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LITR 4332 American Minority Literature Model Assignments Research Project Submissions 2013 Research Post 1 |
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Higginbotham, Tom
03/18/13
Coming Out in Literature
It seems fair to say that LBGT as a minority and
demographic of people is relatively underserved where literature studies are
concerned, or at least where my experience in literature studies is concerned.
To my knowledge, no classes are offered on the UHCL campus which concern the
subject exclusively or as a unit and while this is unfortunate, I expect it is a
product of a smaller pool of material, the relative newness of the subject
(thirty to forty years for many books as compared to the 100+ years allotted to
many ethnic minorities) and subsequent minority of experts on the subject rather
than actual negligence.
Why even choose to study such an underserved focus,
on which I have no formal training and even less experience in as a result?
Partly for its uniquity; the LBGT minority, while arguably comparable to ethnic
minorities, contains several features entirely unique to itself; you never hear
about anyone coming out as Black to their parents or having an Asian experience
in college. No one ever calls being Hispanic a phase or a lifestyle choice. LBGT
“heritage” exists, if it can be said to exist at all, in a much more nebulous
form, being completely devoid of heredity. The other reason being a little more
selfish as I am well acquainted both with one or two of the letters and the
numerous arguments that surround nearly every aspect of these letters' lives.
To that end, I seek to deepen my understanding of both by taking a look at the
most well-known and available theme in LBGT literature, the coming out, and its
portrayal as well as how it portrays the group itself.
Before we can properly examine the coming out
process in literature, we need to get a better handle on what the process is,
itself. Popularly, it's described as simply telling friends and family that one
is, indeed, well into that sort of thing, but many models of this process
actually marginalize this, if not roll it up entirely as part of one of many
internal steps towards truly coming out. The Cass Identity Model treats coming
out as a many-staged internal process made up of 1) Identity confusion(Am I
different?), 2) Identity Comparison (what are gay people like?), 3) Identity
Tolerance (Okay, I very well might be gay) 4) Identity Acceptance (Yep,
definitely gay. Clarke can attest to this) 5) Identity Pride (I am gay and I
don't care if that's a problem!) and 6) Identity Synthesis (I am not so much a
gay person as a person who is also gay).
What's interesting here is that coming out
to other people is not an
established step, but assumed to happen as it will along the way, which I rather
like. In my experience, very few people come out to everyone in one big step
(though the ones that do tend to have the most interesting stories) but rather
to bits and pieces of their social circles as they become comfortable with it.
Someone might not be out to their parents even if all their friends know and if
their parents know then their extended family might not know, to say nothing of
co-workers or other acquaintances who could very well know or not know on an
individual basis. Regardless, two things need to stick out here; that the coming
out process is a life-long thing which doesn't go in that order any more often
than rice dropped on the floor will naturally stack itself, and that the
ultimate form of having “come out” is a person who doesn't identify their
sexuality any more than they identify with a certain hair color; inborn,
comfortable, but far from the most interesting or necessarily defining thing
about them. This will be significant in the next paragraph.
In the article The
Classic Coming Out Novel: Unacknowleged Challenges to the Heterosexual
Mainstream, author Lies Xhonneux spends twenty pages
or so arguing against the charge that the modern “Coming Out” novels, such as
the one by E.B. White, fail to properly question the heterosexual systems which
created a need to come out in the first place, thereby indirectly support it as
a construct. While most of the article is focused on this ongoing argument,
there is still significant information about the importance of coming out as a
literary aspect of LBGT fiction. Xhonneux states that “White himself
recalls...hunting all over the library for books that might … “confirm the
identity [he] was unhappily putting together.' Arguably, once he became a
successful novelist, his books helped create an identity for readers trying to
make sense of their non-heterosexuality,” and goes on later to argue that rather
than being both a journey from a incomplete to a complete person and simply
“[inscribing] itself into the heterosexual system,” coming out as a literary
device is actually a good deal messier, when used appropriately, resulting in
characters who may well be no less conflicted than when they started the story,
pointing out that at the end of the three novels raised, none of the
protagonists have come to a final, complete, and unconflicted position on their
sexuality, rather having simply made steps towards the identity synthesis.
(Xhonneux, quoting E.B.White) While not explicitly stated in the work itself,
it's not a large leap to guess at the significance of this incompleteness;
passing on the idea that synthesis is an ongoing process could potentially speed
up the synthesis process for beleagured readers, allowing them to more
adequately question heterodominance more quickly.
The study of the information presented has done a
few things for me. First, it confirmed the importance of coming out as a
literary device but also as a step in growing as an LBGT person but then took it
a step further and expanded my understanding of the actual process itself, as
much internal as external, if not more. LBGT Literature, insofar as the coming
out device, would seem to act in a similar function as most other forms of
minority literature, giving guidance to members of the minority while giving new
perspective to those outside, much like Fredrick Douglass's
Narrative of the Life. One
question this does raise is of the place of a synthesized LBGT person in
literature. It's a thing I haven't seen yet but would be very interested in
examining, a character who was not defined by their sexuality, but rather
defined it.
Sources:
Xhonneux, Lies. "The Classic Coming Out Novel:
Unacknowledged Challenges to the Heterosexual
Mainstream." College
Literature 39.1 (2012): 94-118. Print.
http://www.uas.alaska.edu/safezone/docs/comingout_stages.pdf
