Homosexual Closet

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Declared the "defining structure for gay oppression in this century," the image of the closet has come to be the structure most acutely identified with the grief, silence and loss of the modern 20th-century homosexual subject (Sedgwick 71). The idea of being "closeted" or a "closet-case" emerged in mid-20th century America with the increased policing of sexuality related to Cold War conspiracy, the McCarthy trials, and the White Flight to the suburbs. The mechanics of the phrase are often used to describe any hidden secret (a "closet misogynist") or a surprise unveiling or announcement ("coming out as a liberal"), although the overtones of "the closet" remain most strongly tied to the homosexual experience.

The closet is generally understood as a figure of speech for the self-imposed (but often necessary) silence someone adopts regarding personal sexuality; individuals are "in the closet" when they either do not announce their homosexuality (allowing their silence to be ambiguous) or actively hide their sexuality (posing as heterosexual). Such distinctions are inevitably mutable--an individual may be "out of the closet" with friends yet "in the closet" with employers or parents; similarly, silence regarding one's sexual orientation or activity may not prevent anyone from presuming an individual is homosexual, especially if one's appearance is not gendernormative.

Perhaps no image offers so poignant a representation of the closet than the scene of Ennis del Mar sitting in his dead lover's childhood bedroom in Ang Lee's 2007 Brokeback Mountain. Framed from within Jack Twist's closet, the stark realism of this shot places the viewer in the position of the closeted observer. From within Jack's closet we bear witness to Ennis' own unbearable silence, as he dwells in the traumatic aphasia of loss. Ennis approaches the camera and the next cut turns us within the closet, residing there with Ennis as he discovers a pair of bloody shirts--one his, one Jack's--long thought lost, hidden behind a panel: the tell-tale hearts of Jack's closet. These lonely remnants are taken away by Ennis, only to re-emerge in the film's final moment, hanging in Ennis' own closet. The moment lingers before Ennis shuts his closet door, the final mis-en-scene juxtaposing the chamber of feeling that is closed within Ennis' closet against the green field out the open window--a field whose verdancy is matched only by the field in which we witnessed Jack's silent and brutal death only minutes before. Within the closet, Ennis and Jack's feelings were protected, although unspoken. Outside the closet, however, Jack's discovered homosexual activities result in his demise--the land outside the closet, outside the window, is not enough, even in its vastness, to preserve Jack from death.

In what has be critically read as yet another crushing expression of queer tragedy (along the lines of Boys Don't Cry, The Well of Loneliness, Stone Butch Blues), Brokeback Mountain's implementation of the closet makes manifest the realities of silence versus speech on which the closet door literally hinges. The relations of the closet are "the relations of the known and the unknown, the explicit and the inexplicit" as it relies, on the surface, in a distinction between the hetero- and homosexual that emerged at the end of the 19th-century as a condensation of all sexual practices in the form of one's gender-object choice (Sedgwick 3).

The Closet as a Mode of Mediation

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Floorplans diagram the relationship between a room and its closet.

The metaphor of the closet is about the relationship between two spaces--one in, one out, one closed, one open, one announced and one shuttered. The complexity of the closet, however, lies in the fact that both of its spaces are simultaneously in and out, closed and open, announced and shuttered. Closets are repositories built off main rooms, and are thus obviously peripheral and marginal; they are storage sites of desire. Yet to be "in the closet" means participating or passing (at least on the surface) among the majority. Thus the emotional dyslexia of the closet: being "in the closet" suggests that the closet individual participates in the larger "room" of heterosexual relations, although one's own occupation of that space is psychically smaller as every covert speech act forces the queer to brush up against the enclosing walls of institutionalized language.

The notion of the closet is held fast upon the individual's ability to live a "dual life" insofar as one must be aware that she is indeed in the closet in order to be in the closet. It is fundamentally a psychic structure, a set of relations between interior/exterior, knowledge/ignorance, with the bar operating as sacred threshold through which one may hide in or come out. The closet, as a mental device for conceptualizing one's relationship to society, mediates a relationship between queer knowledge and social ignorance. To be "in the closet" is to be at once gay and not-gay; it is a microcosm of an internal relationship between shame and pronouncement in which one recognizes oneself as deviant and understands the necessity to be read as normative. It requires self-knowledge and yet a denial of that self-knowledge as a truth that must be expressed; as such, the closet is a secret within a secret.

The Epistemology of the Closet as a Logic of Privacy vs. Risk

It is perhaps unexceptional, in some ways, that the notion of the homosexual closet arises during the same cultural moment as post-WWII McCarthyism. According to Professor of Law William Eskridge: "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, 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" (2). According to Eve Sedgwick, the "damaging contradictions of this compromised metaphor of in and out of the closet of privacy" are simply siphoned from a "larger" topology of privacy and secrecy that emerges in the late 19th century (72). In such a political and epistemological climate, the closet comes to invert the traditional logics of secret intelligence that dominated the World Wars and post-War era. The enemy, in this sense, becomes the self as well as the other, as it is the homosexual's own desire that threatens to pry them from the closet. The homosexual attempts to render themselves as a deceptive object, an object whose "appearance is never more than intentionally misleading" (Horn 67). There is indeed produced a "dynamic of bottomless mistrust and violence-prone paranoia" but this dynamic is entirely internalized in a violent self-navigation of spy-vs-spy. The homosexual in the closet embodies a Cold War-style logic of mistrust, which Eva Horn defines as "the logic of one's own will to deceive" (67).

