Coming Out Of The Mobius Strip

I’ve written here before of the strange attitude many scholars have toward words and concepts, “as though concepts were unproblematically tied to words, and their ramifications were mystically packed into concept and word, so that they need only be unpacked by the intrepid theorist.” It’s so common, in fact, that it might be worth looking at another case.

Historian Michael S. Sherry’s Gay Artists in Modern American Culture: An Imagined Conspiracy (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007) is a very useful book. With the aid of his research assistants, Sherry has unearthed a mass of information about the American fantasy of a homosexual plot to take over America, especially the vital arts and entertainment sectors. Since this theme is nowadays played most audibly on the religious-identified Right, Sherry has done a valuable service in reminding us that it used to be an obsession of secular liberals as well, from philosopher William Barrett to Kennedy court historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., from novelist Philip Roth to theatre and film critic Stanley Kauffmann. The New Left magazine Ramparts published an article by the deliciously-named Gene Marine:

People, I have had it. I really, honestly, truly don’t care what you do with your spare time, but if you are homosexual will you kindly let somebody else play with a piece of the culture for a while?

As usual with such complaints, Marine’s protestations of disinterest ring false, especially given the innuendo (and surely deliberate double-entendre) in the final clause. “Play with a piece of the culture,” eh? Which, erm, piece did you have in mind, Gene?

Gay Artists in Modern American Culture offers valuable historical perspective and is a trove of dish on our queer fore-uncles; see also the stunning photograph of a shirtless and beautiful Alvin Ailey on page 147. But Sherry gets oddly worked up about the term “the closet” as it refers to GLB people’s degree of openness about their lives.

I think George Chauncey established, in his monumental Gay New York, that “coming out of the closet” is a post-Stonewall term. The problematic part of the phrase is “the closet”: gay men did speak before 1969 of “coming out,” campily invoking the emergence of well-born young women from their families into Society (and the marriage market), but not of hiding in the closet; “wearing a mask” seems to have been a more favored metaphor. However, gay people were well aware of gay people who knew they were gay, but still refused for whatever reason to make their debut in Gay Society; I don't know what they called them, and since 1970 or so the favored term has been "closeted." Chauncey conceded that “The fact that gay people in the past did not speak or conceive of themselves as living in a closet does not preclude us from using the term retrospectively as an analytic category, but it does suggest that we need to use it more cautiously and precisely, and to pay attention to the very different terms people used to describe themselves and their social world” (Gay New York, 6).

Sherry won’t even allow that much, though he relies mainly on Chauncey for his position. He spends a couple of pages denouncing retroactive use of “the closet” to refer to gay secrecy before the 1960s:

When the gay magazine One tackled “Coming Out” and asked “Out from where? Out into what?” in 1962, it mentioned no “closet,” instead identifying “coming out” as “our slang phrase for coming from a majority and going to a minority.” One knew the need for “‘wearing the mask’” in a “hostile world” that taught “the evilness of homosexuality.” But “the absolute necessity for secrecy from the majority” was something “you learned quickly” after coming out – a protective device, not a place of hiding. … Made retroactive, the “closet” becomes today’s place to hide a complex past [96]

I think it’s absurd to claim that secrecy was something queers learned only “after coming out” – they’d have learned that from growing up in straight society. In those days, taking off the mask in front of the straight public was almost unthinkable. It was especially unthinkable to straights. Open gayness, as public as heterosexual marriage, requires not only personal decision and courage on the part of those who come out, but a social environment in which the declaration can be heard. It’s often been said that many gay people of a certain age preferred the mask, the “double life,” the feeling of belonging to an elite club with its secret handshakes and passwords. But heterosexuals liked it that way too, and collaborated in keeping the secret – except when they didn’t. It was heterosexual society that decided when homosexuals would wear the mask, and when it would be ripped off. Hence the heterosexual media printed the names, addresses, and often jobs of gay men arrested for “indecency,” which could mean anything from sex in a public toilet to being in a gay bar when the police chose to shake it down. As Sherry points out, the media claimed that queers were “forcing” themselves on the normal public:

Yet the media did most of the “forcing.” Life’s claim was oddly dissonant with how its cameras and reporters pushed into queer settings and peered at what they observed. … It was unclear anyway how people facing intense hostility – stressed and endorsed in most accounts – could do much “forcing,” although queer disguise and conspiracy (“their central office”) were cited. … Much evidence for queer “pressures” was self-referential: observers construed others’ notice of homosexuality as a sign of its swelling presence, and they equated the growth in talk about queers with growth in talk by them. Homosexuality was “more in evidence,” as Time put it, in good part because the media called attention to it – “not to condone it,” Life made clear, “but to cope with it.” If anything, gay activism was as much a response to growing condemnation as its cause [108-9].

