ABSTRACT
According to the traditional psychology literature on gay, lesbian, and bisexual people’s identity formation, the emergence of a non-heteronormative sexual identity creates a situation of crisis that is resolved by coming out—a process through which an individual asserts a self-identification as lesbian, gay, or bisexual, first to oneself and then to relatives, friends, co-workers, and other social network contacts (D’Augelli 2003). Thus, coming out has been considered fundamental to the construction of a queer person’s individual identity as well as to the articulation of an LGBTQ sociopolitical entity. In the coming-out process, the queer subject confronts self and others, creating a situation in which individuals are challenged to accept the newly asserted self-identification or, if not, reject it (Penelope and Wolfe 1989; Weston 1991). Coming out is not something that happens just once in the lives of LGBTQ individuals, as Sauntson (2007) notes; rather, “‘[c]oming out’ … may perhaps be better understood as an ongoing process, rather than a single act” (2007, 142). Although coming out has been widely understood as one of the key steps in LGBTQ identity formation, the universality of the coming out experience has been called into question, as have both the rigidity of stage models of identity formation and the closeted versus out binary (Klein et al. 2015). Many studies point to there being very different orientations to explicit verbal disclosure of sexual identity among Latinxs (e.g. Cantú 2009; Decena 2011; Peña 2013). This topic will be explored in greater detail in the Chapter 4, and one trans Latina participant’s narratives will also be explored separately in Chapter 5, but it is important to stress here, at the outset of this chapter, that it is not my intention to suggest that coming out is a universal experience for LGBTQ folks, or that coming out is a (or the) necessary step for being/becoming LGBTQ. The coming-out metaphor is so widely understood in the U.S. that it has been extended to the experiences of unauthorized migrants who are represented as coming out of the shadows. In the case of queer unauthorized migrants, they are said to be coming out of the closet and out of the shadows (Seif 2011, 2014; Chávez 2013). As was the case with earlier thinking around coming out, ‘coming out of the shadows’ is understood as a political, coalitional act.
