New Identities or New Intimacies? Rethinking ‘Coming Out’ in Taiwan through Cross-Generational Ethnography

Setting the stage

As a humid October afternoon turned to a cool evening in Taipei, I sat on the pavement in front of the Presidential Palace, watching the speeches and performances that capped off the city’s ninth annual pride parade. Together with some 50,000 other pride-goers, I cheered as Guo Mama, the founder of Asia’s first organization for parents of LGBT children, mounted the stage to deliver her annual charge. Consistent with the message she shared at smaller and more intimate gatherings I attended monthly, Guo Mama stressed parents’ love and support for their children, and encouraged children who had not yet ‘come out’ (chugui) to draw on the resources of her organization in order to do so, with the goal of attending next year’s pride parade together with their parents. Three young women seated on the ground in front of me immediately turned and pointed to a friend of theirs, who just as quickly pointed back at one of them while pushing their hands out of her face, in a kind of hot potato game with Guo Mama’s challenge to chugui: no one wanted the challenge to land in her own lap. Yet this act of refusal also functioned as an acknowledgement of the challenge – of the possibility of coming out – which now hung in the air around us as surely as the women’s nervous laughter.

Watching them, I was reminded of a comment by an older gay man at a social gathering in the southern city of Kaohsiung a few weeks earlier:

Many of these younger tongzhi ¹ haven’t come out yet, but they’re planning to do it once they get an education, find a job, and are financially independent from their parents. We [older tongzhi] already have all those things, but we still don’t come out.

When I arrived in Taiwan to conduct fieldwork with gender and sexually nonconforming people and their families of origin, I did not intend to study ‘coming out’, and had not included the term chugui anywhere in my research materials. In fact, I was actively looking for ways not to study ‘coming out’, a construct that has been critiqued for its Eurocentrism and reproduction of linear and essentialist models of sexuality (Jolly, 2001; Klein et al., 2015; see also McLelland, 2001; Wang et al., 2009; Wong, 2007, for more nuanced approaches that consider how ‘coming out’ is hybridized in Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, respectively). Yet from the pride festivities and party mentioned above, to my interviews and visits in family homes, to queer-themed talk shows and other media content, I could not ignore the prevalence of this concept among my younger informants. Even those who were not politically active or familiar with the relatively new language of chugui shared deep concerns about whether and how to disclose their sexuality to their families of origin. Meanwhile, to the same extent that this concept resonated with young people in my research, it was conspicuously absent from the family narratives of those in their 50s and older.

This generation gap did not converge neatly with emerging identity politics, nor with decreasing shame and stigma, as existing models and theories of ‘coming out’ might predict (for representative literature on ‘coming out’ as a process of identity development and stigma management, see Chow and Cheng, 2010; Corrigan and Matthews, 2003; Floyd and Bakeman, 2006; Wong and Tang, 2004). Younger informants were more likely to discuss sexuality with their families even if they did not claim an identity (rentong) on this basis. Older informants spent considerable time and energy managing their various family roles and relationships, but disclosure or discovery of their sexuality figured marginally if at all in their family strategies and the stories they told about their lives, even among those with strong tongzhi identities and activist backgrounds.

The more time I spent with tongzhi of different generations and with their families, the more I came to understand sexual disclosure not as a form of identity work, but rather as a relational strategy connected to a wider set of family practices, norms, and expectations. In this article, I highlight the changing expectations surrounding parent–child intimacy and communication as an important site in the production and negotiation of sexuality within families. I focus especially on the shift from structural interdependency and tacit negotiations to interpersonal sharing and tighter parental surveillance of (adult) children’s lives.

This analysis bridges the scholarship on kinship and family change in Taiwan with an evolving body of work on queer family of origin relationships. While the overlap of these fields is self-evident, ‘queering’ families of origin has occurred largely under the rubric of sexuality studies rather than kinship studies. The relative silence of family scholarship in this area contributes to the construction of queer lives as over-determined by sexual identity, while heteronormative assumptions embedded within kinship and family theories and methods remain intact. It is my hope that a conversation between the two will not only shed light on queer family of origin relationships beyond the dominant paradigms of sexual identity and disclosure, but also highlight the value of queer standpoints for broader understandings of kinship and family change in Taiwan today.

