The notion that coming out as an obligation, is precarious as it is also categorical. The preeminent fantasy is that by doing so, you divulge your authentic self to others and society, insinuating that you weren’t doing so previously. This ‘coming out’ narrative is portrayed throughout mainstream cinema as a tale of woe. Though not much blame can be assumed as it is only reflective of the idiomatic expressions made familiar to self through repetition. The film, Loose Cannons, isn’t a typical coming-out story. The protagonist Tommaso had disclosed his plans of coming out to his older brother, Alberto, but is beaten to the punch when Alberto comes out himself, and Tommaso is left with his distraught family where he is expected to assume his family’s business. Throughout the film, Tommaso is a spectator to the after-effects of Alberto coming out, scrutinizing his family’s affections and his own conscience about the event. He questions whether coming out will make him happier because he feels more genuine with others. In the end, Tommaso doesn’t confess his former intention but rather comes out as his desire to be a writer, not a businessman. On the surface level, the film seems to penalize the notion of coming out as Tommaso has insight on what could’ve happened if he did follow through with his original plan, but I believe that deeper implication is the idea that its the culture and art forms that define who Tommaso is, which is why in the end he didn’t explicitly announce to his family his sexuality/queerness because in a sense he already did. By divulging his authentic self of being a writer, Tommaso indirectly discloses his sexuality because of the insinuating nature between culture and queerness.
This correlation between culture and queerness was posed by Richard Dyer in The Culture of Queers. Dyer explains that there is a spatial connection between the two as culture was an escape where you are ‘allowed’ to be queer. The idea of culture is attractive because being queer also brought with it a compensatory product of some artistic sensitivity for being ‘born or made’ queer; it was positive in the vast outlook of negatives. Culture went beyond the fact that some of its practitioners or subject matters were queer and focused on ones’ ability to appreciate and interact with it. But the fragility of culture is its ability to be both an attractive escape while also playing a part in the mechanism of self-oppression. Dyer uses the word melancholy to describe his allusions of being queer, “‘Melancholy’ was one of my favorite words; I felt it summed up my condition, for it caught…that peculiar mixture of pain and beauty that I took to be the ‘condition’ of homosexuality..”(21 Dyer). Being into culture was not only being into beauty but the pain and validation of being an ‘outsider’. That same compensated product of artistic sensitivity to appreciate the beauty that culture had brought with it, also consequently reinforces the self-oppression it sought to defy; it made you doubly different as queer and as cultured. Being outside the mainstream allowed those dubbed as ‘different’ to see the faults posed within it; its positive consequence was it denaturalized normality of things like the constructed-ness of gender identity. Culture labels queerness a sense of identity to a social group, but in doing so poses a problematic idea because homosexuality isn’t definitive but more a fluid facet than a category like class, gender, or race could ever have.
The fault posed by cultural sensitivity is it being synonymous with femininity, in the same way, that being queer was synonymous with not being a ‘man’. It stressed its concerns with social manners and domesticity; things connotated with being feminine. Culture is seen as expressive or sensuous, not as something intelligent or serious. This naive idea of culture doesn’t stress Big Subjects or work, which is connotated with masculinity. Because being artistically queer was equated with being feminine, the female qualities associated were deemed synonymous with being the lesser. Queerness was already connotated with being the “Other”, but now cultural sensitivity takes it further that femininity in queerness is the “Other”. It creates an oppressive divide of the “One” against the “Other” in a society already set on equating Queerness as the latter, whether consciously or not. This notion is inherently problematic for those who feel it necessary to come out. It’s a repressive interpretation that by being artistically queer, you are cannot have both a sense of seriousness and emotional maturity; that sensuality and emotions are something to be feared because being feminine as being inferior. Being that as it may, this perception of culture is not only reinforced by society but within those who identify with queerness as well. I was at fault for this repressive thinking at a young age. I had hated being perceived as something feminine because I understood it to equate as something weaker. So I had refrained from things that were connotated as “girly”; I limited wearing colors like pink or purple, I had quit ballet after 8 years despite the immense passion I had for it, I even began to portray myself as a ‘tomboy’ in attempts to seem tougher. Subconsciously, I believe I did this in hopes no one would question if I was queer or not because at the time I had internalized that homophobia and feared the possibilities of what coming out would do. In later years, I challenged this skewed mindset and learned to embrace all the connotations that are understood as negative socially and changed it into something positive internally. The manner of how we understand these relations of queerness within ourselves to culture outside ourselves, especially the knowledge gained from queerness being labeled as the “Other” is the primary basis before it can be addressed in gay politics.
