Rejoice, and Believe in the Gospel!

... The gospel (which means "good news") of True Science, that is. I just finished reading James Robert Brown's Who Rules in Science?: An Opinionated Guide to the Wars (Harvard, 2001). Brown, a professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto and an admitted heterosexual, tries to provide a nice middle-of-the-road take on the science wars of the 1990s. He concedes that scientists aren't perfect, but insists that they are awfully good. He opposes scientific orthodoxy to "social constructivists," who are usually postmodernists, and we know about them, with their silly jargon and all.

I admit I'm out of my depth in some of Brown's discussion, because I have little formal training in science and haven't read nearly enough of the "constructivist" works he cites. (I need to read more Bruno Latour, for example.) But in those instances where I have read the writers he discusses, like Paul Feyerabend and Stephen Jay Gould, I found problems. To sum up while oversimplifying a bit, Brown seems to think that every critic of scientific orthodoxy is a "social constructivist," even Gould it appears, and he really should know better than that. This can be seen in his discussion, about halfway through the book, of science and homosexuality.

Research on homosexuality involves an inextricable mix of science and politics. “Pro-gay” and “anti-gay” represent the respective political stances of being in favor or out of favor with improving the social situation of gays and lesbians. Debate tends to flare between the “essentialists” and “constructivists.” (For better or worse, these are the standard terms.)

In fact, "constructivist" is not a standard term in this debate; "constructionist" is. I couldn't say for certain, but I have the impression that "constructivist" is used in this context only by critics of constructionism, and not even all of them. According to Wikipedia, "constructivist" and "constructionist" refer to different theories anyway, which means that Brown's consistent and insistent use of the former term undermines his entire book. (And to nit-pick, "out of favor with" is not the opposite of "in favor of".) It's also an enduring and much-noticed irony of the debate that almost no one actually claims to be an essentialist.

The former [the "essentialists"] claim that one’s sexual orientation is a condition that is either biologically determined or imprinted at an early age and remains more or less immutable through life. On this view, one is objectively gay or lesbian, whether one knows and accepts it or not. For a constructivist, on the other hand, one’s sexual orientation is fundamentally a choice, no doubt a choice conditioned by one’s history and upbringing, but a choice nonetheless.

This is wrong too. Brown describes the "essentialist" position somewhat more accurately, though as he must know, being a philosopher and all, the key is not biology or imprinting but essence, being, nature. As Foucault famously described the concept, "Nothing that went into [the homosexual's] total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere present in him: at the root of all his actions because it was their insidious and indefinitively active principle; written immodestly on his face and body because it was a secret that always gave itself away. It was consubstantial with him, less as a habitual sin than as a singular nature." This isn't an especially scientific notion, by the way; it's almost mystical. Many people, including scientists, simply beg the question by assuming that biology equals essence; and we know what happens when you assume.

It's in his account of the "constructivist" that Brown falls flat on his face. I can't claim that I've read the constructionist literature on homosexuality exhaustively, but I've read a representative sample, probably more than Brown has, and I can't recall ever seeing a social constructionist claim that sexual orientation is a choice. The first few times someone accused me of thinking that homosexuality is a "choice" because I reject biological theories of its cause, I was taken aback because the accusation seemed wilfully irrelevant. The first person who did this was a political operative for a state-level gay-rights organization, and it was less an accusation than a lackwitted stereotype; the second was a graduate student in psychology with a vested interest in biological determinist theories, who should have known better. Brown, as a philosopher, definitely should know better, but apparently his professional education didn't extend to basic issues in philosophy like the free will vs. determinism debate.

So, let me repeat what I've said before: the point (I could mischievously call it the essence, but Diana Fuss beat me to it) of social construction theory is that many traits or behaviors or customs that people consider "natural" -- built into our human nature / blood / genes / DNA by God, Nature, Evolution -- are in fact, products of culture, learned, acquired. Not "chosen", except perhaps in some obscure technical sense of the word, because, again, the interest of social constructionism is to highlight features of human life that we take for granted, things we didn't choose because they are Natural. "That's just the way things are, that's all," though some wicked and perverse souls might decide to rebel against Nature, God's Will, Common Decency, and the American Way.

The key point that gives away Brown's misunderstanding / ignorance is his remark that for "a constructivist, on the other hand, one’s sexual orientation is fundamentally a choice, no doubt a choice conditioned by one’s history and upbringing, but a choice nonetheless." The best I can say in mitigation is that, as far as I know, social constructionists have not been able to come up with scientific-sounding explanations of how social construction works; that is, how people come to be convinced that what they have learned is something they were born with. But then, essentialists have never managed to explain how, say, a smaller INAH3 manifests itself in a talent for interior design and an obsession with ABBA.

Essentialism is compatible with that view of science I have called scientific orthodoxy: sexual orientation is a biological or psychological fact whose nature and causes can be discovered by orthodox science. (This includes both the ontological and epistemological senses of objective, but the emphasis here is on the ontological side.) On a constructivist account, by contrast, such facts simply don’t exist, at least not objectively. Instead, one’s sexuality is constructed – self-constructed at that.

This is more of the same; one' s sexuality is not "self-constructed at that" -- it is socially constructed, shaped from outside as well as inside.

Notice too how casually Brown minimizes the yawning gap between "biological" and "psychological fact." Language, for example, is probably both a biological (in the sense of being rooted physically in our brains and other body parts) and psychological fact, but there is no biological difference between an English speaker and a Chinese speaker. I once angered a gay advocate of biological determinism by pointing out that there probably is a correlation between speaking Chinese and certain physical traits (black hair, dark eyes, etc.), so that by her logic Chinese, like homosexuality, must be inborn.

Brown seems unaware that according to social constructionists, "race" is socially constructed. Even "orthodox" scientists have conceded that race is not, after all, a natural category in human beings, but here, as with "sexual orientation", the debate is as much about the status of the scientific evidence, and many white scientists at least find it difficult to rid themselves of the traditional racial categories. I was startled, a couple of years ago, to find some white liberal bloggers blithely declaring that "race is as real as nappy hair." The motif circulated for a month or two, then faded. It's worth remembering that social construction works with human bodies; the existence of a biological trait like skin color or hair texture does not prove the validity of essentialism. No social constructionist doubts that skin color, for example, is biologically determined; the question is whether skin color constitutes a "racial" trait, how it relates to culture, and so on.

Social constructionism is also compatible with what Brown calls scientific orthodoxy. Before we can really discuss the status of essentialism with regard to sexual orientation, we must first have some solid scientific results to work with, and so far there are none. The scientists involved, especially but not only Simon LeVay, have been explicit all along that they had decided in advance what they were looking for. LeVay told reporters that if he hadn't found evidence to support his beliefs, he'd have given up science. (I doubt the truth of that boast, by the way. True believers can always bend reality to fit their preconceptions, and one could ask whether by demanding that reality conform to his beliefs, LeVay hadn't abandoned science at the outset.)

To be fair, Brown concedes some of these points on page 111:

Now to the interesting philosophical point. The crucial thing about these [scientific] criticisms of essentialism that come from constructivists is that they are wholly within the framework that I have called scientific orthodoxy. Every objection would be recognized – at least in principle – as perfectly legitimate from the point of view of standard scientific method: Don’t use crude tests when better ones are available, don’t beg the question when setting up a classification, don’t take people’s judgments of others at face value, don’t ignore obvious alternative possible explanations, don’t confuse correlation with causation. The list could go on. These are principles that any champion of orthodoxy happily embraces.