Methods and terminology

The findings presented in this article are rooted in ethnographic fieldwork and 80 family history interviews that I conducted in Taiwan between August 2011 and January 2013. I interviewed queer and transgender people ranging in age from their 20's to their 70's. When possible I also interviewed their heterosexual parents and siblings. The individuals and families who contributed to this project are diverse by region of the country, education, income, and levels of involvement in Taiwan’s sex rights movement, including some informants who are very involved and many others who are not involved and do not maintain social networks that are based on sexuality. While traveling to do interviews, I often visited or stayed overnight with my informants in their family homes, and the heart of this research took place during these visits, interwoven with the daily and even mundane rhythms of family life. I also took part in regular family and community activities, such as support group meetings for parents of LGBT children, informational sessions on how to ‘come out’ to parents and other relatives, educational lectures about homosexuality organized and attended by parents, relevant political events, and social gatherings of gender and sexually nonconforming people and their family members. I became a volunteer member of the Taiwan Tongzhi Hotline Association LGBT Elders Working Group, which promotes cross-generational exchanges, preservation of tongzhi history, and quality of life for aging queer populations. This part of the work proved especially important for building relationships with mid and later life tongzhi, and for learning about the generational differences described in this article.

Throughout the article, I will use such terms as gender and sexually nonconforming, LGBT, queer, and tongzhi interchangeably in an effort to keep these terms in question, as fluid as the forms of embodiment and relationality they describe, and to emphasize that no single term is or can be a perfect translation or representation of complex gender and sexual subjectivities. My informants used many different words and concepts to describe themselves and their family members, and varied in whether, to what degree, and under what circumstances they claimed an identity based on gender or sexuality. When referring to specific informants, I include their preferred terminology for talking about these aspects of their lives.

Landscapes of family change

The queer family stories and generational cleavages that motivate this analysis are situated in a dynamic landscape of family change. Taiwan emerged from Japanese colonial rule at the end of WWII as a high-fertility, agrarian, family-based economy. Today it is a robust democracy with the features of late capitalism and one of the latest marrying and lowest fertility populations in the world. Scholars have extensively documented and analyzed this transformation in relation to political and state influences, and the entanglement of local and global forces. For example, under martial law imposed by the KMT (Chinese Nationalists) from 1949–1987, the family served as a focal area first for nationalist propaganda, and later for a comprehensive family planning campaign implemented with US aid (Lan, 2014). The post-martial law period saw sustained interventions in family law and policy, shaped in a large part by the emerging women’s movement (Kuo, 2007). The bodies of queers, sex workers, and other sex and gender ‘deviants’ became battlegrounds in the construction of modern sexual subjects in Taiwan, with emerging familial ideals such as the ‘wife-in-monogamy’ as regulatory and disciplinary mechanisms (Ding, 2007; Huang, 2011). Across these various dimensions of the state, law, political organization, national identity, and new liberal democratic ideals, marriage and family are continuously reproduced and reconfigured in the cultural imagination.

The growing emphasis on monogamous heteroromantic love, and on spousal rather than extended family relationships, has garnered substantive attention from family scholars across disciplines (e.g. Chu and Yu, 2010; Davis and Friedman, 2014; Poston et al., 2014; Thornton et al., 1994). A smaller but growing body of research points to similarly profound changes in what people desire and expect from the relationships between parents and their children. The use of romantic love to reinscribe spousal bonds, at the same historical moment that the normative requirement of marriage is somewhat destabilized (Yu and Liu, 2014) has parallels in the realm of parent–child relations. Normative obligations between parents and children remain strong, but increasingly, people report caring for their parents because of the emotional satisfaction they get from doing so (Yi and Lin, 2009) and parents rank affective ties with their children as an important component of life satisfaction (Lin et al., 2011).

