Coming Out of the LiveJournal Closet

This week I've been challenged to blog about something that makes me uncomfortable. Of course, when danger is your middle name, you scoff in the face of discomfort. It's taken me some time to decide what I might write about that causes me discomfort (short of commitment, human interaction, accountability, and the future, of course). What if I abandoned my faux-cool faux-intellectual detachment and blogged about something personal?

In the winter months of my junior year of high school, I did two things: first, I started a livejournal account, which I more or less actively maintained for the next three years of my life. I've spent some time recently thinking about the new interactions which social media enable, and come to realize a few things about my livejournalistic engagements.

First, though this didn't mean very much to me until recently, my livejournal is the longest writing project in which I've ever been involved. My most recent entry was this past January, bringing my total posts to 348, the majority of which were posted between 2005 and 2008. My eight livejournal friends (my closest real-world friends) and my numerous comments on their respective livejournals also suggests that this has also been the longest-running reading project in which I have ever engaged. Whether I want to admit it or not, my time on livejournal has played a significant role in shaping the way I engage and respond to texts, which is extremely interesting to a blogger for whom English grad school might be on the horizon (This would also be your cue to make a cheap, but well deserved, shot at my grammar and my ability to edit).

The founding of my livejournal, my first adventure in blogging, also coincided almost exactly with my decision to start the coming out process (temporally, I think I started coming out a week or two before I began my livejournal). Obviously, this is not to say that I came out because I started writing about myself online, or that I started blogging because I couldn't handle the (at times very stressful) public/private negotiations of secrecy that mark one's coming out. However, I'm coming to understand that the two were, for me, closely connected. At the very least, my insistence on making all of my entries "friends only" paralleled the kind of "friends only" attitude I took with my sexuality (I came out to my friends a significant amount of time before confronting the issue with either of my parents). Livejournal then, to some extent, helped me negotiate my coming out.

I remember the public nature of such a blog being absolutely terrifying to me; even then I spent a lot of time thinking about how public such a project could potentially be. I spent large quantities of time, at least in the beginning, thinking about what I could write or not in a particular entry and what information about me would be available to the world. I wonder though, if being forced to think about coming out in those terms, as a negotiation of publicity and privacy, actually helped me come out more easily. Rather than compounding my already-sizable anxiety about everyone discovering my secret, I think my livejournal helped concretize the process, enabling me to think about coming out in different terms, even if I wasn't quite aware of it. I wonder, was the way I thought about the telling/keeping of secrets and sharing of information in the "real world," most of all coming out, structured by my engagements with livejournal, at least on some level?

What's more, becoming comfortable with the process of writing about and around my coming out made me infinitely more comfortable with the process off-line. I can, in fact, think of at least two situations (each occurring a significant amount of time after my initial coming out)  in which I ended up coming out to people precisely because they had joined our expanding livejournal community, and it was going to start being weird if I denied them access to mine. My social media interactions both made coming out easier and gave me a little push to do it (something I think people need on occasion, especially me). This also suggests that I was starting to see a weird conflation between my digital interactions and my real ones. What does it mean for my coming out narrative to shift to "Oh, if you're gonna read my livejournal, I should tell you, I'm gay?" And this is not to mention the somewhat obvious and oft discussed point that once I understood it to be a safe space, my livejournal community provided me a place of digital acceptance and relatively judgment free social negotiations (complicated and made even cooler/more useful by the fact that all of my livejournal correspondences were my real-life best friends). 

One of my biggest fears in writing this blog is to become "the boy who cried queer," using the word so many times that it ends up not meaning very much, but I wonder if we can think about this experience in two ways. First, how might we understand the new forms of community and organizing which social media enable to be queer? In the case of my livejournal, my community was a new iteration of my already existing social network, whose workings (though they weren't always positive) feels decidedly queer. Secondly, do we see social media, the blogosphere in particular, to have unique effects on and present unique opportunities to its queer citizens? The wide distribution of the internet is changing coming out narratives and providing new ways for queers to organize, both socially and politically. Maybe social media isn't a queer technology, but we're certainly doing our best to make it one.

Have a good week, folks.

PS: I feel weird that there aren't many links in this post. For the sake of easing my mind, watch this (by now sort of dated) video, in which a bully victim fights back very harshly against his bully. And then this responding penny arcade comic, and let me know what your thoughts are. This alone might be enough to start a discussion. Remember my rule about blogging not being a spectator's sport? I was serious.