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Comment by TimTheTinker | Hacker News Reader

It's weird to me that sexuality and identity are so intertwined. Why should someone "come out" as anything?

(I know a lot of people "come out" as various things in a mere bid for attention... I'll leave that issue aside.)

If I knew someone casually for a while who never talked about his/her sexuality, but one day they said "I never said this before, but I'm a heterosexual", I'd certainly feel awkward about it. Why did he/she say that to me?

To take it further, why phrase it "I am ..." instead of "I have ... desires"? If the latter sounds awkward, why is the former any less awkward?

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It's only weird to you because you are almost certainly straight, cis and male. Let me explain.

All of society is structured around your identity. Like the fish, you can't even see the water because you have always been in it. I'm unlikely to help you see the water, but let me at least try.

If you meet a friend, he might comment he saw a movie with his new girlfriend. He shows you a photo on his phone and you say she's really cute and nice catch. He asks if you want to grab a beer later. You say you have to pick up your wife from the airport later and pick up the kids from their school.

All of this, the girlfriend, the comment she's cute, the wife the kids, they are your life. It is who you are. If someone asks what you are doing later, it's all you have to say, because that's what you do. It is your identity.

I have a partner. We have lived together for 14 years. In order to tell you anything about myself, I have to tell you about him too. It is my life. It is what I do. This is who I am.

Coming out is something you do with each and every new person you meet. I am not rubbing your face in my sexuality. I'm just talking about me. If I tell you I went out for lunch, but avoid telling you with who, that is in the closet. If I tell you it was with my boyfriend, that is out of the closet.

So yup, done hiding here, and not going to start again because some people might be clueless or treat me as less.

Edit: nice, downvotes. Did I make you feel silly for listening to taking points from bigots?

Thank you, that was very nicely said.

It's distressing the degree to which people want to blame others for their identities while regarding their own as some kind of fundamental default of nature. It's only "identity politics" when it's somebody else's identity.

Thanks. I think that gets lost easily in these discussions. This is my family. My partner, my mother and father-in-law, my sister-in-law, my nephew, my home, my plans for the future. It's connected to everything I might tell you about my life over the past 14 years. Having someone label all that as "awkward" or "political" is pretty extreme, especially when the person suggesting it doesn't even have a hint at the enormity of what they just said. It's the very definition of "casual erasure", something that sounds political and till someone comes up to you and tries to erase you.

Edit: to the people down voting my mother-in-law, she is a kind and caring woman!

I don't think you deserve to be downvoted but I don't believe having a conversation about heterosexual relationships is somehow free of consequences. Even if I had a conversation about a partner who is straight, people are going to make snap judgements about the their appearance, what they do for work, what religion they belong to (Be prepared to be judged if it is the wrong one!) etc.

Many children have been disowned by their parents because they fell in love with someone from the wrong family. There is no shortage of thousand year old stories and plays describing this exact situation. So, the idea that "Like the fish, you can't even see the water because you have always been in it." doesn't really resonate with me. That doesn't mean our society is free from discrimination and unfair treatment, but painting people with a broad brush serves to alienate those who might be your allies, and is ironically the very thing you are advocating against.

I think you need to experience some discrimination to see the "water." It gives you an ability to better understand what other people deal with, even if you don't share their identity. I absolutely think experiencing religious discrimination, gender discrimination and so on can give you lots of empathy for a person not like you, but dealing with similar challenges.

To me it's pretty clear the person I was responding to had zero frame of reference to what discrimination feels like, which is why I said so. I really don't know how to get that through to a person with words alone. I think there needs to be a parallel experience to build on.

It's no broad brush to say that a person who thinks sexual orientation has no bearing on identity must be squarely within the favored majority.

> To me it's pretty clear the person I was responding to had zero frame of reference to what discrimination feels like, which is why I said so.

I sympathize with you here, I really do: but making such broad assumptions is a bad way to foster real, productive conversations. Identity and queerness are deeply personal topics with all sorts of nuance and interplay between them. I appreciate that you're living your truth, but coming off with this "scorched earth" rhetoric isn't going to win you any fans.

