ABSTRACT
Empowerment is a principal reason that a growing number of people, including well-known figures in an array of professions, are choosing to identify themselves as gay in the public realm, many times against the counsel of concerned family, friends, and colleagues. This chapter looks at those gay individuals who, despite the potential risks involved, do decide to come out at the public level and at the effects that such heightened visibility has on their lives. Even more fundamentally, an abrupt public exposure of the sort may induce in him a resounding sense of shame in addition to his feelings of guilt, which are usually linked more specifically to his sexual behavior itself. A form of self-rejection, shame emerges when one judges his value as a human being to be uncommonly low, based on the reactions he receives about himself from those around him.