Perhaps so, but they don't apply those principles. Brown himself frames the whole discussion in terms of "constructivism" vs. essentialism, but the scientific discussion, such as it is, has little to with this philosophical debate. The question is the validity, within the terms of scientific orthodoxy, of the research on sexual orientation. It's even debatable whether such critics of biological determinism as Anne Fausto-Sterling, Stephen Jay Gould, Hilary and Stephen Rose, or Richard Lewontin are social constructionists, given that their criticisms are primarily of the quality of the research on its own terms, not whether it conforms to constructionist theory. Brown simply takes for granted than anyone who doubts that every psychological fact is biologically determined must be a social "constructivist," and that doesn't follow.

The essentialist/constructivist debate cuts right across the pro-gay/anti-gay debate. The pro-gay essentialist claims that sexual orientation has a biological character and is perfectly natural, and so completely unobjectionable. It is an immutable characteristic, so it should enjoy the protection of anti-discrimination laws, just as race and gender typically do. The anti-gay essentialist is likely to see it as a nasty disease that ought to be appropriately treated. By contrast, the pro-gay essentialist sees sexual orientation as a choice, one that should certainly be tolerated, if not celebrated. The anti-gay constructivist agrees it is a choice – a wicked one that must be morally condemned.

The trouble here is that the people Brown calls anti-gay constructivists are really essentialists: they believe that human nature is heterosexual, and that sodomites are merely rebels against Nature/God. (This passage makes me suspect that Brown's only source for his discussion is Andrew Sullivan's 1993 tract Virtually Normal; the above paragraph is virtually a paraphrase of Sullivan's, um, argument.) The same claim was made for years by gay Christian essentialists arguing about the interpretation of Romans 1:26-28, who declared that their nature was homosexual, and so for them to try to be heterosexual would be "unnatural," "going against their nature."

Further, Brown oversimplifies (to put it kindly) with his assumption that "an immutable characteristic [as he assumes sexual orientation to be] ... should enjoy the protection of anti-discrimination laws, just as race and gender typically do." It isn't only immutable characteristics that are protected by antidiscrimination laws: religious affiliation, which is neither inborn nor immutable, is also protected under US and Canadian law. This is a common mistake, also made routinely by gay-rights advocates, including scientists trying to justify their sloppy research by touting its supposed political usefulness:

A typical essentialist is Simon LeVay, who claimed as a result of post-mortem studies that a cluster of brain cells in the third interstitial nucleus of the anterior hypothalamus is larger in heterosexuals than in homosexuals. This, he said, shows that “sexual orientation has a biological substrate” ... Another famous work is that of Baily [sic] and Pillard on twins. They found that identical twins were more likely to be consonant for homosexuality than were fraternal twins. Given that identicals are closer genetically than fraternals, Baily [sic] and Pillard drew the conclusion that “genetic factors are important individual differences in sexual orientation” ... In a more public piece they stated that “science is rapidly converging on the conclusion that sexual orientation is innate,” and they concluded that this is “good news for homosexuals” [“Are Some People Born Gay?” NYT, Dec. 17, A21].

Added to his general intellectual slovenliness, this shows that James Robert Brown is not competent to discuss these issues. Can these people really have forgotten that biologically-rooted difference has generally been used to justify discrimination, based on race and sex? No one doubts that women and blacks are "born that way"; that "biological fact" is used to argue that they are incapable of full citizenship. Whether homosexuality is "innate" is not an important question, and mainstream gay-rights advocates have wasted a lot of time and energy letting bigots set the terms of the debate by claiming that it is. At the same time, I've winced when some half-informed gay people have lobbed the term "socially constructed" at essentialist opponents, whether pro-gay or anti-gay. It just isn't pertinent to the controversy until you've cleared away a lot of deadwood first -- and by the time you've done that, you don't really need the label.

Rejoice, and Believe in the Gospel!

... The gospel (which means "good news") of True Science, that is. I just finished reading James Robert Brown's Who Rules in Science?: An Opinionated Guide to the Wars (Harvard, 2001). Brown, a professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto and an admitted heterosexual, tries to provide a nice middle-of-the-road take on the science wars of the 1990s. He concedes that scientists aren't perfect, but insists that they are awfully good. He opposes scientific orthodoxy to "social constructivists," who are usually postmodernists, and we know about them, with their silly jargon and all.

I admit I'm out of my depth in some of Brown's discussion, because I have little formal training in science and haven't read nearly enough of the "constructivist" works he cites. (I need to read more Bruno Latour, for example.) But in those instances where I have read the writers he discusses, like Paul Feyerabend and Stephen Jay Gould, I found problems. To sum up while oversimplifying a bit, Brown seems to think that every critic of scientific orthodoxy is a "social constructivist," even Gould it appears, and he really should know better than that. This can be seen in his discussion, about halfway through the book, of science and homosexuality.

Research on homosexuality involves an inextricable mix of science and politics. “Pro-gay” and “anti-gay” represent the respective political stances of being in favor or out of favor with improving the social situation of gays and lesbians. Debate tends to flare between the “essentialists” and “constructivists.” (For better or worse, these are the standard terms.)

In fact, "constructivist" is not a standard term in this debate; "constructionist" is. I couldn't say for certain, but I have the impression that "constructivist" is used in this context only by critics of constructionism, and not even all of them. According to Wikipedia, "constructivist" and "constructionist" refer to different theories anyway, which means that Brown's consistent and insistent use of the former term undermines his entire book. (And to nit-pick, "out of favor with" is not the opposite of "in favor of".) It's also an enduring and much-noticed irony of the debate that almost no one actually claims to be an essentialist.

The former [the "essentialists"] claim that one’s sexual orientation is a condition that is either biologically determined or imprinted at an early age and remains more or less immutable through life. On this view, one is objectively gay or lesbian, whether one knows and accepts it or not. For a constructivist, on the other hand, one’s sexual orientation is fundamentally a choice, no doubt a choice conditioned by one’s history and upbringing, but a choice nonetheless.

This is wrong too. Brown describes the "essentialist" position somewhat more accurately, though as he must know, being a philosopher and all, the key is not biology or imprinting but essence, being, nature. As Foucault famously described the concept, "Nothing that went into [the homosexual's] total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere present in him: at the root of all his actions because it was their insidious and indefinitively active principle; written immodestly on his face and body because it was a secret that always gave itself away. It was consubstantial with him, less as a habitual sin than as a singular nature." This isn't an especially scientific notion, by the way; it's almost mystical. Many people, including scientists, simply beg the question by assuming that biology equals essence; and we know what happens when you assume.

It's in his account of the "constructivist" that Brown falls flat on his face. I can't claim that I've read the constructionist literature on homosexuality exhaustively, but I've read a representative sample, probably more than Brown has, and I can't recall ever seeing a social constructionist claim that sexual orientation is a choice. The first few times someone accused me of thinking that homosexuality is a "choice" because I reject biological theories of its cause, I was taken aback because the accusation seemed wilfully irrelevant. The first person who did this was a political operative for a state-level gay-rights organization, and it was less an accusation than a lackwitted stereotype; the second was a graduate student in psychology with a vested interest in biological determinist theories, who should have known better. Brown, as a philosopher, definitely should know better, but apparently his professional education didn't extend to basic issues in philosophy like the free will vs. determinism debate.

