Queer Politics at Home

by Katarina Zivkovic

‘Coming out’ - there’s a day dedicated to celebrating it (October 11 is the National Coming Out Day in many countries); it’s a movie and book genre; many years are often spent on making the decision to come out. But coming out is also sometimes a simple ‘her wife/his husband’, a ‘I’m X, my pronouns are they/them!’ Why do people’s coming out experiences lie on such a broad spectrum between daunting, sometimes even dangerous, and completely casual?

Unlike common media portrayals of the subject, to many members of the LGBTQ+ community, coming out is not a one-off thing, and the only two options are not merely to be entirely in the closet, or to be fully out. While some social circles might be safe, others might react negatively, and LGBTQ+ individuals often need to carefully weigh to whom they should come out. I have found that among my friends, a popular strategy to find out someone’s feelings towards the LGBTQ+ community is to figure out what they think of a mutual acquaintance that has come out. But not everyone has a family acquaintance that is openly part of the LGBTQ+ community, and people belonging to less accepting communities are more likely to struggle with thinking of personal acquaintances that are also a member of the LGBTQ+ community.

Visibility of LGBTQ+ individuals in the public and political sphere contributes to the normalisation of LGBTQ+ identities and to norms of acceptance, support and respect. Particularly for people who are coming out for the first time, a lack of representation of LGBTQ+ individual can contribute to feelings of loneliness and isolation even in cases where the individual’s environment is not bigoted against LGBTQ+ people. And environments that are, in fact, homophobic or transphobic, often breed internalised homophobia and transphobia on top of discrimination from the surroundings. Knowing other LGBTQ+ people who can relate to and understand the particular difficulties faced by a newly ‘out’ member of the community, can be hugely beneficial for their mental health.

Important to consider is that the LGBTQ+ rights movement, like any other social justice movement, consists of many subgroups, which are connected by a common nonconformity with cis, heterosexual norms, but also face struggles unique to the interplay between their specific sexual orientation or gender identity, and other facets of their identity. The movement has been deeply intertwined since the 1960s with the US civil rights movement, with a Black drag queen, Marsha P. Johnson, and a Venezuelan and Puerto Rican drag queen, Sylvia Rivera, being seen as pioneers of the LGBTQ+ rights movement. Diversity in LGBTQ+ representation is as necessary today as it was then for members of the community that are also part of other underrepresented and marginalised groups.

As a queer biracial second-generation-immigrant woman with atheist parents from China and Serbia, my experience is shaped by each part of my identity and might look very different if even just one of those labels was changed. Comparing my home country, Austria, to both China, where virtually no anti-discrimination policies exist to protect LGBTQ+ individuals, and to Serbia, where existing anti-discrimination laws are often disregarded by a corrupt legal system, my parents once asked me why I was so excited when same-sex marriage was legalised in Austria, a fairly accepting country. When I pointed out to my dad that among our Serbian acquaintances in Austria, there was still plenty of homophobic sentiment, I remember him replying that ‘government policies are hardly going to change that.’ To me, he unknowingly summed up so pointedly what is missing for real political change in terms of LGBTQ+ acceptance, particularly in communities outside of the mainstream culture. Community knowledge is necessary to advocate for LGBTQ+ people outside the mainstream who often face obstacles particular to the ethnic/cultural/religious (etc.) communities they belong to.

Representation of LGBTQ+ identities in the public and political sphere is undoubtedly increasing, with 49 openly LGBTQ+ MPs in UK Parliament (https://qz.com/1769275/new-uk-parliament-has-record-number-of-female-non-white-and-lgbtq-mps/). Even in Serbia, an openly gay woman, Ana Brnabić, is currently Prime Minister. However, when Brnabić responded to a question asked by Pride Magazine about the potential legalisation of same-sex marriages by saying there are more pressing issues, she spoke from a position of privilege; a privilege that many other LGBTQ+ people in her country, who often struggle to get justice for discrimination while many corrupt local governments turn a blind eye, do not enjoy. While LGBTQ+ politicians have an impact on the normalisation of queer identities, this impact is often limited to mainstream society. To help LGBTQ+ people from minority communities, we need to amplify the voices of politicians, spokespeople, religious leaders etc. from diverse walks of life. The way someone chooses to come out, whether with a rainbow cake or over a text message, is a personal decision, but everyone deserves political advocacy in a way suitable to their own complex identities.