The Sexual Orientation That Won't Shut Up

Heterosexuals just can't seem to shut up about their sexual orientation. A few weeks ago, the straight media were obsessed with the sexual relationship between an unemployed English girl and a soldier from a welfare family; now they are talking about the end of a sexual relationship between a Republican actor and his wife, and the lust child produced by the actor's inability to restrain his animal impulses. Will the revelation of his heterosexuality hurt his movie career? MTV asks. Not to mention the wealthy, powerful man awaiting trial on Riker's Island for forcing himself on a hotel maid. (Seriously: this morning at the store I saw two female anchors on CNN expressing their shock at the fact that an attempted rapist was being held without bail after he was arrested while trying to flee the country: "He's one of the most powerful men in the world!" they spluttered. "Can they do that to him?")

But all this is invisible, not just to heterosexuals but to many gay people. So when another CNN anchor, Don Lemon, publicly acknowledges his homosexuality, it's news even though a celebrity's coming out is not exactly a novelty anymore. Part of this is the corporate media's short-term memory, but part of it is the ongoing struggle by heterosexual society to push us back into silence and invisibility: Oh, you are not! Shut up! Lalalalala I can't hear you! Why do you have to tell us you're gay -- you don't see heterosexuals going around saying "Hi, I'm straight!" (Sure you don't. What you see is incessant, obsessive babble about their sex lives, which are heterosexual because sex is assumed to be heterosexual.)

So coming out is always a beginning, not an ending. After you've broken the ice, the water starts to freeze over and you have to keep chipping, chipping, chipping away at it. Ideally, it's nice to be able to do it casually, as heterosexuals do, by speaking about your relationships and interactions: not "I'm gay" so much as "My boyfriend and I ..." Except for speaking on panels, I think most of my comings-out to straight friends, relatives, acquaintances, and coworkers have been that kind. In Lemon's case it appears to be more or less the same: he'd agreed to write a book about the path to success, which turned into a memoir, and that meant talking about his love life among other things. To his credit, he chose to tell the truth. Marketing the book meant that his sexual orientation would be a hook, but that's not his fault, it's the fault of a heterosexual society that still hasn't learned that not everyone is heterosexual, and insists on reacting to every coming-out as if it were the first in history.

Lemon said some good things in this interview with the annoyingly flirtatious heterosexual Joy Behar:



For example, Behar says "There's a lot of homophobes out there, you know..." and Lemon comes right back with "Who're you telling?" I've lost count of the heterosexuals who've warned me and other gay people that not everyone approves of our Lifestyle, as though this was news to me. He also handles well Behar's question of how this revelation will affect his "objectivity," and her prurient question about the Down Low; he even pointed out that the Down Low (aka The Closet) is a phenomenon in other communities than the African-American: there are plenty of white men on the Down Low, but in my culture we call it The Closet.

He falls down in other areas, as when he talks about the perception that a gay man is "effeminate" or "weak," and the "I was born gay, just like I was born black." More embarrassing is his belief that the suicide of Tyler Clementi (the Rutgers freshman who jumped off the George Washington Bridge last fall after a fellow student put a sex tape featuring him and another man on the Internet) could have been prevented if more prominent people would come out. This is a little kid's fantasy: If I were there, I could have saved him. Gay visibility can't fix all our problems. Heterosexuals torment each other too, and bullying is not limited to the persecution of gay or gender-nonconformist kids. And black people have always been visible, and no one doubted that they were born that way, but that never inhibited racists in the slightest. But part of the problem is the murky zone of corporate-media discourse: it's meant to dumb down almost any issue, and you can see Behar hard at work doing so.

Keith Boykin's response has similar problems:

The popular narrative about gay men depicts a community of affluent, educated city dwellers who have come out of the closet and begun to flex their political and economic muscle. But this image doesn't hold up for black gay men, who often lack access to the same resources and support structure available to their white counterparts.

Um, Keith? Most white gay men aren't "affluent, educated city dwellers" either. And I know you know better.

I'm glad Lemon came out, and good luck to him. But the only way that has a chance of stopping bigotry is for people in all walks of life to stop tolerating it, and actively express their intolerance of it. The PSA at the head of this post sets a good example. You don't have to be gay to criticize antigay bigotry, just as you don't have to be black to criticize white racism, or a woman to criticize sexism -- in fact, what is more important than gay visibility is visibility of straights who won't put up with bigotry, men who won't tolerate sexism, and whites who won't tolerate racism.

In practice such intolerance will be resisted. Consider all the people who are trying to claim that "gay" as an insult has nothing to do with homosexuality, and even trying to reclaim "faggot" for Fag Discourse. A straight friend on Facebook reacted strongly when his son's wife said something about her husband (newly posted to Iraq) going after "towlheads" (sic). First the son asked, "What's the point in being free if the wives can't express themselves"; when that didn't work he used the old "Dad relax its fine she was just joking" evasion. (At least he didn't say "chill.") We should expect this resistance and refuse to let it succeed.

But again, good for Don Lemon; good for Will Sheridan; good for Rick Wells; good for all the people who are refusing to be invisible anymore. And good for NBA Commissioner David Stern for putting his foot down.

The Sexual Orientation That Won't Shut Up

Heterosexuals just can't seem to shut up about their sexual orientation. A few weeks ago, the straight media were obsessed with the sexual relationship between an unemployed English girl and a soldier from a welfare family; now they are talking about the end of a sexual relationship between a Republican actor and his wife, and the lust child produced by the actor's inability to restrain his animal impulses. Will the revelation of his heterosexuality hurt his movie career? MTV asks. Not to mention the wealthy, powerful man awaiting trial on Riker's Island for forcing himself on a hotel maid. (Seriously: this morning at the store I saw two female anchors on CNN expressing their shock at the fact that an attempted rapist was being held without bail after he was arrested while trying to flee the country: "He's one of the most powerful men in the world!" they spluttered. "Can they do that to him?")

