Faking it first before making it real: How lesbians and gay people construct their identites in online Coming Out stories

This presentation addresses how lesbians and gay people use language to construct their identities in Coming Out stories. The data consist of six Coming Out stories which were published online on www.rucomingout.com. The data were analysed using Bucholtz and Hall’s (2004) Tactics of Intersubjectivity. This framework provides a precise vocabulary for analysing the relationship between identity and language and highlights that identity is inherently relational and not a product of isolated individuals. There is a significant body of research concerning the overall narrative structure of Coming Out stories, for example Plummer’s (1995) three stages of suffering, epiphany and transformation, and Liang’s (1997) three stages of self-definition as lesbian or gay to the self, self-presentation as lesbian and gay to others and membership in a series of ongoing acts of self-definition, and/or self-presentation as lesbian and gay. The research of Plummer (1995) and Liang (1997) highlights that Coming Out stories are personal narratives in which lesbians and gay people construct identities, however their work does not consider specific linguistic items which lesbians and gay people use as resources in constructing those identities; this can be achieved using Tactics of Intersubjectivity. Specifically, this presentation focuses on how the tactics of authentication and denaturalisation can be applied to Coming Out stories and reveals that lesbians and gay people present two distinct, almost polarised identities: a ‘fake’ and ‘denaturalised’ identity before coming out to self and others and a ‘real’ and ‘authentic’ identity after coming out to self and others.