The question I want to answer is how have attitudes about and surrounding the LGBTQ+ Community changed throughout generations and what caused those changes. What efforts have been made to close the gap between societal norms and coming out? What can we do to prevent progress from taking steps back? What can we do to help progress advance? I want to discuss the anxieties and fears surrounding coming out in different cultures and within the US. As well as ways people can be supportive and compassionate towards the LGBTQ+ Community.
I want to keep finding scholarly articles about generational differences between coming out now versus coming out in the 1950s. These articles will help build a foundation to build my paper on, as well as show how much progress has been made. I hope to find some first-hand accounts of coming out in different parts of the world as well as in America, in order to highlight the differences and similarities between coming out. Though I suspect that I will have difficulties finding first-hand accounts. I think I have found at least background, exhibit, and argument but I still need motive and theory/tool. My most useful sources so far has been the ones that give insight into why changes have happened.
Erin, I like the idea to focus on the moment of coming out. Let me say one thing about the B-TEAM language: a coming out story could function as several different kinds of o source, depending on what you the author want to do with them in your own project! So, eg, to give the two most likely examples, such stories could be exhibits that you are analyzing, looking for similarities, differences, influences, etc. But they could also work as motive sources, to help convince your reader that a certain conversation about identity is important. (And stories themselves could even work as arguments, especially if the authors of the stories make claims about them, draw political implications from them…
Re. finding accounts, I tried this search as a starting point:
https://scholar-google-com.ezproxy.lib.ou.edu/scholar?q=“coming+out”+narrative+global+identity+lgbtq&hl=en&as_sdt=0,37&as_vis=1
Some adjustment will be necessary (“coming out” or “coming-out”?) but I think you’ll be able to use a search like this one as a starting point, and remember that you can harvest keyterms from sources once you’ve found them.