‘Coming out’: More than just a story

As LGBTQ+ historian Tim Retzloff says in the following pages, the coming-out story has a “stock structure.” Reflecting on his own, which he wrote in the early 1990s, he explained it was written for an audience “presumed to be unfamiliar with gay people.”

But coming out is more than a formulaic narrative of confusion, hardship and eventual self-acceptance. Some people never leave the proverbial closet because they were never pushed inside it. Many transgender people come out twice: first their sexuality, then their gender identity. Some don’t understand their sexuality until after transitioning. For some LGBTQ+ people, coming out means burning bridges with family, friends or religions; for others, it is an acknowledgment of what loved ones already knew.

Local lesbian activist Cheryl VanDeKerkhove, 60, said that coming out was “self-affirming” in her youth during a time when everyone was presumed to be “in the closet.”

“When I was coming up, you were assumed to be heterosexual and cisgender unless you said otherwise,” she said. “And even in circumstances where you were clearly not, people would do a lot of mental gymnastics to put you into the box they thought you were supposed to be in. So it was a proactive step you had to take to say, ‘no, that’s not me.’”

VanDeKerkhove wondered how coming out may be different in a time “where that assumption isn’t so ubiquitous.”

Olivier Stroud, 23, said “things have not improved as much as you might hope.”

A transgender man, Stroud came out twice. Coming to understand his gender identity was particularly difficult in a world where “the language surrounding trans men or trans people is often that the loudest voices are the most harmful or hateful.” A lack of visible trans men made it difficult to contextualize his experiences.

As such, others’ coming out and being visible can create a knob on the closet door. Local drag queen Trifecta, AKA Drew Birchmeier, started their senior year at Haslett High School as the only “out” LGBTQ+ student in the building. But closeted students sought their advice in confidentiality.

“By the end of my senior year, I had the honor of being able to talk through seven or eight different queer people’s experiences,” Birchmeier said. 

“If there isn’t any visibility in a community, there isn’t really anything for you to go off of,” they said. “It’s up to us to establish that visibility so we can make sure that everybody knows who their family and community is.”

Lili Harris, a nonbinary behavioral technician, said they are out in some parts of life, but not others. At work, Harris keeps their gender identity private “to stay neutral.”

“Even though these families perceive me as a healthcare provider who is helping their kid, I don’t want them to ever feel like I’m pushing something on them,” Harris said.

Florensio Hernandez, who works in MSU’s DEI office, said he never had to come out, because “my family always knew that I was different.”

As Latinos in the Lansing area, he said his family “already had a lot of labels” and never felt the need to label him further. In a sense, he has come out dozens of times — his friends and coworkers know he is gay — but in another, he never came out at all.

Lansing’s poet laureate, 80-year-old Ruelaine Stokes, called her story “complicated.”

“I never felt like I fit in the politically correct ‘gay boxes,’” she said. After coming to the Lansing area in the 1960s, she first fell in love with a man, then a woman. When the gay rights movement took off shortly thereafter, reconciling her bisexuality was difficult — not with straight culture, but with a separatist lesbian movement.

Now, Stokes identifies as both a lesbian and as bisexual. She said her experience in the “uncomfortable middle” taught her “that identity is more complicated than I thought, and that I wasn’t comfortable in the conceptual boxes that other people seemed to be.”

There are at least as many coming-out stories as there are LGBTQ+ people. And while the traditional coming-out story exists for a reason, consider while reading these stories that a community defined by its own diversity can never be encapsulated in a formulaic structure.

What follows are first-person coming-out accounts by seven area residents of different generations. They touch on many themes — but there are certainly more to tell. If you’d like to share yours, please send it to leo@lansingcitypulse.com with a photo of yourself. We will publish it online during Pride month.