But all this is invisible, not just to heterosexuals but to many gay people. So when another CNN anchor, Don Lemon, publicly acknowledges his homosexuality, it's news even though a celebrity's coming out is not exactly a novelty anymore. Part of this is the corporate media's short-term memory, but part of it is the ongoing struggle by heterosexual society to push us back into silence and invisibility: Oh, you are not! Shut up! Lalalalala I can't hear you! Why do you have to tell us you're gay -- you don't see heterosexuals going around saying "Hi, I'm straight!" (Sure you don't. What you see is incessant, obsessive babble about their sex lives, which are heterosexual because sex is assumed to be heterosexual.)

So coming out is always a beginning, not an ending. After you've broken the ice, the water starts to freeze over and you have to keep chipping, chipping, chipping away at it. Ideally, it's nice to be able to do it casually, as heterosexuals do, by speaking about your relationships and interactions: not "I'm gay" so much as "My boyfriend and I ..." Except for speaking on panels, I think most of my comings-out to straight friends, relatives, acquaintances, and coworkers have been that kind. In Lemon's case it appears to be more or less the same: he'd agreed to write a book about the path to success, which turned into a memoir, and that meant talking about his love life among other things. To his credit, he chose to tell the truth. Marketing the book meant that his sexual orientation would be a hook, but that's not his fault, it's the fault of a heterosexual society that still hasn't learned that not everyone is heterosexual, and insists on reacting to every coming-out as if it were the first in history.

Lemon said some good things in this interview with the annoyingly flirtatious heterosexual Joy Behar:



For example, Behar says "There's a lot of homophobes out there, you know..." and Lemon comes right back with "Who're you telling?" I've lost count of the heterosexuals who've warned me and other gay people that not everyone approves of our Lifestyle, as though this was news to me. He also handles well Behar's question of how this revelation will affect his "objectivity," and her prurient question about the Down Low; he even pointed out that the Down Low (aka The Closet) is a phenomenon in other communities than the African-American: there are plenty of white men on the Down Low, but in my culture we call it The Closet.

He falls down in other areas, as when he talks about the perception that a gay man is "effeminate" or "weak," and the "I was born gay, just like I was born black." More embarrassing is his belief that the suicide of Tyler Clementi (the Rutgers freshman who jumped off the George Washington Bridge last fall after a fellow student put a sex tape featuring him and another man on the Internet) could have been prevented if more prominent people would come out. This is a little kid's fantasy: If I were there, I could have saved him. Gay visibility can't fix all our problems. Heterosexuals torment each other too, and bullying is not limited to the persecution of gay or gender-nonconformist kids. And black people have always been visible, and no one doubted that they were born that way, but that never inhibited racists in the slightest. But part of the problem is the murky zone of corporate-media discourse: it's meant to dumb down almost any issue, and you can see Behar hard at work doing so.

Keith Boykin's response has similar problems:

The popular narrative about gay men depicts a community of affluent, educated city dwellers who have come out of the closet and begun to flex their political and economic muscle. But this image doesn't hold up for black gay men, who often lack access to the same resources and support structure available to their white counterparts.

Um, Keith? Most white gay men aren't "affluent, educated city dwellers" either. And I know you know better.

I'm glad Lemon came out, and good luck to him. But the only way that has a chance of stopping bigotry is for people in all walks of life to stop tolerating it, and actively express their intolerance of it. The PSA at the head of this post sets a good example. You don't have to be gay to criticize antigay bigotry, just as you don't have to be black to criticize white racism, or a woman to criticize sexism -- in fact, what is more important than gay visibility is visibility of straights who won't put up with bigotry, men who won't tolerate sexism, and whites who won't tolerate racism.

In practice such intolerance will be resisted. Consider all the people who are trying to claim that "gay" as an insult has nothing to do with homosexuality, and even trying to reclaim "faggot" for Fag Discourse. A straight friend on Facebook reacted strongly when his son's wife said something about her husband (newly posted to Iraq) going after "towlheads" (sic). First the son asked, "What's the point in being free if the wives can't express themselves"; when that didn't work he used the old "Dad relax its fine she was just joking" evasion. (At least he didn't say "chill.") We should expect this resistance and refuse to let it succeed.

But again, good for Don Lemon; good for Will Sheridan; good for Rick Wells; good for all the people who are refusing to be invisible anymore. And good for NBA Commissioner David Stern for putting his foot down.

Accentuate the Obvious

Today I was one of the speakers on a GLB panel for a college class, and the question of choice came up again. It occurred to me as I listened to the other speakers that they were even more confused than I'd thought. They talked about people who'd had bad coming-out experiences, and who would choose that? No one, perhaps. This was a variation on the familiar rhetorical question, "Would anyone choose a 'lifestyle' that causes them to be hated, condemned, and vilified?" Why, yes, they would, and they have. But I hadn't heard it applied to coming out before, which has nothing to do with the question whether being gay is a choice.

Or does it? Coming out -- the process of telling other people, gay or straight, that you are not heterosexual -- is pretty clearly a choice. When I started that process, four decades ago, I anticipated that I would have some bad experiences (rejection, hostility, malignant ignorance, etc.), and did my best to prepare myself to deal with them. I was lucky: very few people reacted negatively. But when I did have bad experiences with straight people, it wasn't my choice, it was theirs.

At the risk of distracting the reader, let me suggest an analogy. Anti-choice bigots often try to confuse the issue by conflating the choice of having sexual intercourse with the choice to have a baby: if a woman has sex with a man, they claim, she should expect to get pregnant, and therefore her decision to have sex was a decision to have a baby, regardless of her actual intent -- and if she does become pregnant, she has forfeited all choice thereafter, except the choice of putting the baby up for adoption after its birth. Not all sex leads to conception, however, so choosing to have intercourse is not equivalent to choosing to have a baby. Nor is driving a car equivalent to deciding to die in a fiery collision. Nor is coming out a decision to be disowned by one's parents. Nor, for that matter, is expressing anti-gay opinions a decision to have those opinions derided, rebutted, and vilified -- bigots can usually recognize that distinction, at least!

