Grassroots Literacies: Lesbian and Gay Activism and the Internet in Turkey

3: Coming Out and Legato Members’ Narratives of Sexual Literacy

3 Coming Out and Legato Members’ Narratives of Sexual Literacy From its inception, Legato’s ultimate goal was to have individuals come out on college campuses to participate in activism and take action against the oppressive discursive tradition surrounding homosexuality discussed in chapter 2. In expressing this mission, the back cover of the Legato fanzine (see Figure 3.1), a sophisticated example of Legato’s complex visual rhetoric, featured a visual and verbal emphasis on coming out. It is a collaged graphic manifesto in the style of an anonymous note put together using newspaper cutouts. Although the note seems anonymous, its message is anti-anonymity and pro-coming out: “Çık küçük böcek dolabından! Göreceksin o zaman yeğdir tedirgin yaşamak saklanmaktan ya da sığınmaktan” (“Come, small insect, out of your closet! You will see then that living in apprehension is preferable to hiding or taking refuge”). The sinister look and tone evokes the dangers and difficulties of coming out. The images I discussed in chapter 2 avoided representing or picturing an actual Turkish lesbian or gay man; this text goes further by completely severing its ties from the messenger graphically, and the appearance of the letters spotlights the statement of the text as its sole visual subject. As such, the visual-verbal text is a contemplation of coming out as a subject-making act and visually problematizes the severance of the subject from the message and vice versa. The background of the image, the vortex of light and darkness, seems to offer its own ambivalent resolution to the quandary of coming out. Coming out has been chronicled and established as an important stage of individual and communal lesbian, gay, and bisexual psychosocial development in the U.S. context (e.g., Bérubé; D’Emilio). Although the irresistible vortex behind the visual-verbal text 71 72 GRASSROOTS LITERACIES seems to imply its historical inevitability, its design clearly signals that coming out will both emancipate and constrain through visibility, and the exact consequences, as visually represented by the alternating white and black lines leading into the vortex, will become clear only as individuals come out and experience its repercussions in their immediate social contexts. Coming out, short for “coming out of the closet,” is a metaphor for recognizing one’s same-sex attraction and divulging to others one’s sexual Figure 3.1. A collaged graphic manifesto on the back cover of the Legato fanzine: “Come, small insect, out of your closet! You will see then that living in apprehension is preferable to hiding or taking refuge.” 73 COMING OUT orientation as lesbian, gay, or bisexual. According to Drescher, “The term coming out originated in the urban, homosexual culture of the early twentieth century. As debutantes came out into society, one came out into homosexual society” (245). In his introduction to Coming Out Under Fire, Allan Bérubé lays out three historical meanings of coming out: sexual (i.e., to have one’s first homosexual experience), social (i.e., being out in one’s friendship circles), and political. According to Bérubé, the first two meanings were predominant during the 1930s and 1940s in the United States. During World War II, which mobilized and thus brought many lesbians and gay men into contact with each other, coming out gained an additional political dimension due to antihomosexual policies in the military (6–7). The postWWII social movements in the 1960s and 1970s expanded the political meaning of coming out, as lesbians and gay men formed communities and initiated the struggle for gay rights. The AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 1990s further compounded the activist, post-1970s meaning of coming out and its urgency as a political act of self-definition that is intended to defy and thus change negative societal perceptions of homosexuality. The act of coming out and its re-telling led to the formation of narratives that are collectively dubbed “coming out narratives” or “coming out stories,” in which lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals recount the moments in which they recognized their attraction to people of their own sex (coming out to oneself) or revealed their sexual orientation to friends, families, coworkers , employers, or others. According to this scenario, however, coming out is processual (Liang; Wood); the act of recreating oneself through selfnaming needs to be repeated due to the prevalent assumption and default attribution of heterosexuality, coupled with the complex and...