Waking up in the morning to the news that someone has come out of the closet means that until noon, you'll see unabashed positivity regardless of who the person is, and then starting around two thirty, the pendulum will swing, and people will begin tearing whoever it is apart like gluten-free garlic bread at a Queer Book Club meeting.
Sure enough, after finding out that the guy who came out was Colton Underwood, star of The Bachelor, I immediately found myself bombarded by "Love Wins," "You're saving lives," and "Live your truth." They've become the "Thoughts and Prayers" of someone admitting they'd rather scale a wall and run from a camera crew than make out with a woman whose occupation is "Mannequin Stylist."
I actually don't watch The Bachelor, but I will sit and enjoy any clip of a man running through foreign streets while trying to take off a mic pack. That's why my stakes in all this were very low until I started thinking about the cultural cycle of a high-profile outing.
What begins with support soon turns into thirst (mainly on Twitter) and then people get criticized for the thirst (Another white muscle gay? Cue the Meryl Streep "Groundbreaking" memes). Then the people being criticized fire back at the original critics. Then something comes out that makes the person who came out look really bad. (In this case, it's the reveal that this guy has a deal with Netflix to star in his own reality show and that he stalked an ex-girlfriend by putting a tracking device on her car.) Finally, by the end of the day, we all feel icky, the gays are all exhausted, and anyone famous thinking about coming out is probably like "Hahahaha no thanks."
As someone who has spent the past year interviewing gay men (The Community), I'm always fascinated by what's happening underneath this cycle. The elements of it that get under people's skin is usually either way more or way less complicated than they appear.
The initial positivity is the result of so many people remembering how hard it was for them to come out and wanting to believe that it's equally hard for everyone, especially people who are in the spotlight. The truth is, not really. Like most things in modern life, coming out is easier if you're pretty, white, rich, and a cis-gender male. I'm not saying it's easy, but you'd have a hard time making a case that it isn't easier. Should that be taken into consideration when we're supporting the act of coming out?
Yes.
Putting a blanket of good vibes over an act without acknowledging that the act does not elicit the same results for everyone who commits to it could actually be causing more harm than good. What we need to remember when we say things like "He's saving lives" is that many young, queer people are going to look at someone like Colton Underwood and see nothing about him that they can identify with other than his sexuality, and that might make them feel as though "gay" or "queer" is not an identity they can claim for themselves.
That doesn't mean his coming out is a "bad thing," but coming out is very personal, and not everything personal benefits from being made highly public. That might not have been the case twenty or even ten years ago, but these days, I'm not sure how helpful it is to have a Conservative gay guy who appears to be using his coming out as a financial opportunity as the latest face of the "Live Your Truth" community.
All that being said, the research that goes into pushing back against the narrative can sometimes be worse than the narrative itself. What do I mean? I mean, it is nothing but CREEPY to go through someone's followers on Instagram to try and make a point about who they might be. I follow some absolute nuts on Instagram, and yes I am an absolute nut, but you can't make that correlation just because I want to know what every single Power Ranger is up to. The "Gotcha" of posting that Colton Underwood follows Candace Owens is undercut by you divulging that you took the time to check something like that. Don't get me wrong, I'm as petty as the next guy, but petty is something you keep in the closet, not something you hold up over your head yelling "Bingo" while you wait to get retweeted. If you're trying to accuse someone of being an opportunist while getting attention for trying to cancel that person, you're going to have a tough time proving that case.
I feel bad giving people a hard time when they show themselves to be opportunists, because I believe deep down, we're all opportunists. In business, you're thought of as a fool if you let a chance for money or influence pass you by, but somehow, in culture, you're supposed to be driven by virtue and if a development deal lands in your lap, then good for you, but at least you didn't ask for it.
Usually when we come at people for being opportunists, we're angry because we haven't been given the same opportunity. That can be especially hard if we've walked the same path as the person who somehow wound up at a better destination than we did. It can be even more difficult if we know the reason the person got the opportunity is because they're better looking than us, or more charming, or happened to be positioned by the randomness of life in a place we'd never be allowed to gain entry to. I get why that inspires anger and frustration.
There's also a subset of Twitter that will usually spend ten to twelve hours asserting that they don't find someone like Colton Underwood attractive, and while that may be true for some of them, some of these ladies doth protest way way too much.
If I can take a lesson away from all this, it's that we don't need to stan everything related to the word "gay" the same way every theater person I follow on social media kweens out every time there's a new musical (No, we do not need Don't Talk to Strangers: The Rick Springfield Musical). As what it means to be gay expands, our reaction to someone identifying as that needs to expand as well.
Sometimes it feels difficult for us at such a polarized time to remember that part of critical thinking is learning how to multi-react to news and information. I can be glad that there's one more gay person in the world while still wishing it was someone who was a better representative for the community while also understanding that it is not Colton Underwood's job to be a representative for anyone while also understanding that if you're going to use your new status as a gay man for profit than you are taking on the job of being, at the very least, symbolic, and that that should come with a certain amount of responsibility while also knowing that ultimately none of this is any of my business.
What I'd like is to see us break what has become the "coming out" narrative cycle. I get that it's fun to talk about this stuff, but can we have better conversations? Can we decide that if someone really wants to be a celebrity then, yes, they are subjecting themselves to a sharper look at their actions while still speaking about them in a way that doesn't deter others from coming out? Can we water down the extremism so that we can all live somewhere between "Harvey Milk is Smiling Today!" and "How Do I Sign Up For Conversion Therapy?"
One of the reasons I was drawn to being gay before I came out was because it seemed as though gay people had a better understanding of fluidity and complex character. It wasn't just acknowledging that none of us are saints or devils, but that none of us need to be in order to be shown compassion or scorn. I was drawn to the complicated nature of it all, not turned off by it. I knew I wasn't straight, because being straight seemed to mean being one thing, and even before I knew I was gay, I knew I wasn't just one thing.
Seeing more people--even straight people--come to embrace that way of thinking has, I think, made the world a much easier place to live in, but it's also made it much more intricate, and within that intricacy comes the inability to sum things up in 140 characters or the headline of a news story.
It doesn't necessarily make taking a step towards the truth more difficult, but it can make standing in that truth proudly a hard thing to do, and that might not make things hard for someone like Colton Underwood, but it does make it harder for the rest of us.
At the moment in which you are an entire segment on Good Morning, America, you do have a bigger target on your back, but you're also being given the resources to protect yourself. When people throw stones at you, oftentimes those stones fall before they can reach you and land on someone else instead. Having those attacks come, not just from homophobes and bigots, but from people within a community that doesn't see how its simplified and knee-jerk response to what used to be a joyous occasion, is tragic.
Whether we want Colton Underwood as a gay man or not, that's who he is. How we've reacted to that says a lot about who we are.
One of those things is not going to change.
So maybe we should talk about the other.
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