The metaphor of the closet creates a situation in which one is psychically and physically constrained by the risk of discovery. In this sense, the epistemological equivalent for the post-WWII closeted homosexual may be the double agent, except one lacking the teleology of knowledge gathering. If the purpose of the spy is to "penetrate into the forbidden and protected space, cross borders, and investigate the enemy's territory [...] Physically setting foot on enemy soil to spy out hidden locations [...] His disguise is important: he mimics the enemy", then the homosexual executes a perverse reversal of this role (Horn 73). From within the closet, the homosexual mimics the straight world, but with the sole purpose of survival. The activities of the closeted homosexual are to keep the knowledge secret rather than process it into "information." The homosexual mimics the straight world not to garner intelligence about the enemy but to disguise intelligence about herself; enmity is always simultaneously "out there" and "in here." The closet and the room become jointly theatening spaces of potential discovery. The purpose of the closet is to contain risk, but likewise one must recognize the possibility of risk to be in the closet. In doing so, the closet becomes a secret space of internalized alienation (the much-touted notion of "gay shame"); the closet is a place of covert expression, producing an aesthetic of desire based in silences and ignorances both public and personal. The closet is never a black box, because the tension of the closet resides in the awareness that the world is just beyond; when in the closet the only light comes from the outside underneath the door.

Coming Out

There is a structural reversal inherent to the conceptual interface of closeting, for what the closet encloses it also offers the potential to reveal. "Coming out of the closet" involves making oneself known as homosexual, either to a homosexual or heterosexual audience. It may result in a range of responses, including devastating violence, celebratory self-identification, or institutional refusal to acknowledge the speech act, a refusal Eve Sedgwick summarizes an the statement, "That's fine, but why did you think I'd want to know about it?"

"Coming out" is an image curiously poised in exclusive relation to the closet--indeed, if the closet is based in "fits and starts" of silence, then there is no closet without the speech act of coming out (Sedgwick 71). As Sedgwick writes, "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" (71). If the closet is the homosexual's cruel destiny, then coming out produces a fantasy of acceptance in which the homosexual's secret knowledge becomes public information, the disguise is given up, and she ceases to be a spy against herself. The celebration of announcement is precisely the throbbing heart of gay pride; gay pride operates in response to the closet and, indeed, requires the closet so as to have any emotional efficacy.

If closeting allows the homosexual entrance to the master room as straight, coming out reverses the dynamic of the room: it dispenses with the closet, rendering the closet ultimately straight. Eve Sedgwick draws from the story of Esther to propose the radical potential of "coming out" to create the opportunity to produce a different flow of power by producing straight ignorance in the face of queer knowledge. In this Old Testament story, Esther, a disguised Jew, must unveil herself to her anti-Semetic husband and King, Assuerus, in an attempt to prevent the slaughter of her people. In the face of her revelation, Assuerus can do nothing but articulate his unknowing, and is left speechless. Sedgwick writes: "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 revelation, however, can be as easily fraught with danger as suffused with potential. Coming out renders the double agent no longer double, and in doing so makes the door between the closet and room burn away and the closet itself walled up. Once uncloseted with another individual, the closet can never be rebuilt--this secret knowledge never becomes outdated.

The Closet as Dead Media: A Tale of Two Justins

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JustinUB01.jpg JustinUB02.jpg JustinUB03.jpg JustinUB04.jpg While the closet may be the "defining structure" of the homosexual experience in the 20th-century, its influence as an architectural-mental imaginary is waning in a Western world increasingly posited as "gay friendly". The closet is becoming a historical artifact, as its cultural weight is based on the institutional, legal and linguistic refusal to acknowledge homosexual subjectivity. As Heather Love notes:

'Advances' such as gay marriage and increasing media visibility of well-heeled gays and lesbians threaten to obscure the continuing denigration and dismissal of queer existence. One may enter the mainstream on the condition that one breaks ties with all those who cannot make it--the nonwhite and the nonmonogamous, the poor and the genderdeviant, the fat, the disabled, the unemployed, the infected, and a host of unmentionable others. Social negativity clings not only to these figures but also to those who lived before the common era of gay liberation--the abject multitude against whose experience we define our own liberation" (10).

Coming out involves leaving someone behind, even if that someone is a historical subject. If the closet is constructed to protect the homosexual from the risk of discovery, then the closet ceases to exist once assimilation, rather than discovery, becomes the guiding practice toward homosexuality. As the homosexual is increasingly invited into the practices of monogamy and matrimony (mediations themselves based in the nuclear-family-based accumulation and condensation of economic and physical property), the opportunity to recognize a radical potentiality to queerness wanes. Without the homosexual closet, gay pride simply becomes a celebration of a corporate-sponsored, watered-down liberal goal: being just like everyone else.

