Coming Out
Thumbnail image: Digital download purchased from https://nakedpastor.com/ Used here with permission.
Juli Belian
18th Sunday After Pentecost, Year C
Pride Sunday 2025
I was not a boisterous child. I grew up with three siblings in an 1,100-square-foot house, and the
four of us, I’m sure, created an absolute wall of noise, but I was not the loud one, and I also
wasn’t much able to tolerate incessant noise. My five-foot tall mother commanded us by sheer
volume, and my dad was never afraid to raise his voice either, so there were times when I just
could not take it anymore. If it was a temperate day, I could go outside, climb a tree in our yard,
and I got in trouble more than once for ignoring the voices calling for me, because I just couldn’t
bear to go back in there yet. (By the way, if you ever need to hide, remember that people
generally do not look up.)
But if the weather was not cooperative, I would sometimes climb into the three-foot-square front
coat closet and tuck myself behind all the winter gear, and roost among the trailing scarves and
unhangered jackets until my brain stopped feeling like that static at the end of the broadcast day
and I thought I could handle being around my family again. Either no one ever realized I was
hiding in there, or they were just as glad to be rid of me for a while as I was to escape from them;
either way, my hiding spot remained my secret until I could no longer squeeze myself in there.
We all have our closets. We all have parts of ourselves we keep tucked away from the hurly-
burly of the world. This is not, per se, a problem, really; we deserve our privacy, and we have the
right to keep to ourselves those parts of ourselves that are too difficult, or too tender, to share
with others, until we feel ready to do so.
When too many of those parts are tucked away, however, or when the parts we hide are crucial to
who we are, or when we are not the ones who chose to hide, closets become prisons– unlit spaces
closed by doors with no handles, confining us and restricting our expression until we are no
longer sure who we are, or how we fit into the world. As the poet, philosopher, and activist
Adrienne Rich noted, the pressure to conform to heterosexual and cisgendered expectations was
all the more damaging because it was unseen. It was assumed. It was woven into the fabric of our
social lives. Straight people never had to “come out” of any closets, because everyone was
assumed straight until proven guilty. Being straight was normal. Not being straight was not. As
my friend, the poet Marlon Ross, used to quip, those of us who were not straight were “sick,
sinful, immoral, and unnatural.” We did not choose our sexuality, we did not choose those labels,
we did not choose our closets. Indeed, the “ubiquitous, compulsory nature of heterosexuality”
(Rich) kept us hidden, not only from our families and the larger world, but sometimes even from
ourselves.
The first event of the so-called Pride Movement was a riot, wherein a certain group of citizens in
New York City refused to cooperate meekly with society’s enforcers and fought back against a
police raid on the only safe space most of us had back then–the gay bar. And that is what
happens when your insides and your outsides do not align: The friction between the fiction of our
external manners and the reality of our internal selves increases day by day until we ignite, either
lashing out in reaction against the world, or collapsing like a volcano in the destruction of our
very selves, whether by depression, drug and alcohol use, or suicide.
The Stonewall Riots of 1969 launched a movement that initially asked only that we not be jailed
for who we are. Many of us couldn’t even stand asking for that much and ran from Stonewall as
hard as we could, not wanting to be discovered, not wanting to be who we are, many of us trying
to be “healed” of something that never was an illness in the first place. We stood at a distance,
like the group of lepers, hoping that Jesus could magically transform us into people who could
accept what society expected and then go, our faith having made us “well.”
Gradually, however, the movement came to demand more, not only of society, but of ourselves.
We came to understand, as a people and as individuals, that our integrity, our mental health, even
our lives, required that we align our inside selves with our outside selves. We could no longer be
ignored by either our culture or by ourselves. The friction set a fire in us to be our authentic
selves in all areas of or lives. We decided to leave society’s closets behind for good. We decided
to come out.
The skin conditions that Jesus healed in today’s gospel were not what we know as leprosy.
Leprosy, interestingly, primarily appears only among certain genotypes, and as the archeology
has examined the DNA record left from the Middle East 2,000 years ago, it has become clear
that no one in that area in that time had Hansen’s disease. So what did they have? Well, it was
probably more than one thing, probably a variety of skin disorders, such as psoriasis and eczema.
The prevailing medical philosophy of the time interpreted any sloughing off of skin as proof of a
pestilence within the person trying to escape, a contagion looking for someone nearby to infect.
But the conditions described as leprosy did not kill or even disfigure anyone, and this is an
important point: Even the lepers in our story were not sick in the way we might think. These
conditions did only one thing: It made those who had them ritually unclean, barring the “lepers”
from the communities they came from and bonding them together in their own community of
outcasts. I find it fascinating that Jesus never told the ten they were healed; he told them to go
show themselves to the priests, to go get certified so they could rejoin the worship life of the
community. That was their “leprosy”–a condition essentially invented by the laws of the temple
to refuse them entry in the same way our own churches, until very recently, have admitted us
either for the sole purpose of saving us, or not at all–unless we hid who we were under
appropriate disguise … unless we refused to come out.
A social services organization for LGBTQ+ in Australia has a nice website describing the six
stages of coming out. Each stage begins with the word, “Identity”: Identity Confusion, Identity
Comparison, Identity Tolerance, etc. When I first read it over, I thought I missed something,
because the final stage is not Identity Pride. Identity Pride is only Stage 5, and it is marked
chiefly by anger, as we realize that nothing was ever wrong with us in the first place to justify
our exclusion from society.
Stage 6 is Identity Synthesis, not Pride. Stage 6 is the stage you reach when you realize there is
no end to “coming out”; so long as who we are remains essentially a secret, we will have to
“come out” over and over and over again for our entire lives. I remember the day I hit this point
myself; I was, I decided, so tired of the process that I vowed I would never “come out” again. I
would simply BE out. I would simply act as if who I was, and the details of my life, were as
worthy of inclusion in my public self as everyone else’s. I would start to say, “my wife.” I would
start to talk about “our kids.” I would make the exact same casual references to the insipid details
of my daily life that all my friends and colleagues do every day.
I made that decision quite a long time ago, and I’m not dead yet. But we all know things have
changed. You likely have heard of “gaydar,” the secret sixth (or maybe seventh) sense the good
Lord gave us so we could find each other even in a society that demanded we remain closeted.
Well, gaydar has a cousin, though I’ve never heard it named. It is the sense that lights up like a
scoreboard when we find ourselves in potentially threatening situations, situations that may look
safe to everyone else but which just do not feel safe to us. I don’t know about y’all, but mine’s
been going crazy lately. The world does not feel as safe today as it did three years ago.
And so we must return to the basic principles of coming out, which, as a political strategy, rests
on the belief that most people will soften their bias and bigotry once they realize how many of
the people they love are, in fact, among those they claim to hate. Coming out, as a political
strategy, is founded on the belief that love is stronger than hate, and that for every person we love
who rejects us for who we are, there will be more than one person who will love us for that same
reason, and that if we keep on bravely, the math of that faith will work out in our favor and save
the world.
Those of you here today in support of us have that same opportunity. Instead of wondering when
to mention your gay friends, your inclusive church, you can “come out” and integrate that
accepting love into your daily life. Talk about the people you know. Act as if who we are, and the
details of our lives, are as worthy of inclusion in public conversation as everyone else’s. Start to
say, “his husband.” Start to talk about “their kids.” Make the exact same casual references to the
insipid details of our lives that your friends and colleagues do about their friends. Show the
world you are proud of us – because we certainly are proud of you. You are why we are here.
You are what made us turn around to tell Jesus, “Thank you.”