The writers mentioned above often felt free to attack homosexual artists by innuendo in reviews of their work, or even by naming names. Philip Roth, for example, ranted in the New York Review of Books about the “ghastly pansy rhetoric” of Edward Albee’s 1964 play Tiny Alice, and snarled, “How long before a play is produced on Broadway in which the homosexual hero is presented as a homosexual, and not disguised as an angst-ridden priest, or an angry Negro, or an aging actress, or worst of all, Everyman?” (Roth, like other writers who complained about gay duplicity, wasn’t interested in seeing a play with an unambiguously gay hero; he just wanted to be able to avoid it in advance.) The convention of the open secret made it possible for Albee’s homosexuality to be well-known in New York theatre circles – he was the partner of the composer William Flanagan -- much as John F. Kennedy’s priapic heterosexuality was known to the Washington press corps at around the same time, while being simultaneously swept under the carpet. “The closet is often seen as a regime of silence,” Sherry complains (107), but so it was in those days -- official public silence, except when it was expedient to sacrifice some hapless queer to scandal.

Of course nowadays “coming out” is confusingly ambiguous, denoting a spectrum from “coming out to oneself” to coming out in a gay social milieu to coming out to straight friends, family, world. Just about all of the celebrity queers – Rock Hudson, Melissa Etheridge, k.d. lang, Ian McKellen, Rosie O’Donnell, Neil Patrick Harris, Ellen DeGeneres and the rest -- known to the straight public were “out” in gay life before they “came out” in The Advocate or People. Indeed, they depended on the straight media to cover for them. (I think it was DeGeneres who was observed kissing another woman in a lesbian bar while she was still officially “wearing the mask.”)

Sherry says that “queerness involved a sense of being cast out of society, not trapped in something” (97). Granted, the spatial metaphor of the closet has its limitations, but then so does the metaphor of wearing a mask. A mask that simply covers my face, like the Lone Ranger’s, is meant to hide my identity altogether. (I’ll try to address the complexities of “identity” some other time.) A Nixon mask also hides my identity, but no one is going to think I’m actually Nixon; the falseness of the mask is obvious. Gay people’s forced secrecy – and forced revelations, when it comes to that -- are another matter.

You’d hardly guess from Sherry’s remarks that serious analysis of “the closet” doesn’t necessarily depend on the spatial metaphor. David Halperin’s excellent discussion in Saint Foucault (Oxford University Press, 1995), for example:

[Eve Kosofsky] Sedgwick has shown that the closet is an impossibly contradictory place: you can’t be in it, and you can’t be out of it. You can’t be in it because – so long as you are in the closet – you can never be certain of the extent to which you have actually succeeded in keeping your homosexuality secret; after all, one effect of being in the closet is that you are precluded from knowing whether people are treating you as straight because you have managed to fool them and they do not suspect you of being gay, or whether they are treating you as straight because they are playing along with you and enjoying the epistemological privilege that your ignorance of their knowledge affords them. But if you can never be in the closet, you can’t ever be out of it either, because those who have once enjoyed the epistemological privilege constituted by their knowledge of your ignorance of their knowledge typically refuse to give up that privilege, and insist on constructing your sexuality as a secret to which they have special access, a secret which always gives itself away to their superior and knowing gaze. By that means they contrive to consolidate their claim to a superior knowingness about sexual matters, a knowingness that is not only distinct from knowledge but is actually opposed to it, is actually a form of ignorance, insofar as it conceals from the knowing the political nature of their own considerable stakes in preserving the epistemology of the closet as well as in maintaining the corresponding and exactly opposite epistemological construction of heterosexuality as both an obvious fact that can be universally known without “flaunting itself” and a form of personal life that can remain protectively private without constituting a secret truth [Saint Foucault, 34-5].

Halperin begins by speaking of the closet as a place to be in or out of, but then he moves on to discuss the contradictions of secrecy itself. He could as easily have used the metaphor of the mask; what matters is not the word but the analysis. Sherry’s discussion would have been much richer if he hadn’t taken “the closet” so literally, and had explored with more care the implications of the simultaneous visibility and invisibility of the homosexuality of his gay subjects, as Halperin does here.

