“Something a bit more personal”: Digital storytelling and intimacy among queer Black women

Abstract

Coming-out stories are important cultural texts wherein individuals articulate and interpret experiences of identifying as sexual minorities. Yet, much of the extant literature on coming-out stories examines narratives by white, middle-class gay men and lesbians. Critical inquiry into coming-out stories told by privileged queer subjects points to the formulaic and normative characteristics of their narratives, where sexual difference is downplayed or challenged. The goal of this article, then, is to ask whether and how coming-out narratives told by queer Black women conform to or depart from the “coming-out formula story.” Using an intersectional approach to narrative analysis, this article investigates the performative and discursive strategies that 50 women use in telling their coming-out stories on YouTube. Findings show that queer Black women’s use of intimate candor—the performative and discursive strategy of publicly revealing interior, often sexually explicit, aspects of the self—is a means through which women center desire and queerness; articulate a vision of queer Black womanhood; and complicate the coming-out formula.

Keywords

Black sexuality coming-out stories digital contexts intersectionality intimacy lesbian sexuality

Introduction

I know how difficult this is. Even watching all the coming-out stories in the world, it’s still like, “Do I do it? Or do I not?” Do it! I’m not saying it was easy for me. It came to a point where I had to decide: Do I live for me? Or do I live for everybody else?

—Laila (Black lesbian, early twenties)

Coming-out stories are important cultural texts wherein individuals articulate and interpret past and ongoing experiences when identifying as sexual minorities or claiming non-heterosexual sexualities. The above excerpt from a video blog (hereafter “vlog”) highlights a novel medium through which coming-out stories are told. Beyond the substantive content of Laila’s¹ quote, her passage prompts us to ask several sociological questions: To whom is Laila speaking? What strategies does Laila use in sharing her story online? How does Laila’s identity as a Black woman affect how and what she chooses to share? Furthermore, does Laila’s coming-out story confirm or challenge what we know about these stories?

The extant literature on coming-out stories posits that they operate largely as somewhat predictable formula stories. Coming-out stories record normative coming-of-age and rites-of-passage events, obscuring the complex lived experiences of queer subjects, especially racialized queer subjects who live outside the bounds of normativity. Scholarship on queer digital storytelling, including coming-out videos, complicates the formula-story argument by exploring how queer and trans storytellers both reinforce and contest normative gender and sexual scripts. Yet, far too little attention has been paid to the constitutive relationship of race, gender, and sexuality in articulations of queer subjectivities in offline and online contexts. This study therefore centers the digital coming-out narratives of queer Black women to understand how their social positionalities as racialized sexual minority women affect their narrative strategies on a hypervisible digital platform. As “non-prototypical members of their constituent identity groups,” queer Black women experience “intersectional invisibility” within dominant historical and contemporary narratives, which largely overlook what it means to be queer, Black, and female (Purdie-Vaughns and Eibach, 2008: 378). Centering queer Black women’s coming-out stories on YouTube, the following questions guide my analysis: In what ways do queer Black women’s coming-out stories adhere to or break away from the coming-out formula? What performative and discursive strategies of digital storytelling promote divergence from the coming-out formula?

Queer Black women storytellers use two distinct strategies to narrate their coming-out stories: (1) drawing on normative scripts to craft respectable sexualities and (2) countering respectability politics by employing what I term “intimate candor.” A smaller subset of storytellers move between these strategies in crafting their coming-out stories. I argue that using intimate candor—the performative and discursive strategy of publicly revealing interior, often sexually explicit, aspects of the self—enables queer Black women to (1) center desire and queerness, (2) articulate a vision of queer Black womanhood not tethered to respectability, and (3) complicate the coming-out formula.

Coming-out stories and queer storytelling: Then and now

Coming-out in the pre-Web 2.0 era

Early sociological scholarship on sexual storytelling in the pre-Web 2.0 era, or the period preceding participatory digital culture, reveals how coming-out stories have functioned largely as coming-of-age and rites-of-passage narratives imbued with normative sexual and gender scripts. Perhaps the most prominent work on sexual storytelling, Plummer’s (1995) study traces the emergence of coming-out stories to the gay liberation and women’s movements of the 1970s. The political fervor and critical mass these movements generated were fertile ground on which coming-out narratives and the de-privatization of this narrative genre emerged (Plummer, 1995: 121). The quintessential coming-out stories of that period were “usually ‘modernist tales’ in that [those who told them used] … causal language, [sensed] a linear progression, [spoke] with unproblematic language and [felt] they [were] ‘discovering a truth’” (Plummer, 1995: 83). Although framed as deeply personal, coming-out stories very much responded to a heteronormative gaze; storytellers laid claim to a “gay essence” and promulgated the “born-this-way” discourse in an effort to disrupt religious and medical discourses that pathologized homosexual behavior (Plummer, 1995: 86). Coming-out stories, in terms of both their structure and content, thereby functioned as dominant narratives.

Like Plummer, Crawley and Broad (2004) argue that coming-out narratives operate largely as formula stories that tell “modern narratives of a cohesive, collective LGBT identity” (Crawley and Broad, 2004: 43). According to Loseke (2017: 241), formula stories offer “virtual templates for how lived experience may be defined.” Still, while such stories help actors make sense of their experiences, they “tend to leave the complexity of lived experience in the background” (Loseke, 2017: 242). Moreover, coming-out formula stories signal respectability, as storytellers frequently use normative scripts to challenge sexual stereotypes and claim normativity. Crawley and Broad (2004: 48) elaborate on this point: “While ostensibly directed to act as an individual, one is at all times aware that one is to be a type of LGBT person—the type who does not meet public stereotypes of overtly sexual deviants.” To be sure, other work on sexual storytelling reveals similar findings: in telling their stories, people often draw on normative gender and sexual scripts to counter the stigma and stereotypes associated with non-normative sexual identities and behaviors (Burke, 2014; Schrock and Reid, 2006; Ward, 2008). Consequently, adherence to formula stories and normative sexual scripts often reduces the “variability and diversity of experiences that LGBT people might otherwise narrate” (Crawley and Broad, 2004: 50). However, we might also attribute this lack of variability and diversity to scholars’ overwhelming focus on the coming-out stories of white gay and lesbian subjects and their failure to name race and ethnicity as important to sexual identity projects. As such, many scholarly accounts of what it means to “come out” perpetuate the intersectional invisibility of LGBQ people of color, reinforcing the notion that “all the gays are white” (Hunter, 2010).

