THEORIZING NARRATIVE, GENRE, AND COMING-OUT STORIES

This article employs a set of three analytic constructs: narrative, genre, and identity. The first rests upon a larger domain that consists of the methods of narrative analysis as well as the larger field that has recently emerged around them (see Holstein & Gubrium Reference Holstein and Gubrium2012). In recent decades, scholarship on narrative has shifted its exclusive concern with linguistic form and structure (e.g. Labov & Waletzky Reference Labov and Waletzky1967) to more interactionally emergent and contextually informed perspectives (e.g. Wortham Reference Wortham2001; Koven Reference Koven2002). Following this trend, the current article adopts a ‘narratives-in-context’ perspective (De Fina & Georgakopoulou Reference De Fina and Georgekopoulou2008) in viewing narrative as a social act that cannot be extracted from its surrounding discourse activity.

The emergence of narrative genres such as the coming-out story raises the question of how these narratives are ‘put together’ and performed in ways that make them both culturally intelligible and institutionally viable to recipients. In this regard, it is crucial to consider members' shared expectations for appropriate language use that shape (and are shaped by) the construction and performance of these narratives. My decision to focus on the speaker panels and their institutional constraints stems from this larger question and two related lines of narrative research. The first line of research includes investigations of narratives related to interactionally delicate or private identities and how they are (re)shaped by the particular institutional settings they are told in (e.g. Cain Reference Cain1991; Mattingly Reference Mattingly1998; Carr Reference Carr2011). The second area concerns the notion of genre regimentation (Kroskrity Reference Kroskrity2009), or how local ideologies concerning oral narratives may create, reinforce, or challenge how it is that they are learned and performed by members of a community of practice (cf. Bauman Reference Bauman2004). Taken together, these two strands of research reinforce the importance of looking beyond structural features of coming-out stories to look at the process of how these narratives get told the way they do within particular social contexts.

The coming-out story genre has been documented to be a meaningful one for LGBTQ communities as evidenced by numerous published collections (e.g. Curtis Reference Curtis1988) and empirical research documenting how LGBTQ individuals use these narratives to recount their lived experiences (e.g. Weston Reference Weston1991; DiDomenico Reference DiDomenico2010). Liang (Reference Liang, Livia and Hall1997:294) provides the following general definition of the coming-out story genre:

Beyond this general account, Plummer (Reference Plummer1995) proposes a typology of common narrative stages of the coming-out story. These include for instance ‘first difference’, or the individual's first realization that he or she may not share certain characteristics that their peers hold; and ‘first sexual encounter’, when the individual engages in their first experience of intimate contact with a person of the same sex, among other stages.Footnote ¹ It is important to note, however, that much of this work focuses largely on coming-out narratives as they are told in ordinary conversation or their larger social and relational functions in the lives of LGBTQ people (e.g. Weston Reference Weston1991; Plummer Reference Plummer1995). Instead, I examine instances where this narrative genre is manipulated and told under conditions of institutional, regulatory duress. The narratives that are eventually told on these panels are not necessarily the way these individuals would ordinarily tell them but how they are being asked to tell them for institutional purposes.

Recent theorizing on the topic of genre (e.g. Swales Reference Swales1990; Hanks Reference Hanks1996) has stressed the importance of looking beyond the formal properties of any single performance or text to examining genres ‘as they are enacted in social life’ (Miller, Hengst, Alexander, & Sperry Reference Miller, Hengst, Alexander, Sperry, Rosengren, Johnson and Harris1990:216). This view draws heavily from Bahktin's (Reference Bakhtin1986) account of the heterogeneous, sociohistorical character of speech genres. On this account, speakers are said to never author or own any genre but merely re-appropriate previous instantiations and create ‘a link in a very complexly organized chain of other utterances’ (Reference Bakhtin1986:69). This represents a useful lens for examining coming-out stories in that any single performance of the genre may echo prior tellings (i.e. by the same and other speakers). It also represents local understandings of what the genre's requisite components are and, in the case of their absence, how they should be regulated through discourse. For the current study, then, it is not just the performance of the narratives that contributes to the shaping of a community's identity, but also how they are embedded within carefully trained and rehearsed institutional events.

Notions of identity, including the particular identity categories typically associated with LGBTQ communities, are also critical to understanding coming-out narratives. Although much of the literature on coming out has focused on the types of identity struggles faced by LGBTQ adolescents (see Savin-Williams Reference Savin-Williams2005 for a review), it largely focuses on individual-level processes and narrowly views identity construction as revolving around fixed stages of psychological development. In contrast, Valentine's (Reference Valentine2007) ethnographic research has discussed the centrality of specific identity categories within LGBTQ communities. As Valentine argues, these categories (e.g. ‘transgender’) may also impose significant challenges for individuals struggling to make sense of their experience. For the panels, identity categories such as lesbian and transgender were central to the institutional aims and often became intertwined with talk concerning what constitutes a coming-out story (or simply a ‘good’ story). These discussions were also tied to tacit notions about how coming-out stories expressed stable, coherent parts of who they were as people. Carr (Reference Carr2011) identified a similar phenomenon in examining the dominant Euro-American ideologies of language as they are circulated in clinical settings. The ‘ideology of inner reference’, as Carr refers to it, emphasizes the function of language as referential in nature and primarily for denoting pre-existing, inner states. As I show below, participants of the panel training had to learn how to manage similar types of ideological tensions and dilemmas related to identity categories of LGBTQ communities and the issue of where their own ‘story’ was to be excavated.