Too many scholarly writers I’ve read waste energy and print trying to unpack the literal sense of their concepts, metaphors, and images, defining them with maniacal strictness and then declaring triumphantly that the terms won’t stretch to fit the phenomena. Like, duh! No metaphor – not the closet, not the mask, not the double life – is going to have a perfect one-to-one correspondence with lived experience. It’s especially ironic to see social constructionists – or at least people who officially subscribe to social constructionism – acting as though words had some inner essence that can be revealed if you just peel away the outer layers. But words are like an artichoke: keep peeling away the leaves, and you find there’s nothing left.



P.S. I've been productive the past couple of weeks thanks to semester break. I'm back to the grind starting tomorrow, but I'll try to post at least twice a week, anyway. The ClustrMap showed me I've been getting more visitors than I thought, so I'll try to make it worthwhile to keep coming back for more.

Coming Out Of The Mobius Strip

I’ve written here before of the strange attitude many scholars have toward words and concepts, “as though concepts were unproblematically tied to words, and their ramifications were mystically packed into concept and word, so that they need only be unpacked by the intrepid theorist.” It’s so common, in fact, that it might be worth looking at another case.

Historian Michael S. Sherry’s Gay Artists in Modern American Culture: An Imagined Conspiracy (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007) is a very useful book. With the aid of his research assistants, Sherry has unearthed a mass of information about the American fantasy of a homosexual plot to take over America, especially the vital arts and entertainment sectors. Since this theme is nowadays played most audibly on the religious-identified Right, Sherry has done a valuable service in reminding us that it used to be an obsession of secular liberals as well, from philosopher William Barrett to Kennedy court historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., from novelist Philip Roth to theatre and film critic Stanley Kauffmann. The New Left magazine Ramparts published an article by the deliciously-named Gene Marine:

People, I have had it. I really, honestly, truly don’t care what you do with your spare time, but if you are homosexual will you kindly let somebody else play with a piece of the culture for a while?

As usual with such complaints, Marine’s protestations of disinterest ring false, especially given the innuendo (and surely deliberate double-entendre) in the final clause. “Play with a piece of the culture,” eh? Which, erm, piece did you have in mind, Gene?

Gay Artists in Modern American Culture offers valuable historical perspective and is a trove of dish on our queer fore-uncles; see also the stunning photograph of a shirtless and beautiful Alvin Ailey on page 147. But Sherry gets oddly worked up about the term “the closet” as it refers to GLB people’s degree of openness about their lives.

I think George Chauncey established, in his monumental Gay New York, that “coming out of the closet” is a post-Stonewall term. The problematic part of the phrase is “the closet”: gay men did speak before 1969 of “coming out,” campily invoking the emergence of well-born young women from their families into Society (and the marriage market), but not of hiding in the closet; “wearing a mask” seems to have been a more favored metaphor. However, gay people were well aware of gay people who knew they were gay, but still refused for whatever reason to make their debut in Gay Society; I don't know what they called them, and since 1970 or so the favored term has been "closeted." Chauncey conceded that “The fact that gay people in the past did not speak or conceive of themselves as living in a closet does not preclude us from using the term retrospectively as an analytic category, but it does suggest that we need to use it more cautiously and precisely, and to pay attention to the very different terms people used to describe themselves and their social world” (Gay New York, 6).

Sherry won’t even allow that much, though he relies mainly on Chauncey for his position. He spends a couple of pages denouncing retroactive use of “the closet” to refer to gay secrecy before the 1960s:

When the gay magazine One tackled “Coming Out” and asked “Out from where? Out into what?” in 1962, it mentioned no “closet,” instead identifying “coming out” as “our slang phrase for coming from a majority and going to a minority.” One knew the need for “‘wearing the mask’” in a “hostile world” that taught “the evilness of homosexuality.” But “the absolute necessity for secrecy from the majority” was something “you learned quickly” after coming out – a protective device, not a place of hiding. … Made retroactive, the “closet” becomes today’s place to hide a complex past [96]