Queer storytelling in the Web 2.0 era

What happens when queer storytelling materializes online? Do digital stories adhere to or diverge from the coming-out formula? Digital stories are “short vignettes that combine the art of telling stories with multimedia objects including images, audio, and video” (Rossiter and Garcia, 2010: 37). Unlike studies that examine workshop-based digital storytelling (Lambert, 2013; Meadows, 2003; Poletti, 2011), I focus on unmediated and user-generated digital stories told by ordinary (often marginalized) subjects.² Indeed, the proliferation of user-generated content like digital stories is a hallmark of the Web 2.0 era, which has been defined as the “second upgraded version of the web that is more open, collaborative, and participatory” (Beer and Burrows, 2007: 2). YouTube is the most dominant and accessible platform through which such stories are produced, consequently comprising the subject matter of much of the literature on queer digital storytelling. As “highly visible cultural texts,” YouTube videos are central to contemporary queer cultural production, including the popular subgenre of queer and trans storytelling (Christian, 2010; Lovelock, 2019: 72).

Yet, the rise and spread of digital storytelling has emerged in a political and cultural context in which queer politics is suffused with homonormative and queer liberal discourse. Lisa Duggan (2002) views homonormativity as “the assimilationist politics of the contemporary gay and lesbian movement that emphasizes individualism and sexual restraint” (Ahlm, 2017: 366). Homonormativity works in conjunction with queer liberalism, which David Eng (2010: 2) defines as the “contemporary confluence of the political and economic spheres that form the basis for the liberal inclusion of particular gay and lesbian US citizen-subjects petitioning for rights and recognition before the law.” Spreading beyond the juridical realm, homonormative and queer liberal discourses infuse everyday speech acts, including how queer subjects articulate their subjectivities in public and visible ways. The political and cultural imperative to bring queer intimate life into the public sphere, constituting what Lauren Berlant (2008) terms “intimate publics,” seems more urgent than ever.³

The “It Gets Better Project,” spearheaded in 2010 by the gay journalist and activist Dan Savage, is perhaps the most well-known example of queer storytelling that espouses homonormativity and queer liberalism. Although less visible now, the project aims to prevent suicide among LGBT youth by having adults convey the message that their lives will improve as they enter adulthood. The “It Gets Better” narrative has been widely critiqued for its neoliberal framing that individualizes the problems of homophobia and bullying. In asking queer youth to “wait it out,” the narrative “renders heterosexist attitudes inevitable and enables the heterosexist norm to remain intact while producing new, complacent ‘survivalist’ norms for (presumably) queer teens” (Grzanka and Mann, 2014: 382). Furthermore, such “It Gets Better” stories, when told by white gay and lesbian celebrities, implicitly equate “better” with whiteness and affluence (Majkowski, 2011: 163). Indeed, Lovelock (2019) observes that “It Gets Better” videos have been criticized for “glossing over … issues of racial, gendered and class-based privilege” (Lovelock, 2019: 73). In Majkowski’s (2011: 163) words, “it might not get a damn bit better, especially for young queers of color living below the poverty line.” Given these critiques, “It Gets Better” can be seen as a normative project, much like the coming-out narratives of the pre-Web 2.0 era.

These problems with “It Gets Better” videos notwithstanding, YouTube has become an important site for articulating non-normative sexual and gender identities, offering queer and trans storytellers and their viewers spaces “for exploring what it means to live outside the heterosexual norm in the second decade of the 21st century” (Lovelock, 2019: 73). Lovelock finds that young lesbian, gay, and bisexual storytellers simultaneously confront heteronormativity and negotiate “the contradictory position” of being “normalised yet beyond the norm” (Lovelock, 2019: 83). That is, LGB youth storytellers use coming-out videos to articulate what it feels like to be non-straight in an era in which queer identity is less politically and culturally stigmatized but nevertheless beyond the bounds of heteronormativity. Similarly, studies of trans vlogging by Horak (2014) and Raun (2015) show how trans storytellers use their bodies, technology, and the genre of transition stories to “affirm their bodies and selves” and motivate others “to dare to be visible or claim an identity as trans” (Horak, 2014: 573; Raun, 2015: 365). Indeed, studies on queer and trans digital storytelling illuminate the contemporary reliance on visibility politics to affirm non-normative sexual and gender subjectivities.

One glaring omission from this literature is a pointed empirical focus on race, gender, and sexuality in queer digital storytelling. As observed by Raun (2012) and confirmed by Horak (2014), “whiteness is an unstated norm on YouTube” (Horak, 2014: 576). Indeed, we see that norm in much of the scholarship on queer storytelling, which pays scant attention to the constitutive relationship between race, gender, and sexuality in shaping normative and non-normative articulations of queer subjectivities. Such lines of inquiry should matter given the ubiquity of digital storytelling in a political and cultural context in which queerness takes on contested meanings (i.e. “normalised yet beyond the norm”) and blackness is always already rendered pathological. How then do queer Black women, who are intersectionally invisible and structurally positioned as racialized “others,” articulate their queer subjectivities in the Web 2.0 era?

Black women, sexuality, and storytelling

Early scholarship on Black women’s sexuality has focused almost exclusively on sexual trauma and violence that epistemologically obscures, and at times even silences, Black women’s sexual subjectivities (Hammonds, 1999; Morgan, 2015; Nash, 2012). The “politics of silence” that Higginbotham (1993) describes, and what Hine (1989) terms the “culture of dissemblance,” illuminates how Black women have historically “reacted to the repressive force of the hegemonic discourses on race and sex … with silence, secrecy, and a partially self-chosen invisibility” (Hammonds, 1999: 94). Strategies of silence serve the cause of racial respectability, which culminates in gender and religious scripts that delimit narratives of Black women’s sexualities.

