1

Epístemology of the Closet

The lie, the perfect lie, about people we know, about the rela-
tions we have had with them, about Out motive for sorne action,
forrnuJated in tota1ly different terlllS, the lie as to what we are,
whom we love, what we fee! with regard ro people who love
us ... - that lie is one of the few things in the world that can
open windows for us on to what is new and unknown, that can
awaken in us sJeeping senses for the contemplation of universes
that otherwise we should never have known.
Proust, The Captive

The epistemology oE the closet is not a dated subject or a sllperseded

regime of knowing. While the events of June, 1969, and later vitally rein-
vigorated many people's sense of the potency, magnetism, and promise of
gay self-disclosure, nevertheless the reign of the telling secret was scareely
overturned with Stonewall. Quite the opposite, in sorne ways. To the fine
antennae of publie 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 articlllations of mid a"out the love that is famous for daring not
speak its name. So resilient and productive a structure of narrative wil! not
readily surrender its hold on important forms of social meaning. As D. A.
Miller points out in an :legis-creating essay, seerecy can funetion as

the subjective practice in which the oppositions of private! public, inside!

outside, subject! object are established, and the sanctity oE their first term
kept inviolate. And the phenomenon of the "open secret" does not, as one
might think, bring about the collapse of those binarisms and their ideo-
logical effects, but rather attests ro their fantasmatic recovery. ¡

Even at an individual level, there are remarkably few of even the most
openly gay people who are not deliberate!y in the closet with someone

1. D. A. Miner, "SecretSubjects, OpenSecrers," in his The Noveland the Police,p. 207.

67
68 Epistemo!ogy 01 the Cfoset Epistemology 01 the C!oset

personally or economically or institutionally important ro them. Further- enough for focusing scrutiny on those who inhabit the closet (however
more, the elasticity of heterosexist presumption means that, like equivocally) ro the exclusion of those in the ambient heterosexist culture
Wendy in Peter Pan, people find new walls springing up around them even who enioin it and whose intimate representational needs it serves in a way
as they drowse:every encounter with a new classful of studems, to say less extortionate to themselves.
nothing of a new boss, social worker, loan officer, landlord, doctor, 1 scarcely know at this stage a consistent alternative proceeding, how-
ereets new closets whose fraught and characteristic laws of opties and ever; and it may wel! be that, for reasons to be discussed, no such
physics exact from at least gay people new surveys, new calculatíons, new consistency is possible. At least to enlarge the circumference of scrutiny
draughts and requisitions of seereey or disclosure. Even an out gay person and to vary by some new assays of saltation the angle of its address wiU
deals daily with interlocutors about whol1l shc doesn't know whether they be among the methoclological projects of this discussion.
know or not; it 15 equaUy difficult to guess for any given interlocutor
whether, if they did know, the knowledge would seem very important.
Nor-at the mast basic level-is it unaccountable that someone who In Montgomery Couory, Maryland, in 1973, an eighth-grade earth sci-
wanted a job, cllstody or visiting rights, insurance, protection from ence teacher named Acanfora was transferred to a nonteaching position
violence, from "[herapy," from distorting stereotype, frorn insulting scru- by the Board of Education when tbey learned he was gaYo When Acanfora
tiny, fram simple insult, from forcible interpretation of their bodily spoke to news media, such as "60 Minutes" and the Public Broadcasting
product, could deliberately choose to remain in or to reenter the closet in Svstem, about his situation, he was refused a new.contract entirely.
some or aH segments of their life. The gay closet is not afeature only of the Acanfora sued. The federal district coun that first heard his case sup-
lives of gay people. But for many gay people it is still the fundamental ported the action and rationale of the Board of Education, holding that
feature of sociallife; and there can be few gay people, however courageous Acanfora's recourse ro the media had brought undue attention to himself
and forthright habit, however fortunate in the support of their immedi- and his sexuality, ro a degree that would be deleteriOlls ro the educational
ate communities., in whose lives the closet ís not still a shaping presence. process. The FOllrtil Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed. They considered
To say, as 1 wiU be saying here, that the epistemology of the closet has Acanfora's public disclosures to be protected speech under the First
given an overarching consistency to gay culture and identity throughout Amendment. Although they overruled the lower coun's rationale, how-
this century is nono deny that crucial possibilities around and outside the ever, the appeUate court affirmed its decision not to allow Acanfora ro
closet have been subject to most consequential change, for gay people. return ro teaching. Indeed, they denied his standing to bring the suit in
There are risl.:s in making salient the continuity and centrality of the the first place, on the grounds that he had failed ro note on his original
closet, in a historical f,ilnative that does not have as a fulcrum a saving. employment application that he had been, in college, an officer of a
vision-whether !ocated in past or future-of its apocalyptic rupture. A srudent homophiie organization - a notation that would, as school ofE-
meditation that b.cks that particular utopian organization will risk glam- cials admitted in court, have prevented his ever being hired. The rationaie
orizing the doset itself, if only by default; wil! risk presenting as inevitable for keeping Acanfora out of his classroom was thus no longer that he had
or sornehow valuable its exactions, its deformations, its disempowerment disclosed too rnuch about his homosexuality, but quite the opposité, that
and sheer pain. If these risks are worth running, it is partly because the he had not disciosed enough. 2 The Supreme Court dedined to entertain
nonutopian traditions of gay writing, thought, and culture have remained an appea!.
so inexhaustibly and gorgeously productive for later gay thinkers, in the
absence of a rationalizing or often even of a forgiving reading of their
politics. The epistemology oF the closet has also been, however, on a far 2 On this case see W. La Morte, "Legul Rights ane! Responsibilities oE
vaster scale and \vith a less honorific inRection, inexhaustibly productive Homo'sexuals in Publie EGuGnion," JOllmal oi L/U! ",,,1 Edtlcation 4, no. 23 (luly 1975):
449-67, esp. 450-53; and Jeanne La [)onle Scholl, "Commem: Out oE the Closet, Out oE
of modern Westem culture and history at large. While thar may be reasen ajobo Due Process in Teacher DlsqualificClrion," Hastmgs Law Quarterly 6 (Wmter 1979):
enough for taking it as a súbject oÍ interrogation, it should nor be reason 663-717, esp. 682-84.
 70 Epistemology 01 the Closet
I Epistemology 01 the Closet 71