So, let me repeat what I've said before: the point (I could mischievously call it the essence, but Diana Fuss beat me to it) of social construction theory is that many traits or behaviors or customs that people consider "natural" -- built into our human nature / blood / genes / DNA by God, Nature, Evolution -- are in fact, products of culture, learned, acquired. Not "chosen", except perhaps in some obscure technical sense of the word, because, again, the interest of social constructionism is to highlight features of human life that we take for granted, things we didn't choose because they are Natural. "That's just the way things are, that's all," though some wicked and perverse souls might decide to rebel against Nature, God's Will, Common Decency, and the American Way.

The key point that gives away Brown's misunderstanding / ignorance is his remark that for "a constructivist, on the other hand, one’s sexual orientation is fundamentally a choice, no doubt a choice conditioned by one’s history and upbringing, but a choice nonetheless." The best I can say in mitigation is that, as far as I know, social constructionists have not been able to come up with scientific-sounding explanations of how social construction works; that is, how people come to be convinced that what they have learned is something they were born with. But then, essentialists have never managed to explain how, say, a smaller INAH3 manifests itself in a talent for interior design and an obsession with ABBA.

Essentialism is compatible with that view of science I have called scientific orthodoxy: sexual orientation is a biological or psychological fact whose nature and causes can be discovered by orthodox science. (This includes both the ontological and epistemological senses of objective, but the emphasis here is on the ontological side.) On a constructivist account, by contrast, such facts simply don’t exist, at least not objectively. Instead, one’s sexuality is constructed – self-constructed at that.

This is more of the same; one' s sexuality is not "self-constructed at that" -- it is socially constructed, shaped from outside as well as inside.

Notice too how casually Brown minimizes the yawning gap between "biological" and "psychological fact." Language, for example, is probably both a biological (in the sense of being rooted physically in our brains and other body parts) and psychological fact, but there is no biological difference between an English speaker and a Chinese speaker. I once angered a gay advocate of biological determinism by pointing out that there probably is a correlation between speaking Chinese and certain physical traits (black hair, dark eyes, etc.), so that by her logic Chinese, like homosexuality, must be inborn.

Brown seems unaware that according to social constructionists, "race" is socially constructed. Even "orthodox" scientists have conceded that race is not, after all, a natural category in human beings, but here, as with "sexual orientation", the debate is as much about the status of the scientific evidence, and many white scientists at least find it difficult to rid themselves of the traditional racial categories. I was startled, a couple of years ago, to find some white liberal bloggers blithely declaring that "race is as real as nappy hair." The motif circulated for a month or two, then faded. It's worth remembering that social construction works with human bodies; the existence of a biological trait like skin color or hair texture does not prove the validity of essentialism. No social constructionist doubts that skin color, for example, is biologically determined; the question is whether skin color constitutes a "racial" trait, how it relates to culture, and so on.

Social constructionism is also compatible with what Brown calls scientific orthodoxy. Before we can really discuss the status of essentialism with regard to sexual orientation, we must first have some solid scientific results to work with, and so far there are none. The scientists involved, especially but not only Simon LeVay, have been explicit all along that they had decided in advance what they were looking for. LeVay told reporters that if he hadn't found evidence to support his beliefs, he'd have given up science. (I doubt the truth of that boast, by the way. True believers can always bend reality to fit their preconceptions, and one could ask whether by demanding that reality conform to his beliefs, LeVay hadn't abandoned science at the outset.)

To be fair, Brown concedes some of these points on page 111:

Now to the interesting philosophical point. The crucial thing about these [scientific] criticisms of essentialism that come from constructivists is that they are wholly within the framework that I have called scientific orthodoxy. Every objection would be recognized – at least in principle – as perfectly legitimate from the point of view of standard scientific method: Don’t use crude tests when better ones are available, don’t beg the question when setting up a classification, don’t take people’s judgments of others at face value, don’t ignore obvious alternative possible explanations, don’t confuse correlation with causation. The list could go on. These are principles that any champion of orthodoxy happily embraces.

Perhaps so, but they don't apply those principles. Brown himself frames the whole discussion in terms of "constructivism" vs. essentialism, but the scientific discussion, such as it is, has little to with this philosophical debate. The question is the validity, within the terms of scientific orthodoxy, of the research on sexual orientation. It's even debatable whether such critics of biological determinism as Anne Fausto-Sterling, Stephen Jay Gould, Hilary and Stephen Rose, or Richard Lewontin are social constructionists, given that their criticisms are primarily of the quality of the research on its own terms, not whether it conforms to constructionist theory. Brown simply takes for granted than anyone who doubts that every psychological fact is biologically determined must be a social "constructivist," and that doesn't follow.

The essentialist/constructivist debate cuts right across the pro-gay/anti-gay debate. The pro-gay essentialist claims that sexual orientation has a biological character and is perfectly natural, and so completely unobjectionable. It is an immutable characteristic, so it should enjoy the protection of anti-discrimination laws, just as race and gender typically do. The anti-gay essentialist is likely to see it as a nasty disease that ought to be appropriately treated. By contrast, the pro-gay essentialist sees sexual orientation as a choice, one that should certainly be tolerated, if not celebrated. The anti-gay constructivist agrees it is a choice – a wicked one that must be morally condemned.

The trouble here is that the people Brown calls anti-gay constructivists are really essentialists: they believe that human nature is heterosexual, and that sodomites are merely rebels against Nature/God. (This passage makes me suspect that Brown's only source for his discussion is Andrew Sullivan's 1993 tract Virtually Normal; the above paragraph is virtually a paraphrase of Sullivan's, um, argument.) The same claim was made for years by gay Christian essentialists arguing about the interpretation of Romans 1:26-28, who declared that their nature was homosexual, and so for them to try to be heterosexual would be "unnatural," "going against their nature."

Further, Brown oversimplifies (to put it kindly) with his assumption that "an immutable characteristic [as he assumes sexual orientation to be] ... should enjoy the protection of anti-discrimination laws, just as race and gender typically do." It isn't only immutable characteristics that are protected by antidiscrimination laws: religious affiliation, which is neither inborn nor immutable, is also protected under US and Canadian law. This is a common mistake, also made routinely by gay-rights advocates, including scientists trying to justify their sloppy research by touting its supposed political usefulness:

A typical essentialist is Simon LeVay, who claimed as a result of post-mortem studies that a cluster of brain cells in the third interstitial nucleus of the anterior hypothalamus is larger in heterosexuals than in homosexuals. This, he said, shows that “sexual orientation has a biological substrate” ... Another famous work is that of Baily [sic] and Pillard on twins. They found that identical twins were more likely to be consonant for homosexuality than were fraternal twins. Given that identicals are closer genetically than fraternals, Baily [sic] and Pillard drew the conclusion that “genetic factors are important individual differences in sexual orientation” ... In a more public piece they stated that “science is rapidly converging on the conclusion that sexual orientation is innate,” and they concluded that this is “good news for homosexuals” [“Are Some People Born Gay?” NYT, Dec. 17, A21].

