Tim Cook came out of his closet two hours ago. Finally.
His statement has been shared and reshared; his coming-out is lauded as heroic and altruistic. As a celebrity and icon who happens to value personal privacy a lot, he certainly has made a most difficult step forward. What he made is a public statement–entirely different from daily communications, from what you confide in your family and best friends. He came out not for himself–he makes a firm stance by doing this–that he stands by the underprivileged and the marginalized, that he is doing his part in balancing the scale of this majority-minority tilt.
Nonetheless, the reaction from the society and the media probably reveals something, something not entirely positive: we may want to ask why Tim Cook’s coming-out gained so much attention? Is it because he is gay or because he is Tim Cook? Or both? As a celebrity I guess his every major move will be captured by the flashlight, and declaring himself a gay man gonna be the most explosive kind. And yet, we still have to pursue with this question: will such attention add any political capital to the current gay rights movement?
Why being gay is still a thing? Why has such declaration to be put on the headline, along with Ebola and ISIS? Why can’t people just smile at it and forget about it? Because we haven’t come to that stage, gay rights movement hasn’t arrived at that stage–the stage when we are able to treat it as daily trifles and whatnot. It is a huge deal because it concerns identity, and identity is the core of one’s soul. It defines who we are. And homosexuals’ identities happen to fall in the category unwelcome and unrecognized by the majority. Cook mentioned in his statement that “being gay has given me a deeper understanding of what it means to be in the minority and provided a window into the challenges that people in other minority groups deal with every day.” Having identified with a minority means you have to fight the battle all your life–either you fight by yourself in which case you will certainly lose, or, you can enlarge your group until it has equal strength with the now majority.
Except that the identity-based majority/minority demarcation is problematic.
Identities draw boundaries, form exclusive clubs and antagonize those in the middle. Identities label the camps so that they are ready to stand against each other. Identities obliterate common grounds and hide the fact that we are all human. Identities further turn a blind eye to the rationality of people and the tendency of their being drawn by the ideas they champion, not whether they are attracted to a different or the same sexuality. In other words, there are homosexuals who are in the stage of denial and see anti-gay people as their bedfellows; and there are also heterosexuals who join the movement despite of their different identity.
The expansion of the minority group should not and can never be achieved through increasing the number of homosexuals, rather, it should happen due to majority’s taking a side, switch of camp, a change of heart, or even, a change of mind.
Tim Cook did the right thing. But his is, after all, as he said, one of the minority. The real force of balancing the tilted social structure should come from the other group. Being in the majority group doesn’t mean you are privileged; it most possibly means you are mistaken along with bunches of people who are mistaken in a similar way.