These changes hold multiple implications for queer families of origin. Parenting discourses that emphasize mutual understanding and love are staples of a bourgeoning social movement to support Taiwanese parents of LGBT children. At the same time, intimacy can be a thinly veiled mechanism of parental surveillance and control, as parents demand more access to their children’s inner lives. In my fieldwork with families and community organizations, parents often advised LGBT youth to ‘let mom and dad get to know you’ (rang baba mama renshi ni) to smooth the ‘coming out’ process. Some people used this approach successfully, while others found that letting parents ‘know’ them resulted in more family pressure and conflict, and impeded their ability to embody their genders and conduct their relationships as they desired. To complicate matters further, parenting discourses that emphasize attentiveness to children’s needs and emotions, and close monitoring of children’s bodies and behaviors (Brainer, 2015; Faircloth and Murray, 2014; Lan, 2014) have made ‘coming out’ not only possible but in some cases unavoidable for young adults in Taiwan, often through invasive questioning or direct confrontations initiated by parents. Such experiences represent a meaningful departure from the tacit gestures and strategic silences that previously characterized family negotiations of gender and sexuality.

Recent economic trends such as rising unemployment among young people, the increasing need for higher education to secure even an entry-level job, and soaring housing prices have contributed to a prolonged transition to adulthood across socioeconomic groups (Huang, 2013). As a result, the flow of resources between children and parents is shifting later in life, with many children remaining dependent on their parents through their 20s and into their 30s. As more people postpone marriage and parenthood, some LGBT young adults are finding it easier to blend in with their heterosexual peers, using their prolonged educational trajectories to deflect marriage pressure. For others, the pressure is heightened by financial dependence and increased parental involvement in their day-to-day activities, including parents who have ‘forced’ them out of the closet (bi [wo] chugui) in a manner that would have been unimaginable for earlier cohorts.

Mid and later life queer informants reported facing marriage pressure in their early lives, and many were or had been heterosexually married. However, they did not directly connect this pressure to family members’ views about their sexuality. Young people interpreted family questions about marriage as also being about sexuality, and struggled with how to answer, feeling that they were ‘hiding’ or being dishonest if they ‘pretended’ to be heterosexual. Issues of hiding and pretending did not come up among their queer elders, who were more likely to recognize their non-love based marriages as socially legitimate. Rather than universalizing the subjective experience of the ‘closet’, assuming, for example, that all married tongzhi are closeted, it is crucial to consider the context and meanings attached to these unions, and the tools available to sexually and gender nonconforming people as they navigate family and kinship systems in different historical moments.

Hong (age 53): ‘My boyfriend also encouraged me to marry my wife’

I first knew Hong as a vivacious tongzhi who loves raunchy humor and dreams of being a woman in the next life so that he can properly marry his boyfriend and lifelong sweetheart. Over time, I also came to know him as a heterosexually married father of four children and a devoted son to his widowed mother. His story is reflective of those I often encountered in my fieldwork with gay men born in the 1950s and earlier periods. Hong got married in the late 70s, an era of ‘nearly universal marriage’ in Taiwan by conventional demographic standards (Jones, 2005). He never referred to his marriage as a sham (jia jiehun – a term applied to non-love based marital arrangements, especially marriages between gay men and lesbians, which simultaneously naturalizes heterosexual romantic love marriages), although he did not feel love or desire in this union and found the sex particularly unbearable. His boyfriend encouraged him to persist and even showed his support by giving Hong bottles of lube to use during sex with his wife. Hong found this gesture very touching and symbolic of his boyfriend’s love and care for him and his family. This attitude toward heterosexual marriage departs significantly from that of many younger lesbians and gays, and from the mainstream media in Taiwan, which has come to depict such marriages as dishonest.

Hong entered and remained in his marriage for complex reasons, perhaps most significantly to provide for his mother, who became a widow in her 20s, and faced strong pressure to remain permanently single and devote her labor and income to her marital family. Her in-laws refused to bequeath any assets to Hong (their eldest male grandchild) until they were certain that she would not take another husband. Hong recalled that in the years following his father’s death, his mother often cried herself to sleep at night. At one point, she said to him, ‘You must quickly grow up, get married, and have children; watching over you is all I have in this life (ni yao gankuai zhangda, jiehun sheng xiao haizi, wo zhe beizi jiu shouzhe ni).’ From childhood, Hong understood that his mother’s wellbeing hinged on his establishment of a heterosexual household. As a result, his marriage and his sexual orientation were two separate matters; they really had nothing to do with each other. Hong never considered opting out of marriage, not because he was ‘closeted’ but because his gay sexuality did not diminish his responsibility to provide for his mother’s life by getting married and having sons.

