Can Facebook help end the closet?

An article by Joshua Alston at Newsweek suggests that Facebook, and social media generally, may help end closeted life for gay people if for no other reason than it becomes too much work to constantly monitor one’s “online presence”, as it’s sometimes called. It’s an interesting idea.

Alston begins by talking about a 27-year-old closeted friend who was upset when a mutual friend posted something on his boyfriend’s Twitter feed that revealed their relationship. While apparently an innocent comment, it nevertheless potentially meant they’d have to come out.

The problem for closeted people is that while they can control what they say about themselves, and what they do and don’t post online, they can’t control the actions of their friends—online or real—and it’s frankly unreasonable to expect those friends to go to huge lengths to keep a closeted person’s “secret”.

Obviously, everyone has to make his or her own choices about whether it’s safe to be out. In many countries—like Malawi—it’s clearly dangerous, but in the US? Yeah, even there it’s not safe everywhere.

But safe from what, safe for whom? Maintaining a closeted life—or worse, at the extreme end, the feigned appearance of heterosexuality—is a really bad idea. There are serious consequences to maintaining this façade, and not all of them are obvious—health problems for example, or the social consequences from lying to friends and family for years or decades.

The stress and strain from maintaining a closeted life can cause health problems, as studies have shown. But withholding an important fact about oneself from others means that one isn’t having an honest relationship with them, and they may by upset by that when they finally learn the truth.

The greater threat, however, is bigger: The increasing numbers of GLBT people who live openly and expect to be treated equally means that society’s attitudes are changing. Recently, the US passed, somewhat late in the game, the point at which half the people surveyed thought gay relationships were morally acceptable. That’s progress, however slow, and study after study has shown that the single greatest factor in changing straight people's attitudes is when they actually know a gay person.

So being in the closet is, I think, not just a bad idea for an individual, it’s holding back the achievement of full social and legal equality for GLBT people in general. If social networks like Facebook and Twitter help GLBT people to come out and live proudly and openly, and to live more fully integrated lives, then they will have been a far more positive influence for social good than I would’ve thought they could be. I hope that proves to be the case.