Homosexual Closet

...the subjectivity of this experience is work in progress... ~ <3 Nooney

Eskridge Notes

The firing of Welles, whom Bullitt described as Roosevelt's "Achilles Heel," n10 reflected the emergence of the closet as the residing place for homosexuals. Roosevelt and Welles assumed that Welles could lead a "double life" -- that Sumner Welles the criminal was segregable from Sumner Welles the friend and public servant -- as long as his homosexuality remained closeted in secrecy. Prior to the 1940s, same-sex intimacy was literally unspeakable, as the homosexual and society conspired to keep the matter secret. By the 1940s, however, the edges separating the two halves of the double life were eroding, as greater numbers of homosexuals transgressed the lines separating public and private spheres and more heterosexuals became curious about the secret life, either to condemn it, to explore it, [*705] or both. The erosion required the homosexual to decide whether to openly admit homosexuality or to keep the private life closeted and separate from the public one for fear that exposure of the former could destroy the latter.

While the closet has become the classic metaphor for homosexual secrecy, n11 it is of surprisingly recent origin, not gaining currency until after World War II. The earliest reference I have found is in John Burns' 1949 Lucifer with a Book, whose characters "come out of the cloister" and into the life. n12 Thus, the idea of coming out of the cloister began as a metaphor for a homosexual's entry into the underground gay subculture, not unlike the "coming out" of a debutante into society. n13 The 1950s invoked the closet as the place where private skeletons and personal secrets are hidden. n14 By the 1960s some gay people were using "coming out" as an expression for the homosexual's sharing her or his own private skeleton in the closet with straight people. Whereas homosexuals confronted the possibility of coming out of the closet, some heterosexuals were obsessed with casting them out. To fight against "homosexual recruiting of youth," Florida's Legislative Investigation Committee wrote in 1964, "the closet door must be thrown open and the light of public understanding cast upon homosexuality." n15. (2)

Sedgwick Notes

“a hypothesis about the centrality of this nominally marginal, conceptually intractable set of definitional issues to the important knowledges and understandings of twentieth-century Western culture” (Sedgwick 2)

“An assumption underlying the book is that the relations of the closet—the relations of the known and the unknown, the explicit and the inexplicit around homo/heterosexual definition—have the potential fir being peculiarly revealing, in fact, about speech acts more generally” (3).

“In the vicinity of the closet, even what counts as a speech act is problematized on a perfectly routine basis” (3). She cites Foucault “there is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say […] There is not one but many silences.”

“'Closetedness' itself is a performance initiated as such by the speech act of a silence—not a particular silence, but a silence that accrues particularity by fits and starts, in relations to the discourse that surrounds and differentially constitutes it. The speech acts that coming out, in turn, can comprise are as strangely specific” (Sedgwick 3).

“the pretense of ignorance (one meaning, the Capital one, of the word 'stonewall') can sometimes be enough to enforce discursive power” (Sedgwick 6).

“there is a satisfaction in dwelling on the degree to which the power of our enemies over us is implicated, not in their command of knowledge, but precisely in their ignorance” (Sedgwick 7).

“Perhaps there exists a plethora of ignorances, and we may begin to ask questions about labor, erotics, and economics of their human production and distribution” (8).

“It is a rather amazing fact that, of the very many dimensions along which the genital activity of one person can be differentiated from that of another (dimensions that include preference for certain acts, certain zones or sensations, certain physical types, a certain frequency, certain symbolic investments, certain relations of age or power, a certain species, a certain number of participants, etc. etc. etc.), precisely one, the gender of object choice, emerged from the turn of the century, and has remained, as the dimension denoted by the now ubiquitous category of 'sexual orientation'” (8). If the homosexual is now a species, not longer practicing silence, no longer bound to the speech act of “coming out” but rather bound to the speech act of “I do”, does the death of the closet signal the re-investment in one species, homohetero (ack, is there something about sinthomosexuality here? Edelman...)?

“The reign of telling the secret was scarcely overturned at Stonewall. Quite the opposite, in some ways. To the fine antennae of public attention the freshness of every drama of (especially involuntary) gay uncovering seems if anything heightened in surprise and delectability, rather than staled, by the increasingly intense atmosphere of public articulations of and about the love that is famous for daring not speak its name” (Sedgwick 67). The oppositions of private/public, inside/outside do not destabilize when one “comes out”; rather, it attests to their “fantasmatic recovery” (Miller, qtd. in Sedgwick 67).

Gay life, for Sedgwick is a constant navigation of silences, ignorances, and suggestions, as one engages in the risky gamble of who knows what. “The gay closet is not a feature only of the live of gay people. But for many gay people it is still the fundamental feature of social life; and there can be few gay people, however courageous and forthright by habit, however fortunate in the supports of their immediate communities, in whose lives the closet is not still a shaping presence” (68).

