In a utopian society, coming out is a joke

“The fact that no one was surprised that Cooper is gay, but that everyone was still fascinated by his acknowledgement, shows that the personal politics behind coming out have perhaps gotten less painful but certainly no less complicated. In this case, Cooper’s outing has highlighted the politics behind acknowledging one’s sexual identity and the people who pressure stars to do so. It also raises questions about how much the expectations of neutrality in journalism might collide with personal identity.”

- Matt Pearce, LA Times

In a perfect world, coming out is one of those unheard things. However, in our imperfect society, there’s a politics behind this concept. We are implicitly scrutinized and categorized into a system of norms that operates in a dichotomous gender classification, that when any of us fails to exhibit actions that do not necessarily ‘fit’ into this dichotomous classification, we are immediately put into the hot seat, the never ending gossips, and be the unwilling object of unsolicited public scrutinies concerning our personal gender identity.

This will then put people in a dilemma, because our society implicitly ‘asks’ us to ‘declare’ who and or what we are before they shrug their shoulders and move into another level of ‘investigation’. I just find this ironic, because lately, we are pushing and putting forth a fight against inequality and bigotry. We even encourage people to ‘be themselves’; but with a catch, we push people to be ‘themselves’ but we see to it that they have declared who they are first, before we gasp in surprise, sigh a drama queen sigh, and continue on to say ‘I knew it! Now welcome to the world! Enjoy your life! But don’t do anything stupid.’

Our society has established ‘coming out’ as a sort of ticket for freedom. That when you undergo this process, you’ll be granted the freedom from being the subject and object of scrutiny, freedom from being asked the ‘gay’ question, and freedom from being secretly talked about in a gathering wherein people are busy deciphering your ‘sexuality’.

This goes on to Anderson Cooper’s coming out. People say they don’t care, and they know all along that he’s homosexual. But all of us are still in total chaos about his acknowledgment of his own sexuality, we are so fascinated by this acknowledgment that we find ways to ‘talk’ about it. And this confirms what the aforementioned quotation states, “the personal politics behind coming out have perhaps gotten less painful but certainly no less complicated”.

In reality, coming out is just a propaganda that indirectly promotes gender inequality. Because if we are truly an ‘open’ and ‘accepting’ society like we claim us to be, we don’t need homosexual individuals to ‘declare’, ‘affirm’, and or ‘confirm’ their sexuality; moreover, if we are truly a rational society, we won’t use ‘heterosexuality’ as the normative form of sexuality and refer to other sexualities as ‘deviant’ because they don’t conform to the ideals of what a ‘normal’ sex is. Thus, if we put all these points in consideration, we can say that in a truly ‘perfect’ and ‘open’ society the idea of coming out will be laughed at, and will be considered pointless and unnecessary because it puts  into question as to why do homosexual people need to do it when heterosexual individuals don’t have to deal with the same situation.

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