‘That’s who I am’: exploring the narratives of coming out and impact on the mental health for gender, sexual, and romantic minorities and people of colour

This study explores how emerging adult Sexual and Gender Minority People of Colour (SGM-POC) narrate the complexities of identity, community, and well-being through the lens of dwelling-in-between: a condition marked not by resolution, but by oscillation across cultural, relational, and existential tensions. Using an intersectional framework, twelve in-depth interviews were conducted with SGM-POC participants in an urban Western Canadian setting. Narratives were analysed using thematic analysis combined with scoring for redemption and contamination sequences. Findings reveal six core narrative substructures, three redemptive and three contaminated, which informed three overarching themes: (1) Communities as wound and balm, (2) Coming out as ongoing rupture, and (3) Resilience, mental health, and generativity. Rather than depicting coming out as a linear act of disclosure, participants shared stories of partial visibility, fractured belonging, and strategic disclosure shaped by intersecting factors of race, culture, religion, and geography. While 59.4% of narrative substories reflected redemption, nearly half included enhanced agency or communion, highlighting moral and relational growth embedded within adversity. This research provides novel insights into how emerging adult SGM-POC individuals navigate identity, care, and meaning in spaces that often foreclose full recognition.