Politics & Power Quote by Jane Rule

Rule’s phrasing is deliberately wary: “offered more and more” makes liberation sound like a sales pitch, not a strategy. She’s naming a cultural shift in which visibility gets packaged as both cure and credential, as if the private act of disclosure can stand in for the public work of dismantling power. “All the way out” isn’t just emphasis; it’s an indictment of escalation. Once “coming out” becomes the premier political demand, anything less than total transparency starts to read as complicity, cowardice, or bad politics.

The subtext is a critique of a movement tempted by legibility. Coming out is narratively clean: it produces a before-and-after story, a recognizable protagonist, an uplift arc that media and institutions can applaud. It also creates metrics: who is out, how out, where out. Rule is alert to the way those metrics can flatten oppression into a problem of disclosure rather than a structure enforced by laws, employers, landlords, families, and police. Visibility can win sympathy, but it also concentrates risk on individuals, especially those without money, whiteness, citizenship, or conventional respectability to buffer the fallout.

Context matters: Rule wrote across decades when lesbian and gay politics increasingly centered public declaration as both moral imperative and organizing tool. Her sentence pushes back against the idea that the closet is the main enemy, instead hinting that the bigger danger is mistaking personal revelation for collective change. The line lands because it’s not anti-coming-out; it’s anti-simplification. It asks who benefits when liberation is reduced to a single, photogenic act.