Although silence is a dominant strategy for talking (or rather not talking) about Black women’s sexualities, Black lesbian scholars and activists have long resisted strategies of silence and respectability, foregrounding instead “the very aspects of black lesbians that are submerged—namely, female desire and agency” (Hammonds, 1999: 102). For example, Black lesbian writer and activist Audre Lorde (1984) wrote about the “transformation of silence into language and action,” stating:

Within this country where racial difference creates a constant, if unspoken, distortion of vision, Black women have on one hand always been highly visible, and so, on the other hand, have been rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism … And that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength. Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak. (Lorde, 1984: 42)

Echoing Lorde’s charge, Hammonds (1994: 141) calls on Black feminists to engage in a “politics of articulation” that interrogates “what makes it possible for black women to speak and act” beyond silence and respectability. That is, our analyses should more meaningfully consider how Black women articulate their “complex pleasures and longings” (Nash, 2012: 508).

To be sure, other marginalized groups, especially individuals whose sexual identities or practices fall beyond normative bounds, draw on and contest respectability scripts in articulating a sense of self (Hightower, 2015; Kavanaugh and Maratea, 2016; Schrock and Reid, 2006; Vartabedian, 2017). Importantly, I seek to understand how queer Black women’s positionality as racialized queer women subjects figures into their digital articulations of their queer subjectivities. I therefore employ an intersectional lens to illuminate the performative and discursive strategies that queer Black women use in telling their coming-out stories.

Methods

YouTube is arguably the most popular video-sharing platform in the world, sparking a cultural shift in media production and consumption that allows “ordinary people … working outside the institutional structures of the television and movie industry” to create and circulate content (Strangelove, 2010: 3). More than an archive of videos, YouTube is a dynamic and interactive site that exhibits the complexities of social life. This is especially true for personal vlogs, a component of YouTube content that documents the everyday lives of individuals, couples, and families (Chen, 2016; Holland, 2016).

The study sample includes 50 queer Black women’s coming-out stories on YouTube. Randomly sampling coming-out vlogs was impossible given the structural limitations of the YouTube platform (Rotman and Preece, 2010). For example, the systematic sampling of videos corresponding to the search term “Black lesbian coming-out story” generated a stockpile of videos that did not fit basic sample parameters. I therefore opted to use purposive sampling methods to construct a robust sample of 50 videos (Cutcliffe, 2000: 1477). Accordingly, I used my personal subscription base to select an initial sample of 17 stories. I found the remaining 33 coming-out stories through vlogger recommendations (i.e. when a vlogger references another vlogger’s channel) and YouTube’s recommendation system, which uses an algorithm to generate a list of videos based on related activity and previous searches.⁴ While I reached thematic saturation within the first 30 stories, I extended the sample to 50 stories to capture the stories of vloggers representing a wider range of subscriber bases and number of views. That is, I wanted to capture the stories of lesser-known vloggers, not only popular vloggers who have a structural advantage via YouTube’s recommendation system. While data collection spanned six months in 2016–2017, it is important to note that queer Black women continue to share their coming-out stories on the YouTube platform.

I derive the descriptive information featured in my data from vloggers’ videos. Nearly all women in the sample self-identify as Black, as captured in the titles or descriptions of videos and often explicated as the women share their stories. Several women did not explicitly refer to their racial identity, most likely because, as an ascribed and hypervisible status, they viewed their Black identity as self-evident. Importantly, their stories do not significantly diverge from women who explicitly reference their Black identity. Given that the sample includes videos of couples (n = 9) sharing their coming-out stories, the data also reflect stories of three non-Black Latina women. Those comprising the sample are between their late teens and late thirties, age cohorts commonly referred to as the “Net Generation” or “digital natives” (Helsper and Eynon, 2013; Jones and Czerniewicz, 2010).⁵ The sample includes women who have diverse class (a mix of working-class and middle-class) and educational (ranging from high school to graduate-level educations) backgrounds. The women also represent varying gender presentations. The majority identify or can be read as feminine-presenting, although nine are androgynous or masculine-presenting. Additionally, the women variously claim gay, lesbian, and bisexual identities, sometimes interchangeably, and also describe in more general terms their attraction to women. When quoting storytellers, I refer to the sexual identities that specific women claim (i.e. gay, lesbian, and bisexual). While limited to women living in the US, the sample exhibits regional diversity, with vloggers representing such metropolitan areas as Atlanta, Los Angeles, Miami, Philadelphia, and New York as well as suburban areas. The representation of storytellers from rural areas is noticeably absent from the sample, which is not too surprising given the large concentration of Black residents in urban and suburban contexts (Harshbarger and Perry, 2019; US Census Bureau, 2010).

The women’s coming-out vlogs vary according to platform-specific characteristics (i.e. video length, number of views, and number of subscribers) that varied across a wide range. The vlogs range from just under five minutes in length to just over 30 minutes, with a median of 12.5 minutes and an average of 14.5 minutes. The size of vloggers’ subscription bases ranges from 1 to 1,000,000 subscribers, with a median subscription base of 2794 subscribers. Excluding the vlogger with 1,000,000 subscribers, the average subscription base at the time of data collection was 14,226 subscribers. Eight YouTube channels did not display subscription base information. The number of views per video ranges from 28 to 1,329,159 views, with a median of 5549 views and average of 46,478 views. As previously addressed, the large range in subscription base and number of views is intentional, as I wanted to ensure that the sample captured the stories of popular and lesser-known vloggers. While YouTube videos belong to the public domain—appearing on the platform effectively forfeits one’s right to privacy—additional measures were taken to ensure the confidentiality of the women comprising the sample (Moreno et al., 2013). Such measures include using pseudonyms and omitting storytellers’ YouTube channel names, video titles, and video descriptions.

To analyze the vlogs I transcribed each coming-out story, writing detailed memos after each viewing. Using a grounded-theory approach, the story transcripts were coded and analyzed to let key themes and patterns emerge (Charmaz, 2006). The data coding and analysis capture the performative and discursive dimensions of queer Black women’s stories (Kohler Riessman, 2005). Each excerpt presented in the following section therefore includes brief descriptions of the setting, affects, and gestures the storytellers employ.

