Coming out is not a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Some people like Ellen DeGeneres get a national magazine's cover to declare her gayness. But most people have to settle with private conversations or showing up to social gatherings with significant others of the same sex. And then of course they get to come out over and over again whenever they meet someone or run into an old friend who didn't get their well-circulated ‘I'm-gay’ memo.
At least that's how I imagine it must have been before we all started spending the majority of our procrastination time on that great big time-sucking vacuum called Facebook.
There's a tiny box, probably at the very bottom of your profile that asks a seemingly simple question. “Interested In.” When I first encountered the box I was just barely a freshman in college setting up my Facebook account. I noticed the box and quickly checked “men,” just another one of those little lies you tell almost daily when you're in the closet.
I didn't give it any more thought than the other “closet lies” I told until four years later when I first started coming out. I was going through my profile to do some routine procrastination and encountered the box. One box, three choices: men, women or men and women. I pulled down the tab to click women and then paused. My grandmother checked my Facebook daily and I knew the change would not go unnoticed. And did I want anyone who might happen to friend me in the future to know I was raging homosexual?
I deleted the “Interested In” section, but it lingered in my mind long after it had been removed from my Facebook universe. I started asking friends what their Facebook pages said about their sexuality.
“It's not relevant at all. It's nobody's business,” said my friend Mark while sipping a mimosa at brunch. “I feel I don't need to explain, but if you're looking at my profile I'm pretty sure you'll notice the ten videos of me doing the 'Single Ladies' dance.”
A lot of the people whose Facebook pages I'd stalked to determine how to properly come out on the Internet simply removed the “Interested In” section. Did that mean they were out in the real world, but closeted in their Facebook worlds? Or was the absence of the section enough to tip off the people who really needed to know?
“My Facebook page is painted rainbow anyway,” my friend Liz, whose Facebook apparently screams lesbian without checking the “women” box, told me.
more on next page...
\\\
(continued)
Apparently Mark's “Single Ladies” recreations and Liz's constant status updates about her girlfriend were enough to be “out” on Facebook without having to summarize their sexuality with one, two or three words.
One of my all-time favorite scenes on The L Word is after Alice's apartment has been searched for evidence that her girlfriend, Tasha, is a lesbian. Alice runs around frantically hiding her artwork and scrubbing her notorious chart screaming something about how she's “de-gayifying.” The scene is brilliant, and not just because it's a shining glimpse of Alice being her wonderful neurotic self. The idea that one could “de-gayify” their lives is hilarious at best, and tragic at worst.
When I was considering what to put in the “Interested In” box I wasn't trying to “de-gayify” my profile. In fact I was trying to “gay up” my life. If you're going to be out you should be out and proud, I thought to myself. But I still couldn't get a grip on anyone in the world being able to search for me on Facebook and seeing maybe ten facts about me, one of which would be that I like women. I generally let people know I'm a lesbian within the first few moments of our meeting just to remove any threat of awkwardness. But the section just seemed so ... simple.
Mark, Liz and I moved on from talking about how gay our Facebooks were to laughing about people's “Facebook images.” I'd read something a while back about how Generation Y is constantly crafting their own images, acting as their own publicist trying to craft the perfect image to broadcast to the world. But who needs an image? Last time I checked I was not famous, even in my perfectly crafted Facebook world. And when I am famous I'll be sure to get a real magazine cover to declare my gayness from.
Camille Roane is interested in ...
Follow SheWired on Twitter!
Follow SheWired on Facebook!
Be SheWired's Friend on MySpace!
