{"id":237120,"date":"2022-10-05T09:22:00","date_gmt":"2022-10-05T13:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/?p=237120"},"modified":"2022-10-04T15:08:59","modified_gmt":"2022-10-04T19:08:59","slug":"jessi-hempel-family-comes-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/culture\/jessi-hempel-family-comes-out-237120","title":{"rendered":"What happens when a whole family comes out, one at a time?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In Jessi Hempel\u2019s collaborative memoir, \u201cThe Family Outing,\u201d the journalist is just the first to show her authentic self<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Journalist Jessi Hempel grew up in what appeared to be a picture-perfect, all-American family: nuclear, heterosexual, yet definitively malfunctioning. When she came out as a lesbian at the end of her adolescence, she didn\u2019t realize this was only the beginning of a series of events that would take an eager mallet to her family\u2019s wobbly foundation. Over the next several years, each member of Hempel\u2019s family would come out, in their own way: her father as gay, her sister as bisexual, her brother as a trans man<\/a> and her mother as the survivor of trauma. Under the weight of all these admissions and transitions, her maladaptive family structure crumbled \u2014clearing up room for something stronger and more honest to be built in the space left behind.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In her memoir, The Family Outing<\/em><\/a>, published October 4 by HarperCollins, Hempel recruits her parents and siblings to help her tell the unlikely story of a dysfunctional family working to vanquish shame and move toward authenticity. Hempel writes with vulnerability and transparency about the trials and tribulations of growing up in a family desperately keeping secrets from itself, not shying away from letting the reader into an intimate, and at times troubling, family portrait. We see Hempel coming into her own queerness through GSAs, buzzcuts and campus parties after Ellen DeGeneres\u2019s televised coming out. We see her dad transform from a withdrawn, repressed lawyer into a passionate, proud gay man. We see her siblings find themselves, come out and marry. Most shockingly, we see her mother \u201ccome out\u201d about her traumatic experiences with a serial killer\u2019s alleged accomplice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book is less Hempel\u2019s memoir than the memoir of the family unit, with Hempel as its scribe\u2014each family member is consulted and interviewed with the intention of weaving together a collaborative narrative that honours the truth of their own experiences, experiences that don\u2019t flawlessly align much of the time. Through Hempel\u2019s unwaveringly honest voice, The Family Outing <\/em>provides a portrait of a family in flux\u2014fighting, hiding and hurting, but also, importantly, trying to love and care for one another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBeing queer, and reckoning with that queerness, forced us to do that work that many people never get around to doing, to engage deeply in that process of self-actualization,\u201d Hempel writes. \u201cAnd, in the end, it has given us our family back. We began to find one another when we found ourselves.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hempel spoke to Xtra <\/em>from her home in New York about the book, what it means to be queer in a queer family, finding the \u201cauthentic self\u201d and what it means to come out. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

You were the first person to come out in your family, before your dad, sister and brother. How does it feel to be a trendsetter?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I never really thought of myself as the trendsetter; if you knew me, you would\u2019ve thought that I was the last person to come out to myself. I talk to my dad a lot about whether my coming out influenced him to come out. He came out three years after I did, but in his heart he always knew that he was gay. I think his belief was that he was choosing to live another way, and that you could choose your way out of being gay. He says now that when I came out to him, he realized \u201cOh, if my daughter is going to do the work of being honest with herself, then I\u2019m going to have to do it.\u201d It took him another three years, but that was the moment when he knew he was going to have to look at himself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What about with your siblings? Do you think they were influenced by the two of you? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s sort of impossible to decouple one person\u2019s journey from another; that\u2019s the nature of a really close family. I certainly think that by the time my sister and my brother were reflecting on their own sexuality and their own journey, they had access to models. They knew that they had some sort of social permission within our family to think about it, and that everything would be okay and things wouldn\u2019t fall apart. They already had a model for what it means to confront the secrets that you keep even from yourself, a model for living through that and being okay and even better for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How did your family members coming out make you think differently about your own identity? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

My story about myself until I was in my early 20s was that I lived in what sounded like a perfect family. On paper it looked good, but it didn’t feel good to me; it felt broken and I couldn’t figure out why. That was a key element to my identity. When everybody started to come out, I had to look back and re-examine all the different parts of my family life. That\u2019s when I realized that it didn\u2019t feel good because it wasn\u2019t good. While we might have achieved some outward semblance of normalcy, it didn\u2019t honour who we actually were. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