I'd have thought that all this was obvious, but it obviously isn't, worse luck. I was disturbed by this mutation of the "Would anyone choose a 'lifestyle' ..." meme, which is obnoxious enough in its own right. If gay people (and their allies, presumably) are going to start trying to claim coming out and gay identity as non-choices, then where will we go from there? Evidently the trend is to deny any responsibility and choice in their lives at all, but in order to do that consistently they would have to exempt antigay people from responsibility and choice too, and I don't think that will happen. (Freedom and responsibility for thee, but not for me!) As I said in my own answer to the question about choice, no one knows what choice is, and the science which is used to claim that homosexuality is not a choice doesn't recognize that human beings make any choices at all, since it considers free will an illusion. But the people who claim they were born gay don't realize this: they do believe they make choices, but being gay isn't one of them... and now, it appears, coming out wasn't a choice either.

I must admit, of course, that this has to do with a blind spot of my own. To quote myself:

... unlike most gay people I’ve known, I did not expect everything to be easy when I came out. There’s a weird paradox there: most people who, like me, made a conscious move to come out to straights, seem to have delayed that move as long as we did because we feared the consequences: that our friends, our families, random strangers would hate and despise us for being queer. And yet, after coming out, a good many gay people express shock and dismay that not everyone treats them with respect, let alone acceptance. I’m deliberately echoing Captain Renault’s famous line from Casablanca: I am shocked! shocked, I tell you! to find that there is homophobia going on here. Their shock may be as theatrical, as fake, as Captain Renault's; what I don't get is what it's supposed to achieve.

Accentuate the Obvious

Today I was one of the speakers on a GLB panel for a college class, and the question of choice came up again. It occurred to me as I listened to the other speakers that they were even more confused than I'd thought. They talked about people who'd had bad coming-out experiences, and who would choose that? No one, perhaps. This was a variation on the familiar rhetorical question, "Would anyone choose a 'lifestyle' that causes them to be hated, condemned, and vilified?" Why, yes, they would, and they have. But I hadn't heard it applied to coming out before, which has nothing to do with the question whether being gay is a choice.

Or does it? Coming out -- the process of telling other people, gay or straight, that you are not heterosexual -- is pretty clearly a choice. When I started that process, four decades ago, I anticipated that I would have some bad experiences (rejection, hostility, malignant ignorance, etc.), and did my best to prepare myself to deal with them. I was lucky: very few people reacted negatively. But when I did have bad experiences with straight people, it wasn't my choice, it was theirs.

At the risk of distracting the reader, let me suggest an analogy. Anti-choice bigots often try to confuse the issue by conflating the choice of having sexual intercourse with the choice to have a baby: if a woman has sex with a man, they claim, she should expect to get pregnant, and therefore her decision to have sex was a decision to have a baby, regardless of her actual intent -- and if she does become pregnant, she has forfeited all choice thereafter, except the choice of putting the baby up for adoption after its birth. Not all sex leads to conception, however, so choosing to have intercourse is not equivalent to choosing to have a baby. Nor is driving a car equivalent to deciding to die in a fiery collision. Nor is coming out a decision to be disowned by one's parents. Nor, for that matter, is expressing anti-gay opinions a decision to have those opinions derided, rebutted, and vilified -- bigots can usually recognize that distinction, at least!

I'd have thought that all this was obvious, but it obviously isn't, worse luck. I was disturbed by this mutation of the "Would anyone choose a 'lifestyle' ..." meme, which is obnoxious enough in its own right. If gay people (and their allies, presumably) are going to start trying to claim coming out and gay identity as non-choices, then where will we go from there? Evidently the trend is to deny any responsibility and choice in their lives at all, but in order to do that consistently they would have to exempt antigay people from responsibility and choice too, and I don't think that will happen. (Freedom and responsibility for thee, but not for me!) As I said in my own answer to the question about choice, no one knows what choice is, and the science which is used to claim that homosexuality is not a choice doesn't recognize that human beings make any choices at all, since it considers free will an illusion. But the people who claim they were born gay don't realize this: they do believe they make choices, but being gay isn't one of them... and now, it appears, coming out wasn't a choice either.

I must admit, of course, that this has to do with a blind spot of my own. To quote myself:

... unlike most gay people I’ve known, I did not expect everything to be easy when I came out. There’s a weird paradox there: most people who, like me, made a conscious move to come out to straights, seem to have delayed that move as long as we did because we feared the consequences: that our friends, our families, random strangers would hate and despise us for being queer. And yet, after coming out, a good many gay people express shock and dismay that not everyone treats them with respect, let alone acceptance. I’m deliberately echoing Captain Renault’s famous line from Casablanca: I am shocked! shocked, I tell you! to find that there is homophobia going on here. Their shock may be as theatrical, as fake, as Captain Renault's; what I don't get is what it's supposed to achieve.

The Happy Endings for Homosexuals Club

More than any other single person, Jill Johnston inspired me to come out.

It was early 1971, and I was twenty, in the throes of my latest crush on a conflicted straight boy. I had heard about the Stonewall Riots of June 1969, but they were in New York City a thousand miles away, and I don't recall paying enough attention to the developments in the gay movement that ensued. I do remember some articles on Gay Liberation in The Seed, a Chicago underground newspaper I bought in a South Bend newsstand / head shop. That was also where I sometimes bought the Village Voice, though I mostly read it at the library. (Public libraries were the Internet of those days: a place where you could get information from all over the world. Compared to the net these days, even the best library was limited, but compared to the rural area where I grew up, even a small public library was an exciting portal to the world.)

I remember reading the March 4, 1971 issue of the Voice at IU-South Bend, either in the library or in the snack bar. The title "Lois Lane Is a Lesbian" jumped out at me, and I started reading the article. Of course I'd read other things about being gay, but nothing like this. I had no idea who Jill Johnston was, and I hadn't read the earlier article by the Voice's heterosexual film critic Andrew Sarris that she was replying to. I'd never read anyone who wrote the sort of things she'd written.