In the narrative excerpt below, Hong alternates between describing his mother’s hardships and her response to overhearing a tender conversation between Hong and his boyfriend. Hong produced this story in response to a question I asked him, about whether his mother knows of their relationship (zhidao nimen zhijian de guanxi). In doing so, he moves the conversation beyond my somewhat simplistic notion of ‘knowing’, to re-center a different kind of family intimacy, that of interconnectedness within the socio-familial system.

[My mother] suffered a lot. She had to work for my father’s family, she had to do bookkeeping for the family business, she had to take care of my father’s parents. She was very skinny when she was young because she had so much pressure … But one time she found out that I am gay. I was talking to my husband on the phone (Hong recognizes his partner of 30 years as his husband; they are not legally married). She was listening in from another phone. I didn’t know that. So I said things like ‘honey, I miss you so much’. She heard everything, but she just kept it inside and didn’t say anything, until one time, we were watching TV together, and she saw the news about a foreigner getting deported from Taiwan because he had AIDS. Then she said to me, ‘You must be careful.’ She never said anything else again. But she still insisted on me getting married. My boyfriend also encouraged me to marry my wife. He said, ‘No, you have to do this, your mother has had a very tough life since she was young. You have to get married.’

Hong may not be ‘out’ to his mother, but neither is he ‘closeted’. His mother is aware of his boyfriend and has not interfered with Hong’s quite radical plan of having the three of them housed together in the columbarium. The family issues that matter to Hong and his mother concern larger systems of inequality and cannot be reduced to his mother’s response to finding out that Hong is gay. Approaches to LGBT family of origin relationships that focus disproportionately on sexual identity and disclosure flatten the experiences of Hong, his mother, and many others for whom ‘coming out’ is not the most salient or pressing family issue.

Among the most striking features of Hong’s story is the centrality of women’s subordination, embodied in the figure of his mother (and, to a lesser degree, his wife). Hong is cognizant of his role in ensuring that his mother’s labor and sacrifices are not in vain. Thus he is less concerned about whether or not his mother ‘knows’ that he is gay, and more concerned about how to take care of her life as she ages. Pressure to continue the paternal line is the most cited and discussed reason for Taiwanese gay men’s entrance into heterosexual marriages. Yet it was not duty to their fathers and paternal ancestors, but rather the suffering endured by their mothers (another dimension of the same patrilineal system) that arose most frequently and centrally when my heterosexually married gay interlocutors told this part of their own life stories. This suggests that reducing the cumulative disadvantages accrued to women within families will also have meaningful implications for the lives of gay men, potentially addressing some of the pressure men feel to participate in a system that has tied not only their fathers’ name, but also their mothers’ material wellbeing to their performance of heterosexuality.

Jiang Mama (age 72) and LJ (age 51): ‘They accompanied me silently’

While Hong’s story illustrates broader trends, LJ’s story is unique in ways that make it particularly instructive for addressing the generational salience of ‘coming out’. In addition to her reputation as a handsome T (butch), LJ is known for her efforts to bring older lesbians to gatherings dominated by young people and by men, and for her special family background – specifically, for having a T mother in her 70s, whom I will refer to as Jiang Mama. If mid and later life queers are ‘closeted’ because of fear, shame, and stigma, then we would expect someone like LJ – whose mother is also a T, who has never been married, and who has a robust tongzhi identity – to be more likely to ‘come out’ to her family. That this is not the case raises a host of questions about the appropriateness of the out/closeted typology for LJ and others of her cohort.