Added to his general intellectual slovenliness, this shows that James Robert Brown is not competent to discuss these issues. Can these people really have forgotten that biologically-rooted difference has generally been used to justify discrimination, based on race and sex? No one doubts that women and blacks are "born that way"; that "biological fact" is used to argue that they are incapable of full citizenship. Whether homosexuality is "innate" is not an important question, and mainstream gay-rights advocates have wasted a lot of time and energy letting bigots set the terms of the debate by claiming that it is. At the same time, I've winced when some half-informed gay people have lobbed the term "socially constructed" at essentialist opponents, whether pro-gay or anti-gay. It just isn't pertinent to the controversy until you've cleared away a lot of deadwood first -- and by the time you've done that, you don't really need the label.

I'm Not a Queer, But My Buddy Is

It occurred to me today that in many cases it might be better to substitute the term "common sense" for "essentialism" in many discussions of gender and sexuality. That's partly because I don't much respect common sense, of course, and much of what Everybody Knows about men and women, queers and normal folks, doesn't deserve much respect. It seems to me that if you pay attention you must very soon start to notice all the gaping holes in what Everybody Knows, and I've found that most people, if you get them alone, will admit this. But it's also Common Sense that you don't point out those gaping holes in public. I have to remember what happened to the kid who pointed out that the Emperor didn't really have anything on: she was dragged away by Security, who tortured her for days until she named her communist terrorist accomplices, and then she and her whole family were executed, publicly and slowly.

Common sense is very powerful stuff. The common-sense notion of the Queer as wrongly sexed -- the she-male, the girlyman, the he-she, the diesel dyke -- was taken over by nineteenth-century doctors and christened the Invert, the Third Sex, the Homosexual, and this notion still underlies most "scientific" discourse today. It leads to hopeless contradictions, but these are ignored.

Social construction theories have their own contradictions, but the reason they inspire so much fury among such a wide range of people is that they go against Common Sense. What everyone can plainly see is not always true; often people see plainly what isn't there at all. This bothers those people who, in Clifford Geertz's words, are "afraid reality is going to go away unless we believe really hard in it" -- if I don't believe everything you believe, then obviously I don't believe in anything. That's just common sense.

Anyway. One of the more revelatory examples of the trouble with Common Sense was Brokeback Mountain, whose success inspired a great deal of fussing over the story, Universality, whether the characters were gay, whether the characters were cowboys, and so on. The best writing on I saw on the subject at the time was Larry Gross's piece "Year of the Queer: Hollywood and Homosexuality", especially page 3 and after, though Alan Vanneman's snark-laden piece for Bright Lights Film Journal also sticks in my mind, notably for its takedown of the film's tagline "Love Is a Force of Nature": "We humans stopped doing 'Nature' 50,000 years ago, when we learned to talk good and paint pretty pictures on a wall."

Myself, being an anti-platonist, a social constructionist, a relativist, virtually a nihilist, I saw the movie twice without wondering whether Jack and Ennis were gay. If you'd asked me at the time I'd probably have said it was because I am gay and had no investment in denying that two men who had passionate sex with each other over a twenty-year period were gay; but also that if two men could have passionate sex with each other for twenty-years without being gay, that would be a fine poke in the eye of Common Sense too, so it was a win-win situation.

So imagine my surprise when I found Stephen O. Murray's review of the film at Epinions.com. I have a lot of respect for Murray, who's a controversial figure in the field of whatever-you-want-to-call-it: he was working before Queer Theory and kept on going throughout Queer Theory's hegemony; he's as cranky, crusty and curmudgeonly as I aspire to be; he's ferociously learned, with a merciless Bullshit Detector. I've read most of his books, at least those published since 1990 or so. But on Brokeback Mountain he bogged down in the question of whether Jack and Ennis were gay, and (In My Hubristic Opinion) he came down wrong on just about every point. After reading his review I wrote a rejoinder, which I then sat on for a year or so before I got an Epinions account and finally posted it there. I'm now posting it here, with a few very minor changes, as a sort of prologue or overture to the big Social Constructionist question.
-------------------------------------------------
Are they gay? Who knows? It's amazing how much doublethink turns up even in gay reviewers, though. Sociologist Stephen O. Murray, for instance, agrees with Heath Ledger that Ennis is "not gay", as if Heath Ledger were an expert in such matters. Ennis says, "I ain't no queer" -- that's a noun, not an adjective -- and Jack says, "Me neither." Murray of all people should know better. He's the guy who's famous for writing that he has "been told by young Latinos with semen inside their rectums that they `never get fucked.'" Denials of this kind are not always false; but they can't be taken as always true either. Why sure, if they say they aren't queers, they must not be! Neither was Rock Hudson, or Kevin Spacey, or Nathan Lane until he changed his mind and said he was! And Richard Nixon wasn't a crook -- he said so!

Ennis refers to "this thing, it grabs hold of us". Does this prove that they have been possessed by a spirit that forces them to have sex together? In other writings Murray jeers at Foucauldians who indulge in what he calls "discourse creationism," but that is what he's doing here. What a (fictional!) character says is always true, to be taken at face value. If you don't say you're gay or think of yourself as gay, you're not -- until you say you are, and then, presto change-O!

Murray overlooks the scene late in the film where Ennis asks Jack if he ever gets the feeling that everybody is looking at him, and they know? Fit that question together with Ennis's childhood memory of being forced by his father (his hand firm on the back of the boy's neck) to look at the mutilated corpse of a queerbashed gay man, and it's significant that the word "fear" or its synonyms never appear in Murray's descriptions of Ennis's feelings. I thought it was obvious, for example, that among the emotions Ennis felt when his ex-wife confronted him about his relationship with Jack, was abject screaming terror. ""Panic" (as in "homosexual panic") also comes to mind. Maybe less obvious, but also explained by the memory, is Ennis's crawling into an alley to weep and retch and punch a wall as their first separation begins.

As Murray points out, the idea that he might be killed for loving another man was not at all paranoid or unrealistic. His unwillingness to leave Wyoming for somewhat safer climes -- there is, after all, plenty of horrific antigay violence in cities like New York and San Francisco, it is not limited to rural areas -- is interesting: Ennis is terrified, but (like a horse in a burning barn?) he won't leave. Murray writes, "Ennis believes that men cannot mate for life", but I don't see how the film supports this claim. I think Ennis knows men can mate for life -- the two "old guys" did just that -- but he's obsessed with the fear that their lives will be cut short by violence. His murderous jealousy also is evidence that he knows he is mated to Jack for life.

Murray takes for granted that Jack is the queer one, because he makes "the first (and second and various later) move"; Ennis is a straight guy who happens to fall in love with another man. (Why is "gay" an illicit descriptor, but "straight" isn't?) Yes, Jack makes the first move, but what he offers is not his ass but his cock. Ennis responds by penetrating him. Tradition has it, of course, that Penetrator equals Real Man equals Not Queer. But Ennis apparently didn't need any time to become erect himself; was he lying there hard the whole time? I wouldn't be surprised. In the original story, Proulx endowed Ennis with a mystic knowledge of what to do. Perhaps because he'd been thinking about doing it even before he met Jack? A straight guy isn't supposed to respond to another man's sexual offer by turning him over. Ennis's reluctance to share the tent in the first place is not proof that he hadn't noticed Jack erotically -- rather the opposite. As for the later moves, I'm not sure how Murray is counting them, but it is Ennis who comes to Jack in the tent to initiate their second night together. I think that's crucial, for it shows that Ennis is not just a guy who can't say no.