I think it’s absurd to claim that secrecy was something queers learned only “after coming out” – they’d have learned that from growing up in straight society. In those days, taking off the mask in front of the straight public was almost unthinkable. It was especially unthinkable to straights. Open gayness, as public as heterosexual marriage, requires not only personal decision and courage on the part of those who come out, but a social environment in which the declaration can be heard. It’s often been said that many gay people of a certain age preferred the mask, the “double life,” the feeling of belonging to an elite club with its secret handshakes and passwords. But heterosexuals liked it that way too, and collaborated in keeping the secret – except when they didn’t. It was heterosexual society that decided when homosexuals would wear the mask, and when it would be ripped off. Hence the heterosexual media printed the names, addresses, and often jobs of gay men arrested for “indecency,” which could mean anything from sex in a public toilet to being in a gay bar when the police chose to shake it down. As Sherry points out, the media claimed that queers were “forcing” themselves on the normal public:

Yet the media did most of the “forcing.” Life’s claim was oddly dissonant with how its cameras and reporters pushed into queer settings and peered at what they observed. … It was unclear anyway how people facing intense hostility – stressed and endorsed in most accounts – could do much “forcing,” although queer disguise and conspiracy (“their central office”) were cited. … Much evidence for queer “pressures” was self-referential: observers construed others’ notice of homosexuality as a sign of its swelling presence, and they equated the growth in talk about queers with growth in talk by them. Homosexuality was “more in evidence,” as Time put it, in good part because the media called attention to it – “not to condone it,” Life made clear, “but to cope with it.” If anything, gay activism was as much a response to growing condemnation as its cause [108-9].

The writers mentioned above often felt free to attack homosexual artists by innuendo in reviews of their work, or even by naming names. Philip Roth, for example, ranted in the New York Review of Books about the “ghastly pansy rhetoric” of Edward Albee’s 1964 play Tiny Alice, and snarled, “How long before a play is produced on Broadway in which the homosexual hero is presented as a homosexual, and not disguised as an angst-ridden priest, or an angry Negro, or an aging actress, or worst of all, Everyman?” (Roth, like other writers who complained about gay duplicity, wasn’t interested in seeing a play with an unambiguously gay hero; he just wanted to be able to avoid it in advance.) The convention of the open secret made it possible for Albee’s homosexuality to be well-known in New York theatre circles – he was the partner of the composer William Flanagan -- much as John F. Kennedy’s priapic heterosexuality was known to the Washington press corps at around the same time, while being simultaneously swept under the carpet. “The closet is often seen as a regime of silence,” Sherry complains (107), but so it was in those days -- official public silence, except when it was expedient to sacrifice some hapless queer to scandal.

Of course nowadays “coming out” is confusingly ambiguous, denoting a spectrum from “coming out to oneself” to coming out in a gay social milieu to coming out to straight friends, family, world. Just about all of the celebrity queers – Rock Hudson, Melissa Etheridge, k.d. lang, Ian McKellen, Rosie O’Donnell, Neil Patrick Harris, Ellen DeGeneres and the rest -- known to the straight public were “out” in gay life before they “came out” in The Advocate or People. Indeed, they depended on the straight media to cover for them. (I think it was DeGeneres who was observed kissing another woman in a lesbian bar while she was still officially “wearing the mask.”)

Sherry says that “queerness involved a sense of being cast out of society, not trapped in something” (97). Granted, the spatial metaphor of the closet has its limitations, but then so does the metaphor of wearing a mask. A mask that simply covers my face, like the Lone Ranger’s, is meant to hide my identity altogether. (I’ll try to address the complexities of “identity” some other time.) A Nixon mask also hides my identity, but no one is going to think I’m actually Nixon; the falseness of the mask is obvious. Gay people’s forced secrecy – and forced revelations, when it comes to that -- are another matter.

You’d hardly guess from Sherry’s remarks that serious analysis of “the closet” doesn’t necessarily depend on the spatial metaphor. David Halperin’s excellent discussion in Saint Foucault (Oxford University Press, 1995), for example:

[Eve Kosofsky] Sedgwick has shown that the closet is an impossibly contradictory place: you can’t be in it, and you can’t be out of it. You can’t be in it because – so long as you are in the closet – you can never be certain of the extent to which you have actually succeeded in keeping your homosexuality secret; after all, one effect of being in the closet is that you are precluded from knowing whether people are treating you as straight because you have managed to fool them and they do not suspect you of being gay, or whether they are treating you as straight because they are playing along with you and enjoying the epistemological privilege that your ignorance of their knowledge affords them. But if you can never be in the closet, you can’t ever be out of it either, because those who have once enjoyed the epistemological privilege constituted by their knowledge of your ignorance of their knowledge typically refuse to give up that privilege, and insist on constructing your sexuality as a secret to which they have special access, a secret which always gives itself away to their superior and knowing gaze. By that means they contrive to consolidate their claim to a superior knowingness about sexual matters, a knowingness that is not only distinct from knowledge but is actually opposed to it, is actually a form of ignorance, insofar as it conceals from the knowing the political nature of their own considerable stakes in preserving the epistemology of the closet as well as in maintaining the corresponding and exactly opposite epistemological construction of heterosexuality as both an obvious fact that can be universally known without “flaunting itself” and a form of personal life that can remain protectively private without constituting a secret truth [Saint Foucault, 34-5].

Halperin begins by speaking of the closet as a place to be in or out of, but then he moves on to discuss the contradictions of secrecy itself. He could as easily have used the metaphor of the mask; what matters is not the word but the analysis. Sherry’s discussion would have been much richer if he hadn’t taken “the closet” so literally, and had explored with more care the implications of the simultaneous visibility and invisibility of the homosexuality of his gay subjects, as Halperin does here.

Too many scholarly writers I’ve read waste energy and print trying to unpack the literal sense of their concepts, metaphors, and images, defining them with maniacal strictness and then declaring triumphantly that the terms won’t stretch to fit the phenomena. Like, duh! No metaphor – not the closet, not the mask, not the double life – is going to have a perfect one-to-one correspondence with lived experience. It’s especially ironic to see social constructionists – or at least people who officially subscribe to social constructionism – acting as though words had some inner essence that can be revealed if you just peel away the outer layers. But words are like an artichoke: keep peeling away the leaves, and you find there’s nothing left.



P.S. I've been productive the past couple of weeks thanks to semester break. I'm back to the grind starting tomorrow, but I'll try to post at least twice a week, anyway. The ClustrMap showed me I've been getting more visitors than I thought, so I'll try to make it worthwhile to keep coming back for more.

Locking the Closet Door From Both Sides

Back in 1971, when I first began telling my straight friends that I was gay, I was prepared to deal with either hostility or acceptance from them. So I was surprised when my friends responded, first, by not believing me, and second, by explaining it away as something I was just saying to be different. Of course the years of hidden longings and crushes I’d struggled through were invisible to them. (I wasn’t sexually precocious, and didn’t even kiss another person of either sex until months after I came out, at the age of twenty. It was all in my head, but then, isn’t everything?) My friends’ reaction was partly reasonable, then, but it was also intended to deny what I was telling them, to deny the existence of real gay people. There was a bit of a Mom’s egotism in it too: You’re just doing this to drive me crazy.

I think that straight people have improved a little during the succeeding decades, and have begun to learn that we are gay for our own sake, not to annoy them; but the idea that we have inner lives independent of the Mysterious Twilight World Between the Sexes of Heterosexuality is still threatening to many. I still hear straights claiming that now it is “fashionable” to be gay; such claims have been made for at least a century. I suppose there must be a few scattered people who really do try out homosexuality because they think their gay friends are cool, but once again what’s going is an attempt to deny other people’s inner lives. If I didn’t know about it before, it wasn’t happening. They’re just pretending to be gay; they’re just doing it to annoy me. And why not, after all – it can be profoundly disturbing to consider what might be going on in the heads of all those people around you: what desires, what fantasies, what secret practices they harbor.

This nervousness could be seen in many of the reactions to the recent revelation by his creatrix that Albus Dumbledore, late headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, was gay. Many people, not just straight ones, complained that Rowling was cheating: if she meant Dumbledore to be gay, she should have said so in the books! Not that this would have made them less indignant. If Rowling had said so in the books, the fuss would have begun sooner. (Why did she have to tell us? She’s obsessive. She’s just trying to drive us crazy.) I saw enough fury in fan discussions years ago, when someone would raise the possibility that someone in the Potter universe might turn out to be gay. These are children’s books! people would fume. Harry’s just a child! Even Harry’s burgeoning heterosexuality made some of them queasy, in fact. They pretended that they were only concerned about The Children who would read the books, but I feel sure that they were angry on their own account, as adults: they wanted to escape into a presexual universe, without skin or pumping blood vessels or bodily fluids. Rowling’s very tame accounts of adolescent flirtations and crushes still threatened to burst the dikes and inundate their Nether-Netherlands with passion.

