Today is National Coming Out Day. This year, it falls just days after the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in a case that could deny employment protections to LGBTQ people and force many of us back into the closet in order to keep supporting our families. As many of us queer parents know from personal experience, coming out is not just a simple matter of finding the courage, but of balancing our needs and those of our children.
There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to the dilemma. We must value our own mental health and ability to live authentically—and modeling that for our children is important as well. At the same time, if doing so jeopardizes our financial security and ability to put food on the table, we have to make some tough decisions. Can we be we ourselves at home? At our children’s school functions? In our neighborhood? What is the risk of running into colleagues and bosses? And how do we respond if our children inadvertently out us with a “Mommy and Mama, look at this!” in the supermarket? With more than half of U.S. states lacking employment protections that explicitly include LGBTQ people, these are questions many of us grapple with even today. I wish I had answers, but since every family’s situation is different, each must do what feels right for them. Just know that no matter your choice, you are not alone.
Additionally, as I’ve written before, coming out as a parent means also being aware of our children’s feelings. Regardless of their sexual orientation and gender identity, they have their own journey of coming out about their families. Sometimes they will want to be more out about their families than we are comfortable with; sometimes less. As with so much of parenting, the key is communication.
Those of us who are able to be out in a more public way, though, should do so for those who cannot, lending our voices and our presence to changing hearts, minds, and public policy. Rainbows are made of visible light. The more of us who are visible, the more our collective rainbow will shine. Of course, the spectrum of light includes wavelengths beyond the perception of the human eye; similarly, the LGBTQ spectrum contains many people who are not visible. We should never presume to know another person’s reasons for remaining invisible as an LGBTQ person in some or all of their life. (Or, at the risk of stretching the analogy, their reasons for being detectable only by those tuned to a usually invisible wavelength.) But if we personally can share our light with the world, then perhaps we can help dispel some of the darkness of these troubling times.
For some resources on coming out and being out as an LGBTQ parent, see my National Coming Out Day post from 2015.