The Politics of Coming Out

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore the politics of coming out by homosexuals. There are two points to which I wish to draw attention. First, the discourse of liberationists who aim to move toward the liberated state of nature by telling sexual matters results in homophobic insistence. Second, social constructionists who regard telling of one's own sexuality as a confession conspire with the deployment of sexuality by not questioning one's own positionality in it. Through the analysis of the lawsuit on the Tokyo Metropolitan Government's decision that homosexual groups should not be allowed to use Tokyo's youth center, the following three points on coming out are propounded. First, coming out is a resistance to change how power is exercised in homophobic society through taking a position within the power relations instead of remaining outside of them. Second, coming out shows that heterosexual norms are exclusive to neither the public sphere nor the private. Third, coming out problematizes the frame of knowledge that the truth of self is produced through the deployment of sexuality by constituting sexual pleasures as secrets.