are; and, while sexual orientation may not constitute a person's identity, it is still in a very real way a part of who we are, because it dictates how we relate to people and what sort of relationships we long for, regardless of what our beliefs are about those possibilities.

Pretending to be straight can be suffocatingly inauthentic, and inauthenticity is always isolating, because you're being loved for a part of yourself, or even a fake self, instead of the real you. I was never lonelier than when I was closeted, and no matter what assurances I was given by others that they would love me no matter what, it was only by verifying for myself that a gay man was someone they could love -- which, in rare cases, did prove to be too much for them to handle -- that I was able to begin really receiving love.

Note that I've said authenticity, not honesty. Honesty, that is, telling the truth, can be combined with avoiding the issue in a multitude of ways; which is one reason, too, that I prefer the word gay to same-sex attracted in most circumstances, as I've seen the latter used as a shorthand for "I am going to avoid the implications of my attractions as long as I possibly can, and probably hurt myself and others while doing it" rather too often to like it. Authenticity, by contrast, suggest a way of being: being the same person to everybody, and loving others as that person, because to love is to give oneself. Which is far more important than the mere publication of facts about oneself. That sets me free in daily life to just be who I am, and try, as that person, to love others as best I can, in the grace of God. This above all: to thine own self be true, / And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man.

That's why I don't regret the decision I made a decade ago: because I told the truth, and now, I'm not scared any more. So, for National Coming Out Day: Hi, I'm Gabriel Blanchard, and I'm gay. Pleased to meet you.

*I must admit that my knowledge of the apostolate is limited in that I have never yet set foot in a Courage meeting, because I don't get the impression I'd be welcome even as an orthodox and practicing Catholic, since among other things I'm out of the closet and use the word gay. There are other reasons I haven't visited -- for instance, it is in my experience quite surprisingly difficult to find a chapter.

**I have, at the cost of slightly awkward phrasing in a few sentences, avoided naming this person, out of respect for his own dislike of coming out. Obviously I don't share his approach, but coming out (or not) is after all a very personal decision, and it's none of my business to make it on his behalf.

***This is based partially on the essays on the subject that used to be posted on Courage's website, and also on the general tenor of many Catholic writers on the subject. The said general tenor can be found on the internet if you care to go looking for it, and to violate the First Rule of the Internet, but Courage has altered its website, and doesn't appear to still be hosting the essay I quoted in this post. If that's the case, I am very pleased.

****I would recognize two exceptions, one practical in nature, one principled. The first is in speaking to a spiritual director; if they aren't fully informed of your nature, their counsel will be correspondingly less accurate and useful. The second is in seeking marriage: a spouse has a right to know about this; indeed, I'm given to understand that an undisclosed homosexual orientation is grounds for an annulment in canon law. Whether I'm rightly informed about that or not, information that is thus directly relevant to a husband and wife's life together cannot justly be withheld or distorted.

*****If you don't know what this is, for the love of God, don't Google it. If you must know, look it up on Urban Dictionary, and then cleanse your eyes with fire. Trust me, you'll want to.

******Catechism of the Catholic Church, para. 2332. Sexuality here does not exclusively mean sexual orientation, but the whole of being a human person, an assertion that we are not simply souls that "have" bodies to which sex is incidental, but that we are by nature body-and-soul together, and that gender-sex is part of who we are.