Jiang Mama is somewhat legendary among the circle of LGBT friends with whom LJ socializes. On multiple occasions, I was among a group of a dozen or so people regaled with an enactment of Jiang Mama’s gendered behavior: how she sits and smokes with her legs wide apart, shoulders thrust forward, and chin tucked in a cool and aloof posture. The enactment was usually performed by a gay man and accompanied by admiring exclamations of, ‘oh, how manly!’ By the photos she shared with us, and by LJ’s recollection, Jiang Mama has worn her masculinity proudly for the whole of her life. As the story goes, she dared her own husband to marry her so that he would stop pursuing her girlfriend, managing to turn even her heterosexual marriage into an act of masculine bravado. Of her parents’ relationship, LJ said, ‘In my father’s mind, there are just two kinds of people in the world, men and women. So my father didn’t really care what my mother did with women.’ When I pressed for details about her mother’s family, LJ said something similar: ‘They felt their child (LJ’s mother) is a bit different (zhege xiao haizi bu tai yiyang). But they didn’t have that … that knowledge (tamen ye meiyou na zhong … na zhong zhishi ba).’ However I put the question, LJ’s answer remained firm: it would be impossible for her mother’s family to comprehend or comment on this aspect of her life.

But many months later, as I was chatting with LJ and a mutual friend, a gay man in his late 40’s, LJ mentioned an interaction between her mother and her aunt, which suggested a more tacit knowledge and communication strategy. When LJ’s aunt got married, she asked LJ’s mother (her sister) not to be at home when the bridegroom and wedding party arrived on her wedding day. She did not want her future in-laws to see her sister and think that there was something odd or unnatural (qiguai) about their family. I wondered aloud whether Jiang Mama had any particular feelings (ganjue) about this incident. ‘I don’t think she has any feelings now’, LJ responded. At this point our gay friend chimed in: ‘She remembers. That’s your answer. LJ’s mother remembers this incident.’ His point is well taken. For Jiang Mama, the act of remembering is its own kind of feeling; no further emotional display or statement about the incident is necessary to confirm its significance.

Just as LJ’s aunt tacitly censured Jiang Mama, so Jiang Mama tacitly supported LJ. For example, Jiang Mama did not pressure LJ to get married, and in fact served as a buffer between LJ and potential suitors, turning down invitations on her behalf. LJ could think of only one conversation in which her mother said something explicit about the same-sex relationships they both have had:

One time, as we were chatting, my mother said something a bit more direct. She said, ‘In the past, we didn’t spend so much money on our girlfriends.’ This clarified for me that my mother acknowledges that we’re both T.

The challenges Jiang Mama has faced in her life are undeniable: among them, poverty and raising three children by herself after the death of her husband when she was still a young person, as well as living through the intense political oppression of White Terror under Martial Law ² (I heard someone ask Jiang Mama directly about this experience on just one occasion; she described being harassed by police for cross-dressing, but quickly changed the subject back to mountain-climbing, her favorite hobby and conversation topic). Yet she ‘boasts about her glory days’ and compares these days favorably to the lives of Ts her daughter’s age and younger. It would be inappropriate to characterize Jiang Mama as closeted, pre-liberated, or secretive because she never ‘came out’ by declaring herself to be T or tongzhi, or by talking about her sexual exploits with her kin. Her tacit support for LJ is an important reason why LJ was able to remain unmarried while most of her peers entered heterosexual marriages. In this and other ways, Jiang Mama created space for T masculinity and sexuality within their family. Elsewhere, I have argued that kinship and family-based gender disparities continue to pose major obstacles for lesbians in Taiwan, and that these matter as much or more than any identity-based politics of sexual self-reference (Brainer, 2014). As such, Jiang Mama’s protection of LJ from marriage is a far more revolutionary gesture than simply naming and verbally affirming her sexual orientation.

In addition to tacit negotiations like those presented above, LJ described silence, or not asking about one’s sexual orientation, as a meaningful form of support that she had received at various points, such as after her first breakup:

LJ: At that time my first girlfriend was getting married (to a man), so I was feeling terrible, and I lost a lot of weight. Whenever I had a day off, I went to have coffee and chat with my sisters from the church. They didn’t ask me to explain what was going on with me (tamen ye bu wen wo faxian shenme shi). They just kept me company as I helped myself to get over it.

