What's it like to come out on camera? Ask this documentary filmmaker
A few years back, Alden Peters fell down a YouTube hole that was a bit more productive than most. The filmmaker, then a 22-year-old student at NYU, had decided that he was ready to come out of the closet, so he began binge-watching every coming out video he could find on the site. #ItGetsBetter talking heads, traumatic personal narratives, teens breaking the news over the phone, twentysomethings surprising their parents in person—Peters watched them all, but still he wanted more.
“A lot of these coming out stories show people telling someone over the phone that they’re gay, but I wanted to know what happens next,” he told me in New York City. “I wanted to see a documentary about the whole coming out process,” spanning not just the “Yep, I’m Gay” moment itself but the decades leading up to it and aftermath that follows. Alden couldn’t find the documentary he yearned to see, so he did what any ambitious young film student would do: He made it himself.
Coming Out is a documentary from Casa Vera Films and Wolfe Video that follows Peters as he sets the record straight (so to speak) about his sexual orientation. Shot in New York and Seattle in 2011 and 2012, the film trails its dual director and subject as he tells his close friends that he’s gay followed by his immediate family members, all culminating with the big “interested in” switch on Facebook. It also features interviews with author and TV anchor Janet Mock, journalist Zach Stafford, YouTuber Kayla Kearney, developmental psychologist Dr. Ritch Savin-Williams, and sociologist Greg Hinckley.
The picture, which hit iTunes and other video-on-demand services earlier this week after a year of festival screenings, began as a project for one of Peters’ documentary film classes at NYU, but he continued working on it for a long time after graduation. Coming Out is truly years in the making—decades, even, considering all of the childhood home movie footage spliced throughout its 73-minute runtime. That lead-up, including an 8-year-old Alden’s DIY drag homage to the Spice Girls, was just as important to show as the actual coming out announcement itself, Peters told me.