As a queer child of Asian immigrant parents, I find myself uncomfortably at the intersection of the contradictions presented by National Coming Out Day. 

Unlike many of my peers who are queer people of color, my circumstances prompted me to inform my parents of my queer identity. I emerged from the experience still bound to my family, though not unscarred by an ongoing and evolving process of conflict and reconciliation. But unlike what is so often portrayed in media, coming out is not — and should not be — an inevitable life event for LGBTQIA+ people.

Coming out to my parents — if I am forced to call it such — was an unnecessarily exhausting and anxiety-filled process that years later I continue to hurt and heal from. 

Yet it was a calculated decision — a choice that made a bet on my parents’ values and love toward me in spite of explicitly queerphobic comments they made growing up. It was a decision that weighed my hope and willingness to include my family in important future life decisions; the intertwining of my queer identity with my career aspirations; and, to my privilege, the enduring support of my older sisters who had been raised by my parents to love and care for me so deeply. 

I have met countless other LGBTQIA+ people who have long ago foregone the idea of coming out to their family, balancing factors ranging from financial and social support to fervent religiousness or conservatism. Prevailing these more personal considerations, however, is a combination of both pragmatic and emotional conclusions: the desire to preserve family and community and the resolve that there is no need or incentive to share their queer identity with their family. 

I reject the condescension that this choice is a sacrifice or a lifelong blanket of secrecy and suppression for these individuals, whose multi-layered identities encompass far more than any declaration of a label. 

The young LGBTQIA+ people of today grew up in an age where, for many of us, the only perspectives on queerness we had access to might have been internet niches like coming out videos. I think of millennial gay YouTubers who were almost exclusively white men — influencers like Tyler Oakley, Connor Franta and Joey Graceffa. 

While I acknowledge that such figures provided inspiration for some LGBTQIA+ youth, as an adult I recognize how such limited representation exerted harmful pressure on me to come out and never provided me perspectives on what it meant to be queer in my Taiwanese American family.

Black, Indigenous and people of color’s experiences and struggles of queerness transcend the young, white, gay men’s coming-of-age narrative that dominates our society’s narrow understanding of the LGBTQIA+ community. Indeed, numerous mental health studies demonstrate that nonwhite LGBTQIA+ individuals do not experience the same levels of well-being from a traditional coming out event. 

For example, one study observed that many Latino gay men demonstrated their identity to their family tacitly — non-verbally disclosing their sexual orientation through actions like bringing partners to events or showing support for LGBTQIA+ causes.

Like so many other failings of the western gender system, coming out establishes an impossible binary: those who are out and free, and those who are closeted and unfree. It relies on the nuclear family — an American social model that employs the oppressive gender binary and compulsory heterosexuality. Queer people of color fundamentally do not fit into this model. 

But as an extension of the nuclear family, the coming out narrative also establishes a harmful binary of accepting families versus unaccepting families. To share my story of growing up queer is to be constantly vigilant against portraying my family — an Asian immigrant family that already received its fair share of isolation and unfair judgment in a predominantly white community — as backward, unprogressive and overly traditional. I realize today that my family’s quiet acceptance and deep-seated love has always surpassed any loud notions of western progressivity.

I have no wish to diminish the bravery and personal activism of coming out. Yet out of all the LGBTQIA+ folks I know in my life, it is most commonly the queer and transgender people of color — the immigrant children, the first generation, the painfully marginalized beyond being gay — who occupy the challenging gray space that is neither out nor in.

If coming out is about freedom, I counter that freedom is about personal reclamation. In a world where I was born queer, I don’t believe I ever came out. While I made a choice to say something to my parents, it is a choice that accounts for far more than momentary declarations of gender and sexuality, and only one of many valid paths that a queer person can take.

This National Coming Out Day, I celebrate something other than coming out. I celebrate the everyday ways in which people courageously choose to share their personhood with their birth and chosen families. I celebrate the quietness and fluidity of acceptance among queer communities and their loved ones. I celebrate the everyday bravery of existing as a queer person.