Should We All Come Out?

This week on the Next Big Idea podcast, two of my favorite people, Jessi Hempel Hempel and Michael Kovnat , discuss what Jessi learned when her whole family came out. Listen on Apple or Spotify and let us know what you think in the comments below.

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The way Jessi sees it, we all should consider coming out. Not about our sexuality, necessarily. For her, the idea of coming out is more expansive. We all have parts of ourselves, big or small, that we keep hidden from view. What would happen if we summoned the courage to share those parts with the people closest to us? What would it be like if we all lived the most authentic versions of ourselves?

Jessi Hempel was born into a family of secret-keepers. 

Her father — the son of a minister who’d gone to law school and then to work for a Fortune 500 company — was, unbeknownst to his wife and children, gay. 

Her mother, a tireless and sometimes erratic homemaker, had, at one time, been romantically linked to an alleged serial killer — a traumatic adolescent relationship she’d kept hidden from her family. 

“They stuffed some aspects of themselves so deeply away,” Jessi says of her parents, “that they didn’t understand they were hurting themselves.” Or, for that matter, their children, modeling a kind of shamefaced distance that their kids learned to adopt. Jessi and her siblings became secret-keepers too. Jessi hid that she was a lesbian; her sister concealed that she was bisexual; and her brother buried the truth that he was transgender.

For decades, that’s how the Hempel Family got along — everyone keeping big things from everyone else. But then, in the span of a few years, everything changed. They all came out.

The story of that “Family Outing,” to borrow the title of Jessi’s recent memoir, is moving, heartbreaking, and ultimately hopeful. The way Jessi sees it, we all should consider coming out. Not about our sexuality, necessarily. For her, the idea of coming out is more expansive. We all have parts of ourselves, big or small, that we keep hidden from view. What would happen if we summoned the courage to share those parts with the people closest to us? What would it be like if we all lived the most authentic versions of ourselves?

Jessi has written for Wired, Fortune, and TIME. She’s currently a senior editor-at-large at LinkedIn and host of the award-winning podcast Hello Monday. She spoke with my colleague Michael Kovnat about family, memory, regret, and acceptance.

Listen on Apple or Spotify and let us know what you think in the comments below.

-- Rufus

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