The texture of this transition can be clearly illustrated by comparing mainstream television representations of queer youth a mere decade apart. One the one hand, there is Justin Taylor, the blonde, underage twink who becomes involved with the 30-year-old non-monogamous man-whore Brian Kinney in Showtime's Queer as Folk, which aired 2000-2005. In opposition to Taylor's charming promiscuity is Justin Suarez, a clean-cut Latino with an affected flair for fashion who discovers his desire for boys during the final episodes of Ugly Betty's run. While both these boys struggle with the pressures and impossibilities of gay identity, Taylor's "coming out story" harkens back to an almost Stonewall-sensibility of rage in the face of violence, whereas Suarez's narrative is ultimately one of gay assimilation.

Heather Love Notes

"Homosexual identity is indelibly marked by the effects of reverse discourse: on the one hand, it continues to be understood as a form of damaged or compromised subjectivity; on the other hand, the characteristic forms of gay freedom are produced in response to this history. Pride and visibility offer antidotes to shame and the legacy of the closet; they are made in the image of specific forms of denigration. Queerness is structured by this central turn; it is both abject and exalted, a 'mixture of delicious and freak.' This contradiction is lived out on the level of individual subjectivity; homosexuality is experienced as a stigmatizing mark as well as a form of romantic exceptionalism. It also appears at the structural level in the gap between mass-mediated images of attractive, well-to-do gays and lesbians and the reality of ongoing violence and inequality" (2-3).

"The emphasis on damage in queer studies exists in a state of tension with a related and contrary tendency--the need to resist damage and to affirm queer existence" (3).

"Lot's wife clings to the past and is ruined by it. This figure has taken on a new resonance for queers in the decades since Stonewall. While it was once the case that admitting homosexual feelings meant acknowledging one's status as a tragic figure, gay liberation has opened multiple escape routes from those doomed cities of the plain. With increasing legal protection and provisional inclusion in several arenas of civic life, gays and lesbians no longer see themselves as necessarily damned. Although a brighter future for queers is not assured, it is conceivable. However, as in the story of Lot's escape from Sodom, moving into that future is conditional: one must leave the past behind" (9).

Odysseus and the Sirens "they [Adorno and Horkheimer] understand the allure of the Sirens as 'that of losing oneself in the past.' The Sirens are the repository of historical memory, but to answer their call is to be destroyed: 'if the Sirens know everything that has happened, they demand the future as its price.' [...] By being bound to the mast, Odysseus survives gis encounter with the Sirens: though he can hear them singing, he cannot do anything about it. What saves him is that even as he looks backward he keeps moving forward. One might argue that Odysseus offers and ideal model of the relation to the historical past: listen to it, but do not allow yourself to be destroyed by it [...]the emphasis on progress in contemporary gay and lesbian politics has meant that today we must, like Odysseus, steel ourselves against close encounters with the queer past [...] 'Advances' such as gay marriage and increasing media visibility of well-heeled gays and lesbians threaten to obscure the continuing denigration and dismissal of queer existence. One may enter the mainstream on the condition that one breaks ties with all those who cannot make it--the nonwhite and the nonmonogamous, the poor and the genderdeviant, the fat, the disabled, the unemployed, the infected, and a host of unmentionable others. Social negativity clings not only to these figures but also to those who lived before the common era of gay liberation--the abject multitude against whose experience we define our own liberation. Given the new opportunities available to some gays and lesbians, the temptation to forget--to forget the outrages and humiliations of gay and lesbian history and to ignore the ongoing suffering of those not borne up by the rising tide of gay normalization--is stronger than ever" (9-10). FUCK YEEEEEEEEEEEEES

Am I arguing for the closet as a mechanism for straight people?

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)

"These references (there are many others) illustrate not only how slowly the vocabulary of the closet was worked out, but also how the closet can be either protective or threatening. n16 For the homosexual, it could be an embracing even if temporary cocoon, or it could be a scary prison. For heterosexuals, the closet likewise could have two different kinds of meanings, either a place where skeletons are secluded [*706] from view so that they do not disturb household harmony or, more sinisterly, a place within the home where lurk creatures who could break out and wreak havoc" (2).

"People of minority sexual orientations hid in the closet for reasons of both terror (to avoid annihilation) and social accommodation (to pay the price of toleration). But whereas homosexuals before 1940 were reflexively willing to segregate their double lives and keep their gay one a secret, those after World War II were more ambivalent about the segregation, and some openly violated it. Conversely, heterosexuals before World War II were generally willing to let secret homosexual lives pass unnoticed, but after the war found the secret lives more threatening and sought to expose them. The idea of the closet, therefore, is not just the idea that homosexuality must be secret; that was entailed in the double life. What is distinctive about the political economy of the closet is that both homosexuals and heterosexuals regarded the secrecy with ambivalence. All of us were attracted both to the idea of keeping homosexuality hidden and to the opposite idea that the closet door must be thrown open and homosexuality exposed to view and discussion" (2-3).