lt is striking that each of the two rulings in Acanfora emphasized that

the teacher's homosexuality "itself" would not have provided an accept- ¡ thar a lot of the energy of attemion and demarcation that has swirlecl
around issues of homosexuality since the end of the nineteenth cemury, in
able ground for denying him employment. Each of the courts relied in its Europe and the United States, has been impelled by the distinctívely
1
decision on an imp]icit distinction between the supposedly protected and ¡ inclicative [eJation of homosexuality to wider mappings of secrecy ane!
bracketable fact of Acanfora's homosexuality proper, on the one hand, ¡ disclosure, and of the private and the public, that were and are critically
and on the other hand his highly vulnerable management of information !
I problematical for the gender, sexual, and economic structures of the
1
about i1. So very vulnerable does this latter exercise prove ro be, however, I heterosexíst culture at large, m3ppings whose enabling but d3ngerous
and vulnerable tú such a contradictory array of interdictions, that the incoherence has become oppressively, durably condensed in certain fig-
space for simply existing as a gay person who is a teacher is in fact
bayonetted through and through, from both sides, by the vectors of a
disclosure at once compulsory and forbidden.
I ures ofhornosexuality. "The doset" and "coming out," now verging on all-
purpose phrases for the potent crossing and recrossing of almost any
politically charged lines of representation, have been the gravest and most
l·
A related incoherence couched in the resonant terms of the distinction I magnetic of those figures.
1
of public from private riddles the contemporary legal space of gay being. i The c!oset is the defining structure for gay oppression in this century.
When it refused in 1985 to consider an appeal in Rowland v. Mad River The legal couching, by civilliberties lawyers, of Bowers v. Hardwick as an
Local School Distriet, the U .S. Supreme Court let stand the firing of a issue in the first place of a Constitutional right to privacy, and the liberal
bisexual guidance counselor for coming out to sorne ofher col1eagues; the
act of coming out was judged not to be highly protected under the First I focus in the aftermath of that decision on the image of the bedroom
invaded by policemen- "Letting the Cops Back into Michael Hardwick's
Amendment because it does not constitute speech on a matter "of public Bedroom," the Native headlined4- as though political empowerment
concern." It was, of course, only eighteen months later that the same U .S. I were a matter of getting the cops back on the street where they belong and
Supreme Court mled, in response to Michael Hardwick's contention that
it's nobody's business iE he do, that it ain't: if homosexuality is not,
¡ sexuality back into the impermeable space where it belongs, are among
other things extensions oE, and testimony ro the power of, the image of the
however densely adjudicated, to be considered a marter of public concern, dosel. The durability of the image is perpetuated even as its intelligibility
neither in the Supreme Court's binding opinion does it subsist under the
mantle of the priuate. 3 . I is challenged in antihornophobic responses like the fol1owing, to Hard-
wick, addressecl to gay readers:
The most obvious fact about this history of judicial formulations is
that it codifies an excruciating system of double binds, systematically
¡ What can you do- alone? The answer is obviollS. You're not alone, and

oppressing gay people, identities, and acts by undermining through

contradictory constraints on discourse the grounds of their verybeing.
¡ you can\ :1fford ro try ro be. That closet door-never very secure as
protection-is even more da¡;gerous no\v. You must come out, for your
own sake and for the sake of al! of us. S
!
That immediately political recognition may be supplemented, however, ¡
by a historical hypothesis that goes in the other direction. 1want ro argue The image of coming out regularly interfaces the image of the closet, and
I
¡
its seemingly unambivalent public siting can be coumerposed as a salva-
tional.epistemologic certainty against the very equivocal privacy aHorded
I
3· Nan Hunrer, director oE the ACLU's Lesbian and Cay Rights Project, analyzed ! by the doset: "If every gay person carne out ro his or her family," the same
Rowland in "Homophobía and Academic Fteedom," a taJk at the 1986 Modern Language
Association National Convention. There is an interesting analysis of the limita[ions, for article goes on, "a hundred miJlion Arnericans could be brought to our
gay-rights purposes, of both the right of privacy and the First Amendmenr guarantee of
free speech, whether considered separ¡;:ely or in tondern, in "Notes: The Constitutional
Status of Sexual Orientation: Homosexuality as a Suspect C1assilication," Harvard Law
I side. Employers and straight friends could mean a hundred million
more." And yet the Mad River 5chool District's refusal to hear a wornan's
Revlew 98 (April 1985): 1285·-1307, esp. 1288-97. For a discu,'sion of related legal
issues that is strikingly apropos of, and useful for, the argument made in Epistdmo/og)' 01
the Closet, see Janet E. Halley, "The Politics oE the Closee Towards Egual Protection for
Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual ldentity," UCLA Law Revlt'w 36 (1989): 915-76. . I 4. New York Native, no. 1(,9 Uuly 14, 1986): 11.
5. Philip Bockman, "A Fine Day," New Yor.k Natlve, no. 175 (August 25,1986): 13.

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72. Epistemu/ugy uf thi! e/oset Epistemology o/ the Closet 73

coming our as an aurhcnricaJly pllb!ic spcech act is echoed in rhe Erigid .

!

.!
suffusing stain of homo/ heterosexual crisis been that ro discuss any of
response given many acts of coming out: "That's fine, but why did you ¡- these inclices in any context, inthe absence of an antih?mophobic analy-
L
think I'd want ro know about it?"
Gay rhinkers of this century have, as we'll see, never been blind to
,t
!
sis, must perhaps be to perpetuate unknowingly compulsjons implicit in
each.
the damaging contradictions of this compromised metaphor of in and For any modern question of sexuaJity, knowleclge/ignorance is more
out of the doset of privacy. But its origins in European culture are, as than mere!y one in a meronymic chJin of such binarisms. The pracess,
the writings of Foucault have shown, so ramified - and its rdation to the narrowly bordered at first in European culture bllt sharply broadencd
"larger," i.e., ostensibly nongay-related, topologies of privacy in the cul- and accelerated after the late eighteenth ccnrury, by which "knowledge"
ture is, as the figure of Foucault dramatized, so critical, so enfolding, so and "sex" become conceptually inseparahle from one anorher - so that
represenrational- that the simple vesting of sorne alternative metaphor knowledge means in the first place sexual knowledge; jgnorance, sexual
has never, either, been a true possibility. ignorance; and epistemological pressure of any sort scems a force in-
1 recently heard someone on National Public Radio refer to the sixties creasingly saturated with sexual jmpulsion-was sketched in Volume 1of
as the decade when Black people carne out of the doset. For that matter, 1 Foucault's History of Sexuality. In a sense, this WJS a process, protracted
recently gave an MLA talk purporting ro explain how it's possible to come almost ro retardaríon, of exfoliaring the biblica] genesis by which whar we
out of the doset as a fat woman. The apparent floaring-free from its gay noW know as sexuality is fruit- apparently the only fruit- to be plucked
ongins of that phrase "coming out of the doset" in recent usage might fram the tree of knowledge. Cognition irse!f, sexualiry itself, and trans-
suggest that the trope of the doset is so clase to the hean of sorne modern gression itsdf have always been ready in Western e ':ure to be magnetized
preoccupations that it could be, or has been, evacuated oE its historical gay into Jn unyielding though not an unfissured aligm. :nt with one another,
specificity. But 1hypothesize that exactly the opposite is true. 1think that a and the period initiated by Romanticism accomplished rhis disposition
whole duster of the most crucial sites for the contestation of meaning in thraugh a remarkably broad confluence of different languages and
twentieth-century Western culture are consequential1y anc! quite indelibly institutions.
marked with the historical specificity of homosociallhomosexual defini- t In sorne texts, such as Diderot's La Religieuse, that were influential
tían, notably but not exdusively male, fram around the turn of the 1 early in this process, the desire thar represents sexuality per se, and hence
I
century. 6 Among those sites are, as 1have indicated, the pairings secrecy /
disclasure and private/ public. Along with and sometimes through these
.¡ sexual knowledge and knowledge per se, is a same-sex desireJ This
possibiliry, however, was repressed with increasing energy, and hence
epistemaln gic,lIy charged pairings, condensed in the figures of "the ! increasing visibility, as rhe nineteenrh-century culture of the individual
doset" and "coming out," this very specific crisis of definition has then proceeded to elaborate a version of knowledge/ sexuality increasingly
ineffaceably marked other pairings as basic to modern cultural organiza- 1 structured by its pointed cognitive refusal of sexuality between wornen,
i
tian as masculine / feminine, majarity / minority, innocence / initiation, berween meno The gradually reifying effect of this refusal 8 meanr rhar by
natural! artificial, new / old, growth / decadence, urbane / provincial, the end of the nineteenth century, when it had become fulJy current-as
health / illness, same/ different, cognition/ paranoia, art/ kitsch, sin- ¡ obvious to Queen Victoria as to Freud-that knowledge meant sexual
ceriry / sentimentality, and voluntarity / addiction. So permeative has rhe !¡ knowledge, and secrets sexual secrers, there had in fact cleveloped one
¡
panicular sexuality that was distinctively constituted as secrecy: the per-
6. A reminder rhar "rhe doser" reraim (ar least rhe chronic potenrial of) its gay
sem"ntic specificarion: a media flap in June, 1989, when a Republic:m National Commit-
tee memo cal1ing for House Maiority Lcader Thomas Foley to "come out of the liberal
closet" and comparing his votíng record wirh thar oE an openly gay Congressman, Barney
I
¡
fcer object for the by now insatiably exacerbated epistemologicall sexual
anxÍety of [he turn-of-the-century subject. Again, it was a long chain of
originany scriptural identifications of a sexuality with a particular cog-
Frank, was wiclely perceived (and condemned) as insinuaring rhat Foley himself is gayo The ¡
commirtee's misjudgment abour whctber ir couid m,li!1rain deniabiliry for the insinuarion
is an intercsting index ro bow unpreelicrahly full oc empry of gay specificity rhis locution
¡
¡ 7. On this, see my "Privilege of Unknowing."
may be perceived to be.
¡
¡
8. On rhis, .'.;ee Retween Alfe-n.