I’ve come to realize that heterosexuality makes many heterosexuals uncomfortable. They’re stuck with it, though, because of the need to make babies. (Thanks to artificial insemination, however, heterosex is no longer really necessary.) Homosexuality doesn’t have that excuse, and so it will always be embattled. Straights can project their hang-ups onto gays: we are all about sex, they are all about Love. Just ignore the man and woman screwing behind the curtain.

I often encounter phrases like “kicking in the closet doors” in connection with the post-Stonewall gay movement of the 70s. I’ve probably used such language myself. Surely, we believed, those closet doors would stay down once we’d kicked them in. The visibility we achieved would remain, and all we had to do was to extend it. But at some point I noticed that there was a very strong resistance to gay (and lesbian and bisexual) visibility. Straights who knew me would conveniently forget that I was gay. They wouldn’t want to mention that I was gay to other people, because it was not something one should gossip about. On one level, this discretion might be seen as commendable, since so many gay people do see their homosexuality as a dirty secret. But when it’s applied to openly gay people, it constitutes a quiet, determined attempt to push them back into the closet. Looking back, I found that those closet doors we’d kicked in had been quietly, firmly put back on their hinges and locked once more.

I’m not saying, and I don’t believe, that people who do this are evil. They’re just uncomfortable, and such avoidance is a common way of dealing with discomfort. Gay people are still anomalous and unpopular in this country. (Which is why I laugh bitterly when I talk to or read foreigners who talk as though we are totally accepted in America.) But what these people are doing is harmful. They don’t (consciously) want to eliminate gay people, not necessarily; but life would be so much simpler if we’d just … go away. Be gay somewhere else, okay?

Another place this resistance can be seen is academic discussion of homosexuality, especially under the influence of Queer theory. I think Queer theory offers a lot of important ideas and insights, but it is often used to make us … go away. The mantra that homosexuality is a modern concept, and that famous people of the past weren’t “gay as we know it today” – whatever that means; it’s seldom explained – is true enough; but too often it’s used to justify ignoring same-sex love and passion. It wasn’t homosexual, it was “homoerotic,” or better, “homosocial.” After all, Dumbledore was very old, and they didn’t have “the homosexual” when he was growing up. He was only infatuated with Grindelwald, they never did anything, so it was really just a normal schoolboy crush. And (so far at least) Rowling hasn’t mentioned any other, later loves of his. As long as she doesn’t tell us that he went to Judy’s Carnegie Hall concert, or that he collected Callas opera recordings, or that he was really the older guy with the wand who picked up Michael Tolliver at the tubs in Tales of the City – well, then, we can just define him out of existence. He wasn’t gay, in the modern sense, so we’ll just pretend he was straight. It would be narrow-minded to force Dumbledore into our modern categories. Delitrius. Evanesco. Obliviate.

Much has been made, by some gay writers, of the fact that the term “closet” doesn’t seem to have been used in gay and proto-gay society before the 1950s or so. But as Michel Foucault wrote on the first page of the second volume of his History of Sexuality:

The term [“sexuality”] itself did not appear until the beginning of the nineteenth century, a fact that should be neither underestimated nor overinterpreted. It does point to something other than a simple recasting of vocabulary, but obviously it does not mark the sudden emergence of that to which “sexuality” refers.

"Obviously" is funny here, since according to many people (including Foucault himself at times) the appearance of the word “homosexual” did “mark the sudden emergence of that to which [‘homosexual’] refers.” The same consideration applies to “closet”: we can see enforced secrecy affecting the lives of those who loved their own sex for centuries in the past, whether it was called “the closet” or not.

The closet door was locked from both sides. During the “outing” controversies of the early 1990s, gay writers pointed out that the same straight media which denounced outing as an awful violation of privacy, published the names and addresses of people arrested in gay bar raids. Yes, being arrested puts one on public record, but the costs to the ordinary citizens who were outed by the the police and the New York Times were very different than the costs to the celebrities outed by Queer Nation. The former often lost jobs, heterosexual spouses, children, and sometimes their lives. The latter were already out in most respects, often with partners of many years’ standing, and were known to the straight media, and their homosexuality was an open secret; none of them seem to have suffered from the controversy, and most later came out.

