All right, back to answering these! Sorry I took so long.
Honestly…your ask really made me rethink some things I’d always taken for granted. First I’ll just preface this by saying I’m mostly thinking out loud and offering questions, I’m not insisting on or condemning or judging anything, and certainly not dismissing what people’ve lived through or their choices.
So my original answer to this was going to be to loosely agree with your points and then use them to pivot to John’s speech about everyone’s coming out journey not being the same, because as you both said, it’s not about the partner at all, and was going stay focused on the movie but you’ve really made me consider what coming out and closeted even really mean, on a much larger scale. Because Harper has come out where she lives, right. She’s not hiding herself there, she’s affectionate and loving and by Abby’s own account, a totally different person than with family. So we don’t just mean she has to come out, we mean she has to come out to her family. Why? Like truly, your last point, how come this doesn’t get the same treatment about consent and privacy as everything else? And let’s not say, oh, of course it’s up to you when you come out, nobody should out you, because the message from all directions, within the community and without, is very much that you eventually do have to at some point.
Even in this movie, John’s lovely speech STILL does imply that this is an end destination someone has to be “ready” to finally get to. If they don’t, that’s a failure to get there. And this is of course oversimplifying the fact that some people may come out to a sibling or one parent first or only them ever. But like, really, as you said, why is it seen this way, to prove people aren’t ashamed of themselves, of their gayness, of their partner, that literally, if they love their partner, they have to risk losing their family? Because what else is that saying? Knowing John’s own story, knowing that Harper had just admitted she was scared of telling and losing them, what did Abby’s I want someone who’s ready then mean, if not that? Someone ready to tell their parents and risk losing them, no? And this isn’t at all bashing Abby or even the movie, it’s just this overriding expectation. She’s of course valid in wanting to date someone out (though, again, in the ways that most affected Abby’s life, Harper was out–leaving out this trip from hell that it would also be completely understandable to want to escape from) but in the context of that moment, what else did it mean? And this isn’t the only media that does it, so many stories out there do.
I remember we briefly discussed this because of April from TBH, and even there, a character who is financially dependent on her family and with a conservative, violent father got some flak for not coming out. GLOW did this recently too, and Little Voice, where the queer person who wasn’t fully out is hiding their True Selves and ashamed and how no out person will want any part of that. And then the person comes out and hardly ever is the reaction as bad as it would most likely have been in real life, including for Harper. Why is this narrative so pervasive? “Just stop being a coward and it’ll all turn out okay.”
I mean. I do get WHY. It is an incredibly important step. For a lot of people, their family are the first and closest people they feel like they have to and want to tell, especially if they’re young and/or live at home. And if we don’t tell them, how do we push things forward for the community, and we’ve fought for so long to live openly like this, gay pride is what it is for a reason, and what good is being loved without being known and ultimately, it is traumatizing being closeted. People want to share this and have others share with them and keeping this huge secret that you know is unjustly forced upon you does take a mental toll. Agreed, agreed, agreed. But then why make it even worse by adding shame and guilt and pressure on top of it, you know? Surely there’s a middle ground. I get that there needs to be a strong motivation sometimes, otherwise people might stay in a kind of closeted “comfort zone” and end up missing out on surprisingly positive experiences, but maybe people shouldn’t be pushed either way. Some of us who think we might not ever may still yet decide we want to, but I have confidence that those people coming out in their own time would do so even without this stigma attached to the closet. Nobody stays in there because we want to. We all feel that same need to tell our families, all those reasons above apply to us, too. Circumstances are just different sometimes.
And the funny part is, I do think Harper is a person who should come out to her parents, because it matters that much to her. She’d never be happy without telling them. It goes without saying she shouldn’t have lied or brought Abby within a hundred miles of them before it was all sorted. But, say, a different person in her situation, one who told Abby she had no plans to come out to her parents anytime soon and either went home alone or not at all…is that so bad?