r
¡
(
74 Epistemology Df the eloset Epistemology 01 ¡iJe Closet 75

nitive positioning (in this case, Sr. Paul's routinely reproduced and re- might have had sorne degree, even a very high one, of instrumentality in
warked denominarian of sodomy as the crime whose na me is not to be conceiving or formulating or "refining" or logistical1y facilitating this
uttered, hence whose acccssibility to knowledge is uniqllely preterited) ruJing, these ignominious majority opinions, the sentences in
that culminated in Lord Alfred Douglas's epochal pllblic utterance, in which they were framed.
1894, "1 am the Love that dare not speak its name."9 In such texts as Billy That train of painful imaginings was fraught with the epistemological
Budd and Dorian Gray and through thcir inflllence, the subject - the distinetiveness of gay idemity and gay situation in our culture. Vibrantly
thematics-of knowledge and ignorance themselves, of innocence and resonant as the image of the closet is for many modero oppressions, it is
initiation, of secrecy and disdosure, became not contingently but inte- indicative for hornophobia in a way it cannot be for other oppressions.
grally infused with one particular object of cognition: no longer sexuality Racism, for instance, is based on a stigma that is visible in a11 but
a whole but even more specifically, now, the homosexual topie. And the exceptional cases (cases that are neither rare nor irrelevant, but that de-
condensation of the world of possibilities surrounding same-sex sexu- lineate the ourlines rather than coloring the center of racial experience); so
ality - including, shall we say, both gay desires and the most rabid pho- are the oppressions based on gender, age, size, physical handicap. Eth-
bias against them - the condensation of this plurality to the homosexual nicl cultural! religious oppressions such as anti-Semitism are more anal 0-
topie that now formed the accusative case of modero processes of per- gous in that the stigmatized individual has at least notional1y sorne
sonal knowing, was not the least inf!iction of the turn-of-the-century crisis discretion - although, importantly, it is never to be taken fOf granted how
of sexual definition. much - over other people's knowledge of her or his membership in the
To explore the differences it makes when secrecy itself becomes man- group: one could "come out as" a Jew or Gypsy, in a heterogeneous
ifest as this secret, let me begin by twining together in a short anachro- urbanized society, much more than one could typical1y "come
nistic braid a variety of exemplary narratives-literary, biographical, out as," say, female, Black, old, a wheelchair user, or fato A (for instance)
imaginary-that begin with the moment on ]uly 1, 1986, when the Jcwish or Gypsy identity, and hence a Jewish or Gypsy secrecy or closet,
decision in Bowers v. Hardwiclc was announced, a moment which, sand- would nonetheless differ again from the distinctive gay versions of these
wiched between a weekend of Gay Pride parades nationwide, the an- things in its clear ancestrallinearity and answerabiJity, in the roots (how-
nouncement of a vengeful new AIDS policy by the Jllstice Department, ever tortuous and ambivalent) of cultural identification through each
and an llpcoming media-riveting long weekend of hilarity or hysteria individual's originary culture of (at a minimum) the family.
focused on the national fetishization in a hllge hollow blind spike-headed Proust, in fact, insistently suggests as a sort of limit-case of one kind of
female body of the abstraction Liberty, and occurring in an ambient coming 811t precisely the drama of Jewish self-identification, embodied in
medium for gay men and their families and friends of wave on wave of the Book ofEsther and in Racine's recasting of it that is quoted throughout
renewed loss, mourning, and refreshed personal fear, left many people the "Sodom and Gomorrah" books of A la reeherche. The story of Esther
feeling as if at any rate one's own particular car had final1y let go forever of seems a model for a certain simpl ified but highly potent imagining of
the tracks of the roller coaster. coming out and its transforma ti ve potential. In concealing her Judaism
In many discussions I heard or participated in immediately after the from her husband, King Assuérus (Ahasuerus), Esther the Queen feels she
Supreme Court ruling in Bowers v. Hardwick, antihomophobic or gay is concealing, simply, her identity: "The King is to this day unaware who 1
women and men speculated-more or less empathetical1y or ven- am."lO Esrher's deception is made necessary by the powerful ideology that
omously- about the sexuality of the people most involved with the deci- makes Assuérus categorize her peopJe as unclean ("cene source impure"
sion. The questÍon kept coming up, in different tones, of what it could [1039]) and an abomination against nature ("I1 nous croit en horreur a
have felr like to be a closeted gay court assistant, or clerk, or justice, who toute la natme" [174]). The sincere, reJatively abstract ]ew-hatred of this

9. Lord Alfrea Douglas, "Two Loves," The Chameleon 1 (1894): 28 (emphasis ro. Jean Racine, Esther, ed. H. R. Roach (London: George G. Harrar, 1949), ¡ine
added). 89; my translation. Funhcr citations of chis play wil1 be noted by ¡ine number in the texc.
76 Epistem%gv ni the C/oset Epistemology 01 the C/oset 77

