Sexualities, Ahead of Print.
This article explores lesbians’ coming out strategies in Taiwan, focusing on their identity management and interactions with families. The data came from in-depth interviews with females who self-identified as lesbians. This article centres on lesbians’ everyday lives and how their coming-out decisions were intertwined with familial relationships and goes beyond the dichotomous Western coming-out discourse. I demonstrate ‘hiding’, ‘passing’, ‘unmasking’, and ‘sharing’ strategies lesbians employed to navigate expressing identities and maintaining relationships. I argue that lesbians created diverse identity managements as temporal space for future reconciliation with families and ‘relational leeway’ as ‘implicit activism’ that contributes to future social changes.