Interviewer: Did they know why you were so sad?

LJ: I’m not sure if they knew or not. They wouldn’t ask (tamen bu hui wen). They just accompanied me silently (momo peizhe wo) … I’ve been ok because my church doesn’t really discuss tongzhi issues. If they hold anti-tongzhi views, they don’t express them openly (bu tai hui gongkai jiang). There are other tongzhi in our congregation, but they aren’t that obvious (mingxian) … I mean, you don’t come out and say that you’re tongzhi. At our church, you wouldn’t say, I had intimate relations with this woman.

These tacit negotiations and strategic silences have not disappeared among the younger generations. But younger queers are also more likely to interpret silence as a lack of understanding or support, and describe it as exacting an emotional toll. This shift is not entirely away from Decena’s (2011) ‘tacit subjects’, or from the kinds of family issues that I have identified as being important. Rather, it is a shift toward a complex landscape where tacit negotiations coexist with expectations for more direct interpersonal sharing among family members.

The following two stories illustrate the turn toward 'coming out' which I found prevalent among queers in their 20s and early 30s. Bing’s story highlights new familial expectations and desires that encompass both normative obligations and affective qualities of the parent–child relationship. Leila’s story shows how these emerging forms of sociality and relationality create gendered pressures and shape pathways to sexual disclosure even in the absence of a personal identity politics. Together, these stories point not to new identities, but rather to new forms of intimacy among family members as the impetus for ‘coming out’ or feeling ‘closeted’.

Bing (age 35): ‘A house without windows’

Bing is a single gay man and the doting father of twins whom he had with the help of assisted reproductive technology. As ART is only available to married couples in Taiwan, Bing went through the marriage procedures with a Mainland Chinese woman introduced to him by a Taiwanese marriage agency (see Lu, 2005 for a description of such agencies as brokers of cross-border marriages). Bing compensated the woman financially for her reproductive labor and retained sole custody of the twins when they separated. He did not attach any particular label to this arrangement, noting that its validity ‘depends on your definition of marriage’. Indeed, with increased state scrutiny and anxiety about ‘sham marriages’ across the Strait (Friedman, 2014), the authenticity of this union would be challenged not only because of Bing’s sexual orientation, but also because of its transactional purpose. Thus Bing’s pathway to parenthood peels back multiple layers of the ‘ideal’ contemporary marriage in Taiwan, as an institution ostensibly grounded in heterosexual desire and normative gender relations, without any further material considerations.

We might expect someone like Bing, who has been married and fathered children, to feel that ‘coming out’ is not necessary for his life, since he is unlikely to receive marriage pressure from his parents in the future. But Bing spoke eloquently and at length about why ‘coming out’ mattered to him. Describing life prior to ‘coming out’, Bing said:

You build a wall around yourself (ni zai ziji shenbian zhule yidao qiang). You want to break the wall to see your family. You also want your family to come in, but you worry that if they come in and know this thing about you, it will sadden them. So you have to lock yourself behind the wall. In the end, I felt that it was not a wall anymore; it became a house without windows (bianchengle yi jian fangzi lian chuanghu dou meiyou). My marriage plus the birth of my children put me under immense pressure. Yes. Very, very strong emotional pressure (qingxu shang de yali) … I used to keep my distance from people because I didn’t want to be asked. But when I came out, the wall disappeared. You don’t carry the burden (fudan) anymore. Then you become willing to share yourself with others (yuanyi gen tamen fenxiang) and others become willing to share themselves with you also.

Many early midlife and young adult informants who ‘came out’ did so for reasons similar to Bing. They reported having conversations or writing letters in which they detailed their inner thoughts and emotions as part of the ‘coming out’ process, and hoped that this would improve their relationship with their parents in the long run. The public discourse about ‘coming out,’ particularly in the form of advice to younger queers, reinforced its affective ethos, and marked ‘coming out’ as a significant turning point in the parent–child relationship. In one of many presentations I attended on this topic, the host, Guo Mama, urged a roomful of queer college students to pick a good time and place to ‘come out’ to their parents. To illustrate the importance of doing so, she told a story about someone who attempted to tell his mother that he is gay while she was engrossed in a television program. His mother absently said ‘mmm, uh huh’ and never mentioned the topic again. In Guo Mama’s rendition of this story, the gay son didn’t know what to do next. Was his mother deliberately avoiding the topic, or had she failed to hear him clearly? ‘Be sure to let your parents know that you have something important to tell them’, Guo Mama concluded. Her advice is consistent with a trend among young people for ‘coming out’ to be a planned conversation, not something that one accomplishes through inferences or talking around the issue.