DATA AND METHODS: COMING OUT ON CAMPUS

The data I draw from are based on ethnographic work conducted in 2008 at a university in the Midwestern United States that I call Jensen University. Although I center my analysis on this site, the practice of coming-out panels is in no way limited to this institution alone (see Lucksted Reference Lucksted and Sanlo1998). At Jensen, the LGBTQ office is comprised of a network of several adjacent offices and a lounge area where visitors can study, chat with or seek guidance from staff, browse its vast library of LGBTQ-related resources (e.g. books, magazines, movies, etc.), or spend time with friends. Additionally, the office typically sponsors an abundance of campus events including socials, movie screenings, and an annual ‘Pride Week’ celebrating LGBTQ identities. Many LGBTQ students (and allies) take advantage of the opportunities offered through the office to both show support for the local LGBTQ community and gain valuable leadership experience.

Aside from its role within the surrounding campus community, Jensen's LGBTQ office also played an important role in the early days of the gay liberation movement in the 1970s (cf. D'Emilio Reference D'Emilio1998). As I learned from their staff, it is thought to be one of the first of its kind in an institute of higher education. Before being founded as a full administrative unit in the early 1970s, the office initially began as a chapter of a national gay liberation organization and then evolved into a student-government-approved student organization. Several years later, the Speakers CollectiveFootnote ² was established in an effort to educate students about gay and lesbian issues through the vehicle of panels centered around personal narratives. Thus, the Speakers Collective was one of the first university initiatives dedicated to enhancing Jensen's campus climate regarding LGBTQ issues.

Now, over forty years later, the Speakers Collective still exists to fulfill its mission of holding ‘coming-out panels’. These events, sponsored by the LGBTQ office, are made up of a diverse group of members of the campus LGBTQ community including students (undergraduate and graduate), faculty, and staff. As outlined by the Speakers Collective's mission statement, members share their personal experiences through narratives with the goal of promoting greater knowledge and compassion about LGBTQ communities and the issues they face.Footnote ³ The typical panel event consists of introductions from each of the speakers, the telling of each of their narratives, and a final question and answer portion where audience members can ask any questions they have about the narratives they just heard or about general LGBTQ issues. In sum, while Jensen's LGBTQ office has important roots in the beginnings of LGBTQ advocacy, the Speakers Collective can be seen as having its own legacy in relation to the telling of coming-out stories for the sake of the broader LGBTQ population.

Before any interested individual can become a member of the Speakers Collective, they must first complete a rigorous three-day training process. These trainings have three main objectives: first, to orient new members to the institutional expectations of the Speakers Collective; second, to assist each speaker in honing their personal narrative and their confidence in telling it before an audience; and, finally, to allow the leaders of the training to become familiar with each speaker's narrative and gain a sense as to what types of speakers he or she would best complement on a speaker panel. Only after this training is completed may these individuals volunteer to share their narratives at panel events on campus (e.g. for undergraduate courses like introductory psychology, human sexuality, graduate-level counseling courses, at residence halls, or at meetings of campus student organizations) or in the surrounding community (e.g. for annual National Coming Out Day or Gay Pride Week).

Over the course of the three-day training, I collected field notes, audio recordings of the various group activities, and conducted regular informal interviews with each of the eight participants and several training staff from the LGBTQ office. Although my interests in the coming-out story genre began in the context of the speaker panels, this was my first opportunity to closely examine the sequence of interactions that occurred prior to these carefully orchestrated narrative performances. Explicit talk about language use, what Silverstein (Reference Silverstein and Lucy1993) has called meta-pragmatic discourse, was a staple of these interactions as trainees and staff navigated discussions about a range of aspects of narrative structure and performance. Thus, the meta-pragmatic component of the training is critical to understanding the role of language in developing reflexive understandings of the genre as well as the ideological assumptions underlying it and Jensen's panels.

LEARNING (AND RELEARNING) TO TELL A COMING-OUT STORY

I begin by providing an overview of the various communicative activities that take place during the panel training. At the start of the first day of training, after self-introductions, participants are introduced to the mission of both the university's LGBTQ office and the Speakers Collective.Footnote ⁴ Brief presentations by training staff describe the core values for both of these entities including dispelling myths and stereotypes about LGBTQ issues, developing a holistic understanding of the diversity of LGBTQ populations, and promoting social change in the campus community and beyond.