How did your dad\u2019s relationship with you and your siblings change when he came out? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’m the oldest of the three kids, and I was 23 when my dad came out<\/a>. The other two were in their late teens. And Dad comes bleeding out of the closet, and enters what our family jokingly calls \u201cthe rainbow phrase.\u201d The towels are rainbow towels, he\u2019s got rainbow rings, a rainbow key chain, rainbow candles are burning and he is capital-G Gay. At that point, he knew that I was gay and that my brother was starting the journey of coming out, so he thought we would all be best friends, because we were all on the quote-unquote \u201csame team.\u201d But of course, that\u2019s not how family relationships work. We felt let down by him because he had been absent for so long. It took him a while to learn that he had to do the work of repairing our relationships to make us love and care about and trust him again. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why do you think this \u201crainbow phase\u201d happens to people? It\u2019s something that seems to happen to people for a period of time after they come out. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think it\u2019s because it takes us a while\u2014and it should, this is the journey of our lifetime\u2014to come to the most true version of ourselves. There is a complete freedom that comes when you first come out, and you can look around and say, \u201cThose expectations to which I was trying to conform, I don\u2019t have to conform to them.\u201d But then you ask a harder question, which is, \u201cIf not that, then what? Who am I? What is my model?\u201d These answers are entirely internally driven. It\u2019s something much deeper than what you wear or what your hair looks like. But often, the first thing we do is rush to what we see as the face of a community. When I came out, the first thing I did was shave my head. I knew this is what queer girls in the late \u201990s did. It felt powerful, and for several years I had a shaved head. When I started to settle back into a truer expression of myself, it turned out that I had long blond hair and wore lipstick, which was as surprising to me as anybody else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What are some assumptions that people have about being queer in a queer family that aren\u2019t correct?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That we all have a shared context and background, or a shared political perspective. We don\u2019t all speak the same language. My dad\u2019s experience as a wealthy, white, older gay man is very different than my brother\u2019s experience as a transgender parent carrying a child, and different from my experience as a 40-something lesbian. I had a conversation with my father recently: he was proud of an article he\u2019d written for his local LGBT2SQ+ magazine, which gave advice on being the parent of a transgender young person. He didn\u2019t use my brother\u2019s deadname, but it referred to my dad\u2019s experiences of having a daughter. The publication, to its credit, assumed the best intentions and wanted to work with him, but let him know they couldn\u2019t publish it because it was terribly offensive. My dad needed help from an outsider to understand, and now he does get it intellectually, but he doesn\u2019t get it emotionally. That\u2019s terribly painful, and this is the pain that\u2019s happening inside a family that\u2019s trying really hard, so imagine families that aren\u2019t trying really hard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You write and speak a lot about the idea of the \u201cauthentic self\u201d? Do you think that everyone has a truest version of themselves inside of them?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think about it more as a constant process of becoming. The moment you land on what you consider to be a true expression of yourself, you change. Change is the only constant in our lives. But we\u2019re born into a world of other people\u2019s expectations, good and bad. Your parents, geographic community and maybe religious community all have ideas about who you will be. Sometimes people are those ways, and they live a fairly unexamined life, because life just flows for them. But that\u2019s not usually how it works for most people. For most people, the process of coming out is in tandem with the process of growing up. It\u2019s the process of realizing what doesn\u2019t fit and shirking it, letting go of other people\u2019s expectations as you embrace the things that feel more true for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So you think coming out is more of a process than a singular event?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Completely, completely. We come out over and over again, and if I were to ever stop coming out then I would also stop growing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When you write about your mom\u2019s experiences with trauma, you draw a comparison between coming out as LGBTQ2S+ and coming out as a survivor of traumatic events; why link these things?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I originally went into this process thinking about coming out narrowly, as a sexuality and gender thing, because that\u2019s how it manifested for me. But you can apply that process to many other things. For example, in my mom\u2019s situation, she came out as a survivor; she gradually shifted her identity to take that on. I think there are many things that people come out about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What are some things that we can do to improve our relationships with our families, and make them happier and healthier? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This question is what the purpose for the book really was. I think that the first thing we can do is make space to listen without judgment. If you can get to a place where you want to share with your family members how growing up in that family impacted you, that in itself is a brave move. But if you really want to one-up that and use the conversation to come away closer, then you flip it, and say that you actually want to hear what it was like for the other person. And you listen. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

How does shame about our identities hurt this process of honesty and the strength of our families?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think shame is basically toxic. It\u2019s a disease. I think that there\u2019s a physical and emotional link, that shame can work its way out of us in all kinds of devastating ways. As humans, shame is something we should work to eradicate. And the process of coming out is the process of letting go of shame. We are all worthy by virtue of our birth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In <\/strong>The Family Outing<\/em><\/strong>, you speak a bit on theories of queerness being passed down through families, either on the genetic level, or socially. Is there merit to these claims?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

From everything that I understand through my research, any direct genetic link or \u201cgay gene\u201d theory has been debunked. The best we understand is that it\u2019s possible our genes influence our sexuality and gender to some degree, but it\u2019s impossible to decouple the way genes influence them from how our social upbringing does. If you live in a family with queer role models, you have more options to choose from as you start to consider who you might be. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What do you think is problematic or maybe dangerous about these biological theories of queerness?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

To be really direct, it suggests that there\u2019s a problem to be solved with my experience of being queer. Being queer is the gift of my life. I would hate for anyone to ever think that living as the truest expression of yourself is something that needs to be fixed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s the likelihood of the next generation of your family coming out?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I tie up the end of the book by saying that I expect they will be in the process of coming out, but I have no idea what that will mean. My hope is that in 20 years when they finally get around to reading this\u2014which they probably won\u2019t, because they\u2019ll probably think I’m an old fogey\u2014that they\u2019ll review it and think, \u201cWow, they were at the beginning of understanding the human experience. This is old-fashioned, it\u2019s outdated. We understand so much more about what it is to be human and all of its expressions right now.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What do you hope readers will take away from <\/strong>The Family Outing<\/em><\/strong>?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The ideas in The Family Outing<\/em> feel really crucial, and I hope they encourage others to feel braver in coming out. In the United States today, every time I open the newspaper I see a new threat to my family. Yesterday I opened the newspaper and discovered that the state of Virginia has decided that it\u2019s okay to allow discrimination in schools against transgender people\u2014that\u2019s just a thing that\u2019s suddenly completely legal. So it\u2019s not safe for everyone to come out. But if you\u2019re in a situation where it\u2019s physically safe to come out, I\u2019m here to say that it can also be emotionally safe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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