Putting It Out There

Guest blogger Kareem Khubchandani is a graduate student in Performance Studies at Northwestern University, and one of those family-all-over-the-globe diasporic desis.  He has lived in Chicago for two years now and majorly loves this city!

Today, a friend sent a distressed email over the Trikone-Chicago listserve, severely upset that a picture of him at a Trikone event had appeared in a publication; he’s not out.  I got the email on my phone while I was at dinner with a friend with whom I was extensively discussing an email he was painstakingly crafting to come out to his straight desi friends.  He was writing this email because he felt that he had grown apart from these friends by keeping this part of his life separate from them.  All this fuss over being out.  I came out to my parents when I was 18, visiting them back home in Ghana after my first year of college.  I was outed to the rest of my relatives when my uncle found an article I wrote for my college newspaper online, and forwarded it to the family.  I’ve come out (to friends, family, and strangers), been outed (intentionally and accidentally), and outed other people (intentionally and accidentally).  Sometimes I wait eagerly for a trashy tabloid to announce that Karan Johar, Gurinder Chadha, Rekha, Kal Penn, and Jay Sean have come out, too.  Instead we get Lance Bass, Ricky Martin, and some random country singer.

I guess I’m wondering if visibility politics still matter, or if coming out is just something celebrities do when they need a popularity boost.  Outness clearly matters for my two queer desi friends who attach value to other people knowing they are gay, a value that will either include or exclude them from the communities that matter most.  And of course, it depends on the kind of queer we come out as.  Jim McGreevy (former governor of New Jersey) coming out as a “gay American” certainly made him more palatable to the general public.  And a paparazzi spotting of a hate-mongering homophobe with an escort that he hired to “carry his bags” carries a very different pleasure than knowing that we were right about Ricky Martin all along.  Coming out is and isn’t a radical act, and outing someone is and isn’t a useful means to a political end.

Coming out can be an act of intimate exchange with our loved ones, a sharing of what we imagine to be our true self.  It can be a means of making our sexuality known so that no one uses queerphobic language.  Or making our sexuality known so that we pique the interest of the other (cute) queers in the room.  Coming out also puts us at greater risk for physical and verbal abuse in our heightened visibility.  Some of us have come out to these friends and not those ones. And we don’t have to.  Being out is not the end goal of being queer.  And sometimes we can be out without having to come out; sometimes the people around you just know, and they’ve learned how to signal that “it’s all good.“  Often, the act of coming out is not the declarative statement, “I’m gay/lesbian/bi/trans”; it’s a fashion choice, that little rainbow keychain, a reprimand for queerphobic language, the usage of ungendered pronouns, or (if you’re going for some drama, honey!) bringing a same-gender partner as your guest to a cousin’s wedding.

So why my interest in coming out?  As one of the coordinating members of Trikone, I’ve been trying to think about what sort of politics suit a queer desi organization.  There are certainly many critiques of visibility politics that argue that coming out only marks us as good consumer citizens that can be marketed to: we own the entire seasons of “Will & Grace” and “The L Word,” go to gay/lesbian bars, buy fancier underwear, get gym memberships, go on Rosie O’Donnell’s cruise, and pay more for haircuts.  Coming out isn’t a means of sticking it to the man (no pun intended?) anymore; but was it ever?  I’m not concerned that coming out or showing queer pride is what desis should do.  But rather, my two friends in Trikone show that we’re not past these things; the stakes are still high in being seen as queer by our peers and loved ones.  And so I hope we can reflect on how and why we come out, as opposed to whether we do or not because, as Monisha Das Gupta writes in Unruly Immigrants, we can “retool visibility politics” to critique structures of racist-heteropatriarchy rather than simply reify them.

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Trikone-Chicago is a social, activist, and support group for Queer Desis and their allies.  To find out more about Trikone-Chicago join our listserve or join us on Facebook.

Trikone’s Pride Cocktail Party: This Saturday, June 26^th, from 7-10:30pm.  Call 413.672.1861 or email Kareem for more info.

March in the Dyke March this Saturday: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=14233764762

Coming out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_out

Additional reading:

• Monisha Das Gupta – Unruly Immigrants: Rights, Activism, and Transnational South Asian Politics in the United States (2006)
• Gayatri Gopinath – Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (2005)
• Martin Manalansan – Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (2003)