Not Just Another Coming-Out Story

Students

In an independent research project, Puget Sound student Daniel Pollock ’22 explores the experiences of queerness and belonging

As a first-year student in Ann Putnam’s Introduction to Creative Writing course, English major Daniel Pollock ’22 was given an assignment to write about a memory or a moment he thought he had forgotten. Not only had the memory he chose stayed with him, but three years later, it would inspire an independent research project exploring identity and belonging, and help Pollock reshape the narrative of his own life.

“I started writing about this elusive figure who lived across and down the street from my family when we lived on the eastside of Tacoma,” Pollock recalls. But that story morphed into something new when, through a 10-week summer research project, he revisited the assignment and resulting manuscript with fresh eyes, and reshaped it to focus on his own experience of coming out as a gay man in a religious household.

Although the new work is fictional, Pollock kept the setting in the Tacoma eastside of his childhood and named the 9-year-old narrator after himself. The story now follows young (fictional) Daniel during the final days of his father’s life. Using themes of grief and fear, Pollock explores how queerness manifests in the young boy’s mind and body prior to any expression of queerness sexually. It’s a time of what Pollock calls “pre-coming out” experiences.

“I’m trying to center the story in a 9-year-old’s mind, which is, in itself, a really fun experiment, having to use really stripped-back language and to think about how I build an argument versus how a 9-year-old would build an argument,” Pollock says. “What leads us to that moment of being able to say, ‘I’m going to imagine a new reality, a type of reality that wasn’t modeled for me’?”

Daniel Pollock ’22

“This project isn’t about a character realizing he’s queer, but, rather, that queerness is always there, even before coming out.”

That’s one of the central questions driving the project, and it hits close to home for Pollock. Though he has come out as gay to his own family, he continues to see friends struggle with the experience in the conservative Christian, middle-class community where he was raised. Pollock’s hope is that by exploring the experience of being queer through the eyes of his young narrator, he can help expand the narrative around queerness and coming out.

“This project isn’t about a character realizing he’s queer,” Pollock says, “but, rather, that queerness is always there, even before coming out.”

The act of mining one’s own memories and experiences to tackle issues of identity and belonging could have been traumatic. But Pollock credits his faculty advisor, Associate Professor of African American Studies Renee Simms, with buoying him throughout the application and writing process. “My monthly check-in meetings with her were an invaluable support in my career as a very young writer.”

Literature and media have long centered queer stories on coming-out narratives. That, Pollock says, narrows the scope of storytelling and prevents readers or viewers from seeing the queer experience fully and accurately represented in their favorite shows and novels. With a 50-page fresh draft completed at the end of his summer research, Pollock is on his way toward changing that.

“We’re given this binary way to see the world: before you’re ‘out’ and after you’re ‘out,’” Pollock says. “There’s this promise that you come out, and you find who you are, and suddenly you're a fully realized human. That is bullshit. We need more stories of just queerness.”