fuddled but omnipotent king llndergoes constant stimulation from the Court in the days immediately before the decision in Bowers V. Hardwick.
grandiose cynicism of his advisor Aman (Haman), who dreams of an ¡ Cast as the ingenue in the title role a hypothetical closetcd gay clerk,
entire planet exemplarily cleansed of the perverse element.
1 want ir said one day in awestruek eenturies:
r
¡
I
Assuérus a hypotheticaJ]ustice of the same gender who ii about to make a
majority of five in support of the Georgia law. The Justice has grown fonel
of the cJerk, oe!dly fonder than s/he is used to being of clerks, and ... [n
"Thcrc once used ro be Jews, there was an insolent raee; ¡
they used ro cover the whole faee of rhe earth; our compulsive recursions to the question of the sexualities of court
a single onc dared draw on himself the wrath of Aman, personnel, sllch a scenario was close to the minds of my friends ane! me in
at once they disappeared, every one, from the earth."
many forms. In the passionate dissenting opillions, were there not the
(476-80)
traces of others' comings-out already performed; cOlllcl even the dissents
The king acql'iesces in Aman's genocida! plot, and Esther is told by her themselves represent such performances, Justice coming out ',1 ]llstice?
cousin, guardian, and Jewish cOl1science Mardochée (Mordecai) that the With the blood-Iet tatters of what risky comings-out achieved and thel1
time for her revelation has come; at this rnoment the particular operation overriddw- friends', clerks', employees', children's - was the imperious
of suspense around her would be reeognizable te> aoy gay person who has prose of the majority opinions lined? More painflll and frequent were
inched toward coming out to homophobic parents. "And if 1 perish, I thOllghts of aH the coming out that had not happenecl, of che women and
perish," she says in the Bible (Esther 4: 16). That the avowal of her secret men whohad not in sorne more modern idiom said, with Esther,
identity wiII have an immense potel1cy is c1ear" is the premise of the story.
1dare to beg you, both for my own life
AH that remains to be see' is whether under its explosive pressure the and the sad days of 3n ¡ll-fated people
king's "polítical" animlls ag. "flst her kind wiH demolish his "personal" love that you have eondemned to perish with me.
for her, or vice versa: wdl he declare her as good as, or better, dead? Or (1029-31)
wil! he soon be found at a neighborhood bookstore, hoping not to be What was lost in the absence of such scenes was nQt, either, the
recognized by the salesperson who is ringing up his copy of Loving opportunity to evoke with eloquence a perhaps demeani,¡g pathos like
Someone jewish? Esther's. It was something much more precious: evocatíon, articulation,
The biblical story and Racinian play, bearable to read in their balance of the dumb Assuérus in aH his imperial ineloquent bathos of unknowing:
of the ho!ocallstal with the intimate only because one knows how the story "A périr? Vous? QueJ peuple?" ("To perish? You? What people?" [1032J).
wilJ end, 11 are enactments of a'particular dream or fantasy of coming out. "What people?" ineleed- why, as it oddly happens, the very people whose
F <;rher's e1oquence, in the evem, is resisted by only five lines of her cradication he personally is just on the point of effecting. But only with the
demurral or shock: essentially at the instant she names herseJf, lItterance of these blank syllables, making the weight of Assuérus's power-
both her ruler and Aman see that the anti-Semites are lost ("AMAN, tout fuI ignorance suddenly audible- not least to him - in the same register as
has: Je tremble" [1033]J, Revelation of identity in the space of intima te the weight of Esther's and Mardochée's private knowledge, can any open
love effortlessly overturns ao entire public systematics of the natural and fiow of power become possible. It is here that Aman begins to trembJe.
the unnatural, the pure and the impure. The peculiar strike that the story Just so with coming out: it can bring about the revelation of a powerful
makes to the heart is that Esther's smal!, individual ability to risk losing unknowing as unkl1owing, not as a vacuum or as the blank it can pretend
the love and countenance of her master has the power ro save not only her to be but as a weighty and occupied ane! consequential episremological
own space in life but her people. space. Esther's avowal allows Assuérus to make visible two such spaces at
Ir would not be hard to imagine a version of Esther set in the Supreme once: "You?" "What people?" He has been blindly presuming about
herseJf,12 and sirnply blind to the race to whose extinction he has pledged
II. It is \Vorth remembering, of COLmE, thar Ihe biblical story srill ends with mass
i
sbughrer: while Racine's king reuokes his orders (1197), the biblical kini reuerses his
(Esther 8:5), licen'sing the ]ews' kíillng of "seventy 2nd five thousand" (9:16) of rheir
I 12. In VoItaire's words, "un roi insensé qui a passé six rnois avec 5a femme sans savoir,
enemies, including children and women (8:11), sans s'informer memequi elle esr" (in Racine, Esther, pp, 83-84),

I,I
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 Epistemology of the Closet Epistemology o/ thE C!oset 79

himself. What? you're one of those? Huh? you're a what? This frightening explosive-mined claset of a covertly gay Justice; the derk might wd! fear
thunder can aiso, however, be the sound of manna falling. being too isolated or sclf-doubting to be able to sustain the consequences
of the avowal; the imersection of gay revelation with underlying gender
expecti1tions might well be roo confusing or disorienting, for one or the
There is no question that to fixate, as 1 have done, on the scenario other, to provide an intelligible basis for change.
skerched here more than flirts with senrimentality. This is true for quite To spell these risks and circllmscriptions out more fully in the com-
explicable reasons. First, we have too much cause ro know how limited a parison with Esther:
leverage any individual revelation can exercise over collecrive1y scaled and 1. Although neither che Bible nar Raeine indicates in what, if any,
institutionally embodied Acknowledgment of this dis- religiolls behavicrs or beliefs Esther's Jewish identity may be manifested,
'proportion does not mean that the consequences of such acts as coming there is no suggestion that that identity míght be a debatable, a porous, a
out can be circumscribed within predetennilled boundaries, as if between mutable ¡act about her. "Esther, my lord, had a Jew far her father"
"personal" and "political" realms, nor does it require us to deny how (1033 )-ergo, Esther is a Jew. Taken aback though he is by this announee-
disproportionately powerful and disruptíve such acts can be. But the brute ment, Assuérus does no! suggest that Esther is going through a phase, or
incomrnensurabílity has nonetheless ro be acknowledged. In the the- is just angry at Gentiles, or could change if she only loved him enough to
atrical display of an already institutionalized ignoran ce no transformative get counseling. Nor do such undermining possibilities occur to Esther.
potential is ro be looked foc The Jewish identity in this play-whatever it may consist oE in real life in a
There is another whole family of reasons why too long a lingering on given historieal contex -has a solidity whose very unequivocalness
moments of Esther-style avowai must misrepresent the truths of homo- grounds the story of Esther's equivocation and her subsequem self-
phobic oppressíon; these go back ro the important differences between disclosure. In the processes of gay self-disclosure, by contrast, in a
Jewish (here 1 mean Racínian-Jewish) and gay identity and oppression. twentieth-century context, questions of authority and evidence can be the
Even in the "Sodom and Gomorrah" books of Proust, after aH, and first ro arise. "How do you know you're really gay? Why be in such a hurry
especial1y in La Prisonniere, where Esther is so insistently invoked, the play to jump to conclusions? After aH, what you're saying is only based on a
doesnot oHer an efficacious model of transformative revelation. To the few feelings, not real actions [or alternatively: on a few actions, no!
contrary: La Prísonniere is, notably, the book whose Racine-quoting hero necessarily your real feelings]; hadn't you better talk ro a therapist and
has the most disastrous incapacity either ro come out or to be come out too find out?" Such responses- and their occurrenee in the people come out
The suggested doseted Supreme Court clerk who struggled with the lO can seem a belated echo of their occurrence in the person eoming out-
possibility of a se1f-revelation that might perceptibly strengthen gay slsters reveal how problematical at present is the very concept of gay identity, as
and brothers, but would radically endanger at least the foreseen course of well as how intensely it is resisted and how far authority over its definition
her or his own Me, w<Juld have an imagination filled with possibilities has been distanced from the gay subject her- or himself.
beyond those foreseen by Esther in her moment of risk. It is these pos- 2. Esther expects Assuérus to be altogether surprísed by her self-dis-
sibilities that mark (he distinctive structures of the epistemology of the closure; and he is. Her confident sense of control over other people's
closet. The clerk's ,u;thority ro describe her or hisown sexuality might knowledge about her is in contrast to the radical uncertaimy closeted gay
well be impeaehed; the avowal might well only further perturb an already people are likely ro fee! about who is in control of information about their
stirred-up current of the open secret; the avowal might well represent an sexual identity. This has something ro do with a realism about secrets that
. aggression against someone with whom the clerk felt, after all, a real is greater in most people's lives than it is in Bible srories; but it has much
. bond; the nongay-identified Justice might well fee! roo shaken in her or his more to do with complications in the notion of gay identity, so tnar no OIle
own self-perception, or in the pereeption of the bO;1d with the clerk, to person can take control over al! the multiple, often eontradictory codes by
respond with anything but :m increased rigor; the derk ¡iJight \vell, which information about sexual identity and activity can seem to be con-
through the avo\val, be getting dangerously into the vieinity of the veyed. In many, if not most, relationships, coming out is a matter of
80 Epistemo!ogy of fhe e/oset EpisteJilOlogy o/lhe e/oset SI