Murray says that "they are not cowboys. They ride horses in their line of work, but they are responsible for sheep, and anyone who has seen very many westerns knows that the cattle barons and the would-be sheep-raisers are recurrent foes. Jack, for a time, is a 'rodeo cowboy,' riding bulls." After Ennis's summer tending sheep with Jack, he works on ranches with cattle. I think that Murray is defining "cowboy" far too strictly here, and I really don't understand why some people work themselves into such a lather over whether this is a "gay cowboy" movie or not; is it because cowboys aren't universal enough, or their feelings don't matter? Or is it because cowboys are too universal, and they can't be gay or America will fall? I really don't get it.

As Murray also complains, "The word 'gay' is bandied about very loosely in regard to the movie"; but then, "gay" does not have a strict meaning. "Ennis and Jack have homosexual sex, but neither has a self-identification as gay (and, as I have explained at considerable length in American Gay, self-identification, at least intrapsychically, is the criterion of gay)." American Gay is a fine book, but while Murray can define "gay" strictly for his own writing purposes, he can't require other people to hew to his definition, and most don't.

He goes on say that Brokeback is not a "gay movie" because "The story was written by a straight woman, adapted for the screen by a straight couple, directed by a straight man, and stars straight movie stars". So, Of Human Bondage is a homosexual novel because, though it has no gay content, it was written by a homosexual? What constitutes a "gay novel" or "gay play" or "gay movie" has been much debated over the years. Gay playwright Robert Patrick playfully defined a gay play as a play that sleeps with other plays of the same sex. Murray's definition might work for him, but I think that for most people, a movie with central same-sex content is a "gay movie" regardless of the sexual orientation of the writers, directors, or stars, or second assistant grip.

Murray continues:

In rural Wyoming it seems plausible for someone who spends his waking hours outdoors not to know of the emergence of gay communities during the 1970s. It, however, seems more difficult to imagine that by the early 1980s Jack would not have learned that somewhere (in Texas, even) there were gay bars and gay circles and gay neighborhoods. Jack is less isolated (both in general and from media) than Ennis. Instead of crossing the Rio Grande at Ciudad Juarez, he could have tooled over to Houston... but he didn't, and continued to dream of splendid isolation a deux on a ranch with Ennis (who never left Wyoming). I'm definitely not saying that Jack wanted an urban gay lifestyle. What he did want was more conceivable and obtainable after "almost twenty years" (a specification that crops up at one of their brief reunions in the wilds).

That reminds me: how does Ennis know "what they got for boys like you in Mexico", if he's so ignorant and isolated and all? I suspect that Jack's self-limitation is best explained as a result of Proulx's naivete (in interviews she's made much of her personal ignorance, as an old straight woman), and perhaps her own wish to keep her characters uncontaminated by urban gay lifestyles. But I've also known gay men who, even though they lived in cities with gay resources, refused to use them, or even to admit that they were there, while dreaming that Jack Armstrong the All-American Boy would come knocking on their doors one night and take them away from all this. Murray should know that "gay" is still a stigmatized identity, and that closet cases often have intricate strategies to avoid applying it to themselves even "intrapsychically." There's a widespread tendency to treat them as sophisticated thinkers so soaked with integrity that they won't apply a label to themselves unless it truly fits, no matter how much they want to, when it really is the other way around. Think, by analogy, of the difficulty of the strategies people have for identifying themselves as alcoholics. Just because Jack is less paralyzed than Ennis, it doesn't mean he's ready to move to the Montrose in Houston. (Where he might also be queer-bashed.) But then, he was only 39 when he died. Murray must know, as I do, men who came out later in life than that.

Brokeback Mountain, Murray declares ex cathedra, "is a story of the tragic internalization of homo-hatred, not a movie about `gay cowboys.'" False antithesis. The movie is both, and more.

I'm Not a Queer, But My Buddy Is

It occurred to me today that in many cases it might be better to substitute the term "common sense" for "essentialism" in many discussions of gender and sexuality. That's partly because I don't much respect common sense, of course, and much of what Everybody Knows about men and women, queers and normal folks, doesn't deserve much respect. It seems to me that if you pay attention you must very soon start to notice all the gaping holes in what Everybody Knows, and I've found that most people, if you get them alone, will admit this. But it's also Common Sense that you don't point out those gaping holes in public. I have to remember what happened to the kid who pointed out that the Emperor didn't really have anything on: she was dragged away by Security, who tortured her for days until she named her communist terrorist accomplices, and then she and her whole family were executed, publicly and slowly.

Common sense is very powerful stuff. The common-sense notion of the Queer as wrongly sexed -- the she-male, the girlyman, the he-she, the diesel dyke -- was taken over by nineteenth-century doctors and christened the Invert, the Third Sex, the Homosexual, and this notion still underlies most "scientific" discourse today. It leads to hopeless contradictions, but these are ignored.

Social construction theories have their own contradictions, but the reason they inspire so much fury among such a wide range of people is that they go against Common Sense. What everyone can plainly see is not always true; often people see plainly what isn't there at all. This bothers those people who, in Clifford Geertz's words, are "afraid reality is going to go away unless we believe really hard in it" -- if I don't believe everything you believe, then obviously I don't believe in anything. That's just common sense.

Anyway. One of the more revelatory examples of the trouble with Common Sense was Brokeback Mountain, whose success inspired a great deal of fussing over the story, Universality, whether the characters were gay, whether the characters were cowboys, and so on. The best writing on I saw on the subject at the time was Larry Gross's piece "Year of the Queer: Hollywood and Homosexuality", especially page 3 and after, though Alan Vanneman's snark-laden piece for Bright Lights Film Journal also sticks in my mind, notably for its takedown of the film's tagline "Love Is a Force of Nature": "We humans stopped doing 'Nature' 50,000 years ago, when we learned to talk good and paint pretty pictures on a wall."

Myself, being an anti-platonist, a social constructionist, a relativist, virtually a nihilist, I saw the movie twice without wondering whether Jack and Ennis were gay. If you'd asked me at the time I'd probably have said it was because I am gay and had no investment in denying that two men who had passionate sex with each other over a twenty-year period were gay; but also that if two men could have passionate sex with each other for twenty-years without being gay, that would be a fine poke in the eye of Common Sense too, so it was a win-win situation.