Data and analysis

Constructing a digital audience

Digital contexts influence storytelling in important ways. While all individuals modify and adapt their behavior to shape the impressions they transmit to their audiences (Goffman, 1959), the hypervisibility of YouTube arguably gives storytellers a strong incentive to manage how they are seen online. YouTube is “conducive to strategic self-presentation,” enabling users to creatively construct their digital selves and manage how they are seen (Chen, 2016). As a video-sharing platform, YouTube allows storytellers to use their voices, bodies, physical settings, and technologies to virtually curate their stories (Hogan, 2010). It further allows storytellers to label and tag their videos to create a networked public or digital audience, even when those who access their content differ from those for whom the content was intended.

In theory, digital audiences are “potentially limitless” (Litt, 2012; Marwick and Boyd, 2011: 2). The storytellers in this study, however, imagine, define, and address multiple audiences, including YouTube channel subscribers, real-life networks, and a broader LGBT audience. The storytellers implicitly and explicitly address their audiences early and late in their videos, reflecting on why they decided to share their stories. Some storytellers address their personal subscriber bases (“I chose to put this video out, because some people have contacted me about advice and about how I came out and how it was”). Others address an imagined audience of LGBT viewers (“I’m sharing my story just in case anyone is trying to figure out how to say this or is just interested”). Fewer storytellers address their real-life networks, but this was common among women who had come out recently and did not feel completely accepted by their families (“I’m also doing this to open the eyes of my family members if they’re watching this”). Such videos are not used by women to come out to their families; rather, just like the wider sample, their coming-out videos detail their coming-out process. Most storytellers address multiple audiences when sharing their stories.

In navigating multiple audiences, queer Black women use performative and discursive strategies to recount their coming-out stories. Staged in the private spaces of their homes, the coming-out vlogs offer a level of “visual intimacy,” whereby viewers are invited to peer into the living spaces and bedrooms of our storytellers (Miguel, 2016). Moreover, because digital storytelling on YouTube is an embodied practice, storytellers’ bodies are the affective vessels through which stories emerge. Detailed later in this article, storytellers perform emotional vulnerability by “engaging with or displaying negative [and positive] affect,” often in the form of tears, distress, joy, and humor (Berryman and Kavka, 2018). Indeed, regardless of the discursive strategies that queer Black women employ, these performative dimensions (i.e. visual intimacy and emotional vulnerability) are present in all 50 coming-out stories. However, the discursive strategies that storytellers use vary in the degree to which they either shield or reveal the inner aspects of their lives.

Crafting respectable sexualities

Confirming findings reported in the extant literature on coming-out stories, 11 queer Black women use respectability strategies to narrate stories about their sexualities. Specifically, their stories address the struggles involved in reconciling with same-sex desires as Black women. Sandra (Black, gay/lesbian, early thirties) makes this point clear when she states, “The hardest thing for me is that I’m a female, I’m a black female, and I’m a gay female. So, a gay black female is not the easiest thing to be.” Coming to terms with these identities, the storytellers I present in this section explicitly and implicitly draw on normative sexual and gender scripts to articulate respectable queer sexualities.

Importantly, Nora, a self-identified lesbian woman of Jamaican descent, describes how queerness is positioned antithetically to respectability. Donning a short, sleek bob and light pink lipstick, Nora sits at the edge of her bed and recounts how her gay identity tarnished her status as a respectable daughter:

Obviously, this was hard for my mom, because [she pauses and nods her head] this is not what she had planned. I was the first person in my immediate family to go to university. I was supposed to be the posterchild for my family. I’m the one who’s supposed to succeed and all of that stuff. So, to turn out gay, it was kind of a slap in the face … I used to wish I was straight, because my family would love me. I would be the perfect child if I was straight. You know, I’m going to the best university in the country. I’m pretty smart. Like if I was straight, I would be the perfect ten. I would be the perfect daughter. I would be the perfect person in their eyes.

In the above excerpt, Nora articulates the framing of her sexuality as a blot on her otherwise respectable status. Claiming a gay sexuality ultimately caused Nora to sever ties with her family:

It’s not easy to say to yourself, “I’m done.” [She raises her hand in a stopping gesture.] It’s not easy to say to yourself, “I do not consider these people my family anymore.” You’re essentially cutting out a piece of your life that was there since you were born. And, right now, there’s a hole [she rests hand on chest] because I’ve made that decision.

Nora and other storytellers demonstrate how claiming a gay sexuality can not only undermine one’s perceived respectability but can also represent a “fall from grace.” Like Nora, Lisa and Carmen, a married couple in their early thirties, explain how being gay negatively altered their families’ perceptions of them. Yet, rather than sever family ties, Lisa (Black, lesbian) and Carmen (Afro-Latina, gay) detail how marriage and motherhood salvaged their relationships with their families. Sitting together at the edge of their bed, framed photographs of their daughter behind them, Carmen explains:

I know at the beginning it was kind of hard when she realized that I was becoming a lesbian, and because she thought I wasn’t going to be able to have children, she thought I wasn’t going to have a husband—all the things that a lot of mothers want for their children.

A few moments later, Lisa goes off camera to retrieve their toddler daughter, and Carmen excitedly exclaims:

We want to introduce you to somebody who means the world to us, our daughter! [both women clap as their daughter joins them in the frame] Yeah! As you can see—remember my part when I told you that my mom was concerned that she couldn’t have grandkids, well look right here, guys! This is Lisa and I’s [sic] daughter. So, my mom’s dreams came true!

As a married woman with a young daughter, Carmen lays claim to a respectable sexuality by explaining (and indeed showing) how, in spite of her sexuality, motherhood allowed her to fulfill her mother’s expectations. Furthermore, Carmen’s story demonstrates how respectability is not merely a static measure of propriety that grants or denies individuals a positive conception of self—women employ it to mitigate the stigma attached to claiming a non-normative sexuality.

Motherhood, as Moore (2011) argues, enables Black lesbian women to enact a respectable gay sexuality. Yet, for women who bear children prior to coming out, claiming a gay sexuality threatens to undercut their respectability. Illustrating this point, Jackie, a Black lesbian woman in her early thirties, explains how her ex-husband and parents threatened to take custody of her children after coming out: “I was told I would never see my kids. [On the verge of tears] I was told that I was a bad mother and that my kids would be kept from me.” Paired with Carmen’s story, Jackie’s situation shows how precarious respectability can be when norms of motherhood and sexuality diverge. Whereas Carmen frames motherhood as a path to respectability and acceptance, Jackie reveals how her sexuality threatened her status as a mother.