crystallizing intuitions or convictions that had been in the aír for él while froro what he had thOllght her. The dOllblc-edged potential for injury in
already and liad already established their own power-circuits of siiem the scene of gay coming out, by contrast, results partly fram rhe fan ,hat
contempt, silem blackmail, silent glamorízatíon, silent complicity. After the erotic identity of ¡he person who receives the is apt abo ro
aB, the position of those who think they know something about one that be implicatee! in, hence perturbed by ir. This is truefirst ane! generalIy
one may not know oneself is an cxcited and empowered one-whether beeause erotic identity, of al! things, is never ro be circumscribed simply as
what they think one doesn't know is that one somehow is homosexual, or itself, can never not be reIational, is never ro be perceived or known by
merely that Ülle's supposed secret is known ro them. The glass doset can anyone outside oE a structure of transference and countertransference.
license imult ("I'd never have said those things if I'd known you were Second and specifically it is true because the incoherences and contradic-
gay!" - yeah, sure); it can also license far warmer relations, but (and) rions of homosexual identity in twentieth-century culture are responsive
'relations whose potential for exploitive;less is buílt ínto the optícs of the ro and hence evocative of the ineoherences and contradictíons of com-
asymmetrical, the specularízed, and the inexplicit. 13 There are sunny and pulsory heterosexuality.
apparently símpJifying versions of coming out under these circumstances: 5. There is no suggestion that Assuérus might himself be a Jew in
a woman painfully decides to teH her mother that she's a lesbian, and her disguise. But it is entirely within the experience of gay people ro find that a
mother responds, "Yeah, 1 sort of thought you might be when you and homophobic figure in power has, iE anything, a c1isproportionate like-
Joan started sleepíng together ten years ago." More often this fact makes lihood ofbeing gay ane! closeted. Sorne examples and implications of this
the doset and its exíts not more but less straightforward, however; not, are discussed toward the end of Chapter 5; there is more ro this story. Let ir
often, more equable, but more volatile or even violent. Living in and stand here merely ro demonstrate again that gay identity is a convoluted
hence coming out of the doset are never matters of the purely hermetic; and off-centering possession if it is a possession at all; even ro come out
the personal and political geographies to be surveyed here are instead the does not end anyone's rdation ro the doset, induding turbulently the
more imponderable and convulsive ones of the open secreto doset oE the other.
3. Esther worries that her reve!ation might destroy her orfail to hefp her 6. Esther knoU/s who her people are arzd has an immediate answerability
people, but it dof's not seem to her likely to damage Assuérus, and it does lIot to them. UnJike gay people, who seldom grow up in gay families; who are
indeed damage him. When gay people in a homophobic society come out, exposed to their culture's, if not their parents', high ambient homophobia
on the other hand, perhaps especially to parents or spouses, it is wíth the long before either they or those who care for them know that they are
consciousness oE a potential for serious injury that is likely to go in both among those who most urgently need to define themselves against it; who
directions. The pathogenic secret itself, can circulate contagiously have with difficulty and always belatedJy ro patch together fr'om frag-
as a secret: a mother says that her adult child's coming out of the doset ments a community, a usable heritage, a politics of survival or resistanee;
with her has plunged her, inturn, into the doset in her conservative unlike these, Esther has intact and ro hand the identity and history ane!
eommunity. In fantasy, though not in fantasy only, against the fear oE commitments she was brought up in, personified and legitimated in a
being killed or v;,rished dead by (say) one's parents in sueh a revelation there visible figure oE authority, her guardian Mardochée.
is apt ro recoil the often more intensely imagined possibility of its killing 7. Correspondingly, Esther's auowal occurs withill and perpetuates a
them. There is no guarantee that being under threat fram a double-edged coherent system of gender subordinution. Nothing is more explicit, in the
weapon is a more powerful position than getting the ordinary axe, but it Bible, about Esther's marriage than its origin in a crisis of patriarchy ane!
is eertain ro be more destabilizing. its value as a preservative of Eemale discipline. When the Gentile Vashti,
4. The inert substance of Assuérus seems to have 110 definitional il1- her predecessor as Ahasuerus's queen, had refused to be put on exhibition
volvement witiJ the religious/ethnic identity of Esther. He sees neither tohis drunk men friends, "the wise men, which knew the times ," saw that
hímself nor their relationship differently when he sees that she i? different
Vashti the queen hath not done wrong to the king only, but also to aH the
princes, and to aH the people rhar are in aH the provinces Df the king
13. On this, se" "Prívilege of Unknowíng," esp. p. 120.
 Epistemo!ogy o/ the C!oset Epistemology o/ the Closet
Ahasllerus. For this deed of the gueen shal! Cüme abroad unto al! women, ,, locates in about the ninereenth century a shift in European thought from
so that they shall despise their husbands in their eyes, when it shall be t,
1,
viewing sarne-sex sexuality as a matter of prohibited and isolated genital
reponed. ¡
(Esther 1: 13-17) acts (acts to which, in that view, anyone might be liable who did not have
j'
their appetites in general under close control) to viewing it as a function of
Esther the Jew is introduced OntO this scene as a salvific ideal of female
submissiveness., her single moment of risk with the king given point by her
l' stable definitions of identity (so that one's personality strueture might
mark one as a homosexual, even, perhaps, in the absence of any genital
customary pliancy. (Even today, Jewish little girls are educated in gender t activity at all), Thus, according to Alan Bray, "1'0 talk of an individual [in
roles- fondness for being looked at, fearlessness in defense of "their ¡ the Renaissance] as being or not being 'a homosexual' is an anachronism
people," nonsolidarity with their sex-thraugh masquerading as Queen and ruinously misleading,"14 whereas the period stretching roughly be-
. Esther at Purim; 1 have a snapshot of myself at about five, barefoot in the t tween Wilde and Proust was prodigal!y praL:uctive of attempts ro name,
pretty "Queen Esther" dress my grandmother made [white satin, gold explain, and define this new kind of creature, the homosexual person - a
spangles], rnaking a carefuJ eyes-clown toe-pointed curtsey at [presum- t project so urgent that it spawned in its rage of distinction an even newer
ably] my father, who is manifest in the picture only as the flashgun that 1I category, that of the heterosexual person. 15 .
hurJs rny shadow, pi1Jaring up tal! and black, over the dwarfed sofa Onto ¡ 1'0 question the natural self-evidence of this opposition between gay
the wall behind me.) Moreover, the literaJ patriarchism thar makes com- I <1nd straight as distinct kinds of persons is not, however, as we saw in the
ing out ro parents the best ernotional analogy to Esther's self-disclosure to
her hU" (lild is shown with unusual clarity ro function through the maje ! Introduction, to dismantle ir. Perhaps no one should wish it to do so;
substantial groups of women and men under this representational regime