Now I suggest you go up to a black person and say White People Have Problems Too and see what kind of response you get. I'm going on record here to notify every heterosexual male and female that every lesbian and every homosexual is all too aware of the problems of heterosexuals since they permeate every aspect of our social political economic and cultural lives. That we were in fact educated on these problems. That we were brought up and spoon fed or pitch forked on the crucible of the problems of thousands of Romeos and Juliets radiating outward from all our sublimely miserable and broken families into the movies and the funnies and the histories and the psychologies and the novels and our great Western classics. ... I think all of us are authorities on the heterosexual problem. Knowledge on the subject is instantly available, in case you've missed out, in every daily newspaper with their front page accounts of the Wars. We are bored with the news from the heterosexual fronts. We want to hear from the lesbians and the homosexuals now. I want homosexual movies and novels and funnies and histories and songs and classics. Even problem stories. Certainly the songs. Let all those gay rock artists come out from behind their phony lyrics. But the movies! The big medium. I don't expect the next batch of gay ones to show us nothing but the doomed clandestine affair of Therese and Isabelle in boarding school, and the wrecked life of Sister George whose girlfriend leaves her for a great white witch of the west whose cold clawing sexual advances constitute the only sexual revelation in the film ... This film critic a few months ago wrote in the context of some review that "although I don't belong to the happy-endings-for-homosexuals club ..." which made me ask him when I saw him "why don't you belong to the happy-endings-for-homosexuals club?" Exactly. Can you imagine me saying, in any context, "although I don't belong to the happy-endings-for-heterosexuals club"? ...

Just a year ago I permitted Rosalyn Drexler at a small dinner party to convince me I'd been a dope for revealing myself at an artists' colony where I'd been I was not being self protective as Rosalyn pointed out "Oh Jill, can't you keep a secret" and I was not yet able to reply immediately "Do you keep your marriage to Sherman a secret?"

As I look at what I've typed here I see how much of what Johnston wrote has stayed with me, ventriloquized itself through me as a speaker and a writer about gay and lesbian issues. Those who've read much of this blog, for example, may recognize Johnston's ideas from things I've written. Of course it's also because the attitudes she railed against remained potent in heterosexual culture, and remain so to this day; it's still necessary to talk back to them, and Johnston's answers still work for me.

Anyway, not long after I read this article I read a notice in the Chicago Seed of the Chicago Gay Alliance's monthly meetings in their community center on West Addison. I took a couple of vacation days in April, and drove to Chicago -- the first time I'd ever gone there on my own, instead of with my family or on a school trip. I remember it being a clear, sunny, hot day. I found the CGA building, then explored Old Town, and killed time until the meeting. I sat toward the back of a half-finished room upstairs and watched and listened, and after the meeting ended I paid $5 for a membership. (I liked the idea of being a card-carrying homosexual.) I didn't talk much to anyone, being too overwhelmed by the experience of being in a room full of other people like me, though I wasn't sure how much like me they were. An hour later I was on the road back to South Bend, my head buzzing with excitement and confusion. I didn't go back to Chicago for several years; the following fall I moved to Bloomington and got involved in the gay community here.

Alison Bechdel has a new post on her blog which mentions that Jill Johnston died on September 18th at the age of 81. I hadn't known she was that old, thought she was maybe ten years my senior rather than twenty, almost as old as my mother in fact. She wrote many books after she inspired me to come out; I guess I need to read some of them.

The Happy Endings for Homosexuals Club

More than any other single person, Jill Johnston inspired me to come out.

It was early 1971, and I was twenty, in the throes of my latest crush on a conflicted straight boy. I had heard about the Stonewall Riots of June 1969, but they were in New York City a thousand miles away, and I don't recall paying enough attention to the developments in the gay movement that ensued. I do remember some articles on Gay Liberation in The Seed, a Chicago underground newspaper I bought in a South Bend newsstand / head shop. That was also where I sometimes bought the Village Voice, though I mostly read it at the library. (Public libraries were the Internet of those days: a place where you could get information from all over the world. Compared to the net these days, even the best library was limited, but compared to the rural area where I grew up, even a small public library was an exciting portal to the world.)

I remember reading the March 4, 1971 issue of the Voice at IU-South Bend, either in the library or in the snack bar. The title "Lois Lane Is a Lesbian" jumped out at me, and I started reading the article. Of course I'd read other things about being gay, but nothing like this. I had no idea who Jill Johnston was, and I hadn't read the earlier article by the Voice's heterosexual film critic Andrew Sarris that she was replying to. I'd never read anyone who wrote the sort of things she'd written.

Now I suggest you go up to a black person and say White People Have Problems Too and see what kind of response you get. I'm going on record here to notify every heterosexual male and female that every lesbian and every homosexual is all too aware of the problems of heterosexuals since they permeate every aspect of our social political economic and cultural lives. That we were in fact educated on these problems. That we were brought up and spoon fed or pitch forked on the crucible of the problems of thousands of Romeos and Juliets radiating outward from all our sublimely miserable and broken families into the movies and the funnies and the histories and the psychologies and the novels and our great Western classics. ... I think all of us are authorities on the heterosexual problem. Knowledge on the subject is instantly available, in case you've missed out, in every daily newspaper with their front page accounts of the Wars. We are bored with the news from the heterosexual fronts. We want to hear from the lesbians and the homosexuals now. I want homosexual movies and novels and funnies and histories and songs and classics. Even problem stories. Certainly the songs. Let all those gay rock artists come out from behind their phony lyrics. But the movies! The big medium. I don't expect the next batch of gay ones to show us nothing but the doomed clandestine affair of Therese and Isabelle in boarding school, and the wrecked life of Sister George whose girlfriend leaves her for a great white witch of the west whose cold clawing sexual advances constitute the only sexual revelation in the film ... This film critic a few months ago wrote in the context of some review that "although I don't belong to the happy-endings-for-homosexuals club ..." which made me ask him when I saw him "why don't you belong to the happy-endings-for-homosexuals club?" Exactly. Can you imagine me saying, in any context, "although I don't belong to the happy-endings-for-heterosexuals club"? ...

Just a year ago I permitted Rosalyn Drexler at a small dinner party to convince me I'd been a dope for revealing myself at an artists' colony where I'd been I was not being self protective as Rosalyn pointed out "Oh Jill, can't you keep a secret" and I was not yet able to reply immediately "Do you keep your marriage to Sherman a secret?"

As I look at what I've typed here I see how much of what Johnston wrote has stayed with me, ventriloquized itself through me as a speaker and a writer about gay and lesbian issues. Those who've read much of this blog, for example, may recognize Johnston's ideas from things I've written. Of course it's also because the attitudes she railed against remained potent in heterosexual culture, and remain so to this day; it's still necessary to talk back to them, and Johnston's answers still work for me.