In my initial conversations with the lead coordinator of the training, Nick, I learned that the main objective of the first day of the training was two-fold: first, to help the participants to develop rapport with one another (and thus provide a ‘safe space’ to ground the activities that would follow); and second, to provide an opportunity for them to freely describe their identities and experiences to others outside the constraints of a traditional panel event. Thus, building solidarity among participants was a crucial element of the training. This ethos reemerged throughout the training when the training leaders would remind the participants, ‘when you tell your story, you're never alone’.

The second day of the training featured the participation of four current members of the Speakers Collective who I refer to as mentors. Each of these individuals had participated in the Speakers Collective's coming-out panels for anywhere from one to nearly forty years.Footnote ⁵ After observing these more experienced tellers present their stories in a ‘mock’ panel, trainees split into groups of two or three to work more closely with a mentor on how to deliver their own narratives. This next portion involved trainees delivering their first proper telling of their narratives at the training, in this case to an audience of one or two fellow trainees and a panel mentor. Following each telling, these recipients provided feedback on how to tell their narrative ‘better’ for the purposes of the panel.

On the final day, trainees were encouraged to invite their friends and loved ones to a final ‘practice panel’. For this simulation exercise, participants proceeded through the typical panel procedures by beginning with a brief introduction about the LGBTQ office, the mission of the Speakers Collective, and followed by a series of coming-out narrative tellings from the panel speakers. Afterwards, the ‘pretend’ audience (consisting of a mixture of their peers, the training leaders, panel mentors, and other staff members from the LGBTQ office) gave feedback about how the panel had been conducted.

Early on in the training, Nick stressed to the group (and to me in our one-on-one conversations) that the coming-out story was a ‘personal thing’ and something ‘they already have coming in here’. It was here that I first encountered a recurring theme of the training: explicit talk about identity, especially regarding sexuality and gender. This talk implied the Speakers Collective assumption that participants each had a stable, unified self that would serve as the primary resource for telling their coming-out story. Yet, as I later observed, trainees had to do a great deal of communicative and meta-pragmatic work to reconcile this principle with what I call performative expectations, the panel's expectations (often made explicit) for how panelists ought to tell their narratives in the context of the speaker panels. For many, the training became a struggle to manage the task of crafting a narrative that was both true to their (multiple) identities and sufficiently tellable for the purposes of the panel.

(RE)TELLING STORIES, (RE)CONSTRUCTING SELVES

One of the biggest obstacles for the trainees involved the performative expectation to strive for narrative performances that were no more than roughly five minutes in length. According to training staff, this was necessary to allow enough time for introducing the resources available at the LGBTQ office and answering questions from the audience after the tellings were completed. This became most challenging for one trainee, John, a male university staff member who identified as gay (mentioned earlier in the introduction of this article). The events recounted in his narrative took place during his college years alongside a difficult battle with cancer. In an excerpt from one of his first tellings of the training, John has just narrated a difficult conversation he had with his doctor about the odds of him surviving his cancer.

1. (1)Footnote ⁶

   58 And here with this man I'm having a conversation about not only could I

   59 lose all of those things (.) but I could lose everything. Like I could lose

   60 my life. And it was just very very real. (0.3) And so that conversation:: (0.4)

   61 led me hhh into two interactions (0.2) with two people (0.3) that ultimately

   62 (0.3) ultimately redefined what I wanted (.) out of my sexuality? And what I

   63 wanted out of my life. And the first place that it took me (0.3) was a

   64 conversation:: (0.2) with my best friend James¿ who I've- who I've known

   65 all my life,  um (.) very tight (.) and as much as you can love a person:

   66 without (0.2) being their brother or being their sister (.) if- if not completely

   67 synonymous with that. A::nd (0.2) going into a conversation with James in

   68 the residence hall that we lived in: (0.2) he had no idea the amount of

   69 pressure that I was putting on him (0.2) with the story that I was about

   70 to tell him. Cause he didn't realize (.) that (0.2) he was the one person

   71 that I wanted approval from? And the one person's love that I was

   72 looking for. And he didn't know that I had a game plan already set in place

   73 that if James (0.2) didn't feel like he wasn't- he was in a position to accept

   74 me¿ Or in a position to love me (0.5) that I kne::w (0.8) that I could stop

   75 taking drugs. Or I could mix my drugs. Or: I could take them all at one time,

   76 an:d I could do: what I felt was God's plan anyways? In:: (0.3) taking

   77 my life because I was doing something so sinful.

John recounts a range of narrative events in this short extract: his reaction to the troubling diagnosis from his cancer specialist (lines 58–60), a causal linking between different reported interactions (‘that conversation led me to…’, 60–62), an evaluation of the significance of his relationship with his best friend (64–67 and 70–72), and an account of his own private dialogue about the possibility of taking his own life (72–77). While only a short excerpt, this instance illustrates how one's construction of self may shift and evolve throughout the telling of a coming-out story and, more generally, the potential for narrative to ‘generate a multiplicity of partial selves’ (Ochs & Capps Reference Ochs and Capps1996:22).