I!
trafEc in women: Esther's real mission, as a wife, is ro get her guardian have found that the nominative category "homosexual," or its more recent
Mardochée installed in place of Aman as the king's favorite and advisor. near-synonyms, does have a real power to organize and describe their
And the instability and danger that by contrast lurk in the Gentile Aman's experience of their own sexuality and idemity, enough at any rate to make
rdation to the king seem, lago-like, to attach to the inadequate heterosex- their self-application of it (even when only tacit) worth the enormous
ual buffering of the inexplicit intensities between them. If the story of i accompanying costs. If on]y for this reason, the categorization com-
¡ mands respecr. And even more at the leve! of groups than of individuals,
Esther reflects a firm Jewish choice of a minority politics basecl on a
conservative reinscription of gender roles, however, such a choice has
¡ the durability of any politics or ideology that would be so much as
never been able to be made intel!igibly by gay people in a modern culture f permissilJe of same-sex sexuaJity has seemed, in this century, to depend on
(although there nave been repeated attempts at making it, especially by ¡ a definition of homosexual persons as.,;:: distinct, minority population,
however produced or labeled. 16 Far beyond any cognitively or politically
men). Instead, both within and outside of homosexual-rights movements,
the contradictory understandings of same-sex bonding and desire and of Ii enabling effects on the people whorn it claims ro describe, moreover, the
male and female gay identiry have crossed and recrossed the definitional nominative category of "the homosexual" has robustly failed to disinte-
lines of gender identity with such disruptive frequency that the concepts I grate under rhe pressure of decacle after decade, battery after battery of
"minority" and "gender" themselves have lost a good deal of their cate- I
I
deconstructíve exposure-evidently not in the first place beca use of its
gorizing (though certainJy not of rheir performative) force. meaningfulness to those whorn it defines but because of its indispens-
I
Each of these complicating possibilities stems at least partly fram the i ableness to those who define themselves as against it.
plurality and the cumulative incoherence of modern ways of conceptualiz- For surely, if paradoxically, it is the paranoid insistence with which the
ing same-sex desire and, hence, gay identity; an incoherence that answers, I
¡
too, ro the incohen:nce with which heterosexual desire and identity are !

conceptualized. A long, populous theoretical project of interrogating and i! 14. BrJY, Homosexuality, p. 16.
15. On this, see Katz, Gay/Lesvian Almanac, pp. 147-50, and the otherworks cited
historicizing the self-evidence of the pseudo-symmetrical opposition ho- in note 1 to che Introducrion.
16. Concei,abiy, contemporary liberal! radical feminism, on the speetrum stretehing
mosexual/heterosexual (or gay / straight) as categories of persons wilJ be from NOW to something short of radical separatism, could prove to be something of <ln
assumed rather rhan surnmarized hefe. Foucault among other historians exception to this rule- though, of eourse, already a mueh compromised Ol1e.
 ¡
f
Epistem%gy of the C/oset 1 Epistem%gy 01 fiJe Closet

definirional barriers bctween "che homosexual" (minority) and "the het- strLlctureS attached [Q coming out, it has offered Eew new analytic facilities
erosexual" (majority) are forcified, in this century, by nonhomosexuals ·1, for the question of horno/heterosexual definiríon prior ro the moment uf
i
and especialJy by mm against men, that most saps one's abiliry to believ; .. individual corning out. That has not, indeed, been its projece. In fact,
in "the homosexual" as an unproblematicaJly diserete category oE per- f
¡
except for a newly pwduni ve interest in historicizing gay definition itself,
sonso Even the homophobic fifties folk wisdom oE Tea and Sympath v the array of analytic tools available today to anyone thinking abollt issues
detects that the man who most e1l:ctrifies those barriers is che one !í of homo/hererosexual definition is remarkably little enriched from that
own current is at most intermíttently direce. Ir was in the period of the so- available to, say, ProLlSe. Of the strange plerhora of "explanatory" schemas
I
called "invention of the 'homosexual'" that Freucl gave psychologica! newly available to Prousr ancl his contemporaries, especiaJly in support of
texture and credibility ro a countervalent, universalizing mapping oE this
t·. rninoritizing views, sorne have beeIl superseded, forgotten, or rendered by
. territory, based on the supposed protean mobility of sexual desire and on ¡l· history too unpalatable to be appealed to explicitly. (Many oE the sup-
the potential bisexuality of every human creatme; a mapping that implies 1
1
posedJy JOS! ones do survive, if not in sexological terminology, then in folk
no presumption tLat one's sexual penchant wil! always incline toward ¡ wisdom and "commonsense." One is never surprised, either, when they
persons of a single gender, and that offers, additionaily, a richly de- ! reemerge under new names on the Science page of the Times; the men-
naturalizing description of the psychological motives and mechanisms
of male paranoid, projective homophobic definition and enEorcement.
¡ women of Sodom matriculate as the "sissy boys" of Yale University
Press.) 19 But rhere are few new entries. Most moderately to weJl-educatecl
Freucl's antiminoritizing account only gained, moreover, in influcnce by I Western people in this century seem to share a similar understanding of
being articuiated through a developmemal narrative in which hetere'exis(
and masculinist ethical sanctions found ready camouflage. If til. new
I homosexual definitian, independent of wherher they themselves are gay or
straight, homophobic or aIltihomophobic. That undersranding is c10se ro
common wisdom that hotIy oven homophobes are men who are "insecure
about their masculinity" supplements the implausible, necessary illusion I whar Proust's probably was, what for rhat matter mine is and probably
yours. That is to say, it is organized around a radical and irreducible
that there could be a secure version of masculinity (known, presumably, by t incoherence. It hoJels the minoritizing view that there is a distinct popula-
the coolness of its homophobic enforcement) and a stable, intclligible way I tion of persons who "really are" gay; at the same time, it holds the
for men to feel abollt other men in modero heterosexual clpitalist pa- 1 universalizing views thar sexual desire is an llnpredictably powerful 501-
tri arch y, wfiat tighter turn couid there be to the screw of an already off- 1
¡ vent of stable identities; that apparently heterosexual persons and abject
center, always at fault, endlessly blackmailable maje idemiry ready to be ¡ choices are strongly marked by same-sex influences aIle! desires, and vice
manipulated into any labor of channeled violence?17 versa for apparently homosexual anes; am! that at least male heterosexual
It remained for work emerging from the later feminist and gay move-
ments to begin to clarify why the male paranoid project had become so I idenrity and n.odern masculinist culture may require for rheir mainte-
nance the scapegoatiIlg crysrallization of a same-sex male desire that is
widespread ane! in the firsr place internal. 20
urgent in the maintenance of gender subordination; and it rernainecl for a
stunningly efficacious coup of feminist redefiniríon to transform lesbian-
ism, in a predominant view, from a matter of female virilization to one of
19. ['m referring here ro lhe publiciry given ro RicliJrd Green's The "Sissy Boy
woman-identification. 18 Ahhough the post-Stonewall, predominantly Syndrome"and ,he Oe"e!opment ofHomosexualityon ilS 1987 plIbl¡cJrion. The imense1y
male gay liberation movement has had a more distinct political presence stereotypical, hOl11 fJphoGlc journJ.lism that appearcd on the occasion seerned 1::0 be legiti-
mateo by the hook il::se1f, \\/hich seemed, in turn, [O be legitimated by rhe status of Yale
rhan radical lesbianism and has presented potent new images of gay Universiry Prcss itsdf.
people and gay communities, along with a stirring new family of narrative 20. Anyone who im"gines rhar lliis pereeprion is connned ro anrihomopliobes should
lisren. for insrance, ro ¡he college fombal! eoach's rirualislic scapegoaring and abjecrion of
liis reums "sissy" (or 'Vorse) personaliry ¡mirs. D. A. !v1iiler's "Cage auxfolles: Sensarion
17. For a fuller disclIssion of lhis, see Chaprer 4. ane! Gender in Wilkic Collins's The Wornan in White" (in his The Nouel and the Poliee, pp.
18. See, for example, Radieaiesbiaos, "The Woman1der1rified 'Xbman," reprintee! in 146-91, esp. pp. 186-90) makcs espeeialIy forcefulIy rhe poinr (oughrn'r il always ro have
Anne Koedr, E!len Lt'vine, ;md Anita Rapone, eds., Radú:al Feminism (Nevv York: beeo obvious?) that this whoie famiiy of perceptions is if anythíng less distinctively rhe
Quadrangle, 1973), pp. 240-45; and R1Ch, "Compulsory HererosexualilY." property of cLdt'Jral criticisID than vf cultural en[orcemcnt.
86 Epistemology 01 the e/oset Epistemology of the Closet

