Once upon a (surprisingly-worse) time, only members of the LGBTQ community could come out to the world. For many, coming out was a long, stigmatizing journey that could fray family relationships while putting housing and employment opportunities at risk.
To some people living outside the community, there was something so delightfully saccharine about these liberation stories. By the end of the aughts, everyone was "coming out" as their own "non-traditional" identities: vegetarians, emo fans, nerds and atheists, just to name a few.
While the term's appropriation has always been irritating, it's never been more grating than in its latest iteration: people who now "come out" as conservative. They claim, erroneously, that it's similar to coming out as gay.
And they're wrong.
People have been"coming out conservative"for close to a year now. Take, for example, two viral stories from the past month. Out Magazine writer Chadwick Moore penned a story for the New York Post titled "I'm a gay New Yorker, and I'm coming out as conservative." In it, Moore claims to have become a Republican after publishing a profile of alt-right troll-star Milo Yiannopoulos that prompted intense social media backlash. Moore chose to fight his critics. He abandoned his party and converted to conservatism, and this, he wrote, caused certain friends to abandon him, and was actually "harder" than coming out as gay.
Then, just last weekend, The New York Timespublished a widely-shared story claiming a similar thesis, using similar language:
"The name calling from the left is crazy,” said Bryce Youngquist, 34, who works in sales for a tech start-up in Mountain View, Calif., a liberal enclave where admitting you voted for Mr. Trump is a little like saying in the 1950s that you were gay."
It might be strange to see newly "out" conservatives attach themselves to the phrase, but there's savvy behind it. Consider: There's plenty of romance attached to the traditional American "coming out narrative." What's more moving than the story of people who liberate themselves from oppression? Who wouldn'twant to enjoy the moral victory associated with coming out (without having to suffer its material consequences)?
If people are able to somehow position themselves as "the voiceless," their voices will be harder to silence.
It's a canny role-reversal and power play—people of privilege, positioning themselves as repressed or "voiceless." It's thorny to attack anyone who claims to have "come out" (with the implicit suggestion being that they were hiding, at some point, out of fear). It's more challenging to go after "out" Trump voters, who sometimes advocate for policies that endanger marginalized people, when they're claiming marginalization themselves. Attacking anyone asking for empathy should, ostensibly, feel kinda cruel.
And yes, while these voters' claims to marginalization might be exaggerated, it doesn't justify bad behavior on the part of progressives. To be clear: It's absolutely wrong for liberals to threaten writers like Moore, as he claims to have happened. And it's just poor organizing for Democrats to reflexively reject all Trump voters from their personal lives or Facebook pages. Political polarization is bad enough as it is, and the social isolation caused by de-friending will likely only exacerbate it. Sorry.
Credit: press eye ltd/shutterstockBut it bears repeating: "coming out as gay" and "coming out as conservative" just aren't the same. Though there are some barely detectable political similarities between Trump voters and the LGTBQ community, and probably some very, very marginal crossover, it doesn't mean Trump voters are right to co-opt the vocabulary of coming out to espouse their political beliefs free from argument, or recourse.
Moreover, while it might be sincerely painful for conservatives to lose a few friends, "coming out" as a Trump voter is nothing like coming out as gay in the 1950s or even today. Their political beliefs don't prevent them from adopting children. Their views don't put them at risk of losing their employment or housing. Their voting record won't lead them to being deported to a country where they could be jailed or murdered.
These two experiences are vastly, almost comically different. Some of these voters who "came out" as Trump supporters have asked their liberal friends to embrace their worldview or simply "agree to disagree"—an idea that, sure, seems perfectly reasonable on the surface.
"I hope that New Yorkers can be as open-minded and accepting of my new status as a conservative man as they’ve been about my sexual orientation," Moore writes.
People's sexual orientations and gender identities pose no immediate physical threat to others.
This is an absurdly false parallel. Sexual orientations and gender identities pose no immediate physical threat to others.
Mass incarceration does.
Mass deportation will.
Hateful rhetoric and gender-and-race-targeted crimes—an uptick in which since Trump's election have been quantified and well-documented—absolutely has, does, and will.
Trump has already signed executive orders to those first two effects, too. Of course, liberals would probably be more effective if they stopped banning everyone they disagreed with from their social media—but that doesn't mean they should feel compelled to accept a dangerous ideology because someone else was worried about losing friends over espousing it.
So: Please. If you're not a member of the LGBTQ community, stop using the vocabulary of its birth. Grow up, and own your beliefs, and sell off your ginned-up persecution complex. And yeah, most semantics battles are absurd—but if there's one thing we learned from this election, it's that words matter. You don't get to steal the language of someone else's pain to tell your personal story.
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