Outing

Outing

Outing is a term most frequently associated with members of the gay or lesbian community when they voluntarily or involuntarily reveal their sexual orientation publicly.

Outing is similar in many ways to those living within the BDSM lifestyle. Outing, even if you are the person initiating this revealment, is frightening and dangerous. Many aspects of BDSM play can lead to real-life legal situations and problems if your BDSM activities become part of any type of 'abuse' related lawsuit. In addition, BDSM activities can and sometimes are reported by detached third persons as 'domestic violence'. D/s is or tends to be poorly understood by law enforcement, whose primary duty is to maintain civil order. From their perspective, any type of activity where one person may appear to strike, injure, or cause significant pain to another is abuse.

There are often excellent reasons for hiding your involvement in the BDSM community. You may be at risk through the potential removal of your children from your custody, the loss of employment, and the potential identification of you as a sexual offender if you are subjected to legal prosecution with BDSM or D/s as part of that prosecution. In addition, you risk the loss of family, friends, and community. Your involvement in external activities such as church, scouting, and other philanthropic or charitable organizations may be severed. Your standing within your community may be damaged or your reputation irrevocably tarnished by the implications of sexual deviant misconduct.

There are lots of reasons to maintain secrecy. However, living behind a mask can be difficult and demeaning as well. The implications that you 'agree' with external society's assessment of BDSM or D/s as wrong, improper, perverted, profane, abusive, and destructive can be very difficult to sustain. Outing in some forms is a final acknowledgment of personal belief. It is a way of standing by your beliefs and accepting the wrath, contempt, and fear of those around you.

Members of this community have long acknowledged the risk they take in accepting new people into their lives. With every person who knows of your nature, your risk of personal exposure grows. In many cases, anonymity is maintained through mutual blackmail. If one person knows the other, each is at risk of a potential equivalent loss. This works except that one person is willing to be outed. Not all things are equal. One person may have a very public career, while another has no visible public reputation at all. In that case, the risk is virtually all one-sided. There is no way to adequately protect against outing except by isolation from the community completely. It is important for everyone involved in the D/s community who has a level of risk to realize that this risk is real. If you are one of these people, it becomes mandatory to consider whether you can reasonably risk the custody of your children, the integrity of your marriage, and the investment in your career on addressing your needs at this moment in your life. In most cases, the risk is not worth this choice!

Within the D/s community, it is important to believe in the person you interact with. To trust in them. We often do not wish to recognize that D/s relationships are just as liable to breakage and perhaps even more so than vanilla ones. We also do not wish to acknowledge that such breakups sometimes make people act out in angry, bitter ways. At such a moment, even a very short-lived D/s relationship can result in the forcible angry outing from one partner to the other. This can wreak wholesale devastation in the lives of all concerned. It may be a blind momentary choice driven by heightened emotion and hurt, raw feelings. There is no adequate way for a person to predict the actions of someone else when things go wrong! So, if you are in a position where your life, children, family, and career are indeed vulnerable to outing - choose in favor of the oaths you have already taken in this life and set aside your own needs until you feel that risk is greatly minimized.

For some of us, outing is a voluntary choice. We may be independent, our children grown or almost grown. Our relationships with those dear to us are solid, and our careers may not be vulnerable to the external judgment of others. Choosing to reveal our orientation or involvement in the D/s or BDSM lifestyle often comes after years of consideration and frequently after many slight suggestions of our nature to those who are meaningful to us to test their potential response to the revealment of this information. None of us wants to lose people we love!

Delicately, we approach those whom we deem truly important in our lives to sit down with them and try to explain in some form who we are and the kinds of lives we choose to live. Setting aside the mask offers a freedom most of us have never known before. Executing this choice with dignity restores our belief in ourselves.

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Retrieved April 2026 https://web.archive.org/web/20120127132632/http://www.steel-door.com/outing.htm.