f
Ir has been the project of many, many wrirers and thinkers of many and intimately entangled with it, has ro do with defining the relation ro
1
different kínds to adjudicate between the minoritizing and universalizing gender of homosexual persons and same-sex desires. (It was in this
views of sexual definition and to resolve this conceptual incoherence.
With whatever success, on their own terms, they have accompIished the I
!
conceptual register that the radical-feminist reframing óf lesbianism as
woman-identification was such a powerful move.) Enduringly since at
project, none of them has budged in one direction or other the absolute
hold of this yoking of contradictory views on modern discourse. A higher
1 least the turn of the centur)', there have presided two contradictory trapes
ojgender through which same-sex desire could be understood. On the one
valuatiort on the transformative and labile play of desire, a higher valua- I hand there was, and there persists, differently coded (in the homophobie
tion on gay identity and gay community: neither of these, nor their
opposite, often far more potent depreciations, seems ro get any purchase
t folklore and science surrounding those "sissy boys" and their mannish
sisters, but also in the heart and guts of much living gay and lesbian

I
on the stranglehold of che available and ruling paradigm-c1ash. And this culture), the trope of inversion, anima muliebris in corpore virili inc!usa-
incoherence has prevailed for at least three-quarters of a century. Some- "a woman's soul trapped in a man's body" - and vice versa. As such
times, but not aJways, it has taken the form of a confrontation or ¡ writers as Christopher Craft have made elear, one vital impulse of this
nonconfrontation between politics and theory. A perfect example of this I trope is the preservation of an essential heterosexuality within desire itself,
potent incoherence was the anomalous legal situatíon of gay people and through a particular reading oE the homosexuality of persons: desire, in
acts in this country after one recent legal ruling. The Supreme Court in this view, by definition subsists in the current that runs between one male
Bowers v. Hardwick nororiously left the individual states free ro prohibit
any acts they wish to define as "sodomy," by whomsoever performed, with
I
1
self and one female self, in whatcver sex of bodies these selves may be
manifested. 22 Proust was not the first to demonstrate-nor, for ",at
no fear at all of impinging on any rights, and particularly privacy rights, matter, was the Shakespeare of the comedies-that while these atuiull-
safeguarded by the Constítution; yet only shortly thereafter a panel of the
Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled (in Sergeant Perry]. Watkins v.
! tions oE "true" "inner" heterogender may be made to stick, in a haphazard
way, so long as dyads of people are al! that are in question, the broadening
United States AmlY) that homosexual persortS, as a particular kind of I of view ro inelude any larger circuit of desire must necessarily reduce the
person, are entitled to Constitutional protections under the Equal Protec- inversion or liminality trope to a choreography of breathless faree. Not a
tion elause. 21 To be gay in this system is to come under the radical!y
overlapping aegises of a universalizing discourse of acts and a mi noritizing I
i
jot the less for that has the trope of inversion remained a fixture oE modern
discourse oE same-sex desire; indeed, under the banners of androgyny or,
discourse of persons. Just at the moment, at least within the discourse of ¡ more graphica!ly, "genderEuck," the dizzying instability of this model has
law, former of these prohibits what the latter of them proteers; but in ¡ itself become a token of value.
the concurrent pubJic-health constructions related to AJDS, for instance, Charged as it may be with value, the persistence of the inversion trope
it is far from elear that a minoritizing discourse of persons ("risk groups") i has been yoked, however, ro thar of its contradictory eounterpart, the
is not even more oppressive than the competing, universalizing discourse
of acts ("safer sex"). In rhe double binds implicit in the space overlapped I trope of gender separatismo Under this latter view, far from its being of the
essence oE desire to cross boundaries of gendet, it is instead the most
by the two, at any rate, every matter of dennitional control is fraught with I
I natural thing in the world that people oE the same gender, people grouped
consequence. I together under the single most determinative diacrítical mark of social
I
The energy-expensive bllt apparently sta tic clinch between minoritiz- organization, people whose economic, institutional, emotional, physical
ing and universalizing views of horno/heterosexual dejlnition is not, either, needs and knowIedges may have so much in common, should bond
the onl)' major conceptual siege under which modero homosexual and I
;
together also on the axis of sexual desire. As the substitution of the phrase
heterosexist fates are enacted. The second one, as important as the first "woman-identífied woman" Eor "lesbian" suggests, as indeed does the

21. When Waikins's reinsraremenr in rhe army was supported by the full Ninrh Circuit 22. Chrisropher Craft, '''Kiss Me with Those Red Lips': Gender and Inversion in
Court of Appeals in a 1989 ruling, however, ir was on narrowér grounds. Bram Stoker's DraCllía," Representations, no. 8 (FaIl1984): 107-34, esp. 114.

