By Dawn Wolfe Gutterman
Several years after coming out as a lesbian, comedian and hero, Ellen DeGeneres has come out as a survivor of sexual abuse that happened when she was a teenager.
I don't blame her for taking some time between the two revelations. Coming out as an LGBT person is hard. Coming out about sexual abuse is also… hard. I would say, "harder," or "more difficult," but that wouldn't be correct. Each of those revelations holds its own challenges, and each opens up the person coming out to being hurt in entirely different, though equally painful, ways.
When I first came out about having been raped to my doctor, he said, "Don't tell anyone." He asked me what I was wearing; he asked me if I'd fought back, and how hard. It was as though I was at an Olympic event and he was the judge, determined to score just "how raped" I really was.
Years before, when I first came out as bisexual to my then-fiancee, the result was the opposite. He told everyone – his family, close friends, drinking buddies from high school. And suddenly they cared what I was wearing, how I spoke, and how I carried my body. This time, I was being judged on some invisible scale that measured whether or not I was really a woman.
So why come out at all? Why tell others our orientation, or share about a physical violation when doing so often leads to emotional violations? Why not just creep into our shells, divide up our lives so one part doesn't touch the rest, and make ourselves forget the memory that years later can still make us wake up in a cold sweat late at night?
For those of us who come out as lesbian, gay, trans, or bi, some of those answers are obvious. We come out because we accept ourselves, or because we want to. We come out because denying our sexuality seems as silly as denying our left-or-right-handedness. And we come out to ease the way for those who will come out after us.
These are also the reasons to come out as a sexual abuse survivor. I talk about my experiences as a rape survivor because doing so helps me reclaim ownership over something within me that was taken away. I do it to remind myself that having been raped is no more shameful than being bisexual. And I do it so that anyone who hears me and who has had the same experience might be able to come out, too, and receive the help she or he needs.
As part of my research for the article about the Ellen DeGeneres story in this issue, I wanted to compile a list of rape support organizations run by or friendly to LGBTs. I'm sorry to say there are very few; in fact, I was told by someone at the Michigan Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence that most such service organizations aren't LGBT accepting.
So now I have yet another reason for coming out, both as a bisexual woman and as a survivor of sexual assault. For the first time, I am coming out as both in the desperate hope that more agencies that work to heal the damage in a rape victim's eyes will support everything else they see in those eyes; sexuality and all.
