"I'm Gay": Declarations, Desire, and Coming Out on Prime-Time TV

Discourses of ‘coming out’ play a significant role in the construction of lesbian and gay sexualities, and in the politics of lesbian and gay movements. Although the critique of ‘identity claiming’ has been well established in the literature, popular culture representations of coming out have only recently begun to proliferate. My focus here is on prime-time television; I explore two lesbian coming out texts in some detail in order to consider how different forms of coming out have different meanings and effects. I argue this is due to the two competing discourses at work: identity versus desire. I also explore what these two seemingly different coming out moments share, how, at the end of the day, they may be more similar than it appears at first. And while much scholarship in the field prefers transgressive acts to identity declarations, I use these case studies to suggest that this critique may be misplaced.