Double Trouble

When I open Instagram, I’m often presented with an ad for the streaming service Mubi. Over a curated selection of queer films, a bolded line reads, “This is not a coming out story.” The implication seems to be that our community, that nebulous alphabet of sexual identities, has transcended the need for stories of our emergence from the closet. To continue revisiting these tropes, the sponsored post suggests, dooms us to remain in a perpetual creative — and political — adolescence. However, as long as we live in a time and place in which heterosexuality remains compulsory, to paraphrase Adrienne Rich, coming out stories will matter.

The closet remains a spectral presence in Eddy Boudel Tan’s The Tiger and the Cosmonaut. When we meet the narrator, Casper Han, he’s already in his mid-thirties. He has moved away from his isolated hometown of Wilhelm, British Columbia, to Vancouver — and from his shame-filled adolescence into an ostensibly happy adulthood. When...