“[...] a lot of the energy of attention and demarcation that has swirled around issues of homosexuality since the end of the nineteenth century, in Europe and the United States, has been impelled by the distinctively indicative relation of homosexuality to wider mappings of secrecy and disclosure, and of the private and the public” (71).

But homosexuality is no longer “the secret”--if anything it is “that which we should already know”, that which is evident, that which speaks its name on the body, a determination based on object choice. No where is this clearer than in the representation of the queer child. The queer child is, in fact, the last to know their very queerness. Mark intercedes to prevent a very “gay-pride” coming out—instead his coming out happens at a wedding, forshadowing the new teleology of gay relations—what is precisely articulated by Lee Edelman in the false assertation that we are just like everyone else.

Am I essentially arguing that silence vs. speaking is no longer the fixture that determines queer oppression?

“The closet is the defining structure for gay oppression in this century […] the image of coming out regularly interfaces the image of the closet, and its seeming unambivalent public siting can be counterposed as a salvational epistemologic certainty against the very equivocal privacy afforded by the closet: 'If every day person came out to his or her family,' the same article goes on, 'a hundred million Americans could be brought to our side. Employers and straight friends could mean a hundred million more.' And yet the Mad River School District's refusal to hear a woman's coming out as an authentically public speech act is echoed in the frigid response given many acts of coming out: 'That's fine, but why did you think I'd want to know about it?'” (71-2).

“Gay thinkers of this century have, as we'll see, never been blind to the damaging contradictions of this compromised metaphor of in and out of the closet of privacy. But its origins in European culture are, as the writings of Foucault have shown, so ramified—and its relation to the 'larger,' i.e., ostensibly nongay-related, topologies of privacy in the culture is, as the figure of Foucault dramatized, so critical, to enfolding, so representational—that the simple vesting of some alternative metaphor has never, either, been a true possibility” (72).

SO CONNECT THE CLOSET to the EPISTOMOLOGY OF SECRET FROM THE HORN ESSAY

It becomes increasingly clear over the course of the 1800s, that by their end, “knowledge meant sexual knowledge, and secrets sexual secrets, there had in fact developed one particular sexuality that was distinctively constituted as secrecy: the perfect object for the by now insatiably exacerbated epistemological/sexual anxiety of the turn-of-the-century subject” (73).

St. Paul demonized sodomy and declared it a crime whose name was not to be uttered. This shaping of silence culminated in Lord Alfred Douglas' “epochal public utterance” : “I am the Love that dare not speak its name” (74).

In texts like Billy Budd and Dorian Gray produce a subject of knowledge and ignorance infused with one object: “no longer sexuality as a whole but even more specifically, now, the homosexual topic. And the condensation of the world of possibilities surrounding same-sex sexuality—including, shall we say, both gay desires and the most rabid phobias against them—the condensation of this plurality to the homosexual topic that now formed the accusative case of modern processes of personal knowing, was not the least infliction of the turn-of-the-century crisis of sexual definition” (74).

Sedgwick argues that secrecy itself becomes “manifest as this secret” (74).

“Vibrantly resonant as the image of the closet is for many modern oppressions, it is indicative for homophobia in a way it cannot be for other oppressions” (75).

Story of Esther, who is hidden as a Jew and must unveil herself to her anti-Semetic husband/King, in an attempt to prevent the slaughter of her people. In the face of her revelation, Assuerus can do nothing but articulate his unknowing: “Only with the uttering of these blank syllables, making the weight of Assuerus's powerful ignorance suddenly audible—not least to him—in the same register as the weight of Esther's and Mardochee's private knowledge, can any open flow of power become possible. […] Just so with coming out: it can bring about the revelation of a powerful unknowing as unknowing, not as a vacuum or as the blank it can pretend to be but as a weighty and occupied and consequential epistemological space” (77).

“This frightening thunder can also, however, be the sound of manna falling” (78).

The coming out is not always a surprise, and when the listening party presumes to know the secret the homosexual may themselves not be able to acknowledge, a “potential for exploitiveness is built into the optics of the asymmetrical, the specularized, and the inexplicit” (80).

“the open secret”

“even to come out does not end anyone's relation to the closet, including turbulently the closet of the other” (81).

The closet ultimately rests on a stabilized notion of homo/heterosexual dyad. Among moderately educated Western people, there is a “similar understanding of the homosexual definition” which hasn't changed since Proust. “It holds the minoritizing view that there is a distinct population of persons who 'really are' gay; at the same time, it holds the universalizing views that sexual desire is an unpredictably powerful solvent of stable identities; that apparently heterosexual persons and object choices are strongly marked by same-sex influences and desires, and vice versa for apparently homosexual ones; and that at least male heterosexual identity and modern masculinist culture may require for their maintenance the scapegoating crystallization of a same-sex male desire that is widespread and in the first place internal” (85).