Can you unpack "scorched earth rhetoric" for me? I am clearly upset that someone tried to stuff me back in the closet, but isn't that a natural reaction? I think it's fairly generous to share my personal experiences in the hopes that someone out there might learn how to better respect others.

Well, it starts from your first line.

> It's only weird to you because you are almost certainly straight, cis and male. Let me explain.

I don't think that's a fair assessment, and it's certainly not a true generalization. I'm not cis, but I completely understand how weird the concept of "coming out" is. Nobody wants to put you back in the closet, we just want to discuss how much the current paradigm surrounding sexuality sucks.

My priors on who is most likely to have low empathy for minorities are pretty strong. I bet I am right, but could be wrong:)

I agree that "coming out" takes some explanation. You're going to have an easier time explaining it to some people than others. A shared experience certainly helps! Otherwise you're left trying to explain what blue looks like to someone who's never seen it.

Why does the current paradigm suck? There is unprecedented LGBT acceptance, and that does not suck. There are no sucky paradigms around jeans vs. khakis because there isn't a cohort of people who would prefer if khakis were banned in public.

> Why does the current paradigm suck?

From great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandparent post:

> This was ironically one of the things that was hardest about coming out as gay, for me. Nobody ever treated me the same way again. I was either uncomfortably praised or silently judged, with practically no in-between. Suffice to say, my sexuality is on a need-to-know basis, now.

That does suck, but isn't this exactly why LGBT stories need to be shared instead of hidden? I have lived in more and less accepting places. In the less accepting places, I have experienced the unwanted praise and judgement. In the more accepting places I have been treated as a regular old person with a regular old life. And I think the world is moving more and more towards that place of boring acceptance, and that is just an awesome thing. I am forever grateful to the people who put in all that hard work so I can go about my life. And in gratitude I will keep talking about mine, and keep helping other people who aren't being heard to be heard as well.

For what it's worth, I didn't read any "scorched earth" rhetoric in dougmwme's original post. I thought it was a reasoned argument, well-explained, in a way that gave me a really interesting perspective on the situation (as someone who has heard and thought about these sorts of perspectives often).

Maybe read it after applying the principle of charity, without assuming the writer is angrily banging on the keyboard, and instead is being thoughtful and trying to teach?

Thanks for the thoughtful comment.

I wasn't thinking as much about normal conversations - "I was at lunch with my boyfriend", etc. It's one thing to say that, it's quite another to make statements to people about what sort of sex you want to have -- that's what I find awkward.

I guess the takeaway is that sex is pretty central to civilization and society, as it's a prerequisite to and determinant of family structure. It really is part of our identity.

I think the issue is that a gay man or a lesbian does not yet know if it is safe to even have those normal conversations with some person they are just getting to know. If they're asked a question that would lead to "I was at lunch with my boyfriend/girlfriend", they might get a homophobic response.

Directly coming out to you, when they are comfortable and emotionally prepared for it, is a way to avoid a traumatic reaction during normal conversation.

Beyond that, when you've been forced to repress some part of yourself due to social expectations, it can be a big relief to be able to specifically tell people about that part of you, rather than just letting it come up obliquely during conversation when you happen to refer to a same-sex partner.

I really do appreciate your response and glad I got through. And yeah, sex is pretty foundational to society. As I get older I see that more and more. Just know that the next time a person comes out to you explicitly and says "I'm gay!", they are not trying to awkwardly insert their sex lives, they are doing the best they could to get through a potentially difficult moment with a person they had to come out to. This is especially true when a person is at the beginning of their journey to accept themselves and find acceptance in others.

The experience of "coming out" (to me) was reconciling my sexuality with my family. In America, you're basically born straight and everyone in your family assumes so. The easiest part of it was coming out to my close friends, who already know that I'm not vain or chasing attention with it. The harder half is finding some way to frame it to your parents (and grandparents). Knocking on their door, sitting down in their home and eating their food is just irreversibly ruined. In some sense, I know it's my fault: I'm basically telling them that their bloodline ends here, I hope they enjoyed their transient acknowledgement on this earth while it lasts. That's a tough pill to swallow for a generation that's all about making the idyllic "50s family" a reality.