Despite this trend, it is not the case that all young queers ‘come out’ or desire to do so. Most of my younger informants were still in the early stages of planning and worrying about disclosure to family in the future. The final vignette is illustrative of this group, foregrounding the emerging significance of the ‘coming out’ discourse independently of a realized ‘coming out moment’.

Leila (age 26): ‘We have to give more’

Leila is one of several young women in this research who maintained a long-term same-sex relationship without forming an identity on this basis. These women described themselves variously as straight, liking guys, undecided, or as having no particular/fixed sexual identity or orientation. Leila articulated this through the specific context of a family conversation about her sexual preferences:

In fact, my mom asked my sister directly whether I like girls. My sister said, ‘maybe’ (you keneng). [Laughter] I think that’s OK. I never really felt that I like boys or girls. For me the ‘being together’ feeling is about feeling happy with a particular person, not about that person’s gender.

When I met Leila, she was in a monogamous cohabiting relationship with her female classmate. Her siblings and cousins knew that this classmate was Leila’s girlfriend, and Leila planned to tell her parents as well if the relationship proved to be a stable one. She decided to slowly introduce her girlfriend into the family by emphasizing their compatibility and her girlfriend’s positive qualities. In the meantime, she worried that her mother might ‘come right out and ask me if I like girls’, a conversation she would like to avoid ‘for now’. In contrast to her queer elders, who believed it would be ‘impossible’ for their families to ask them such a direct question, Leila regarded this as a very real prospect. The chance of discovery was heightened by the fact that Leila was expected to live with her parents whenever she was not in classes (they did not know about her cohabiting relationship as Leila led them to believe that she stayed in the dormitory), and her mother frequently went through her things while cleaning and organizing her room. In fact, for queers of Leila’s generation, parents were just as likely as their children to initiate conversations about sexuality, and often went to great lengths to follow up on their suspicions.

Given her intention to ‘come out’ eventually, why did Leila subject herself to the stress of hiding her relationship from her mother’s watchful eye? To explain her hesitancy, Leila, like Bing, invoked interlocking notions of love, affection, and normative family roles. She emphasized the importance of love between parents and daughters in particular, since the relationship is not buoyed by patrilineal reproduction as it would be for sons:

Since we’re daughters, even if we have kids in the future, their family name won’t be ours, it will be our husband’s name. So we are under less pressure to have kids. But actually because of that, because we have less pressure, so we have to give more of our love and affection and take care of our parents as much as we can. So I really don’t want to disappoint my mom and my dad. If they know that I’m with a woman and I won’t have a normal family in the future, they will be very disappointed.

Finally, Leila’s story reminds us that changing notions of intimacy and disclosure can occur, for some, in ways that do not rely upon or reproduce identity categories. This is not to say that all or even a majority of young Taiwanese queers have rejected an identitarian model of sexuality. However, this model should not be taken as the de facto reason for rising concerns about sexual disclosure in the family context. It is also notable that themes of interpersonal sharing/knowing foregrounded in this article do not require a fixed identity, and may be just as relevant to more fluid or transient personal and relational qualities.

Beyond the out/closeted dichotomy: Changing forms of family intimacy

The informants whose stories I have introduced share some things in common. As individuals and collectively, they are confident in their non-normative genders and sexual relationships, and find pleasure in these aspects of their lives. But like other mid and later life informants, Hong, LJ, and Jiang Mama have not discussed these things with their kin and do not anticipate wanting or needing to do so. In contrast, Bing felt strongly that he must disclose this part of his life in order to maintain a good relationship with his family members, and a majority of the younger queers whom I interviewed had at least considered ‘coming out’, even if they ultimately rejected this possibility. Many, like Leila, chose indirect and gradual methods, but they nevertheless saw full disclosure as their eventual and perhaps inevitable destination.