John's narrative was seen by his peers as a masterful weaving together of narrative events, complete with reported conversations, flashbacks, and contemplations of suicide. At several points during the training, I overheard participants complimenting the complexity of John's story and the ease by which he told it. At one point, when the performance of another trainee, Sam, was being discussed among the group, he openly exclaimed, “I wish my story was as good as John's!”. John's tellings averaged between ten and twelve minutes in length over the first two days of the training. As a result, the difficulty of collectively determining what could be cut from his story was ongoing. While this transcript helps to illustrate some of the subtle identity work that might occur in a typical telling of a coming-out story, John next had to negotiate with his peers whether or not it qualified as a panel-appropriate telling when assessed against the genre expectations of the Speakers Collective. What followed after this particular telling now brings us to a closer examination of the scene that opened this article.

COLLECTIVELY ASSESSING AND ADJUSTING PRACTICE TELLINGS

As mentioned earlier, John's telling was initially met with a lengthy silence from his group members. Approximately a minute later, the following exchange occurred between John, Joe, another trainee, and Jane, a panel mentor.

1. (2)

   206 Jane: Maybe a little (2.2) maybe a little less about the:: (0.5) the

   207   de:tails of the cancer¿

   208   (1.0)

   209 John: O:h okay.

   210   (0.2)

   211 Jane: Just that it dropped down (to the body,),)

   212   (0.8)

   213 John: That could be just kind of implied.

   214 Jane: Yeah (.) because the (1.0) the important part I think on that

   215 is (0.3) y-you've got this perfect health and all this. A:nd (0.2)

   216 this is why you think you think (ya know) “well (.) I have to get”

   217 married I have to conform to all this, .hh because I have this whole

   218 huge fu:ture ahead of me, (0.2) I've got family that depends on

   219 me (0.6) is depending on how if you have nothing else to (0.2)

   220 keep the family going,” (0.8) a::nd (0.2) all the sudden this cancer

   221 hits which came out of nowhere, (1.0) (like I saw) that physical stuff

   222 everything you were depending on: (0.6) you were basing (on it)

   223 is poof (0.8) it's gone (1.0) and now what's important. And that-

   224 >I think that's the< critical part. (0.4) You had to go over (to say)

   225 “okay what's reall:y important.” (1.5) °Because° (0.5) the critical

   226 thing is that (0.4) you had that (0.4) crisis (.) in your life. (0.5)

   227 And that's what (0.2) forced you to- (0.2) basically take a

   228 different perspective.

   229 [((John nods in agreement))]

   230 [(0.5)]

   231 Joe:That's very constructive. I agree.

This exchange illustrates how the performative expectations of the genre were invoked and taken up by recipients. In lines 206–207, Jane begins giving advice to John with an utterance littered with features of indirectness (Goodwin Reference Goodwin1990): two rather lengthy within-turn pauses, various qualifiers and hedgings (e.g. maybe and a little) in addressing the extent of her suggestion, and rising intonation at the end that frames the turn as being more tentative in character (Heritage Reference Heritage2012). More generally, the ‘nudging’ enacted here (which was prevalent throughout the feedback sessions) illustrates an orientation towards the delicate nature of framing what features of narratives were not worthy of telling. Additionally, it provides a sense of how the institutional aims of the Speakers Collective are communicatively accomplished.

After John acknowledges her comment with a minimal display of agreement (“Oh okay”), Jane provides an account for her suggestion. She interprets the plot structure of his story as being resolved after finding a new perspective during the time of his ailing health (lines 214–227). After Johns nods in agreement (line 229), another group member, Joe, a nineteen-year-old male undergraduate who identified as gay, positively assesses Jane's suggestion as ‘really constructive’ and displays his agreement (line 231).

These two forms of communicative activity—practice tellings and peer-feedback sessions—illustrate the central role of performance and collaborative-consensus building that permeated the training sessions. All of the trainees seemed to understand that they were working to develop a type of sophistication in narrating their own LGBTQ experiences. For instance, Joe and Jane's attentiveness to the quality and development of John's narrative embodies a type of concern for its aesthetic qualities (Bauman Reference Bauman1984). In a way, these communicative activities (and the training as a whole) constituted a type of ‘back region’ (Goffman Reference Goffman1959) where tellers could work at ‘staging’ future performances (as well as exhibit understandings of the genre itself).Footnote ⁷ As such, these activities represent the primary means through which institutional regulation and socialization were discursively realized.

At a more implicit level, this extract illustrates one of the core dilemmas that trainees encountered during the training: Trainees' task of managing the objectives of narrating what they understand as the core of their coming-out experience (i.e. their singular ‘story’) in addition to the normative constraints of the panel. In this sense, trainees face the challenge of enacting their LGBTQ identity in a way that was recognizable under the communicative norms of the institution. In John's case, he had to narrate his coming-out experiences along with his ‘cancer story’ while also meeting the performative expectations of telling a narrative that positions an LGBTQ identity at the forefront. This expectation implied that each panel member's narrative would express a unified and enduring identity, while in practice they had to carefully mold their narratives to fit a set of local, normative constraints for enacting LGBTQ identity categories (i.e. identity as an active, situated accomplishment; see Antaki & Widdicombe Reference Antaki and Widdicombe1998). After witnessing the exchange above (as well as my ongoing conversations about it with John), it was clear that this tension was a difficult one for him and his peers to collectively manage. Following this feedback session, the trainees laughed about how difficult it was to pinpoint what was not essential to John's narrative in their efforts to get him under the time limit.

