Telling my life: Narratives of coming out in LGB people between certainty/uncertainty and revelation/concealment

Abstract

Introduction: The coming out (CO) process frequently entails moments of questioning and challenge, as well as strength and resilience. The aim of the present study was to investigate the CO process and identity development of lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) people through their own life narratives.

Method: Adopting a social-constructionist perspective, we administered the Life Story Interview (LSI) from the qualitative protocol of the Generations Study. In total, 64 LGB people aged 23–75 participated in the study. Interviews were analyzed using the semiotic enunciative square technique, based on discourse analysis and mitigation markers.

Result: The present study highlighted how participants’ life stories were characterized by fluctuating moments lived between certainty/uncertainty, revelation/concealment, denial/non-denial (i.e., “blocked identity” vs. assertive-agent identities), and acceptance/non-acceptance (i.e., aware vs. fearful identities).

Conclusion: The perspective of social constructionism was shown to be appropriate for investigating the CO process. Implications for clinical practice and future research are discussed.

Keywords:

• Coming out
• LGB
• minority stress
• identity
• life stories

Acknowledgments

The authors express their sincere gratitude to the LGB+ people who participated in this study. All authors who contributed significantly to the work have been identified.

Ethics statement

Ethical approval was acquired from the Institutional review board and the study was conducted in compliance with Ethical principles for medical research involving human subjects of Helsinki Declaration.

Disclosure statement

Conflict of interest: none.

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Data availability statement

Data are available upon request in compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR; Regulation EU2016/679) on the protection of natural persons with regards to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data.