Respectability politics are often infused with religious currents, and several storytellers draw on religious scripts to frame their coming-out stories. As Cohen (1999: 284) elaborates in her discussion of the Black church, “members of black churches assert that homosexual behavior is immoral and in direct contrast to the word of God.” Here homosexuality precludes respectability because it undermines privileged notions of sexual morality (Cohen, 1999: 72; Higginbotham, 1993). Some queer Black women confront this reality by crafting narratives that reconcile their religious beliefs with their sexuality. Most frequently, religion emerges in women’s narratives when they address homosexuality’s relationship to sin. With her girlfriend by her side, Sherri, a Black lesbian woman in her thirties, staring directly into the camera, offers:

Please, by all means, do not feel that because you’re gay, or any other terms associated with homosexuality, that that sin is the number one of all sins. All sin is unacceptable in God’s eyes. Being gay is just another sin. It’s a not a worse sin, but it’s something that you have to deal with personally.

Sherri accepts the sinfulness of homosexuality. Indeed, Sherri’s quote animates the perceived incompatibility between homosexuality and Christianity with which many queer Black women contend. Sherri’s and other’s narratives may not explicitly articulate their desire to enact a respectable sexuality, but they express ambivalence when addressing religious discourses that condemn same-sex desire.

The aforementioned excerpts more explicitly reveal how some queer Black women utilize normative scripts to present a respectable sexuality. Other storytellers implicitly craft sexual respectability by avoiding details that could cast them in a sexually deviant light. Consider Jennifer’s coming-out narrative. Seated at her beauty vanity, donning white pearl earrings, Jennifer, a young Black lesbian, narrates the moment she came out to her mother and stepfather:

So, it was a Friday night, I was in the kitchen, and I was like, “I just need to tell you something, I’m scared, I’m scared.” … I couldn’t get it out. So, I typed out something on my phone that I was planning to say. So, I was like, “Can y’all just read it?” My stepdad took the phone, and he’s just reading it. And, I’m starting to cry. I was so scared. And then my stepdad said, “Well, Jen said she’s gay.” And then my mom was like, “Stop playing!” And, I was like, “No, it’s for real.” I was crying hysterically. My mom’s not saying anything so I automatically think she hates me … And, then she’s like, “No, Jen, no. I’m just happy if you’re happy. It doesn’t matter, as long as you’re happy. I would have never guessed it, but as long as you’re happy.” My stepdad was like, “Yeah, Jen, it’s not something I’m thrilled about, but if that’s you, it’s you, and we’re always going to love you.” They asked me why I kept it in so long, and that it would be killing me to live such a secret, which it was … and, my stepdad used to always ask me about guys that I was dating. So, he was like, “All those times we talked, you would just keep it in? That must have been hurting you.” I was like, “It was. I hated those conversations.” [She pauses] So, my coming-out story went great. They accepted it well.

A 20-year-old Jennifer filmed her story months after coming out, the details of the conversation with her parents fresh in her mind. Jennifer offers a linear coming-out story that says little about how she “came into the life” or how she thinks about her queer sexuality (Moore, 2011). Her story illustrates another way in which normative gender and religious scripts inform coming-out stories within a frame of respectable queer sexuality by avoiding overtly sexual or intimate themes.

Countering respectability through intimate candor

Diverging from the narratives presented in the previous section, 24 vloggers offer stories that counter respectability through intimate candor—the performative and discursive strategy of publicly revealing interior, often sexually explicit, aspects of women’s lives. Whereas strategies of respectability are enacted to conceal the “inner aspects” of Black women’s lives (Hine, 1989), intimate candor represents the disclosure of arguably the most intimate aspects. These narratives, ignoring the stigma attached to same-sex desire, map the vicissitudes of women’s experiences as it relates to pleasure, sex, desire, and pain. These coming-out stories reveal how storytellers enact intimate candor through sexual language, explicitly centering same-sex desire, and “airing” their proverbial “dirty laundry.”

Unlike Jennifer, Rachelle (Black, lesbian) suffuses her story with sexual language. Recording her vlog in a hotel room, she is highly animated:

First of all, I came out as a bisexual when I was 12 years old. My mother thought it was a phase. She didn’t really think too much about it. She didn’t think too much about it until I slapped her in the face with, “Oh mommy, I’m a lesbian and I like coochies and coochies only.” That’s when she really addressed my lifestyle … So, I told them, and the first thing that I hear is, “You’re going to hell.” [She pauses dramatically, stirs a cup of tea, and gives a side-eye to the camera as she takes a sip] I didn’t know how to respond to that … I thought this conversation was going to go much differently. My mother, she couldn’t even look at me. [Emphasis added]

Rachelle shares this experience at the beginning of her narrative, framing the rest of her story. Like Jennifer, 18-year-old Rachelle filmed her story shortly after coming out to her family. The details of their respective coming-out stories are unique to their individual experiences: Jennifer’s parents “accepted it well” while Rachelle’s mother refused to engage with the issue. Rachelle’s story stands out for its discursive and performative framing strategies. Steeped in sexual overtones, Rachelle’s story places her beyond respectability, specifically because she unabashedly centers her same-sex desire (“I like coochies and coochies only”) to claim her queer sexuality forthrightly.

The theme of desire emerges in a number of vlogs when women detail their journey into claiming a queer sexuality. In framing her history of being attracted to women, Alex (Black, gay/lesbian, early thirties), for example, quite humorously recalls her mother’s frantic reaction when she stumbled upon her daughter’s lesbian porn collection. Laying stomach-down on a hotel bed next to her girlfriend, Alex observes:

In high school, I knew I was attracted to women. Because, you know how they always tell you when you’re little, like you’ll have these dreams about boys. You know, when you’re in puberty, you’re going to start dreaming about boys and fantasize about boys. [She pauses and rolls her eyes.] That never happened to me. I was dreaming and fantasizing about girls. I was sneaking shows on the porno channel, and watching lesbian porn, and all lesbian situations. I snuck porn into my room and had it hidden, and I came home from school one day, and my room was trashed. And, my mom found all my porn [she laughs], and then she called my dad. My mom and dad aren’t together, but she called my dad and was like, [in a panicked tone] “Alex has all this porn and all this derogatory stuff in her room, and she’s watching it!” And, my dad was like, “I don’t know what you want me to do about it. What do you want me to do about it?” All that to say, when I was younger I had more sexual fantasies about women.