This performative expectation regarding narrative and identity was regularly implicated during these feedback sessions. Shown below are two further instances of feedback selected from different sessions. In extract (3), feedback is presented to a trainee by Cam, a fellow trainee, and in extract (4), feedback is presented to a trainee by Tim, a panel mentor.

1. (3)

   1 Cam:Yeah I g- I guess the only: thing (0.2) that (0.2) I wondered i- is

   2 if you could (2.2) u:m:: (1.5) inject a little more:: (3.8)

   3 sense of lik- like (0.2) what you were feeling, (1.0) leading

   4 up to your decision to come out? (…)

1. (4)

   1 Tim: I:: um (.) think you could give a little bit more detail? On um (1.0)

   2 what the girl was like? Th- the girl you had your first kiss with?

   3 (0.2) Like the one who was (0.2) sort of sitting across the circle

   4 from you:: (…)

These extracts further illustrate the mitigative features that were common in these activities: within-turn pauses, qualifiers and hedgings, and a tentative intonational style. Although I cannot provide a full analysis of the sequential environment of these turns, they provide additional support for understanding the delicate nature by which participants produced advice for their peers and, in the process, challenged tellers' construction (and enactment) of both narrative and identity. In this way, not only did tellers have to wrestle with the performative expectations associated with the training (i.e. in terms of their own narrative telling) but so did their peers and mentors as they cautiously navigate the delivery of feedback. Perhaps most telling, however, is that the core suggestion put forth in each of these extracts was eventually taken up and implemented in the tellers' later narrative enactments.

So far I have highlighted aspects of identity construction, collaborative-consensus building, and core dilemmas surrounding how these processes should unfold and, if required, be adjusted to fit specific performative conventions. With John's case, the identity-related aspects that emerged in his performance were made salient and, to an extent, made subject to modification in light of the group's suggestions. Yet a further way in which these performative expectations became relevant was in moments when notions of a larger LGBTQ community were invoked.

ENACTING CATEGORIES AND NOTIONS OF COMMUNITY

As discussed earlier, Jensen's speaker panels are linked to the rich historical trajectory of the gay liberation movement and its ongoing struggle for equality. This larger political frame was most apparent during discussions of ‘the community’, how it should (and should not) be represented, and the types of identity categories that define it. One key mantra that was repeatedly emphasized over the three-day period was that of ‘putting a face on the community’.Footnote ⁸ Upon its initial mention, this principle was discussed in terms of members' duty to try to represent the full spectrum of identities that comprised the community (especially those often less represented in the mass media such as bisexual or transgender identities). The training leaders would also remind everyone that the Speakers Collective did not aim to represent or speak for the beliefs and positions of the community as a whole.Footnote ⁹ Often this latter point was stated most explicitly in a disclaimer that was voiced at the beginning of each speaker panel. A version of this statement is shown below in (5) as it was recited during one of the practice panels of the training.

1. (5) The stories you're going to hear are all terrifically personal and they are unique. No one of us speaks for a group. We can't. Everybody's coming-out story is slightly different. Some have gone through things that nobody else goes through. Some are easier some are harder but they are unique. And in those terms every panel member is speaking from their own perspective so um we won't- what they see is not necessarily what other people see and it doesn't need to be. The important thing is this is what the individual had to go through to be able to stand in front of you or sit in front of you or to be able to go out in public to be able to look in the mirror and say “this is who I am”.

It was during moments like this (as well as moments when the ‘putting a face…’ mantra was explicitly invoked) that the embeddedness of the panels within a larger LGBTQ population (and its sociopolitical struggles) was made most explicit. During such moments, panel members would display an orientation to a second performative expectation that applied to the Speakers Collective: The importance of balancing considerations of representing a specific category (or categories) of the community while also refraining from letting their experiences or opinions speak for the entirety of the community. What this meant for the trainees was that they inevitably represented a variety of categories to which the members of the community may belong (e.g. a gay trans woman) and had to select which to include within their genre-fitted tellings. Throughout the training, trainees engaged in communicative activities where this performative expectation was made salient, demonstrating how critical identity categories were to the Speakers Collective and the broader LGBTQ community it sought to support.

Towards the end of the first day of training, two participants expressed concern about how they were supposed to incorporate their various identities into their tellings: Sam, a transgender male who also identified as gay; and Melanie, an African American lesbian. After each had presented a version of their telling to their fellow trainees, it became evident that they each had a great deal of experience to share that resulted in confusion as to which ‘story’ they should tell. At the end of the first day, Sam told me that his main dilemma surrounded whether he should focus his telling his initial coming out as a lesbian (prior to his transition to presenting as a male) or coming out as transgender (which, in the context of the panels, he worried would necessitate the further burden of discussing hormone treatment, pronoun usage, gender reassignment surgery, etc.). He eventually decided to concentrate his efforts on the ‘lesbian story’ arc for the second day's tellings, yet his frustration remained clear in his not being able to convey the full extent of his LGBTQ-related experiences. Meanwhile, Melanie's situation seemed equally complex. Although she only identified as a lesbian (in terms of the larger set of LGBTQ identities), she felt a personal obligation to speak about how this linked to her experiences as a Catholic and as an African American. Earlier in the first day of training, she described to me her concerns about “not being able to fit it all in” and how her narrative felt “incomplete”.

