The Quiet Queer: Coming Out & Queer Fabrications

Abstract

The remnants of bourgeois consciousness maintain a split between the private sphere and public sphere, despite the ongoing mass privatization of all things in what Mark Fisher calls “business ontology” in Capitalist Realism. This proliferation of supposed borders between an interior world and an exterior world maintain the “in” and “out” of a conceptual closet from which one can come out. But coming out is not a universal or universalizing part of the queer experience: not throughout the globe, and not even in America. But how is it that somebody is generally not held up as “really queer” unless they’ve come out? Who gets to come out? Who doesn’t have to? Who doesn’t have the privilege to do so? And how does the fact that coming out never really ends insofar as coming out to new colleagues and friends and romantic partners is a perpetual process? Scholars like Jasbir Puar in Terrorist Assemblages and Chandan Reddy in Freedom with Violence reject the alleged hyper-immediate “outlaw” status of the homosexual subject by lamenting its militaristic deployment and its rearticulation into heterosexual terms, rendering it something palatable to the masses and exceptional only in its banal marketability. Other scholars, like Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner in “Sex in Public”, still uphold the reign of heteronormativity. This article will examine the “magical” and revelatory properties of the speech act of coming out, as well as the structures demanding that those with big profiles come out, by looking at celebrity queer culture, fandom, and queer icons to interrogate why some are expected to come out, ultimately reifying the coming out process. The article will also examine the ways that the coming out process actually supports the reign of heteronormativity by placing regulations on the interpellation of queer identity.