Coming Out as a Secular Rite of Passage – a Lived Experience Study Based on Diary Narratives of the Polish LGBTQ+ Community

Abstract

In the article, I examine whether an act of coming out as an LGBT+ person can be perceived as the existential equivalent of a religious rite of passage. The paper contains an analysis of fragments of diaries from the collective volume All the Strength I Draw for My Life. Testimonies, accounts, diaries of LGBTQ + people, composed of texts sent to a diary competition organized by the Institute of Applied Social Sciences of the University of Warsaw. To conceptualize the term ‘rite of passage’, I adopt a methodological framework derived from the phenomenology of religion and the theory of Mircea Eliade. A qualitative narrative analysis of the lived experience is conducted in the phenomenological approach in order to show the similarities between the meaning structures pertaining to act of coming out and the phenomenon of initiation. In the conclusions drawn from the juxtaposition, I show that in researching modern spirituality it is useful to abandon the binary opposition between the sacred and the profane as this will underpin a more reliable description of the phenomena.