During the peer-feedback sessions on the second day, the training leaders assisted in further refining everyone's tellings by posing the following question to the group: “What is your story really about?”. This more rhetorical prompt was paired with the task of trainees breaking down their tellings to “a few main points”. At the end of the day, I asked Melanie what this question meant for her narrative, which she responded to with “I guess mine is that you can be black and queer and gay—all at the same time—and it will be okay”. Although Melanie's vision for her narrative seemed straightforward, implementing it within the performative expectations of the genre had been far more difficult.

I now shift to a scene on the third and last day of the training where Sam was now attempting to tell ‘the stories’ of being transgender, a lesbian, as well as an individual who engages in kink or BDSM (bondage dominance and sado-masochism) with sexual partners. The latter identity had become increasingly important to his telling at the conclusion of the second day of the training when several peers had encouraged him to expand upon what was initially only a passing mention of BDSM-related interests. Extract (6) is taken from the feedback portion of the final practice panels, when Sam is given pointed feedback regarding the evolving ‘focus’ of his story from a panel mentor, Kris, a gay male.

1. (6)

   400 Kris: Sam since the last time I heard your story¿ it does

   401 seem much more focused. Much more specified since

   402 the last time we sat down and chatted, (0.2) and so it

   403 sounds like (0.3) our- y-your focus now is kink-BDSM?

   404 Sam: Th- that's kinda the main one. Yea:h.

   405 Kris: And I thi- I think (0.3) there's one more step you can ta:ke

   406 in outlining your sto:r[y? So th]at when they go in:: (0.2)

   407 Sam: [Mm hm]

   408 they know that tha- that's what it's about¿ and (your rounding)

   409 thoughts are about that identity? And so:: (0.2) uh I think your

   410 introduction:: (.) still kinda leaves you guessing like “which”

   411 way are we going, which one of these identities are we with,”

   412 Sam: [Oka(h)y ]

   413 Kris: [And the]n half way through your story you

   414 figure out “okay we're 100% kink.”

   415 [That's where we're] goin’.” Ya know¿ [Um::: (.)]

   416 Sam: [HA he he he ] [HE he ]

   417 Kris: and I think (0.2) I think you can be much more deliberate

   418 in the words that you choose at the beginning:: so that

   419 [(so like)] the audience can prepar::e (0.2) and start asking

   420 Sam:[O:ka:y]

   421 Kris: themselves those questions like “do I know what kink”

   422 really is:, what does that mean:,” and [then be]gin to

   423 Sam: [Yeah::]

   424 Kris: answer those for them along the way.

In offering advice to Sam, Kris makes several references to the role of the audience that may hear these narratives. In lines 400–402, Kris commends Sam on the superiority of his most recent telling in comparison to a telling during the group feedback sessions the day before. More specifically, in lines 402–403, he interprets Sam's ‘focus’ to be kink and BDSM. In doing so, Kris invokes the performative expectation that Sam's story ought to follow, particularly in how the teller's story should be oriented to the panel audiences as the main recipients of the telling. This provides clear evidence of panel members' orientations towards the relationship between narrative design and audience.

In the remainder of this extract, Kris focuses on articulating ways Sam can improve the telling of his narrative. In lines 417–419, Kris suggests he can be “much more deliberate” in terms of the words he chooses, which further underscores this orientation to the panel audiences. In lines 421–422 and 424, Kris goes on to explain the importance of providing a clear preview and explication of terms that audience members may not be aware of or have questions about (e.g. BDSM or kink) and then “answer those along the way” during the course of the telling. This interchange provides further evidence of an institutional stance regarding ‘the community’ that was often referenced throughout the training. Through exchanges of feedback like the one shown above, trainees were exposed to this expectation that their tellings should align with and (re)create. Namely, that they include a clear depiction of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and/or transgender identities in order to facilitate the political visibility of the community as a whole.

Just after the conclusion of the practice panels at the end of the training, I spoke to Melanie and Sam about what they had learned from the feedback they had just received from Kris and the other mentors, trainees, and friends who were in the audience. They described a sense of relief in hearing one mentor's suggestion to them: to resist thinking of their narrative as having to encompass each of their multiple identities and instead prepare several variations of their narrative that each focus on a different identity. In response to Kris' comment at the panel (extract (6)), Nick had added “you never have to tell the same story twice”. Melanie and Sam both found this advice to be especially helpful. Going forward, Melanie explained to me that she would work on tailoring her narrative towards particular panel audiences, such as a religion-oriented narrative for courses on religion and a race-oriented narrative for audiences where the intersection of race and sexuality is of primary interest. Sam had adopted a similar plan related to creating separate gender and sexuality-centered narratives. As a result, it seemed that both Melanie and Sam had ‘solved’ their narrative dilemmas by learning of the versatility by which they could ‘fit’ their tellings to specific facets of their identities and the needs of different types of generalized audiences. Yet the struggles they experienced from the prior discussions about their tellings had not been forgotten.

