'You will always have to "out" yourself': Reconsidering coming out through strategic outness

Abstract

Increasingly, researchers casually use the concept of coming out. After tracing its conceptual inflation, this article shifts the lens from identity development to reconsider coming out as identity management. I develop the perspective of strategic outness - the contextual and continual management of identity - to emphasize the role of social context in sexual identity disclosure. Using data from open-ended essays, I explore three aspects of strategic outness: strategies, motivational discourses, and social relationships. My participants discuss using multiple strategies to manage who knows about their sexuality, cohesively describe multiple motivations for controlling that information, and emphasize the role of social relationships in their decision-making. Strategic outness reconsiders how coming out is used with sexuality research, providing researchers with an explicit perspective to consider the social context of sexual identity disclosure in their analyses. © 2011 The Author(s).