So imagine my surprise when I found Stephen O. Murray's review of the film at Epinions.com. I have a lot of respect for Murray, who's a controversial figure in the field of whatever-you-want-to-call-it: he was working before Queer Theory and kept on going throughout Queer Theory's hegemony; he's as cranky, crusty and curmudgeonly as I aspire to be; he's ferociously learned, with a merciless Bullshit Detector. I've read most of his books, at least those published since 1990 or so. But on Brokeback Mountain he bogged down in the question of whether Jack and Ennis were gay, and (In My Hubristic Opinion) he came down wrong on just about every point. After reading his review I wrote a rejoinder, which I then sat on for a year or so before I got an Epinions account and finally posted it there. I'm now posting it here, with a few very minor changes, as a sort of prologue or overture to the big Social Constructionist question.
-------------------------------------------------
Are they gay? Who knows? It's amazing how much doublethink turns up even in gay reviewers, though. Sociologist Stephen O. Murray, for instance, agrees with Heath Ledger that Ennis is "not gay", as if Heath Ledger were an expert in such matters. Ennis says, "I ain't no queer" -- that's a noun, not an adjective -- and Jack says, "Me neither." Murray of all people should know better. He's the guy who's famous for writing that he has "been told by young Latinos with semen inside their rectums that they `never get fucked.'" Denials of this kind are not always false; but they can't be taken as always true either. Why sure, if they say they aren't queers, they must not be! Neither was Rock Hudson, or Kevin Spacey, or Nathan Lane until he changed his mind and said he was! And Richard Nixon wasn't a crook -- he said so!

Ennis refers to "this thing, it grabs hold of us". Does this prove that they have been possessed by a spirit that forces them to have sex together? In other writings Murray jeers at Foucauldians who indulge in what he calls "discourse creationism," but that is what he's doing here. What a (fictional!) character says is always true, to be taken at face value. If you don't say you're gay or think of yourself as gay, you're not -- until you say you are, and then, presto change-O!

Murray overlooks the scene late in the film where Ennis asks Jack if he ever gets the feeling that everybody is looking at him, and they know? Fit that question together with Ennis's childhood memory of being forced by his father (his hand firm on the back of the boy's neck) to look at the mutilated corpse of a queerbashed gay man, and it's significant that the word "fear" or its synonyms never appear in Murray's descriptions of Ennis's feelings. I thought it was obvious, for example, that among the emotions Ennis felt when his ex-wife confronted him about his relationship with Jack, was abject screaming terror. ""Panic" (as in "homosexual panic") also comes to mind. Maybe less obvious, but also explained by the memory, is Ennis's crawling into an alley to weep and retch and punch a wall as their first separation begins.

As Murray points out, the idea that he might be killed for loving another man was not at all paranoid or unrealistic. His unwillingness to leave Wyoming for somewhat safer climes -- there is, after all, plenty of horrific antigay violence in cities like New York and San Francisco, it is not limited to rural areas -- is interesting: Ennis is terrified, but (like a horse in a burning barn?) he won't leave. Murray writes, "Ennis believes that men cannot mate for life", but I don't see how the film supports this claim. I think Ennis knows men can mate for life -- the two "old guys" did just that -- but he's obsessed with the fear that their lives will be cut short by violence. His murderous jealousy also is evidence that he knows he is mated to Jack for life.

Murray takes for granted that Jack is the queer one, because he makes "the first (and second and various later) move"; Ennis is a straight guy who happens to fall in love with another man. (Why is "gay" an illicit descriptor, but "straight" isn't?) Yes, Jack makes the first move, but what he offers is not his ass but his cock. Ennis responds by penetrating him. Tradition has it, of course, that Penetrator equals Real Man equals Not Queer. But Ennis apparently didn't need any time to become erect himself; was he lying there hard the whole time? I wouldn't be surprised. In the original story, Proulx endowed Ennis with a mystic knowledge of what to do. Perhaps because he'd been thinking about doing it even before he met Jack? A straight guy isn't supposed to respond to another man's sexual offer by turning him over. Ennis's reluctance to share the tent in the first place is not proof that he hadn't noticed Jack erotically -- rather the opposite. As for the later moves, I'm not sure how Murray is counting them, but it is Ennis who comes to Jack in the tent to initiate their second night together. I think that's crucial, for it shows that Ennis is not just a guy who can't say no.

Murray says that "they are not cowboys. They ride horses in their line of work, but they are responsible for sheep, and anyone who has seen very many westerns knows that the cattle barons and the would-be sheep-raisers are recurrent foes. Jack, for a time, is a 'rodeo cowboy,' riding bulls." After Ennis's summer tending sheep with Jack, he works on ranches with cattle. I think that Murray is defining "cowboy" far too strictly here, and I really don't understand why some people work themselves into such a lather over whether this is a "gay cowboy" movie or not; is it because cowboys aren't universal enough, or their feelings don't matter? Or is it because cowboys are too universal, and they can't be gay or America will fall? I really don't get it.

As Murray also complains, "The word 'gay' is bandied about very loosely in regard to the movie"; but then, "gay" does not have a strict meaning. "Ennis and Jack have homosexual sex, but neither has a self-identification as gay (and, as I have explained at considerable length in American Gay, self-identification, at least intrapsychically, is the criterion of gay)." American Gay is a fine book, but while Murray can define "gay" strictly for his own writing purposes, he can't require other people to hew to his definition, and most don't.

He goes on say that Brokeback is not a "gay movie" because "The story was written by a straight woman, adapted for the screen by a straight couple, directed by a straight man, and stars straight movie stars". So, Of Human Bondage is a homosexual novel because, though it has no gay content, it was written by a homosexual? What constitutes a "gay novel" or "gay play" or "gay movie" has been much debated over the years. Gay playwright Robert Patrick playfully defined a gay play as a play that sleeps with other plays of the same sex. Murray's definition might work for him, but I think that for most people, a movie with central same-sex content is a "gay movie" regardless of the sexual orientation of the writers, directors, or stars, or second assistant grip.

Murray continues:

In rural Wyoming it seems plausible for someone who spends his waking hours outdoors not to know of the emergence of gay communities during the 1970s. It, however, seems more difficult to imagine that by the early 1980s Jack would not have learned that somewhere (in Texas, even) there were gay bars and gay circles and gay neighborhoods. Jack is less isolated (both in general and from media) than Ennis. Instead of crossing the Rio Grande at Ciudad Juarez, he could have tooled over to Houston... but he didn't, and continued to dream of splendid isolation a deux on a ranch with Ennis (who never left Wyoming). I'm definitely not saying that Jack wanted an urban gay lifestyle. What he did want was more conceivable and obtainable after "almost twenty years" (a specification that crops up at one of their brief reunions in the wilds).

That reminds me: how does Ennis know "what they got for boys like you in Mexico", if he's so ignorant and isolated and all? I suspect that Jack's self-limitation is best explained as a result of Proulx's naivete (in interviews she's made much of her personal ignorance, as an old straight woman), and perhaps her own wish to keep her characters uncontaminated by urban gay lifestyles. But I've also known gay men who, even though they lived in cities with gay resources, refused to use them, or even to admit that they were there, while dreaming that Jack Armstrong the All-American Boy would come knocking on their doors one night and take them away from all this. Murray should know that "gay" is still a stigmatized identity, and that closet cases often have intricate strategies to avoid applying it to themselves even "intrapsychically." There's a widespread tendency to treat them as sophisticated thinkers so soaked with integrity that they won't apply a label to themselves unless it truly fits, no matter how much they want to, when it really is the other way around. Think, by analogy, of the difficulty of the strategies people have for identifying themselves as alcoholics. Just because Jack is less paralyzed than Ennis, it doesn't mean he's ready to move to the Montrose in Houston. (Where he might also be queer-bashed.) But then, he was only 39 when he died. Murray must know, as I do, men who came out later in life than that.

Brokeback Mountain, Murray declares ex cathedra, "is a story of the tragic internalization of homo-hatred, not a movie about `gay cowboys.'" False antithesis. The movie is both, and more.