As Michael Bronski wrote, “A person’s homosexuality is often mentioned by the mainstream press when it wants to discredit a public figure.” Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, and others had been smeared by innuendo and sometimes even outed in heterosexual media for decades. (Right now I’m reading Michael Sherry’s Gay Artists in Modern American Culture: An Imagined Conspiracy [North Carolina, 2007], which gives plenty of examples, such as Philip Roth’s 1965 attack on Edward Albee in the New York Review of Books.) Contrariwise, even a fairly open homosexual like W. H. Auden would be ‘inned’: poet and anthologist Louis Untermeyer, in a biographical essay for his collection Modern American Poetry, mentioned Auden’s marriage of convenience to Erika Mann (which took place solely to get Mann out of Nazi Germany) but not his decades-long partnership with Chester Kallmann. Joan Acocella’s raving “defense” of Willa Cather, published in 2000, is a reminder that this strategy is still with us. So is the more recent reaction to the “outing” of Albus Dumbledore – a fictional character! -- which made it clear that the “privacy” being violated was not Dumbledore’s but that of the homophobes, both gay and straight, who didn’t want to know.

Locking the Closet Door From Both Sides

Back in 1971, when I first began telling my straight friends that I was gay, I was prepared to deal with either hostility or acceptance from them. So I was surprised when my friends responded, first, by not believing me, and second, by explaining it away as something I was just saying to be different. Of course the years of hidden longings and crushes I’d struggled through were invisible to them. (I wasn’t sexually precocious, and didn’t even kiss another person of either sex until months after I came out, at the age of twenty. It was all in my head, but then, isn’t everything?) My friends’ reaction was partly reasonable, then, but it was also intended to deny what I was telling them, to deny the existence of real gay people. There was a bit of a Mom’s egotism in it too: You’re just doing this to drive me crazy.

I think that straight people have improved a little during the succeeding decades, and have begun to learn that we are gay for our own sake, not to annoy them; but the idea that we have inner lives independent of the Mysterious Twilight World Between the Sexes of Heterosexuality is still threatening to many. I still hear straights claiming that now it is “fashionable” to be gay; such claims have been made for at least a century. I suppose there must be a few scattered people who really do try out homosexuality because they think their gay friends are cool, but once again what’s going is an attempt to deny other people’s inner lives. If I didn’t know about it before, it wasn’t happening. They’re just pretending to be gay; they’re just doing it to annoy me. And why not, after all – it can be profoundly disturbing to consider what might be going on in the heads of all those people around you: what desires, what fantasies, what secret practices they harbor.

This nervousness could be seen in many of the reactions to the recent revelation by his creatrix that Albus Dumbledore, late headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, was gay. Many people, not just straight ones, complained that Rowling was cheating: if she meant Dumbledore to be gay, she should have said so in the books! Not that this would have made them less indignant. If Rowling had said so in the books, the fuss would have begun sooner. (Why did she have to tell us? She’s obsessive. She’s just trying to drive us crazy.) I saw enough fury in fan discussions years ago, when someone would raise the possibility that someone in the Potter universe might turn out to be gay. These are children’s books! people would fume. Harry’s just a child! Even Harry’s burgeoning heterosexuality made some of them queasy, in fact. They pretended that they were only concerned about The Children who would read the books, but I feel sure that they were angry on their own account, as adults: they wanted to escape into a presexual universe, without skin or pumping blood vessels or bodily fluids. Rowling’s very tame accounts of adolescent flirtations and crushes still threatened to burst the dikes and inundate their Nether-Netherlands with passion.

I’ve come to realize that heterosexuality makes many heterosexuals uncomfortable. They’re stuck with it, though, because of the need to make babies. (Thanks to artificial insemination, however, heterosex is no longer really necessary.) Homosexuality doesn’t have that excuse, and so it will always be embattled. Straights can project their hang-ups onto gays: we are all about sex, they are all about Love. Just ignore the man and woman screwing behind the curtain.

I often encounter phrases like “kicking in the closet doors” in connection with the post-Stonewall gay movement of the 70s. I’ve probably used such language myself. Surely, we believed, those closet doors would stay down once we’d kicked them in. The visibility we achieved would remain, and all we had to do was to extend it. But at some point I noticed that there was a very strong resistance to gay (and lesbian and bisexual) visibility. Straights who knew me would conveniently forget that I was gay. They wouldn’t want to mention that I was gay to other people, because it was not something one should gossip about. On one level, this discretion might be seen as commendable, since so many gay people do see their homosexuality as a dirty secret. But when it’s applied to openly gay people, it constitutes a quiet, determined attempt to push them back into the closet. Looking back, I found that those closet doors we’d kicked in had been quietly, firmly put back on their hinges and locked once more.