The institutionalization of identity categories is particularly relevant to understanding their role in LGBTQ communities and organizations like the Speakers Collective. Valentine (Reference Valentine2007) examined the category ‘transgender’, including its historical emergence and the scope of individuals subsumed both within and outside of it. As he argued, the category ‘transgender’ was effectively institutionalized for several reasons: (i) to enhance LGBTQ visibility in the public eye, and (ii) to further advocate for transgender rights in political and legislative bodies. A similar justification was provided and reiterated throughout the training of the Speakers Collective, creating an alignment between its institutional performative expectations and the ideologies of the envisioned community it sought to support. Yet, as Valentine notes, categories may also obscure the ways identity-related experiences are expressed through language (e.g. for those whose experiences lie outside of the category transgender). In the case of Sam and Melanie, then, it would seem such category-related obstacles played some part in how they managed their narrative dilemmas.

The performative expectations I have discussed thus far each created narrative dilemmas for trainees to manage. In John's case, he had to deal with his telling not meeting the temporal expectations and, arguably, the extent to which it positioned his sexuality as a core aspect of his personhood (as opposed to his identity as a cancer survivor).Footnote ¹⁰ In the case of Sam and Melanie, their dilemmas stemmed from expectations regarding the extent to which their tellings highlighted the central categories of the LGBTQ community over other identity categories. At first glance, one might view these performative expectations of the Speakers Collective as insignificant or aesthetic in nature. However, the experiences of these individuals provide evidence of how powerful such genre conventions were in shaping and constraining trainees' narrative constructions and, as a result, the image of community that was to be presented through them. Throughout the time I spent observing the panel trainings, I wondered how much of the complexity of trainees' identities was being effectively consolidated (i.e. via each teller's self-presentation) to appear more homogenous for the sake of the larger ideological mission of political visibility. Although it is beyond the scope of this article to consider whether the achievement of such homogeneity is good (i.e. for the purposes of visibility or political gain) or bad (i.e. for minimizing the diversity of the individuals representing the community), this unintended consequence of the training was clear.Footnote ¹¹

COMING OUT (AND STORYTELLINGS ABOUT IT) AS A LIFELONG PROCESS

A further feature of the panel trainings I observed was the ongoing reminders (either explicitly or implicitly) that the act of coming out be thought of as ‘a lifelong process’. This notion often surfaced during discussions of the importance of fitting one's telling to a particular context. Towards the end of the training, Nick elaborated upon this idea by telling the trainees about the evolving nature of many of the panel members’ narratives. He described a male panelist, Jay, who identified as gay, who was “always switching it up”, and had a narrative that “changes constantly”. Nick went on to explain that, in the panels they had been on together, he had never heard Jay tell the same story before. This confirmed that, like what Sam and Mel were told, members’ coming-out stories could have narrative elements that were more malleable in nature and, more generally, that the teller's general ability to shape his or her narrative towards a particular focus or audience justified a type of flexibility with the genre. Trainees were told to expect, and even embrace, the idea that their narratives would evolve during their lives as they gained new experiences as LGBTQ people.

Hank's (Reference Hanks1996) practice-oriented view of genre provides several insights here. The author distinguishes between schematic aspects of language use—or the stable, prefabricated communicative resources individuals bring to episodes of interaction, and the emergent aspects of language use that come to light over the course of the interaction itself. For the Speakers Collective trainings, then, it can be seen that that trainees not only learned the schematic aspects of the coming-out story genre (e.g. what to include or not include), but also its more emergent, creative aspects. This latter component includes the art of blending one's individual experiences with the more static resources afforded by the genre, learning to tell or design one's narrative relative to a particular audience or identity, as well as considering one's narrative as a flexible, evolving ‘text’ (as was the case with Jay's narrative performances). This was most succinctly stated by Nick on the last day of training when he reminded the group “you never have to tell the same story twice”.

The collective message that trainees could embrace the fluidity of their narratives is striking for several reasons. At first glance, it would seem this notion would be in tension with the earlier performative expectation of learning to tell a narrative that expressed a fixed, pre-existing self. Yet it is important to note that the collective acknowledgement of this tactic did not occur until the end of the training (at the practice panels) when trainees were to simply be ‘fine-tuning’ their tellings. Some of the related discussions I observed at this stage (e.g. between the mentors and trainees) emphasized the development of this skill as being dependent upon how much experience one had with different types of panel audiences, the diversity of speakers scheduled for any given panel, and the question of what was the best way to present ‘the community’ given each of these shifting circumstances. Said a different way, it was generally established that the prospect of ‘switching up’ one's narrative should only be reserved for those who had more or less mastered telling what the Speakers Collective defined as a ‘good’ story given its performative expectations. Drawing on the earlier analysis of Jon, Sam, and Mel's dilemmas, this involved the following institutional expectations: (i) learning to tell a narrative that effectively presents a sexual or gender identity that represents more or less ‘who they are’, and (ii) learning how the specific categories presented in their narrative align with an envisioned image of ‘the community’.