Essentially Yours

In an endnote to an article* co-written with her partner of 20 years Nicola Griffith, Kelley Eskridge wrote:

For the record, I don't call myself a lesbian writer. I don't even call myself a lesbian. I live in a committed relationship of nearly twenty years with Nicola, and would crawl on my belly like a reptile to beg her forgiveness for having mad sex with Johnny Depp if I ever got the chance. And yet what's the point of correcting people? No, no, I'm not a lesbian! is defensive at best, and offensive at worst, and I don't feel either way about this part of me.

This sent me back to an interview** with Marge Piercy, conducted by her husband Ira Wood, where Piercy said:

Frequently when I go into a place, because I’m a feminist, people assume I’m a lesbian. I never question that silent assumption. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t be a lesbian if I fell in love with a woman again.

There are interesting similarities in these remarks: the refusal to correct others' misimpressions, for one. But there are differences too: for Piercy, loving a woman makes one a lesbian, at least for the duration, whether or not one has loved or will again love men. For Eskridge, it seems that loving a woman for twenty years doesn't make her a lesbian, because she has loved men before and has never loved another woman.

Well, fine. People should label themselves as they see fit. And it's good to see how different people mean different things by the same word, so one should be alert to that possibility. (Recall, for example, that Thai toms and dees "explicitly reject the English term 'lesbian' largely due to its explicitly sexual associations. 'Lesbian' is understood to refer to two feminine women who are engaging in sex with each other ... [as] a performance for a lascivious male audience.") But I was surprised by Eskridge's note, because in the body of the essay she had written that she's "never cottoned to essentialism. ... I find such things stupid and reductive, and I'm not partial to being reduced" (page 41). And insisting, for example, that one is not a lesbian because one isn't really a lesbian, despite a twenty-year relationship with another woman, is essentialism: she is saying that her nature, her essence, her being, isn't lesbian. There are evidently "real" lesbians in Eskridge's universe, but she's not one of them.

Eskridge's remark caught my attention because not long before, I'd overheard a gay kid complaining about something he saw in his Gender Studies class that "essentialized" all gay men as effeminate. I think he meant "stereotyped," though of course there's some overlap in the concepts. But as he kept repeating "essentialized," I felt a powerful urge to walk over to him and say, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

"Essentialism" is a tricky word, for all that it's bandied about so much. Some people have talked about coming up with a social constructionist understanding of sexual identity, but I think that project is doomed, because identity, saying "I am a ...", is essentialist. Most attempts I've seen to get around that problem mistake social constructionism for social determinism, the belief that we are molded and shaped by our environments (including the cultures/societies into which we're born), with the corollary that our real selves are something other than whatever our upbringing did to us. Sometimes social determinists seem to think that human beings have no nature, we are totally malleable in the hands of our parents and our societies. That's a much-disputed issue, and I'm glad I don't have to try to settle it here. Those who'd like to begin exploring it might start by reading Noam Chomsky's critique of B. F. Skinner in For Reasons of State (Pantheon, 1973), though much of it is available online, and / or Clifford Geertz's essay "Anti-Anti-Relativism", originally published in 1984 and reprinted in Available Light (Princeton, 2000).

But I want to try to stay with social construction / essentialism. It's popular to accuse social constructionists of believing that, for example, being gay is a "choice" rather than something we're born with. Aside from the fact that "born this way" and "choice" are not opposite concepts, social constructionism investigates the ways people try to avoid or deny choice, to believe that their customs are natural, in the blood, in the genes. Even if it could be shown (and so far, it hasn't been) that genes can drive men to engage in sex with other men, or women with other women, we have a complex system of understandings about the meanings of that sexual behavior. For example, is a man who only penetrates other men a "homosexual"? Many cultures would say No, only a man who is penetrated is a "homosexual." In a butch-femme lesbian couple, are they both lesbians or is only the butch the lesbian? The lesbianism of femmes has often been denied, including by lesbians themselves, including butches.

Although identity is essentialist, it isn't always believed to be inborn / genetic / biological. That I'm an American is part of my identity, because by historical accident I was born here. I'm not biologically different from people who aren't Americans. The same can be said for religious identity, political identity, and many other kinds. At the same time, people seem to find it difficult not to essentialize. Even academics, trying to avoid essentializing terms like "homosexual," "gay," or "lesbian" in favor of "same-sex," soon start loading terms like "same-sex" with all the essentializing baggage they're trying to leave behind. They write about "same-sex desires", for example, as though such desires were always erotic, or same-sex relationships or communities, forgetting that monastic orders and the military are same-sex communities. And just recently I read someone referring to "same-sex parents."

I believe all this is mainly a problem when we're trying to communicate with other people about such things. (Which means, a lot of the time.) Go back to Kelley Eskridge. Since she hasn't defined her term, I speculate that for her a lesbian is a woman who never has sex with men, or never wants to. The trouble is that by this definition a good many self-defined lesbians are not lesbians after all, and the same would be true for gay/homosexual men. Take the (in)famous figure of 10% for the proportion of gay people in the population, ascribed to Alfred Kinsey. Kinsey didn't use the word "gay," and 10% is the proportion of men in his research who were more or less exclusively homosexual in their erotic experience for at least three years of their lives. (Only 4% were exclusively homosexual in their erotic experience throughout their lives.) That leaves a lot of wiggle room, and it would seem that according to Kinsey, most "gay" people are significantly bisexual in their actual behavior. The poet Adrienne Rich calls herself lesbian, though she was married to a man in her youth, and has three sons. The poet W. H. Auden, though most of his erotic experience was with males and the central relationship of his adult life was with a male, had numerous sexual relationships with women. Not only are labels like "gay" and "lesbian" not determined by a person's erotic experience, they seem to be largely independent of it. I've often noticed that people deliberately seem to define problematic terms very narrowly so as to exclude themselves, and then they complain that the term is too narrow and excludes them. So now I'm wondering why Eskridge, who is a very intelligent and well-informed person, can be unaware that the term "lesbian", as it's commonly used, does not necessarily exclude her and her experience.

Besides, essentialism isn't a bad thing in itself: it's a tool we use to socially construct. It can't be eliminated, because then social construction would come to a halt. That's the other trouble (besides misunderstanding the concept) with the kid who was upset about essentializing. "Essentializing" isn't, or shouldn't be, a pejorative; it just refers to one way of looking at human society, as incomplete as social construction is. There's a funny bit in one of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City novels where Michael, an older gay man, is shocked that a young lesbian friend doesn't know who Sappho was. "How can you call yourself a dyke?" he asks her. "I don't call myself one," she replies, "I am one. I didn't have to take a course in it, you know." Both have essentializing views of what a lesbian is -- which is another way of saying that they rely on different social constructions. Two sides of the same coin, two poles of the same magnet.

And then Mrs. Madrigal, the series' resident oracle, reminds Michael that, eons before, she'd had to explain to him who Ronald Firbank was.