Here Alex not only recounts the moment when her parents learned of her same-sex desires, but uses the scenario to illustrate her longstanding attraction to and “sexual fantasies” about women. Her candor helps her viewers better understand her history of same-sex desire.

Other storytellers center same-sex desire by recounting their first same-sex sexual experiences. For example, some women, such as Asha and Mia, who respectively recall “kissing, touching, and rubbing” and “making out” with their grade-school girlfriends, reflect on early childhood sexual experiences. Others detail their first “real” same-sex sexual encounters—experiences typically framed as concretizing their queer sexuality. Cierra, for example, recalls the first time she had sex with a woman:

I was nervous, my hands were shaking, and it was just like happening. It was just whatever. [She grimaces.] And, my first time giving head was so bad, it was just bad to me because I didn’t know what I was doing. And I was like, “What am I doing? What if my aunt comes home? What if I get caught? This is just going to be really fucking bad and embarrassing, and I just really don’t know—she might put me out or something—I just really don’t know what’s going to happen.” So, we ended up having sex, and let me tell you: Oh! [She raises her hand in the air.] It was good. It was so good.

In detailing her first time “giving head” and having sex, Cierra captures the fears (i.e. being “put out” by her aunt), sexual missteps (“I didn’t know what I was doing”), and pleasures (“It was so good”) she experienced coming into her queer sexuality.

At first glance, stories of early same-sex attraction echo the “gay essentialist” discourse for which coming-out stories have been widely critiqued (Plummer, 1995). At the same time, queer Black women’s deployment of “illicit eroticism,” evident in their stories about watching lesbian porn, “giving head,” and “kissing, touching, and rubbing” other girls, can also be seen as reinforcing the stereotype of Black women as hypersexual. In doing so, these stories counter claims to respectability to which gay essentialist discourses often aspire (Glover and Glover, 2019). This is the central tension of employing intimate candor: in explicitly detailing their sexual desires and pleasures, queer Black women’s stories conjure the controlling image of the lascivious Black woman (Collins, 2004). However, as argued by Glover and Glover (2019: 174), the deployment of “illicit eroticism” can also be understood as “a performative strategy [that] Black women deploy to secure liberatory space for themselves.”

Storytellers also describe their sexual experiences to demonstrate their complicated pathways into a queer sexuality. For example, several women discuss their heterosexual relationships and sexual experiences prior to claiming an exclusively queer sexuality. Cierra, for example, explains how she “lost [her] virginity to a guy when [she] was 16.” She qualifies this experience by stating, “It didn’t feel comfortable at all.” Of course, one might argue that most first-time sexual experiences are uncomfortable and awkward at best. We can also, however, read Cierra’s comments as a proclamation of her same-sex desire and disavowal of heterosexuality. Other women speak about having had meaningful heterosexual relationships prior to claiming queer sexualities. For example, a Black lesbian couple in their mid-thirties were married to men when they first started dating, their stories detailing their transition out of heterosexual marriages.

Extending beyond explicit discussions of desire and sexual experiences, women detail aspects of coming out that reveal the complex, and often negative, realities of their experiences. In particular, several storytellers offer accounts of rejection, displacement, and abuse that direct a critical eye at their families and communities. Jacy, a masculine-presenting Black gay woman in her early twenties, frames her coming-out story around her fractious relationship with her mother. Sitting in her room, wearing a red sports jersey and a black fitted cap, Jacy recalls the backlash she received from her mom after coming out:

So, I was sitting on the couch and my mom said, “Well, I got a call from school today and I have to come in the next day. They didn’t want to tell me over the phone, so you better tell me now before I go to school and embarrass you and myself.” So, then I was like, “Okay, I like girls.” And, she was like, “What do you mean you like girls?” And, I was like “Yeah, the school is probably going to call you into a meeting because I’ve been kissing a girl in school” … That was the most awkward time. I started crying. The whole time I was crying. I don’t know why I was crying. She said nothing. She was just like, “That’s so gross, how can you do that? How can you be gay and not really care?” But, it wasn’t that I didn’t care, it was who I am, who I was … We started being cool again during my senior year. We barely talked. We were always fighting and never got along. She would say some really crazy shit whenever she got upset, like “You fuckin’ dyke. How can you do that? You’re so disgusting. You coochie-licker.” I was like “Okay, what the fuck?” I guess it was really hard on me. I went through like a little baby depression. You get enough of the name-calling, “the dyke,” “the lesbo,” “the butch.” You get enough of that name-calling and shit from everyone else, so it was like a punch in the head. You come home and your mom is saying the same shit that you get from everyone else. It was just really, really, really hard on me.

Many of the storytellers experienced such rejection, as do queer people elsewhere. In exposing her mother’s actions, however, Jacy’s narrative functions as a proverbial “airing of dirty laundry,” a public disclosure of private, often socially condemnable, matters. Unraveling the shroud of secrecy that often blankets family drama, Jacy’s narrative transgresses what Jenkins (2007: 14) terms the “salvific wish,” or “a black, largely, female, and generally middle class desire—a longing to protect or save black women, and black communities more generally, from narratives of sexual and familial pathology.”

Revealing interior details of their lives—including their desires, sexual experiences, and thorny paths into a queer sexuality—storytellers offer narratives that run counter to, and perhaps even challenge, respectability politics. This is not to say that women who craft respectable sexualities do not share similar experiences. Yet storytellers who employ intimate candor eschew respectability in publicly revealing their pleasures, desires, and pain as they come to terms with their sexualities.

Moving between respectability and intimate candor

If, as the coming-out stories I have presented demonstrate, some queer Black women craft respectable sexualities while others use intimate candor to frame their narratives, the remaining 15 women featured in this study incorporate both strategies. When shifting between these strategies, queer Black women poignantly illustrate their simultaneous adherence to and disavowal of respectability in articulating their queer sexualities. This section offers two narratives to better illuminate these findings.

