The Gaze - Tumblr Posts

The meaning of “coming out” has changed several times over the course of the twentieth century. In the 1920s it referred to initiation into the gay world [in the campy style of debutante balls], and even when “coming out” was used in a narrower sense, to refer to the process by which someone came to recognize his sexual interest in other men, it referred to something other than a solitary experience. […] By the 1950s, gay men usually used “coming out” in a narrower sense to refer exclusively to their first sexual experience with another man. “I remember someone who was a total virgin but ran to the bars every weekend with makeup and screamed and shrieked and camped like crazy,” one man recalled, “and everybody would ask, ‘for God’s sake, when is he going to come out?’” By the 1970s, its meaning had changed again. It could still be used to refer to a person’s first homosexual experience, but it more commonly referred to announcing one’s homosexuality to straight friends and family. The critical audience to which one came out had shifted from the gay world to the straight world.

George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940 (Message me for PDF)

Odysseus sketch in class oah