* "War Machine, Time Machine", in Queer Universes: Sexuality in Science Fiction, ed. Wendy Gay Pearson, Veronica Hollinger, and Joan Gordon. Liverpool University Press, 2008, page 49

** Marge Piercy, Parti-colored Blocks for a Quilt. (Poets on Poetry) University of Michigan Press, 1982, page 313

Essentially Yours

In an endnote to an article* co-written with her partner of 20 years Nicola Griffith, Kelley Eskridge wrote:

For the record, I don't call myself a lesbian writer. I don't even call myself a lesbian. I live in a committed relationship of nearly twenty years with Nicola, and would crawl on my belly like a reptile to beg her forgiveness for having mad sex with Johnny Depp if I ever got the chance. And yet what's the point of correcting people? No, no, I'm not a lesbian! is defensive at best, and offensive at worst, and I don't feel either way about this part of me.

This sent me back to an interview** with Marge Piercy, conducted by her husband Ira Wood, where Piercy said:

Frequently when I go into a place, because I’m a feminist, people assume I’m a lesbian. I never question that silent assumption. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t be a lesbian if I fell in love with a woman again.

There are interesting similarities in these remarks: the refusal to correct others' misimpressions, for one. But there are differences too: for Piercy, loving a woman makes one a lesbian, at least for the duration, whether or not one has loved or will again love men. For Eskridge, it seems that loving a woman for twenty years doesn't make her a lesbian, because she has loved men before and has never loved another woman.

Well, fine. People should label themselves as they see fit. And it's good to see how different people mean different things by the same word, so one should be alert to that possibility. (Recall, for example, that Thai toms and dees "explicitly reject the English term 'lesbian' largely due to its explicitly sexual associations. 'Lesbian' is understood to refer to two feminine women who are engaging in sex with each other ... [as] a performance for a lascivious male audience.") But I was surprised by Eskridge's note, because in the body of the essay she had written that she's "never cottoned to essentialism. ... I find such things stupid and reductive, and I'm not partial to being reduced" (page 41). And insisting, for example, that one is not a lesbian because one isn't really a lesbian, despite a twenty-year relationship with another woman, is essentialism: she is saying that her nature, her essence, her being, isn't lesbian. There are evidently "real" lesbians in Eskridge's universe, but she's not one of them.

Eskridge's remark caught my attention because not long before, I'd overheard a gay kid complaining about something he saw in his Gender Studies class that "essentialized" all gay men as effeminate. I think he meant "stereotyped," though of course there's some overlap in the concepts. But as he kept repeating "essentialized," I felt a powerful urge to walk over to him and say, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

"Essentialism" is a tricky word, for all that it's bandied about so much. Some people have talked about coming up with a social constructionist understanding of sexual identity, but I think that project is doomed, because identity, saying "I am a ...", is essentialist. Most attempts I've seen to get around that problem mistake social constructionism for social determinism, the belief that we are molded and shaped by our environments (including the cultures/societies into which we're born), with the corollary that our real selves are something other than whatever our upbringing did to us. Sometimes social determinists seem to think that human beings have no nature, we are totally malleable in the hands of our parents and our societies. That's a much-disputed issue, and I'm glad I don't have to try to settle it here. Those who'd like to begin exploring it might start by reading Noam Chomsky's critique of B. F. Skinner in For Reasons of State (Pantheon, 1973), though much of it is available online, and / or Clifford Geertz's essay "Anti-Anti-Relativism", originally published in 1984 and reprinted in Available Light (Princeton, 2000).

But I want to try to stay with social construction / essentialism. It's popular to accuse social constructionists of believing that, for example, being gay is a "choice" rather than something we're born with. Aside from the fact that "born this way" and "choice" are not opposite concepts, social constructionism investigates the ways people try to avoid or deny choice, to believe that their customs are natural, in the blood, in the genes. Even if it could be shown (and so far, it hasn't been) that genes can drive men to engage in sex with other men, or women with other women, we have a complex system of understandings about the meanings of that sexual behavior. For example, is a man who only penetrates other men a "homosexual"? Many cultures would say No, only a man who is penetrated is a "homosexual." In a butch-femme lesbian couple, are they both lesbians or is only the butch the lesbian? The lesbianism of femmes has often been denied, including by lesbians themselves, including butches.

Although identity is essentialist, it isn't always believed to be inborn / genetic / biological. That I'm an American is part of my identity, because by historical accident I was born here. I'm not biologically different from people who aren't Americans. The same can be said for religious identity, political identity, and many other kinds. At the same time, people seem to find it difficult not to essentialize. Even academics, trying to avoid essentializing terms like "homosexual," "gay," or "lesbian" in favor of "same-sex," soon start loading terms like "same-sex" with all the essentializing baggage they're trying to leave behind. They write about "same-sex desires", for example, as though such desires were always erotic, or same-sex relationships or communities, forgetting that monastic orders and the military are same-sex communities. And just recently I read someone referring to "same-sex parents."

I believe all this is mainly a problem when we're trying to communicate with other people about such things. (Which means, a lot of the time.) Go back to Kelley Eskridge. Since she hasn't defined her term, I speculate that for her a lesbian is a woman who never has sex with men, or never wants to. The trouble is that by this definition a good many self-defined lesbians are not lesbians after all, and the same would be true for gay/homosexual men. Take the (in)famous figure of 10% for the proportion of gay people in the population, ascribed to Alfred Kinsey. Kinsey didn't use the word "gay," and 10% is the proportion of men in his research who were more or less exclusively homosexual in their erotic experience for at least three years of their lives. (Only 4% were exclusively homosexual in their erotic experience throughout their lives.) That leaves a lot of wiggle room, and it would seem that according to Kinsey, most "gay" people are significantly bisexual in their actual behavior. The poet Adrienne Rich calls herself lesbian, though she was married to a man in her youth, and has three sons. The poet W. H. Auden, though most of his erotic experience was with males and the central relationship of his adult life was with a male, had numerous sexual relationships with women. Not only are labels like "gay" and "lesbian" not determined by a person's erotic experience, they seem to be largely independent of it. I've often noticed that people deliberately seem to define problematic terms very narrowly so as to exclude themselves, and then they complain that the term is too narrow and excludes them. So now I'm wondering why Eskridge, who is a very intelligent and well-informed person, can be unaware that the term "lesbian", as it's commonly used, does not necessarily exclude her and her experience.

Besides, essentialism isn't a bad thing in itself: it's a tool we use to socially construct. It can't be eliminated, because then social construction would come to a halt. That's the other trouble (besides misunderstanding the concept) with the kid who was upset about essentializing. "Essentializing" isn't, or shouldn't be, a pejorative; it just refers to one way of looking at human society, as incomplete as social construction is. There's a funny bit in one of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City novels where Michael, an older gay man, is shocked that a young lesbian friend doesn't know who Sappho was. "How can you call yourself a dyke?" he asks her. "I don't call myself one," she replies, "I am one. I didn't have to take a course in it, you know." Both have essentializing views of what a lesbian is -- which is another way of saying that they rely on different social constructions. Two sides of the same coin, two poles of the same magnet.

And then Mrs. Madrigal, the series' resident oracle, reminds Michael that, eons before, she'd had to explain to him who Ronald Firbank was.

* "War Machine, Time Machine", in Queer Universes: Sexuality in Science Fiction, ed. Wendy Gay Pearson, Veronica Hollinger, and Joan Gordon. Liverpool University Press, 2008, page 49

** Marge Piercy, Parti-colored Blocks for a Quilt. (Poets on Poetry) University of Michigan Press, 1982, page 313

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.