Anyway, not long after I read this article I read a notice in the Chicago Seed of the Chicago Gay Alliance's monthly meetings in their community center on West Addison. I took a couple of vacation days in April, and drove to Chicago -- the first time I'd ever gone there on my own, instead of with my family or on a school trip. I remember it being a clear, sunny, hot day. I found the CGA building, then explored Old Town, and killed time until the meeting. I sat toward the back of a half-finished room upstairs and watched and listened, and after the meeting ended I paid $5 for a membership. (I liked the idea of being a card-carrying homosexual.) I didn't talk much to anyone, being too overwhelmed by the experience of being in a room full of other people like me, though I wasn't sure how much like me they were. An hour later I was on the road back to South Bend, my head buzzing with excitement and confusion. I didn't go back to Chicago for several years; the following fall I moved to Bloomington and got involved in the gay community here.

Alison Bechdel has a new post on her blog which mentions that Jill Johnston died on September 18th at the age of 81. I hadn't known she was that old, thought she was maybe ten years my senior rather than twenty, almost as old as my mother in fact. She wrote many books after she inspired me to come out; I guess I need to read some of them.

Identity Crisis

Believing as I do that being gay is what you make of it, I am constantly baffled by the way "gay identity" has become a bogeyman in both academic and popular discourse. It seems to have the same function for gay academics as "the gay lifestyle" has for homophobes, connoting a sinister, all-devouring, vampiric shadow that sneaks up on unsuspecting young faglings and dykettes, recruits them by deceit, and sucks out all their vital force. And once they've succumbed to it, alas, there is no escape. I don't think I'm exaggerating here at all, not least because it's so unclear what either "gay identity" or "the gay lifestyle" is. It is, as I said, a bogey, a lurking horror to be dreaded (Be afraid, be very afraid), not understood or defined. "Gay identity" doesn't sap your individuality (or does it?) because in this discourse it is the epitome of individualism. I've been picking on Mark McLelland lately, though despite this niggling little problem Male Homosexuality in Modern Japan is a fine, valuable book, so let me quote another scholar who covers roughly the same waterfront, Song Hwee Lim, who writes in his Celluloid comrades: representations of male homosexuality in contemporary Chinese cinemas (University of Hawai'i Press, 2006, 50-51):

In terms of the cinematic representation of homosexuality, the logical corollary to the contestation of negative representation often means the creation of openly gay characters, since the rhetoric of gay liberation dictates that to remain in the closet is a sign of self-loathing, whereas to come out is an affirmative act of pride. Over the decades, the act of coming out has acquired such an unquestioning and sometimes unquestioned status that not to come out is seen as an unfathomable form of behavior [50].

My dear! First of all, it's dishonest to claim that coming out has "acquired such an ... unquestioned status" when it is still being argued about, debated, fought over, in life and in print -- and not just in postcolonialist academic tracts, but among American queers in every walk of life. (What an "unquestioning ... status" would be, I have no idea.) Second, it should be noticed again that "coming out" has distinct, yet partially overlapping meanings. It used to mean making one's debut in Gay Society, getting to know other gay people and getting one's cherry popped. After the Stonewall riots of 1969 and the emergence of the Gay Liberation Movement another meaning was added, without replacing the earlier one: "coming out of the closet" to straight people as well, or becoming "openly gay." It's this latter meaning that is the "affirmative act of pride." While it's possible to get along without being openly gay, it's hard to have much of a life as a gay person without knowing other gay people; though for gay men, anyway, it is possible to have an anonymous sex life without socializing in gay society or telling one's mom about it. Is it "unfathomable"? I don't know. Is it necessary for gay cinema to have "openly gay" characters? I don't know, but both forms of coming out provide easy ways to move a narrative forward, and supply ready-made drama of various kinds, quite apart from any political concerns. I think that in his apparent eagerness to distance himself from gay politics, Lim overlooks these points. I'm also not sure that not-coming-out is "a form of behavior," but leave that aside.

To borrow a Cartesian formulation, the rhetoric of gay liberation beseeches the homosexual to declare, "I come out, therefore I am."

Well, no it doesn't; this may have sounded cute or witty to the author, but it's neither. In its most famous form, gay liberation exhorted (not beseeched) "the homosexual", to come "Out of the Closets and Into the Streets!" Not, in other words, just for Gay Pride Day Parades each June, but to work with others to make the streets (indeed, the whole world) safe all year round for gay people, against cops, thugs, priests, families, and others who sought to keep us scared and invisible. I want to stress this because Lim prefers to keep "the homosexual" individual and isolated, standing alone against his family and society.

This line of argument raises several questions: Who decides if homosexuals should come out? Does the act of coming out necessarily promote understanding and acceptance of homosexuality? If coming out is chiefly linked to Western epistemologies and practices (as argued [but not proven! -- DM] by Munt via Foucault), should it be regarded as universal and imposed indiscriminately on other cultures? [51]

Well, of course, homosexuals should decide if homosexuals should come out -- that is, each homosexual must decide for him or herself. (Lim does not take up the question of outing.) The act of coming out doesn't necessarily promote or automatically understanding and acceptance of homosexuality, but it is the only way that homosexuals can take that project into their own hands. You can only pretend to be a disinterested heterosexual for so long in challenging bigots. As for the question whether "coming out is chiefly linked to Western epistemologies and practices", leaving aside Lim's misunderstanding of Foucault, Lim skates perilously close to a racist essentialism there. He then relies on the blind passive: "should it be regarded as universal" by whom? Should it be "imposed indiscriminately on other cultures" by whom? This is especially pertinent because Lim here is criticizing other gay Chinese critics who, according to him, are demanding "positive representation" and "openly gay" protagonists in Chinese film. Either he's insinuating that they are collaborating with the monolithic Gay Western Imperialists to impose coming-out indiscriminately on all cultures, haha!, or he's attacking a straw man. The first seems likely:

To begin with, I suggest that there is no inherent moral high ground in coming out, the rhetoric of gay liberation notwithstanding. Demands on homosexuals to come out, whether in reel life or real life, often reflect the need of gay activists and critics for greater visibility, alliance, and support for their political cause.

