By Jennifer Vanasco

“Are you married?” my Guatemalan cab driver asked.

Are you married? I’m always asked that question. Any woman traveling alone is always asked that question, by cab drivers, hotel staff, tour guides, shop keepers, random people we meet on the street.

I’m not married. I’m single. And I say so, sometimes. But being not married and female and traveling alone often leads to another slew of questions, usually beginning with “Why not?” and ending with “Will you go out with me?”

My straight female friends are asked these questions, too; most of them fend them off quickly by simply saying that yes, they are married, and their husband is at home. Unless the guy is cute, of course, and they’re interested.

But for lesbians, it’s trickier. Often I say, “I’m single and I’m gay.” After all, the whole gay and lesbian marketing machine is geared toward the idea of coming out. We are supposed to be out everywhere, to everyone, all the time.

“Are you married?” my cab driver asked. And I thought about what I should answer.

Coming out, of course, is mostly good—for our civil rights movement and for ourselves. Letting ourselves be counted increases our political, consumer and personal power. Survey after survey has shown that tolerance goes up when people know a gay person in their family, office or circle of friends.

Now that we’re visible, politicians and corporations go out of their way to court us.

And because our individual visibility equals collective influence, we are constantly being reminded, cajoled and lectured to Come Out, Come Out, Wherever We Are.

We even have a National Coming Out Day in October, to reinforce the idea that coming out is a good thing. HRC started advertising their “Coming Out Day Kits” this week, complete with resource guides, posters, balloons and stickers. Party hats are optional.

Time was, I didn’t need a coming out poster—I myself was the coming out poster child. I diligently asserted my lesbianness anytime it seemed slightly relevant, no matter where I was: the office, a job interview, Christmas dinner at the home of an unsuspecting relative and once, famously, a literal dark alley where I was approached by a hulking man who asked if the rainbow sticker on the back of my car meant I was a dyke.

Amazingly, luckily, I never had a bad experience (not even in the alley), once the hurdle of close friends and family was overcome about 15 years ago. My coming out announcement was always met with warmth, acceptance, tolerance or indifference.

Then about five years ago I started to rethink. I received a letter from a teenager in Oklahoma. He had been reading my column since he was 12; he felt like he knew me, he said, and now at 15 he felt like I was the only gay adult he could turn to.

His parents were evangelical; he was certain they would either kick him out or send him to ex-gay therapy if they learned he was gay. But I had exhorted my readers over and over again to come out and he had listened, and he was tired of living a lie.

So he asked me the question he felt like he couldn’t ask anyone else: Should he come out to them?

And I said no.

Wait, I told him. You say you’re going to college—wait until you’re safe somewhere, until you can afford to take care of yourself, and then, when you have a social network of other gay people and feel financially secure, then you can come out.

I don’t know what he decided to do. I didn’t hear from him again.

And maybe I failed him, that young man. Maybe what he needed to hear was that he had my tacit support. Maybe his parents were different from what he and I feared; maybe they would have accepted him happily and he could start living his life with the openness he craved.

But maybe not.

And that “maybe not” is what I’ve started to listen to when it comes to my own perpetual coming out.

Maybe not everywhere or everyone or anytime is safe.

Maybe I should be more circumspect about who I declare my lesbianism to.

After all, I live a fairly open lesbian life in general—do I always need to be lesbian in the specific, even when I’m in a situation that’s not completely comfortable?

During my latest travels, I decided the answer to that question was no. I decided, for those two weeks, that I wouldn’t worry about being the American lesbian representative in Guatemala. I wouldn’t spend my vacation trying to defend and make a case for my people.

So I didn’t come out to the nice American family I had dinner with near the ruins of Tikal. And I didn’t come out to the young Mayan girl who I spoke with for an hour about our families.

And I didn’t come out to my friendly cab driver. When he asked, “Are you married?” I simply said, “No.”

Jennifer Vanasco is an award-winning, nationally syndicated columnist based in New York. Email her at jennifer.vanasco@gmail.com; read her occasional blog and column archive at jennifervanasco.com.