Shay’s story

Shay, a young Black woman in her early twenties, shares a story about the ambivalence she felt when coming to terms with her same-sex desires. Sitting in front of a black wall, wearing a chunky gold chain and flawless make-up, Shay observes:

I remember back in elementary school I had a very, very dear best friend, and I remember us being fast little girls, and we would like hump each other. So, when it happened when I was younger, that shit was pretty random. Not to mention I was just being fast and clearly not being watched the way I should have been. So, maybe around my 9th grade year, there was this girl. We would flirt around in class, and it would literally just be between us. I didn’t want anybody to know that I was friends with her. I didn’t want anybody to kind of figure out that we were flirting. Then, 10th grade year I was in a fashion marketing class, and there was another girl. We always sat by each other. We would only really flirt around in class. I think she had a girlfriend—I don’t know. That passed. Eleventh grade, I still had never acted on it. I never felt a reason to—I had never had a girl that made me want to go all the way. It was just kind of an infatuation thing. I was realizing there’s certain girls that I’m attracted to. It wasn’t just everybody. But there was this one girl. I would talk to her, we would talk about her relationship and my relationship, but I still had a crush on her. I was like, “I’m never going to let that out,” and when I would still see other people in these [same-sex] relationships, I would still be like, “I’m good, that’s not going to be me.” It had nothing to do with religious reasons or nothing like that, I was just like, “What can a girl do for me? How is that going to work?”

Shay describes feeling childhood same-sex attraction, commenting that she and her best friend from grade school were “fast little girls” who would “hump each other,” but ultimately downplays the experience, reasoning, “I was just being fast.” She similarly qualifies her attraction to girls during adolescence, rationalizing that she was not attracted to “just everybody.” Her ambivalence was explicitly clear when she queries, “What can a girl do for me? How is that going to work?” While Shay ultimately pursues a same-sex relationship, she states that “it didn’t have to do with the physical or sexual relationship, it was literally more of a mental thing.” In this way, Shay’s story dances between candid sexual descriptions, including “humping” and “flirting,” and de-sexualizing her queer sexuality.

In other ways, however, Shay more explicitly adheres to respectability politics. In the following excerpt, Shay describes the moment when she told her mother about her girlfriend:

Now, when I told my parents [she puts on glasses and clears her throat], I was arguing on the defensive. And, so, I was like, “Ma, I got something to tell you.” She’s like, “What is it? You pregnant? What is it?” I’m just like, “No, that’s not it. Just brace yourself. I really don’t care about your opinion, I don’t care how you feel about this, but this is me, and this is just me trying to let you into my life.” And, she’s just like, “Okay, what is it?” So, I’m just like, “I got a girlfriend.” She’s like, “Okay.” And, I was like, “That’s it? That’s all you’re going to say?” She said, “Well, just make sure you not doing—just make sure y’all protecting y’all selves with all the nasty stuff that goes on.” I’m just like, “Ma, you just now trying to give me this conversation about protecting myself and nasty diseases and stuff like that?” I thought she was just biased against the gays. Of course, you care about AIDS and stuff that goes on in the gay community. So, that was just her biased opinion. But, I was like, “Mom, that same nastiness that goes on with a guy also goes on with a girl. It doesn’t matter.”

Toward the end of the video, Shay addresses her viewers, stating:

It’s okay to be you. Whatever you’re feeling. I’m not necessarily saying to act on it. The same way you shouldn’t like a guy and have sex with him the same day, or see a girl and say you want to do all this stuff with her—you shouldn’t act on first-glance opportunities. That was the same way I decided to date a girl, a woman. So, same deal.

In the first excerpt, Shay attempts to challenge her mother’s ideas that gay sex is atypically perverse. Yet, in doing so, she reinscribes queer sexuality as “nasty.” By the second excerpt, Shay clings to normative sexual scripts by cautioning her viewers against sexual impulsiveness and promiscuity.

Monique’s story

As a professional Black lesbian woman in her early thirties, Monique frames her narrative by first explicating how she came out to herself and shares how her family learned of and responded to her gay sexuality. Like Shay, Monique came into her sexuality expressing ambivalence about her attraction to women. Yet, rather than proclaim “that’s never going to be me,” Monique followed her “curiosity” by logging into online chatrooms for Black lesbians:

My mom got me a really good computer for Christmas. That’s when AOL was coming onto the scene. I remember it was AOL 3.0. And then I came across something that said “Black lesbians,” I was just really curious. I was like, “Black lesbians? What is that?” I mean I knew what lesbians were, but you know I was just curious. I went in there, and I was just sitting there looking at the dialogue. I never would really respond at all. So, I was just on everything. So, I kind of got hooked on going on those particular chatrooms. And, then I ended up meeting some chick—come to find out she was younger than me. She was lying about her age. She was some mixed chick I met in Georgia, and I’m from South Carolina, and we started talking. And then one day, we were on the phone and she asked, “Monique, will you be my girlfriend?” I remember I was drinking soda and I spit the soda out. I spit it out of my mouth [spit noise], and I was like, “What? What are you talking about?” I think I was just like, “Okay, sure.” So, that was my first [air quotes] “girlfriend” in the eleventh grade, if you really want to call it that.

Coming into her sexuality in college, Monique experienced a series of relationships with women. During weekends and holiday breaks, she would bring girlfriends home with her: “When I would bring women home, my mom would be like, ‘Don’t drive back, just stay the night.’ And, we would sleep in the same bed. But mama never said anything, so I just kept on.” As Monique recalls of her coming-out experience, she came into her sexuality with relative ease, satisfying her same-sex desire with the support of her college friends and a mother who never explicitly voiced disapproval. Nevertheless, Monique reveals what she perceives to be her mother’s disappointment around her sexuality:

She didn’t curse me out. She has never cursed me out or anything in reference to dating women. But, I kind of feel that maybe now she’s a little disappointed. Because, I think other than [being gay], I’m a pretty good daughter. I don’t have 20 kids. I have a career. I have a couple degrees. [My girlfriend and I] just bought our first house. You know what I’m saying? I’m pretty much independent. I don’t ask my parents for anything … So, other than that, I do think there may be some disappointment there to be honest. And, I do feel bad about that. That does not make me feel good. (Emphasis added)

The above excerpt demonstrates Monique’s invocation of the “other”—the “bad daughter,” the daughter with 20 kids, the daughter without a career, the uneducated daughter, the daughter who doesn’t own her home—to legitimize her status as a “good daughter.” In doing so, Monique’s story both centers her same-sex desire and positions herself as respectable.