As though "activists" were some weirdly distinct group, not really gay at all! Of course, "their political cause" will get nowhere if they/we can't persuade other gay people that the strategies and goals we advocate will be useful to them. What Lim calls "demands on homosexuals to come out" were, in the US, part of an often acrimonious debate between the open and the closeted that isn't over yet.

I want to point out, though, that whatever role the "political cause" and evil Western epistemologies and practices may play, I and many other gay people choose to be openly gay for a bluntly personal reason: to stop the heterosexuals in our lives from nagging us about when we're going to get married, why aren't we married yet, let me introduce you to a wonderful girl/boy I know, oh of course you want to meet her/him, when are you going to settle down, don't you want to have children? Where are my grandchildren? Those gay people who aren't bothered by this sort of thing, of course, needn't come out to their straight friends and family; but they also needn't gripe privately to me about how annoying it is to put up with all those questions.

However, who would have to bear the consequence of coming out? Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues that when gay people come out to parents, it is "with the consciousness for a potential for serious injury that is likely to go in both directions."

But Lim is only interested in the injury that the children inflict on the parents, not the reverse. It's also highly dishonest of him to enlist Sedgwick as an advocate for the closet.

Particularly in a homophobic society, the gay person's coming out may in turn plunge the parents "into the closet of [their] conservative community" (1990 [Epistemology of the Closet], 80). Questions of ethics, responsibility, emotion, and family ties are so intricately intertwined that the rhetoric of oppression and liberation seems simplistic and naive by comparison.

As though American gay people hadn't been debating those questions for 40 years and more! As though "gay activists" hadn't been struggling with, arguing about questions of ethics, responsibility, emotion and family ties all that time! And as I said before, Lim pictures "the gay person" as standing alone, with no questions of ethics, responsibility, emotion, and family ties to other gay people, especially our partners. As Sarah Schulman wrote in 1990:

Most gay people stay in the closet -- i.e., dishonor their relationships -- because to do so is a prerequisite for employment, housing, safety, and family love. Having to hide the way you live because of fear of punishment isn't a "right" nor is it "privacy." Being in the closet is not an objective, neutral, value-free condition. It is, instead, maintained by force, not choice [emphasis added].

Notice that she was writing here about the US, twenty years after Stonewall. It doesn't occur to Lim that lying, "hiding the way you live," has consequences for our partners, the gay people we love. Whether we have any responsibilities to them has been hotly contested among gay people, let alone straights, for decades. (Evidently Lim thinks the answer is no.)

It is highly possible that the complications and consequences of coming out may, for both the homosexual and the family, be so constricting as to make the closet a relatively liberating place to inhabit. Indeed, coming out cannot necessarily be presumed to achieve the dual goals of liberating the homosexual from the suffocating closet and gaining the understanding of those to whom the homosexual comes out. As the coming-out scene in The Wedding Banquet shows, getting the message across is not always easy [52].

Well, duh! We Western homosexuals never ever noticed that! We never expected, or experienced, any difficulty in getting acceptance of our declarations from friends, family, or anyone else!

It should also be noticed that you can't use The Wedding Banquet to argue that "the closet [is] a relatively liberating place to inhabit," because the whole point of the story is that being closeted with respect to his family has been very uncomfortable for Wai-tung and his partner Simon, even when his parents are at home in Taiwan. When they come to New York in anticipation of his (heterosexual) wedding, the pressures of pretending that Simon is no one to Wai-tung nearly destroys their relationship. (Someday I should write about the way that The Wedding Banquet uses deceptions of various kinds, and their consequences, as leitmotifs.) "Relatively liberating"? Please! But Lim sees only Wai-tung as "the homosexual" in the story; Simon doesn't count. In the end, it's Wai-tung who has to decide whether to come out to his parents, and there is no pretense that it's easy or magically makes all the problems go away. But if Lim were to watch a thoroughly American movie like, say, Torch Song Trilogy, he'd see the very same issues in play. To claim that "Western" gays, whether artists or activists or both, ignore the complications of coming out is outrageously dishonest, yet it's a very common accusation in this kind of writing.

In The Wedding Banquet, does the mother's failure to fully comprehend her son's sexuality, despite his coming out to her, shut the closet door back on Wai-tung?

"Refusal" would be a better word than "failure," and it sure as hell is intended to shut him up.

Does the father's tacit acknowledgment of Wai-tung's homosexuality leave the closet door half open?

It's not intended to, since the father insists that Simon keep "our secret". (Some say the closet door is half open ...) Which is an irony that many gay people who've been through this experience will recognize: the way that family members will try to practice damage control by insisting that the revelations stop with them, and that no one else be told. I've always hoped that Simon told Wai-tung, if not immediately (they had conflicts of their own to resolve) then at least as soon as the parents went back to Taiwan.

It is clear from the above that the metaphor of the closet has its limitations, whatever the cultural context.

Well, duh. All metaphors have their limitations. And again, it's not as if American gays haven't been wrassling with this conundrum, too, for decades.

More important, the political evaluation accompanying the issue of coming out must be brought into question. That is, an implicit acknowledgment of a family member's homosexuality may not always be morally less acceptable than an explicit one, and the atmosphere surrounding such tacit acknowledgment cannot be regarded as simply "homophobic" [54-55].

Each case would have to be evaluated on its own merits of course. I'd agree with Lim if, for instance, the family stopped insisting that the "family member" get heterosexually married, stopped asking about his or her heterosexual involvements, when will they pop out a grandchild, and so on. If the pressure continues, then "such tacit acknowledgment" must be "regarded as simply 'homophobic.'"

Even the most radical militant queers have always recognized that some homophobes will never change, but can be tolerated if they make some adjustments. If not, they can be resisted. Just looking at The Wedding Banquet, the mother remains homophobic and surely wouldn't stop applying emotional pressure if she stayed in New York; back home, it's likely that the father, while he lives, will simply withhold support for projects to pressure Wai-tung to be heterosexual -- Wai-tung is, after all, not only married but a father-to-be now. Would the father be as 'accepting' if a grandchild weren't in the pipeline? I doubt it. His manipulativeness reminds me (and maybe Lim too, who mentions her on 63) of Dona Herlinda, who now that I think of it is a cinematic ancestor of Mr. Gao.