I’m not saying, and I don’t believe, that people who do this are evil. They’re just uncomfortable, and such avoidance is a common way of dealing with discomfort. Gay people are still anomalous and unpopular in this country. (Which is why I laugh bitterly when I talk to or read foreigners who talk as though we are totally accepted in America.) But what these people are doing is harmful. They don’t (consciously) want to eliminate gay people, not necessarily; but life would be so much simpler if we’d just … go away. Be gay somewhere else, okay?

Another place this resistance can be seen is academic discussion of homosexuality, especially under the influence of Queer theory. I think Queer theory offers a lot of important ideas and insights, but it is often used to make us … go away. The mantra that homosexuality is a modern concept, and that famous people of the past weren’t “gay as we know it today” – whatever that means; it’s seldom explained – is true enough; but too often it’s used to justify ignoring same-sex love and passion. It wasn’t homosexual, it was “homoerotic,” or better, “homosocial.” After all, Dumbledore was very old, and they didn’t have “the homosexual” when he was growing up. He was only infatuated with Grindelwald, they never did anything, so it was really just a normal schoolboy crush. And (so far at least) Rowling hasn’t mentioned any other, later loves of his. As long as she doesn’t tell us that he went to Judy’s Carnegie Hall concert, or that he collected Callas opera recordings, or that he was really the older guy with the wand who picked up Michael Tolliver at the tubs in Tales of the City – well, then, we can just define him out of existence. He wasn’t gay, in the modern sense, so we’ll just pretend he was straight. It would be narrow-minded to force Dumbledore into our modern categories. Delitrius. Evanesco. Obliviate.

Much has been made, by some gay writers, of the fact that the term “closet” doesn’t seem to have been used in gay and proto-gay society before the 1950s or so. But as Michel Foucault wrote on the first page of the second volume of his History of Sexuality:

The term [“sexuality”] itself did not appear until the beginning of the nineteenth century, a fact that should be neither underestimated nor overinterpreted. It does point to something other than a simple recasting of vocabulary, but obviously it does not mark the sudden emergence of that to which “sexuality” refers.

"Obviously" is funny here, since according to many people (including Foucault himself at times) the appearance of the word “homosexual” did “mark the sudden emergence of that to which [‘homosexual’] refers.” The same consideration applies to “closet”: we can see enforced secrecy affecting the lives of those who loved their own sex for centuries in the past, whether it was called “the closet” or not.

The closet door was locked from both sides. During the “outing” controversies of the early 1990s, gay writers pointed out that the same straight media which denounced outing as an awful violation of privacy, published the names and addresses of people arrested in gay bar raids. Yes, being arrested puts one on public record, but the costs to the ordinary citizens who were outed by the the police and the New York Times were very different than the costs to the celebrities outed by Queer Nation. The former often lost jobs, heterosexual spouses, children, and sometimes their lives. The latter were already out in most respects, often with partners of many years’ standing, and were known to the straight media, and their homosexuality was an open secret; none of them seem to have suffered from the controversy, and most later came out.

As Michael Bronski wrote, “A person’s homosexuality is often mentioned by the mainstream press when it wants to discredit a public figure.” Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, and others had been smeared by innuendo and sometimes even outed in heterosexual media for decades. (Right now I’m reading Michael Sherry’s Gay Artists in Modern American Culture: An Imagined Conspiracy [North Carolina, 2007], which gives plenty of examples, such as Philip Roth’s 1965 attack on Edward Albee in the New York Review of Books.) Contrariwise, even a fairly open homosexual like W. H. Auden would be ‘inned’: poet and anthologist Louis Untermeyer, in a biographical essay for his collection Modern American Poetry, mentioned Auden’s marriage of convenience to Erika Mann (which took place solely to get Mann out of Nazi Germany) but not his decades-long partnership with Chester Kallmann. Joan Acocella’s raving “defense” of Willa Cather, published in 2000, is a reminder that this strategy is still with us. So is the more recent reaction to the “outing” of Albus Dumbledore – a fictional character! -- which made it clear that the “privacy” being violated was not Dumbledore’s but that of the homophobes, both gay and straight, who didn’t want to know.