> To take it further, why phrase it "I am ..." instead of "I have ... desires"? If the latter sounds awkward, why is the former any less awkward?

I wish we could do that too, but if I told that to people now I'm gay and a freak. Society won't care one way or the other, because queerness is political now. You're either with "them" or against "us", and never the two shall meet.

That's just my view on it though. I'm only 1 (one) gay person out of millions, so take my anecdata with a grain of salt.

> In some sense, I know it's my fault: I'm basically telling them that their bloodline ends here, I hope they enjoyed their transient acknowledgement on this earth while it lasts. That's a tough pill to swallow for a generation that's all about making the idyllic "50s family" a reality.

That is an uncommonly insightful and empathetic characterization.

I think fault implies intention, so I wouldn't call it fault. It's just a conflict of life goals and personal properties that no one particularly chose to have.

Though I also approve of the intention of GP to understand the situation from their parents' perspective.

Agreed.

Because it is something they felt the need to repress for a potentially long portion of their life. Coming out is the start of a process to release the pressure that has built up from that repression and letting the person's personal view of themselves realign with the public view of themselves.

Also, yes it is weird that sexuality and identity are intertwined, but that is not something that is new and it is something that is tied to all sexualities, including heterosexuals.

> Why should someone "come out" as anything?

> Why did he/she say that to me?

Isn't this just the process of getting to know someone? As you get to know someone, you share more information about yourself. I think it's a pretty normal desire for people you spend time around to understand you, and part of that is understanding the way you relate to other people.

It's because it was ostracized for so long. If most of society is telling you that something is wrong with you, then you'll seek out other people who share that trait and develop a sense of community with them. It's normal to identify with your community.

I think many times coming out is about reconciling expectations with reality. If people assume one thing about you but that is not the case, coming out can be a way to correct assumptions. In a sense, not coming out can feel like lying to those close to you.

It can also have the effect of making a relationship more close...sharing something intimate with someone can strengthen a friendship (or, obviously, break it in some cases).

> If I knew someone casually for a while who never talked about his/her sexuality, but one day they said "I never said this before, but I'm a heterosexual", I'd certainly feel awkward about it. Why did he/she say that to me?

That's because the dominant mode of society in _most_ cultures involves a heterosexual identity; it's just so deeply embedded in culture that most people can't tell. For the longest time, it was (and still is in many cultures) socially acceptable for men to ogle women. Why? Because there was a tacit understanding that part of being a man meant being hypersexual, and because all men are attracted to women (in this trope), ogling women is just part of "being a man". This ties a man's behavior and identity with his sexuality.

> Why should someone "come out" as anything?

"When are you going to find a good girl to marry?"

"Mom, I'm gay".

For example.

> Why should someone "come out" as anything?

Because the choice is either to hide important aspects of yourself, or else come out, whether that's explicitly by saying something, or implicitly by your actions.

In my case, if I didn't explicitly come out as nonbinary / trans, the change in my wardrobe and appearance was going to "out" myself regardless. It seemed healthier and emotionally safer to be upfront about it with the people I know.

In your example, a person doesn't have to "come out" as heterosexual, they can just introduce their spouse, or mention who they are dating. Maybe in an ideal world that would be the case for everyone, but it's not today.

> To take it further, why phrase it "I am ..." instead of "I have ... desires"? If the latter sounds awkward, why is the former any less awkward?

I definitely agree on this point, and what I find fascinating is that in my (albeit very limited) knowledge of French, instead of saying a phrase like "I am hungry", you say "j'ai faim", which has the literal translation of "I have hunger".

https://www.wordhippo.com/what-is/the/french-word-for-9a6e76...

People come out, because they keep their gayness secret for a whole lot of good reasons. The alternative to coming put is not dating your boyfriend and going to reataurant. It is making sure no one ever see you with him, kiss him, hold his hands.

Also, parents and relative reacting badly on finding out ypu are gay are not exactly unheard of. There are also plenty of accepting parents, sure. But as heterosexual, they already assume you are one and you dont have to guess whether it will be breaker for them or not.

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