Shay and Monique’s narratives reveal their proximity to and distance from respectability, a strategy that enables storytellers to claim same-sex desires while mitigating the stigma attached to queerness. By drawing on multiple strategies, queer Black women articulate their queer subjectivities in ways that illustrate the stronghold of respectability while telling stories that center their sexual experiences and same-sex desires.

Discussion and conclusion

Early literature on coming-out stories by Plummer (1995) and Crawley and Broad (2004) point to how coming-out stories often fail to capture the “variability and diversity of experiences that LGBT people might otherwise narrate” (Crawley and Broad, 2004: 50). By centering the coming-out stories of queer Black women, this study illuminates how intersectionally marginalized subjects narrate stories that both adhere to and diverge from the coming-out formula story, navigating the racialized and gendered terrain of claiming queer sexualities. That is, queer Black women’s narrative strategies, which vacillate between silence and respectability on the one hand, and intimate candor on the other hand, speak to their subjective experiences as queer Black women. While other queer subjects might draw on similar strategies, the motivations and meanings attached to enacting these strategies are unique to queer Black women—an interpretation best gleaned by taking an intersectional approach to sexual storytelling.

In this moment of ubiquitous digital storytelling, queer Black women’s coming-out vlogs form what Berlant (2008: viii) terms an intimate public: “a porous, affective scene of identification among strangers that promises a certain experience of belonging and provides a complex of consolation, confirmation, discipline, and discussion about how to live as an x.” The intersectional subjective experiences of queer Black women are the affective grounds upon which this intimate public takes shape. Indeed, digital storytelling allows storytellers, performatively and discursively, to elucidate what it means to be queer Black women (Horak, 2014; Raun, 2015). For some storytellers, articulations of their queer sexualities are deeply entwined with and rely on normative gender, sexual, and religious scripts, mitigating the stigma attached to being a queer, Black, adult woman. As one storyteller commented, “a gay Black female is not the easiest thing to be.” To be sure, stories in which queer Black women either crafted respectable sexualities or shifted between respectability and intimate candor illustrate the historical stability and modern-day saliency of respectability politics. Conversely, other queer Black women counter silence, respectability, and the culture of dissemblance, echoing what Hammonds (1999) calls a “politics of articulation.”

Like their coming-out experiences, the narrative strategies through which queer black women articulate their queer subjectivities are diverse. While 11 of the 50 storytellers draw on dominant gender and sexual scripts to craft respectable sexualities and 24 used the strategy of intimate candor, the remaining 15 alternated between respectability and intimate candor. What accounts for such diversity in narrative strategies? Storytellers within each narrative group are working and middle class, range in age from their late teens to their late thirties, inhabit feminine and masculine gender presentations, and reside in suburban and urban centers. Additionally, the corpus of coming-out videos within each strategy group encompasses considerable variation in number of subscribers, number of video views, and video length. Given the variation in demographic and platform-specific characteristics exhibited by the women comprising my sample, I am less able to determine why some storytellers choose one strategy over others. Indeed, one limitation of the study is the absence of interview data on queer Black women’s narrative choices.

The sheer number of storytellers who favored intimate candor over respectability hints at the emergence of a new formula—one that asks queer and other intersectionally marginalized subjects to publicly reveal intimate details in their lives. While intimate candor may engender feelings of belonging, affirmation, and connection for storytellers and their viewers, we should turn a critical eye on performative and discursive strategies that ask queer subjects to forfeit their privacy, especially given the seemingly contradictory “imperative [within contemporary LGBT politics] to be visible as a sexual minority yet be sexually discreet” (Ahlm, 2017: 375). This demand for queer visibility is met, and arguably intensified, in the Web 2.0 era, but not without risk (Lupton, 2016).

Engaging in intimate candor potentially imperils storytellers, especially in light of the hypervisible context in which they tell their stories. Because intimate candor necessarily involves blurring the line between public and private, the very public context of YouTube leaves vloggers vulnerable to racist, homophobic onlookers seeking to distort women’s narratives and reinforce their problematic viewpoints. Scholars have long documented various ways in which racialized sexual imagery dominates historic and contemporary media representations of Black women, depictions justifying Black women’s maltreatment and marginalized status (Collins, 2004). Queer Black women who employ intimate candor in digital contexts must contend with the potential costs and backlash that intimacy and vulnerability more explicitly invite. Thus, while narratives of intimate candor challenge normative racialized gender and sexual scripts, any analysis of coming-out narratives must acknowledge the burden of visibility and candor that queer Black women who use this strategy inevitably carry. While digital platforms can facilitate “possibilities for safe spaces, levelling power, gender bending and queering,” queer Black women who center desire, sex, and pleasure risk reinforcing racist stereotypes that render them sexually pathological (Jamieson, 2013: 52). The point I am making is that our analyses must be attuned to both the drawbacks and generative aspects (i.e. the material effects) of digital technologies in matters of intimacy and hypervisibility.

This study contributes to extant research on coming-out stories and queer digital storytelling by investigating how race, gender, sexuality, and digital technologies influence coming-out narrative strategies. Analyzing queer Black women’s coming-out videos on YouTube, the article concludes that storytellers articulate their queer subjectivities using divergent strategies, some of which adhere to, complicate, and/or counter respectability. We need future investigations into queer digital storytelling to determine whether and how intimate candor constitutes or supports an emergent coming-out formula. Furthermore, future sociological studies should empirically assess the benefits and risks of intimate candor, or more generally the performative and discursive strategy of publicly revealing interior, often sexually explicit, aspects of the self.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Dominique Adams-Santos

Notes

Dominique Adams-Santos is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Northwestern University, USA whose work centers questions of race, sexuality, and intimacy in the digital era. She is currently working on a collaborative project to understand Black women's perceptions and experiences of using mobile dating apps. Additionally, her dissertation research explores how queer women of color navigate Chicago's urban-digital sphere to create spaces of intimacy and belonging.

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