New Criticals

Coming out is a form of travel. First, the metaphor of removal: the ostensibly heterosexual subject is located one place (in the closet, what have you) and then must move out to another. This idea has been tacitly accepted through the stock phrase of gay liberation, but even tourism scholars acknowledge that gay subjects have a particular affinity for travel, beginning from that first shattering movement. Howard L. Hughes, in an article in Tourism Management, argues that the travel requirement for the gay subject becomes an indelible part of her identity: “Given that the fulfillment or achievement of gay identity often involves travel and is thus, in practice, a variation of tourism, it may also be argued that the search for gay identity is itself conceptually a form of tourism.” [1] To come out as gay is to be a tourist.