In her study of queer female sexuality in Taiwan, Yu-Ying Hu (2011) identifies the practice of xin zhao bu xuan (knowing by heart but making no declaration) as one of several strategies adopted by her informants to achieve implicit visibility within their families. Upon close examination, Hu finds that this implicit visibility is not separate from, but often conducive to an eventual ‘coming out’ moment. A young T encapsulated this ethos when she emphatically stated that her mother ‘is definitely not able to accept it’ but ‘after all, I would really like those who I love and feel intimate with to know my real self’ (p. 167). Hu’s conceptualization of xin zhao bu xuan as a tactic of self-revelation, shaped by deeply felt mutual affection and love between parents and their children, is directly relevant to the findings and analysis of this article. While previous generations practiced tacit negotiations or implicit visibility without expectations of eventual disclosure, younger queers combined this tactic with desires for self-revelation, an act that many associate with intimacy and love. For their elders, love and intimacy materialized in other ways, such as making major life decisions that prioritized support for parents (Hong) or shielding a child from hetero-marital pressure in an era of nearly universal marriage (Jiang Mama).

These generational differences propel us beyond developmental models of ‘coming out’ and the out/closeted dichotomy, toward a more situated approach to ‘coming out’ as a discourse that is gaining resonance in Taiwan at this historical moment. Gender and sexually nonconforming people who grew up in the mid-20th century and are now in mid and later life are likely to be caring for (and often living with) elderly parents and in-laws. Those whose parents and in-laws have passed on are likely to have managed their end of life care and continue to memorialize and venerate them. In many ways, the intimacy of these deep ties exceeds the more friendship-style intimacy of sharing personal information. But for younger queers, these ties are complicated by a growing desire or, just as often, a growing pressure to allow family members to know (renshi) and understand (liaojie) them. The desire/pressure to connect with parents in this way has combined with other economic and social changes, such as smaller family sizes and a prolonged transition to adulthood, to transform not only the functions, but also the meanings of silence, disclosure, and intimacy.

The continued salience but changing function of tacit negotiations – from a primary mode of communication, to part of a gradual project of self-revelation – offers an opportunity to examine other changes and continuities in family life. Across the four vignettes, dances between concealment and disclosure (Martin, 2003) evoke the on-going complexity of sexual subjectivity and visibility within families. Silence is shown to be a versatile tool that can provide support (particularly for older generations) or create feelings of distance and loneliness (particularly for younger generations). At the same time, the fact that parents are just as likely as their young adult children to break from the tacit approach and adopt a more confrontational strategy – and the fact that this possibility generates considerable anxiety among some younger queers – suggests that the ‘tacit’ does not only serve to protect the heterosexual, cisgender members of the family, but also to provide a liminal space in which queer subjects can occupy family and kinship structures. In this way, tacit negotiations are qualitatively different from the ‘closet’ which is characterized as wholly oppressive and damaging to queer existence.

To productively analyze queer family of origin relationships, researchers must adopt a greater variety of disciplinary and analytic frameworks. The overemphasis on sexual identity and disclosure is accomplished, in a large part, by the reproduction of Anglo-centric frames that take these concepts for granted, and then test whether they exist in similar or different forms elsewhere. There is an urgent need for ethnographically grounded research that situates queer families of origin in relation to family formations and other key issues in their surrounding contexts and regions. Especially crucial are comparisons among locales outside the Anglophone West. By comparing and contrasting the Taiwan case with Western paradigmatic knowledge of sexuality, gender, and family, we risk constructing the Taiwan story as principally one of difference from a Western norm or center. A wider lens, drawing together work from multiple underrepresented areas, promises to bring the variation in queer kinship and relationships globally more sharply into focus. Just as importantly, it promises to elucidate points of connection – such as the limits of the trope of the ‘closet’ in a wide variety of contexts and cultures – that challenge us to more radically reconsider existing methods, theory, and praxis.