The Savvy Ally. Jeannie Gainsburg
out for a beer?”
It’s also important to keep confidentiality in mind. Coming out is the LGBTQ+ person’s job, not yours. You should never out the person to others. If it doesn’t come up naturally in the coming-out conversation, you may want to say something like, “I want to be very careful that I keep this information confidential. Are you comfortable telling me who else knows?” If the individual has come out as transgender and is asking you to use a new name and pronoun, it is also critical to discuss when and where the new name and pronoun should be used. Sometimes people will ask close friends to support them and affirm their identity by using their new name and pronoun in private, but they will use their old name and pronoun in public with others because they are not ready to come out or they don’t feel safe doing so. Getting clarity on how the person would like you to navigate those situations is important and shows how committed you are to supporting them and keeping them safe.
WHAT NOT TO SAY WHEN SOMEONE COMES OUT TO YOU
If someone comes out to you, do try to avoid asking, “Are you sure? Perhaps this is just a phase.” Even if you truly think that this might just be a phase, saying it aloud is unlikely to be received well. If it is a phase, the person will figure it out in their own time. For now it’s their reality and it should be respected. If it’s not a phase, you are at risk of really pissing them off.
Another question to avoid asking is when they “decided” to be LGBTQ+. Just as I didn’t choose or decide to be straight or cisgender, LGBTQ+ people don’t choose their identities. A better question to ask is, “How long have you known this about yourself?”
A great point by Dannielle Owens-Reid and Kristin Russo, from their book This Is a Book for Parents of Gay Kids,6 is to avoid saying “I always knew,” even if you did. You may be pleased by your expert sleuthing, but keep it to yourself. Hearing that you knew already may make the person coming out to you feel foolish or cowardly for waiting so long, diminish the importance of the information they want to share with you, cause them to wonder what they did to make it so obvious, and make them worry that others can also tell.
Finally, you should also avoid asking questions about a person’s anatomy or sexual behaviors. There is an interesting phenomenon that sometimes happens when people talk about LGBTQ+ individuals and the LGBTQ+ communities: Their heads go right to the person’s body parts and/or what they are doing in the bedroom. Being LGBTQ+ is not a bedroom issue and it does not give us a free pass to ask invasive questions about someone’s body or sex life. It’s about being able to live authentically and safely in all aspects of life. So asking a gay man who has just come out to you, “Have you slept with a guy yet?” or asking a trans woman, “Are you planning on having surgery?” is not okay. Just because someone comes out to you does not mean that they are required to be an open book. If you’re curious about what LGBTQ+ people actually do in the bedroom or what types of surgeries are available for transgender people, do some online research.
If someone comes out to you and you’re not sure if a question is okay or not, the “switch it” technique is useful: Switch the person’s LGBTQ+ identity for straight or cisgender and try the question again in your head. Is the question polite, supportive, or useful, or is it offensive, invasive, or motivated by curiosity? Never in my fifty-six years of living have I ever had anyone ask me, “Do you think being cisgender might just be a phase?” or, “How do you know you’re straight if you’ve never slept with a woman?” Our society believes I am on the “right” course and therefore no one has ever questioned my sexual orientation or gender.
Another great thing to keep in mind that may help to steer you away from inappropriate questions is that sexual orientation and sexual behaviors are completely separate things. One has to do with whom we are attracted to and the other is what we actually do. Think about when you first knew whom you were attracted to. I had a pretty solid idea by the time I was in third grade. Was I having sex yet? No. I didn’t need to have sex to know that my little nine-year-old heart went pitter-patter every time I looked at Danny Fox.
POP QUIZ
What do LGBTQ+ people do in the bedroom?
A. Have sex
B. Read books
C. Sleep
D. Occasionally vacuum and change the sheets
E. All of the above
Answer: E
A friend of mine described a workshop he participated in once where everyone in the room got an index card. On one side they wrote down their sexual orientation and gender. On the other side, they wrote down a favorite sexual activity. They then put all of the cards on a table with the “sexual activity” side up. The facilitator asked the participants to look at the sexual activities and figure out who was gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, straight, and cisgender. Guess what happened? They couldn’t do it. They had no idea. Humans can be very creative in the bedroom, and no one group has cornered the market on any one sexual activity. Are there straight couples who engage in anal sex? Yup. Are there gay couples who have never engaged in anal sex? Yup. It’s disrespectful and inaccurate to make assumptions about or to define a group of people by what we think they are doing in the bedroom.
I often hear this comment from straight, cisgender people: “No one should be out in the workplace. That’s not appropriate.” Actually, the vast majority of straight, cisgender people are out in the workplace. They talk about the movie they saw over the weekend with their wife. They have a photo of their husband on their desk. They bring their girlfriend to the company’s holiday party. This is what being out in the workplace looks like. Being out at work doesn’t mean I am going to share with you the new sexual position my partner and I just discovered. An important role for allies is to help folks understand the difference between sexual orientation (which comes with us to work) and sexual behaviors (which do not).
FUTURE FANTASIES
I hope I live long enough to see the Cass model and other LGBTQ+ identity development models disappear. They won’t be needed because our societal expectations will have shifted. Parents, teachers, friends, and faith leaders will read stories to children about all kinds of people and families, will use language that doesn’t assume sexual orientation or gender, and will have no expectations about who a person is or who they will be. There will be no fear, shame, or despair for anyone as they figure out who they are and whom they are attracted to. LGBTQ+ centers will close down or become museums, and books like this one will no longer be needed. Students will read about conversion therapy (therapy aimed at turning gay people straight) and people like CeCe McDonald and Matthew Shepard in their history books and say, “Can you believe stuff like that used to happen back then?” (If you aren’t familiar with CeCe McDonald or Matthew Shepard, there’s some ally homework for you.) In this future world, it will be as easy to come out as LGBTQ+ as it was for me to come out as a straight cisgender person. The Cass model process will disappear not because we have fixed our LGBTQ+ people but because we have fixed our society.
NOTES
1. Vivienne Cass, “Homosexual Identity Formation: A Theoretical Model,” Journal of Homosexuality 4, no. 3 (spring 1979): 219–235.
2. Laura Kann, Emily O’Malley Olsen, Tim McManus, et al., “Sexual Identity, Sex of Sexual Contacts, and Health-Related Behaviors among Students in Grades 9–12—United States and Selected Sites, 2015,” Center for Disease Control and Prevention Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Surveillance Summaries 65,