As the response of the mother illustrates, the act of coming out cannot be assumed to be the best, if not the only, "solution."

It doesn't illustrate anything of the kind. For one thing, "coming out" is always a beginning, not an end; in Wai-tung's case, it can mean the beginning of his refusal to let his mother bully him into marrying heterosexually -- a ongoing struggle, but so is life. We inscrutable Occidentals have a phrase, "the best of a bad lot," which implies that the best available option is not necessarily a positively good one. Lim should learn from our ability to transcend easy binaries.

Identity Crisis

Believing as I do that being gay is what you make of it, I am constantly baffled by the way "gay identity" has become a bogeyman in both academic and popular discourse. It seems to have the same function for gay academics as "the gay lifestyle" has for homophobes, connoting a sinister, all-devouring, vampiric shadow that sneaks up on unsuspecting young faglings and dykettes, recruits them by deceit, and sucks out all their vital force. And once they've succumbed to it, alas, there is no escape. I don't think I'm exaggerating here at all, not least because it's so unclear what either "gay identity" or "the gay lifestyle" is. It is, as I said, a bogey, a lurking horror to be dreaded (Be afraid, be very afraid), not understood or defined. "Gay identity" doesn't sap your individuality (or does it?) because in this discourse it is the epitome of individualism. I've been picking on Mark McLelland lately, though despite this niggling little problem Male Homosexuality in Modern Japan is a fine, valuable book, so let me quote another scholar who covers roughly the same waterfront, Song Hwee Lim, who writes in his Celluloid comrades: representations of male homosexuality in contemporary Chinese cinemas (University of Hawai'i Press, 2006, 50-51):

In terms of the cinematic representation of homosexuality, the logical corollary to the contestation of negative representation often means the creation of openly gay characters, since the rhetoric of gay liberation dictates that to remain in the closet is a sign of self-loathing, whereas to come out is an affirmative act of pride. Over the decades, the act of coming out has acquired such an unquestioning and sometimes unquestioned status that not to come out is seen as an unfathomable form of behavior [50].

My dear! First of all, it's dishonest to claim that coming out has "acquired such an ... unquestioned status" when it is still being argued about, debated, fought over, in life and in print -- and not just in postcolonialist academic tracts, but among American queers in every walk of life. (What an "unquestioning ... status" would be, I have no idea.) Second, it should be noticed again that "coming out" has distinct, yet partially overlapping meanings. It used to mean making one's debut in Gay Society, getting to know other gay people and getting one's cherry popped. After the Stonewall riots of 1969 and the emergence of the Gay Liberation Movement another meaning was added, without replacing the earlier one: "coming out of the closet" to straight people as well, or becoming "openly gay." It's this latter meaning that is the "affirmative act of pride." While it's possible to get along without being openly gay, it's hard to have much of a life as a gay person without knowing other gay people; though for gay men, anyway, it is possible to have an anonymous sex life without socializing in gay society or telling one's mom about it. Is it "unfathomable"? I don't know. Is it necessary for gay cinema to have "openly gay" characters? I don't know, but both forms of coming out provide easy ways to move a narrative forward, and supply ready-made drama of various kinds, quite apart from any political concerns. I think that in his apparent eagerness to distance himself from gay politics, Lim overlooks these points. I'm also not sure that not-coming-out is "a form of behavior," but leave that aside.

To borrow a Cartesian formulation, the rhetoric of gay liberation beseeches the homosexual to declare, "I come out, therefore I am."

Well, no it doesn't; this may have sounded cute or witty to the author, but it's neither. In its most famous form, gay liberation exhorted (not beseeched) "the homosexual", to come "Out of the Closets and Into the Streets!" Not, in other words, just for Gay Pride Day Parades each June, but to work with others to make the streets (indeed, the whole world) safe all year round for gay people, against cops, thugs, priests, families, and others who sought to keep us scared and invisible. I want to stress this because Lim prefers to keep "the homosexual" individual and isolated, standing alone against his family and society.

This line of argument raises several questions: Who decides if homosexuals should come out? Does the act of coming out necessarily promote understanding and acceptance of homosexuality? If coming out is chiefly linked to Western epistemologies and practices (as argued [but not proven! -- DM] by Munt via Foucault), should it be regarded as universal and imposed indiscriminately on other cultures? [51]

Well, of course, homosexuals should decide if homosexuals should come out -- that is, each homosexual must decide for him or herself. (Lim does not take up the question of outing.) The act of coming out doesn't necessarily promote or automatically understanding and acceptance of homosexuality, but it is the only way that homosexuals can take that project into their own hands. You can only pretend to be a disinterested heterosexual for so long in challenging bigots. As for the question whether "coming out is chiefly linked to Western epistemologies and practices", leaving aside Lim's misunderstanding of Foucault, Lim skates perilously close to a racist essentialism there. He then relies on the blind passive: "should it be regarded as universal" by whom? Should it be "imposed indiscriminately on other cultures" by whom? This is especially pertinent because Lim here is criticizing other gay Chinese critics who, according to him, are demanding "positive representation" and "openly gay" protagonists in Chinese film. Either he's insinuating that they are collaborating with the monolithic Gay Western Imperialists to impose coming-out indiscriminately on all cultures, haha!, or he's attacking a straw man. The first seems likely:

To begin with, I suggest that there is no inherent moral high ground in coming out, the rhetoric of gay liberation notwithstanding. Demands on homosexuals to come out, whether in reel life or real life, often reflect the need of gay activists and critics for greater visibility, alliance, and support for their political cause.

As though "activists" were some weirdly distinct group, not really gay at all! Of course, "their political cause" will get nowhere if they/we can't persuade other gay people that the strategies and goals we advocate will be useful to them. What Lim calls "demands on homosexuals to come out" were, in the US, part of an often acrimonious debate between the open and the closeted that isn't over yet.