I find the notion of coming out nowadays is less scary than it was formerly, but that wasn’t always the case. I had learned at a young age about my sexuality/queerness, but it was the negative possibilities to ‘coming out’ as something obligatory which had caused me to demonized that part of myself of being queer for so long. It was the implication that if I came out, all prior perceptions of who I was by others meaningful to me would be deemed corrupted or disgenuine because I hadn’t disclosed that part of my life. It was that fear that controlled me, so much so that I refrained from sharing that part of my life for almost a decade. Thus in a way, I did feel disgenuine, not with others but with myself. So, I turned to artistic outlets to make up for that part I had repressed; I wrote poems, made collages, even wrote short stories, but nothing filled that sense of self I felt missing. I felt that those outlets had helped me feel express the beauty of the pain posed within myself; I felt at home in artistic forms because for once those feelings of being an outsider were validated. I had placed value on queerness as something definitive of who I was. I had come to realize that I didn’t like the grandness that coming out posed; I felt it to be heteronormative and repressive of what I thought actually mattered. I often questioned the normality of coming out as queer versus the normality of being heterosexual. It wasn’t until the last couple of months of my high school senior year when I had ‘came out’. But in a way, I didn’t. Rather than coming out like the unnecessary obligation, I felt it to be, I introduced my sexuality as it was something normal because it was for me. In other words, I divulged my sexuality the same way someone who is heterosexual would divulge theirs.
I found that my sexuality was equated with who I was because queerness had posed a sense of identity. Because being queer was synonymous with the “Other”, I latched on to any sense of connection to identity; to diminish that feeling of Exulansis inside. This idiomatic notion is in some form relative to everyone, thus why ‘coming out has been problematized and continually reinforced time and time again as something obligatory. But as I stated before, the fluidity of sexuality cannot be categorized like it is definitive. Like Tommaso, I’ve come to learn that my identity of who I am is based on the parts I value most, not on the parts society values. For example, when asked by others to describe me, my first instinct isn’t to explicitly disclose my queerness, but rather my passion for science and my career goals of rehabilitating wild animals. My queerness doesn’t define or influence the decisions I chose to make. My sense of self is not so fragile that my sexuality controls the very nature of my path. And this is not to say I demean any past experiences because of such, but rather not giving it hegemony over the course I am on.
More or less, the purpose of this blog is to challenge the focus on sexuality as the main determinate of one’s sense of self, and acknowledge the limited perception of just that; perception is what you allow yourself to perceive. So the repeated occurrence of others perceiving queerness as a singular determinant of one’s self is extremely biased and naive. It doesn’t incorporate personal experiences, or perceptions one has of themselves (which is the only perception of importance). The idea of occhiolism explains this feeling appropriately. Occhiolism is the awareness of how small one’s perception is; you couldn’t possibly draw any meaningful conclusions at all, about the world or the past or the complexities of culture. Your life is a unique and solitary anecdote, but it’s only a sample size of one, and thus it can be the control for a much wilder experiment in the next room. I use this word with the purpose that we as a whole can assume that we are not the only ones going through the same experiences because there is no way to know if others have felt the same as us. The latter sentence implies that our own uniqueness is possibly the result of someone else’s control. Culture only poses to contradict itself by simultaneously complementing and defying self-oppression in one’s sense of queerness, thus only allowing that singular perception by and of others. Our understanding of sexuality in the context of culture is limited to such, as it only incorporates the perception that hegemony of culture on queerness has. We must understand that our views on coming out as something obligatory are limited to just that. We walk a fine line of understanding culture to be both expressive and oppressive. Queerness is not determined by the singular perception that culture only allows. Coming out isn’t something simply just binary as being proudly out or staying in the closet and not expressing one’s’ true’ identity. The fluidity of queerness is not limited to what culture determines it to be, but by how much hegemony we allow it to have on our sense of self.