Coming out

Telling people you are gay, short for coming out of the closet: first to yourself, then to friends and family, and then again with every new person you meet.

Coming out is telling people you are gay: your friends, your family, your boss, the guy at the gym who keeps asking about your girlfriend. Short for coming out of the closet, it is less a single event than a habit you keep for life, because every new job, new neighbor and new doctor is another small coming out.

It is not the same as being outed, which is when someone else tells the world for you, and it is not compulsory. Some men come out at a family dinner with a speech; some just turn up at a wedding with a boyfriend and let everyone do the math.

Where it comes from

The phrase is older than the closet, and it did not start as an exit but as an entrance. The historian George Chauncey found that a gay man's coming out originally meant being presented to gay society, at the enormous drag balls that copied the debutante balls where rich young women "came out" into high society. In 1931 the Baltimore Afro-American reported on "the coming out of new debutantes into homosexual society" at a local ball.

Slang dictionaries follow the same track. Gershon Legman listed come out in his 1941 glossary of gay language, and a 1949 guide defined it as being "initiated into the mysteries of homosexuality". For a long time it meant your first steps into the gay world, often your first time with a man, and you came out to other gay people, not to your mother. The closet itself joined the story only later: according to Chauncey it does not appear in gay men's letters, diaries or novels before the 1960s.

From private to political

With gay liberation at the end of the 1960s, coming out changed meaning and direction. It became something you did in front of everyone, straight people included, and a political act: the more of us who were visible, the harder we were to ignore. That is the sense we know today, from the celebrity interview to the nervous phone call home.

How it is used today

We talk about coming-out stories, coming-out anniversaries, being out at work, being out to some people and not others. "Are you out?" is a normal question on the apps, where plenty of men are discreet or on the DL and say so up front. The verb has spread far beyond us, too: people now come out as vegan, as Republican, as a fan of pineapple pizza, which is a compliment of sorts to how much the original phrase meant.

Related terms