Not QT or "queer" but I do know a lot of people who've come out, and I have a longer-range perspective on the matter, so I'm gonna take the liberty of answering.

Before social media, most people came out to others in their lives in the ways that were most appropriate for them as individuals. For most people, this usually meant just telling others face-to-face - either one-on-one as with friends and co-workers, or a couple of people at a time, as when coming out to parents, grandparents, housemates or couples they were close to.

Sometimes people came out to their friends and loved ones on the telephone, too, especially if they lived at a distance. People who had friends or relatives who were overseas or lived very far away, or otherwise couldn't be seen face-to-face or spoken to on the phone, might write letters to those particular persons as well.

But before social media, coming out did not usually involve making public statements or grand announcements. Nobody hired billboards, put ads in papers, took out radio spots, seized the lectern at church, ran PSAs on TV, held school assemblies, or handed out typewritten press releases to announce they were gay or bi.

As a result, for most people prior to social media, coming out wasn't a single event that occurred at one particular moment in time - it was something they did on a piecemeal basis throughout their lives as they met new people, got to know them and came to care enough about them to want to share personal information with them.

The only exceptions I recall to this were in the case of people who were already were well-known journalists or public figures. They were the only ones who might make a public pronouncement. In 1971, for example, Village Voice writer Jill Johnstone publicly came out in a story whose headline on the paper's front cover read: Lois Lane Is A Lesbian. To this day, I can still see that issue of the VV with that headline as clearly in my mind's eye as if I saw it just last week.

But most people, even celebrities, came out in a quieter, less dramatic way to their family, friends and colleagues on a case-by-case basis. Lesley Gore, for example, came out as a lesbian to her family, close friends and the women she dated when she was in her 20s during the 1960s (she was born in 1942) - and to some other people she knew and met after she got involved in the women's movement later on. But she never made a public statement telling the whole world of her sexual orientation until 2004.

As for written statements: Lots of people used to write down their thoughts about their sexuality in journals, and some would use journal entries and practice letters rehearse or imagine how they'd come out to others. But such statements were usually for private viewing, meant more to help the writers sort out their own feelings and to prepare for the reactions they feared and expected from others. Such writings weren't meant for public consumption, nor were they composed with the idea that the whole world or "the community" would read or hear of them.

Also, it should be pointed out that during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, a lot of gay men who'd come out only to a small number of people ended up being unintentionally outed to the wider world by the very visible illnesses they developed: Kaposi's sarcoma lesions, AIDS-related wasting and PCP. Although not all men who developed AIDS back then were gay, the vast majority were, and any man who became evidently sick with an AIDS-related illness was presumed to be gay.

Finally, it's not just the emergence of social media in the current century that has changed what coming out means and what it involves. Until the "new journalism" of the 1960s and 1970s, it wasn't customary even for well-known writer to put themselves in their non-fiction accounts, or to make their non-fiction largely or even partially about themselves (novels were another matter). And until the 1990s, there was no market for memoirs written and published by ordinary people. Traditionally, unless you were already well accomplished and famous, pretty much nobody wrote autobiographies. On the contrary, writing nonfiction accounts detailing your personal life in the first-person was derided as "confessional" and automatically considered second-rate blather not to be taken seriously.

As a result, prior to the new fad for memoirs that arose in the 1990s, pretty much everyone regardless of sexual orientation was loathe to pick up a pen, or take to the keyboard, for the purpose of divulging details of their private lives. Most people back then were accustomed to keeping their cards closer to their vests - and to allowing others to do the same. I have friends, or had them as they are now deceased, who didn't come out to anyone - not even to themselves - until they were in their 50s and 60s, or even older. One friend didn't come out to anyone until he was 75 - and that was in the 1990s, in a very gay nabe in a gay-friendly USA city too.

BTW, as someone to whom many friends, relative and colleagues have come out as gay, lesbian and bi over the years, I can't say I've ever once been shocked or surprised. In many cases, I'd figured as much long before. That's been the experience of a good number of my gay, lesbian and bi friends too - they often took longer to come to see and understand their sexuality than many others around them did.