Coming out is selfish.

This sounds very homophobic but please bear with me.

I'm a bi guy and this is something that I find slightly annoying about the LGBTQ community. Don't get me wrong, it's very important that everyone's sexuality is accepted by the people in their lives and coming out is an excellent way of accomplishing that. I have no problem with coming out to friends and family. However, I think making some big announcement out of it is selfish, tasteless, and not helpful in normalizing the LGBTQ community.

Queer people are not special. We might be different, but nothing about us being queer makes us special. Someone using social media to come out feels wrong to me because it feels like they're just pimping the fact that they are queer to their own benefit. I don't think that social media presence does anything for anyone except famous people so trying to score likes with your coming out post is pointless. Additionally, I think that coming out in a big, public way is selfish. If coming out is important to you, I think you should tell the people you want to know in person. That way it will be more meaningful to you and the people you tell.

I also think it's important to mention that I still think people should keep coming out on social media. LGBTQ representation is extremely important for cultural education and the internet is an excellent tool for getting our community normalized in a world that is only recently starting to not hate us.

Also it's pretty ironic that I'm posting this on reddit for karma but it's okay to be selfish sometimes.