COMING OUT ALL OVER: DEVIANTS AND THE POLITICS OF SOCIAL PROBLEMS*

Having presented this paper to the meetings of the Society in Boston last August, I dutifully circulated copies of it among my colleagues for their comments. I should have known. Not that they were unresponsive; they were very responsive. "You go too far; you don't go far enough. How about this and how about that, and how about cutting whole pages of the statement?" What to do? Just set it aside, give it time, let it season. So I filed those responses away with the paper, hoping that by juxtaposition and by osmotic process they might interact symbolically and give new clarity, if not felicity, to the line of argument I had hoped to develop in the address. Alas, time has not performed this miracle, and I am faced with the problem of how to prepare this paper for publication. The problem has led me to wonder what exactly the publication of a presidential address is supposed to represent. Is it a record of what was presented to the membership of the Society on a certain day and hour or, as I asked one of my colleagues, is that presentation to be considered a run-it-up-the-flagpole exercise which, finding the flag tattered and torn when it is brought down, should be patched together for more formal display? The question was perhaps rhetorical, and a colleague, good friend that he is, suggested that I "tinker with it as little as your sense of intellectual fastidiousness will permit. . . . Let it live as a lecture, a controlled outburst of thought, and leave details for the ragpickers to scrap at." Whereupon, he of course stepped forward to be among the first of the ragpickers. Well, fair enough. Why not let it fly (as in the flag) and respond to as many of his and others' comments as I can in a "postword." This seems such a reasonable solution that I suspect that there is something wrong with it, but I am ready to seize it as a perquisite of the office. Still, it seems from some of the responses to the paper that a few introductory comments may be helpful to sharpen the line of argument that I want to develop. The questions that organized my thoughts for the paper were concerned with how we sociologists of deviance and social problems have conceptualized the problem of deviance. In refering to the "coming out process," I am less interested in the ways various stigmatized groups have engaged in the politics of social and legal "entitlement" than I am in how those activities might be conceived from the interactionist perspective on deviance. I am interested, then, in examining the interactionist conception of the social and moral situation of deviants in order to identify some theoretical issues articulating the study of deviance with the sociology of social problems. My use of the term "coming out" may require further clarification. Although the term is commonly used in conjunction with closets, I will be less concerned with the conditions of secrecy, visibility and disclosure than with the issue of the social affirmation of self. Coming out as an act of self-affirmation is not limited to the matter of the visibility of the stigmatizing condition that Goffman took as the basis for the distinction between the "discredited" and the "discreditable."