i
i
!
i
!
 .. ...
88 Epistemology of the Closet !r- Epistemology of the Closet

patriarchal society and ranked aboye the heterosexual in terms of his

Separatist: Integrative:
capacity for leadership and heroism."24
Hamo/hetera Minoritizing, e.g., gay Universalizing, e.g., Like the dynamic impasse between minoritizing anCl universalizing
sexual definitían: identity, "essentialist," bisexual potential, "social
views of homosexual definition, that between transitive and separatist
third-sex models, civil constructionist,"
rights models "sodomy" models, trOpes of homosexual gender has its own complicated history, an es-
"Iesbian continuum" pecially crucial ane for any understanding of modern gender asymmetry,
Gender definitíon: Gender separatist, e .g., 11llJersion/liminality/ oppression, and resistance. One thing that does emerge with clarity from
homosocial continuum, transitivity, e.g., cross-sex, this complex and contradicrory map of sexual and gender definition is
lesbían separatist, androgyny, gay Ilesbian that the possible grounds to be found there for alliance and cross-
manhood-initiation solidarity models identification among various groups will also be plura!. To take the issue
models
of gender definition alone: under a gender-separatist topos, lesbians have
looked for identifications and alliances among women in general, includ-
Figure 2. Models of Gay/Straight Definition
in Terms oE Overlapping Sexuality and Gender ing straight women (as in Adrienne Rich's "lesbian continuum" model);
and gay men, as in Friedtinder's model-or more recent "male liberatíon"
eoneept of the continuum of maje or female homosocial desire, this trape l11odels-of masculinity, might look for them among men in general,
tends to reassimilate ro one another identification and desire, where including straight meno "The erotie and social presumption of women is
inversion models, by eontrast, depend ontheir distinctness. Gender- our enemy," FriedJander wrotein his "Seven Theses on Homosexuality"
separatist models would thus place the woman-loving woman and the . (190S).25 Under a topos of gender inversion or liminality, in contrast, gay
man-loving man eaeh at the "natural" defining center of their own gen- men have looked ro identify with straight women (on the grounds that
der, again in contrast ro inversion models that locate gay people- they are also "feminine" or also desire men), or with lesbians (on the
whether biologically or culturally - at the threshold between genders (see grounds that they occupy a similarly liminal position); while lesbians have
Figure 2). analogously looked ro identify with gay men or, though this latter identi-
The immanenee of each of these models throughout the history of fication has not been strong sinee second-wave feminism, with straight
modern gay definition is clear from the early split in the German homo- meno (Of course, the political outcomes of all these trajecrories of poten-
sexual rights movement between Magnus Hirschfeld, founder (in 1897) tial identification have been radically, often violently, shaped by differen-
of the Scientifie-Humanitarian Committee, a believer in the "third sex" tiaJ historical forces, notably homophobia and sexism.) Note, however,
who posited, in Don Mager's paraphrase, "an exaet eguation ... between that this scnematization over "the issue of gender definition alone" also
cross-gender behaviors and homosexual desire"; and Benedict Fried- does impinge on the issue ofhomo/heterosexual definition, as well, and
lander, eo-founder (in 1902) of the Community of the Special, who in an unexpectedly chiasmie way. Gender-separatist models like Rich's or
eoncluded ro the eontrary "that homosexuality was the highest, most Friedlander's seem ro tend roward universalizing understandings of homo /
perfeet evolutionary stage of gender differentiation."23 As James Steakley heterosexual potentia!. Ta the degree that gender-integrative inversion or
explains, "the true typus inverstls," according to this larter argument, "as liminality models, such as Hirschfeld's "third-sex" model, suggest an aJ-
distinct from the effeminate homosexual, was seen as the founder of liance or identity between lesbians and gay men, on the other hand, they
tend toward gay-separatist, minoritizing models of specificalIy gay identity
and politics. Steakley makes a useful series oE comparisons between
23. Don Mager, "Gay Theories of Gender Role Devianee," SubStance 46 (1985): 32-
Hirschfeld's Scientific-Humanitarian Cammittee and Friedlander's Com-
48; quored from 35-36. His sourees here are John Laurirsen and David Thorsrad, The
Early Homosexual Righis ¡"Iovemeni (New York: Times Change Press, 197ti), and James
D. Steakley, TheHomosexual Emancipaiion Movement in Germany (New York: Amo 24. Sreakley, The Homosexual Enumcipaiiol1 Movemeni in Germany, p. 54.
Press,1975). 25. Steakley, The Homosexual Em.mcipaiion Mouement ¡" Germany, p. 68.
90 Epistemology of the Closet

munity of the Special: "Within the homosexual emancipation mavement

there was a deep factionalization between the Committee and the Com-
munity.... [T]he Committee was an organization af men and women,
whereas the Community was exclusively male.... The Cammittee called
homosexuals a third sex in an effort to win the basic rights accorded the Sorne Binarisms (1)
othertwo; the Community scorned rhis as a beggarly plea far mercy and Billy Budd: After the Homosexual
touted the naríon of supervirile bisexuality."26 These crossings are quite
contingent, however; Freud's universalizing understanding of sexual defi-
nition seems to go with an integraüve, inversion model of gender defini-
tion, for instance. And, more broadly, the routes to be taken across this
misleadingly symmetrical map are fractured in a particular historical 1 would likf' this chapter and the next one to accomplish three main tasks.
situation by the profound asymmetries of gender oppression and hetero- First, they aiIn, between thern, to provide a set oE terms and associations
sexist oppression. to introduce each of the bínarisms around which other issues in the book,
Like the effect af the minoritizing/universalizing impasse, in short, in the century, are organized. Second, they will offer something in the way
that of the impasse aE gender definitian must be seen first of all in the of a reading of each of two texts - an essentialJy continuous reading of
creation of a fidd aE intrattable, highly structured discursive incoherence Billy Budd in this chapter, and in the next, a Nietzsche-inflected and
at a crucial node of social organizatíon, in,' . case the node at which any thematically oriented set oE readings of and arollnd Darían Gray. Finally,
gender ís discriminated. 1 have no optimism dt all about the avaiJability of the chapters mean to give something of a texture, albeit a necessarily
a standpoint of thought from which either question could be intelligibly, anachronizing one, to a particular historical moment, clllminating in
never mind efficaciously, adjudicated, given that the same yoking of 1891, a moment from the very midst of the process from which a modern
contradictions has presided over aH the thought on the subject, and a11 its homosexual identity and a modern problematic of sexual orientation
violent and pregnant modern history, that has gone to form our own could be said to date.
thought. Instead, the more promising project would seem to be a study of In the last chapter 1 suggested that the current impasse within gay
the incoherent dispensation itself, the indisseverable girdle of in- theory between "constructivist" and "essentialist" understandings of ho-
congruities under whose discomfiting span, for most of a century, have mosexuality is the mast recent link in a more enduring chain oE concep-
ulifok1f:o both the most generative and the most murderous plots oE our tual impasses, a deadlock between what 1 have been calling more gener-
culture. aHy universalizing and minaritizíng accounts of the reJatíon of homosexual
desires or persons ro the wider field of a1l desires or persons. 1 argued, too,
26. Steakley, The Homosexual Emancipation lvlovement in Germany, pp. 60-61. that not the correctness or prevalence of one or the other side oE this
enduring deadlock but, rather, the persistence of the deadlock itselE has
been the single most powerful feature of the important twentieth-century
understandings of sexuality whetherhetero or horno, and a determining
feature too oE aH the social reJations routed, in this sexualized century,
through understandings of sexuality. This deadlock has by now been too
deeply constitutive oE our very resources for asking questions abom
i
J sexuality for us ro have any realistic hope oE adjudicating it in the Euture.
¡ What we can do ís ro understand better the structuring, the mechanisms,
I

I and the immense consequences of the incoherent dispensation under

which we now live.

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