I want to point out, though, that whatever role the "political cause" and evil Western epistemologies and practices may play, I and many other gay people choose to be openly gay for a bluntly personal reason: to stop the heterosexuals in our lives from nagging us about when we're going to get married, why aren't we married yet, let me introduce you to a wonderful girl/boy I know, oh of course you want to meet her/him, when are you going to settle down, don't you want to have children? Where are my grandchildren? Those gay people who aren't bothered by this sort of thing, of course, needn't come out to their straight friends and family; but they also needn't gripe privately to me about how annoying it is to put up with all those questions.

However, who would have to bear the consequence of coming out? Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues that when gay people come out to parents, it is "with the consciousness for a potential for serious injury that is likely to go in both directions."

But Lim is only interested in the injury that the children inflict on the parents, not the reverse. It's also highly dishonest of him to enlist Sedgwick as an advocate for the closet.

Particularly in a homophobic society, the gay person's coming out may in turn plunge the parents "into the closet of [their] conservative community" (1990 [Epistemology of the Closet], 80). Questions of ethics, responsibility, emotion, and family ties are so intricately intertwined that the rhetoric of oppression and liberation seems simplistic and naive by comparison.

As though American gay people hadn't been debating those questions for 40 years and more! As though "gay activists" hadn't been struggling with, arguing about questions of ethics, responsibility, emotion and family ties all that time! And as I said before, Lim pictures "the gay person" as standing alone, with no questions of ethics, responsibility, emotion, and family ties to other gay people, especially our partners. As Sarah Schulman wrote in 1990:

Most gay people stay in the closet -- i.e., dishonor their relationships -- because to do so is a prerequisite for employment, housing, safety, and family love. Having to hide the way you live because of fear of punishment isn't a "right" nor is it "privacy." Being in the closet is not an objective, neutral, value-free condition. It is, instead, maintained by force, not choice [emphasis added].

Notice that she was writing here about the US, twenty years after Stonewall. It doesn't occur to Lim that lying, "hiding the way you live," has consequences for our partners, the gay people we love. Whether we have any responsibilities to them has been hotly contested among gay people, let alone straights, for decades. (Evidently Lim thinks the answer is no.)

It is highly possible that the complications and consequences of coming out may, for both the homosexual and the family, be so constricting as to make the closet a relatively liberating place to inhabit. Indeed, coming out cannot necessarily be presumed to achieve the dual goals of liberating the homosexual from the suffocating closet and gaining the understanding of those to whom the homosexual comes out. As the coming-out scene in The Wedding Banquet shows, getting the message across is not always easy [52].

Well, duh! We Western homosexuals never ever noticed that! We never expected, or experienced, any difficulty in getting acceptance of our declarations from friends, family, or anyone else!

It should also be noticed that you can't use The Wedding Banquet to argue that "the closet [is] a relatively liberating place to inhabit," because the whole point of the story is that being closeted with respect to his family has been very uncomfortable for Wai-tung and his partner Simon, even when his parents are at home in Taiwan. When they come to New York in anticipation of his (heterosexual) wedding, the pressures of pretending that Simon is no one to Wai-tung nearly destroys their relationship. (Someday I should write about the way that The Wedding Banquet uses deceptions of various kinds, and their consequences, as leitmotifs.) "Relatively liberating"? Please! But Lim sees only Wai-tung as "the homosexual" in the story; Simon doesn't count. In the end, it's Wai-tung who has to decide whether to come out to his parents, and there is no pretense that it's easy or magically makes all the problems go away. But if Lim were to watch a thoroughly American movie like, say, Torch Song Trilogy, he'd see the very same issues in play. To claim that "Western" gays, whether artists or activists or both, ignore the complications of coming out is outrageously dishonest, yet it's a very common accusation in this kind of writing.

In The Wedding Banquet, does the mother's failure to fully comprehend her son's sexuality, despite his coming out to her, shut the closet door back on Wai-tung?

"Refusal" would be a better word than "failure," and it sure as hell is intended to shut him up.

Does the father's tacit acknowledgment of Wai-tung's homosexuality leave the closet door half open?

It's not intended to, since the father insists that Simon keep "our secret". (Some say the closet door is half open ...) Which is an irony that many gay people who've been through this experience will recognize: the way that family members will try to practice damage control by insisting that the revelations stop with them, and that no one else be told. I've always hoped that Simon told Wai-tung, if not immediately (they had conflicts of their own to resolve) then at least as soon as the parents went back to Taiwan.

It is clear from the above that the metaphor of the closet has its limitations, whatever the cultural context.

Well, duh. All metaphors have their limitations. And again, it's not as if American gays haven't been wrassling with this conundrum, too, for decades.

More important, the political evaluation accompanying the issue of coming out must be brought into question. That is, an implicit acknowledgment of a family member's homosexuality may not always be morally less acceptable than an explicit one, and the atmosphere surrounding such tacit acknowledgment cannot be regarded as simply "homophobic" [54-55].

Each case would have to be evaluated on its own merits of course. I'd agree with Lim if, for instance, the family stopped insisting that the "family member" get heterosexually married, stopped asking about his or her heterosexual involvements, when will they pop out a grandchild, and so on. If the pressure continues, then "such tacit acknowledgment" must be "regarded as simply 'homophobic.'"

Even the most radical militant queers have always recognized that some homophobes will never change, but can be tolerated if they make some adjustments. If not, they can be resisted. Just looking at The Wedding Banquet, the mother remains homophobic and surely wouldn't stop applying emotional pressure if she stayed in New York; back home, it's likely that the father, while he lives, will simply withhold support for projects to pressure Wai-tung to be heterosexual -- Wai-tung is, after all, not only married but a father-to-be now. Would the father be as 'accepting' if a grandchild weren't in the pipeline? I doubt it. His manipulativeness reminds me (and maybe Lim too, who mentions her on 63) of Dona Herlinda, who now that I think of it is a cinematic ancestor of Mr. Gao.

As the response of the mother illustrates, the act of coming out cannot be assumed to be the best, if not the only, "solution."

It doesn't illustrate anything of the kind. For one thing, "coming out" is always a beginning, not an end; in Wai-tung's case, it can mean the beginning of his refusal to let his mother bully him into marrying heterosexually -- a ongoing struggle, but so is life. We inscrutable Occidentals have a phrase, "the best of a bad lot," which implies that the best available option is not necessarily a positively good one. Lim should learn from our ability to transcend easy binaries.

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.