A regular outing

In which I contemplate queer visibility, yet again

Hello friends,

Last week was Lesbian Visibility Week. I knew it was because all of a sudden I was bombarded by lesbian visibility posts on Instagram, and towards the end of the week I half-heartedly put up one of my own, out of a mixed sense of duty, and not wanting to be left out.

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Image: Samantha Saskia Dugon

I care quite a lot about queer visibility, having benefited enormously from it in the past (thank you to all those people who were out and proud in the 90s and early 2000s), but I still struggled to see the point of this. Everyone already knows I’m gay, I reasoned – or they could make an educated guess, given the haircut and the rainbow socks. And queers are everywhere these days – we’re living through a golden age of media representation, and there’s an absolute wealth of role models for anyone who might still be figuring things out.

Also, I found myself thinking – I’m really over coming out. It’s been 20 years now, and I have never fully overcome the awkwardness of announcing “I’m a lesbian” again and again and again, worrying that I’m making it my entire personality, worrying that people will think I’m inviting them to speculate about my love life, worrying that I’m picking the wrong moment, worrying that it’s a frivolous thing to spend so much time and attention on, worrying that no one cares any more, neither the homophobes nor the allies, and I’m just making a fuss about nothing. To be honest, a lot of the time I’d rather not talk about it publicly. It feels too personal, too intimate, too private. But concealing it would be as much a choice as announcing it. There’s a long and painful history of my fellow queers being forced to hide who they are, and punished if they refuse, and given that, for me, coming out is almost entirely safe and unremarkable, there’s only really one way I could make that decision.

I didn’t really have much to say on the matter, beyond “umm, hello, I’m a lesbian and it’s currently our visibility week.” But I put the post up anyway, and then I was bowled over by how many people responded – far more than for most of my other posts. A lot of them just sent emojis, but quite a few thanked me, and some said how much it had meant to them, to see a cyclist/athlete/adventurer/author just getting on with their thing, and thriving, whilst also being a lesbian.

I think I might have underestimated how much people still need and benefit from role models, and been guilty of that old adventurer trope of believing that everything you’ve overcome was straightforward, the moment you emerge from it. It’s now easy for me to be out, find other queers, and exist among straight people without being treated as something different, dangerous or disgusting. But there are many, many people for whom that isn’t the case, because of differences in their social or cultural background, or because of personal circumstances that make it more difficult to be out, to themselves and those around them. Even those who have come out, been happily accepted by their family and friends, and got on with their lives, might still find themselves unexpectedly lighting up when they see a queer person out in the wild, doing their thing.

I should have known that, because I still feel this way myself. Even when (and this is slightly weird), the queer person in question is me - as I discovered back in November 2021 (so really not that long ago at all), when I was invited by Rapha to interview the great Lael Wilcox at a sold-out event in the Soho Clubhouse.