SOCIALIZATION AND LGBTQ IDENTITY POLITICS

The institutional assumptions and narrative dilemmas analyzed in this article suggest a number of implications for studies of language in social context. The primary contribution is to scholarship on narrative and genre in demonstrating the discursive processes through which prospective (and current) members of coming-out panels must maneuver a number of genre-related institutional (and ideological) challenges. In order to achieve membership and earn the right to enact their narratives as a part of panel events, they must first consent to an intensely collective process built upon a system of conventions regarding language use and identity. In this way, the links between genre, narrative, and identity are shown to be deeply reflexive in nature.

For Jensen University, coming-out panels and their associated trainings function as a way for the Speakers Collective to construct—and closely monitor—its own institutional legacy and larger cultural rhetoric regarding LGBTQ advocacy. Particularly relevant to this understanding is Linde's (Reference Linde2008) work on ‘institutional remembering’ and the sets of social practices that may be implemented to represent and preserve aspects of an institution's past. The main task of the training can be seen as shaping how, via a process of ongoing regimentation and entextualization (Bauman & Briggs Reference Bauman and Briggs1990), one learns to narrate their personal experience in a way that fits the performative expectations that are outlined and regulated. These panels, then, serve as an institutional mechanism for molding how audiences (and Speakers Collective members) may interpret and retell the narratives presented, potentially extending a ‘remembering’ of the LGBTQ community that the Speakers Collective seeks to support. This prioritization of the circulation of coming-out stories (and the categories narrated therein) opens up new ways of understanding how notions of ‘visibility’ (Walters Reference Walters2001) and ‘imagined community’ (Anderson Reference Anderson1983; cf. Jones Reference Jones2014) are managed and contested within LGBTQ populations. Thus, this study provides further insight to the identity politics that emerge when (re)constructing these types of issues for public consumption—whether it is within this population or beyond.

Jensen's trainings also reveal the larger socialization work that is accomplished through rounds of tellings and what others have referred to as ‘speech chains’ (Bahktin Reference Bakhtin1986; cf. Agha Reference Agha2007), or the signs or texts that link and move across sets of speech events. Relatedly, Wortham (Reference Wortham2005) has examined how a series of intertextually linked events socialized an individual into, in his analysis, an academic identity. For the Speakers Collective, the training activities and panel tellings contribute to members' socialization to a particular sociopolitical identity associated with beliefs regarding social change and ‘speaking out’. It is these values (which are reiterated throughout the training) that represent how the institution defines what it means to be a member of this community. This includes beliefs regarding how these types of identities ought to be presented (e.g. to the broader heterosexual public), and more broadly, how LGBTQ individuals may utilize narrative to mobilize further participation for the purposes of LGBTQ advocacy (cf. Bacon Reference Bacon1998; Rand Reference Rand2014).Footnote ¹²

The narrative dilemmas that characterize the Speakers Collective training also allow for deeper reflections related to identity and authenticity. A common presupposition in scholarship on narrative—and one that circulated throughout much of the training—is that in narrating personal experience one is using language to refer to a ‘true’ or authentic self that is pre-existing and internal to speakers (cf. Carr Reference Carr2011). My analysis of the panel's behind-the-scenes discursive work, however, has shown participants also encounter the idea that narrative and identity are (re)constructed in situ. For much of the training, the time trainees spent rehearsing and collectively revising their narratives served to reify the existence of a ‘true’ self. Later in the training, however, this ideology was qualified in ad-hoc discussions about the importance of tailoring one's narrative to specific panel audiences. In this way, some panel training activities may serve to foreground some of tellers' identity categories, and as a result, deemphasize others. While prior sociolinguistic research on authenticity has centered around researchers ultimately assessing what ‘counts’ as authentic or inauthentic within a speech community (see Coupland Reference Coupland, Llamas and Watts2010), my approach here has focused more on processes of authentification (Bucholtz Reference Bucholtz2003). Taking this perspective on authenticity has afforded greater analytic attention to the process of how these narratives and identities come to be viewed and intersubjectively validated as authentic by training participants and staff alike.

The more reflexive understanding of context that was invoked during the latter part of the training lends additional support to a view of identities as fragmented and dynamic rather than coherent and enduring (e.g. Antaki & Widdicombe Reference Antaki and Widdicombe1998; Wortham Reference Wortham2001). Analysis of the Speakers Collective training reveals some of the social and linguistic practices that serve to manage these (fluid) identities and how they come to be recalibrated, publicly supported, and collectively remembered and celebrated within particular communities. Future research in this area might explore other communicative practices through which same-sex or nongender conforming identities are understood, reinforced, or called into question within particular communities of practice.