Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (9 page)

EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK

The lie, the perfect lie, about people we know, about the relations we have had with them, about our motive for some action, formulated in totally different terms, the lie as to what we are, whom we love, what we feel with regard to 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 sleeping senses for the contemplation of universes that otherwise we should never have known.

—Proust,
The Captive

The epistemology of the closet is not a dated subject or a superseded regime of knowing. While the events of June, 1969, and later vitally reinvigorated many people’s sense of the potency, magnetism, and promise of gay self- disclosure, nevertheless the reign of the telling secret was scarcely overturned with 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. So resilient and productive a structure of narrative will not readily surrender its hold on important forms of social meaning. As D. A. Miller points out, secrecy can function as

the subjective practice in which the oppositions of private/public, in- side/outside, subject/object are established, and the sanctity of 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 ideological effects, but rather attests to their fantasmatic recovery.
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Even at an individual level, there are remarkably few of even the most open- ly gay people who are not deliberately in the closet with someone personally

or economically or institutionally important to them. Furthermore, the dead- ly elasticity of heterosexist presumption means that, like Wendy in
Peter Pan
, people find new walls springing up around them even as they drowse: every encounter with a new classful of students, to say nothing of a new boss, so- cial worker, loan officer, landlord, doctor, erects new closets whose fraught and characteristic laws of optics and physics exact from at least gay people new surveys, new calculations, new draughts and requisitions of secrecy or disclosure. Even an out gay person deals daily with interlocutors about whom she doesn’t know whether they know or not; it is equally difficult to guess for any given interlocutor whether, if they did know, the knowledge would seem very important. Nor—at the most basic level—is it unaccountable that some- one who wanted a job, custody or visiting rights, insurance, protection from violence, from “therapy,” from distorting stereotype, from insulting scrutiny, from simple insult, from forcible interpretation of their bodily product could deliberately choose to remain in or to reenter the closet in some or all seg- ments of their life. The gay closet is not a feature only of the lives of gay peo- ple. 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 support of their immediate communities, in whose lives the closet is not still a shaping presence.

To say, as I will be saying here, that the epistemology of the closet has given an overarching consistency to gay culture and identity throughout the twentieth century is not to deny that crucial possibilities around and out- side the closet have been subject to most consequential change, for gay peo- ple. There are risks in making salient the continuity and centrality of the closet, in a historical narrative that does not have as a fulcrum a saving vi- sion—whether located in past or future—of its apocalyptic rupture. A med- itation that lacks that particular utopian organization will risk glamorizing the closet itself, if only by default; will risk presenting as inevitable or some- how valuable its exactions, its deformations, its disempowerment and sheer pain. If these risks are worth running, it is partly because the nonutopian traditions of gay writing, thought, and culture have remained so inex- haustibly 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 vaster scale and with a less honorific inflection, inexhaustibly productive of modern West- ern culture and history at large. While that may be reason enough for tak- ing it as a subject of interrogation, it should not be reason enough for fo- cusing scrutiny on those who inhabit the closet (however equivocally) to the exclusion of those in the ambient heterosexist culture who enjoin it and

whose intimate representational needs it serves in a way less extortionate to themselves.

I scarcely know at this stage a consistent alternative proceeding, however; and it may well be that, for reasons to be discussed, no such consistency is possible. At least to enlarge the circumference of scrutiny and to vary by some new assays of saltation the angle of its address will be among the method- ological projects of this discussion.

• • •

In Montgomery County, Maryland, in 1973, an eighth-grade earth science teacher named Acanfora was transferred to a nonteaching position by the Board of Education when they learned he was gay. When Acanfora spoke to news media, such as “60 Minutes” and the Public Broadcasting System, about his situation, he was refused a new contract entirely. Acanfora sued. The fed- eral district court that first heard his case supported the action and rationale of the Board of Education, holding that Acanfora’s recourse to the media had brought undue attention to himself and his sexuality, to a degree that would be deleterious to the educational process. The Fourth Circuit Court of Ap- peals disagreed. They considered Acanfora’s public disclosures to be protected speech under the First Amendment. Although they overruled the lower court’s rationale, however, the appellate court affirmed its decision not to allow Acanfora to return to teaching. Indeed, they denied his standing to bring the suit in the first place, on the grounds that he had failed to note on his original employment application that he had been, in college, an officer of a student homophile organization—a notation that would, as school officials admitted in court, have prevented his ever being hired. The rationale for keeping Acanfora out of his classroom was thus no longer that he had dis- closed too much about his homosexuality, but quite the opposite, that he had not disclosed enough.
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The Supreme Court declined to entertain an appeal.

It is striking that each of the two rulings in
Acanfora
emphasized that the teacher’s homosexuality “itself ” would not have provided an acceptable ground for denying him employment. Each of the courts relied in its decision on an implicit distinction between the supposedly protected and bracketable fact of Acanfora’s homosexuality proper, on the one hand, and on the other hand his highly vulnerable management of information about it. So very vul- nerable does this latter exercise prove to be, however, and vulnerable to such a contradictory array of interdictions, that the 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.

A related incoherence couched in the resonant terms of the distinction of
public
from
private
riddles the contemporary legal space of gay being. When it refused in 1985 to consider an appeal in
Rowland v. Mad River Local School District
, the U.S. Supreme Court let stand the firing of a bisexual guidance counselor for coming out to some of her colleagues; the act of coming out was judged not to be highly protected under the First Amendment because it does not constitute speech on a matter “of public concern.” It was, of course, only eighteen months later that the same U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in response to Michael Hardwick’s contention that it’s nobody’s business if he do, that it ain’t: if homosexuality is not, however densely adjudicated, to be considered a matter of
public
concern, neither in the Supreme Court’s binding opinion does it subsist under the mantle of the
private
.
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The most obvious fact about this history of judicial formulations is that it codifies an excruciating system of double binds, systematically oppressing gay people, identities, and acts by undermining through contradictory con- straints on discourse the grounds of their very being. That immediately polit- ical recognition may be supplemented, however, by a historical hypothesis that goes in the other direction. I want to argue that a lot of the energy of at- tention 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, that were and are critically problematical for the gender, sexual, and econom- ic structures of the heterosexist culture at large, mappings whose enabling but dangerous incoherence has become oppressively, durably condensed in certain figures of homosexuality. “The closet” and “coming out,” now verging on all- purpose phrases for the potent crossing and recrossing of almost any politi- cally charged lines of representation, have been the gravest and most magnet- ic of those figures.

The closet is the defining structure for gay oppression in the twentieth cen- tury. The legal couching, by civil liberties lawyers, of
Bowers v. Hardwick
as an issue in the first place of a Constitutional right to privacy, and the liberal focus in the aftermath of that decision on the image of the
bedroom invaded by po- licemen
—“Letting the Cops Back into Michael Hardwick’s Bedroom,” the
Na- tive
headlined
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—as though political empowerment were a matter of getting the cops back on the street where they belong and sexuality back into the im- permeable space where
it
belongs, are among other things extensions of, and testimony to the power of, the image of the closet. The durability of the image is perpetuated even as its intelligibility is challenged in antihomophobic re- sponses like the following, to
Hardwick
, addressed to gay readers:

What can you do—alone? The answer is obvious. You’re
not
alone, and you can’t afford to try to be. That closet door—never very secure as pro- tection—is even more dangerous now. You must come out, for your own sake and for the sake of all of us.
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The image of coming out regularly interfaces the image of the closet, and its seemingly unambivalent public siting can be counterposed as a salvational epistemologic certainty against the very equivocal privacy afforded by the clos- et: “If every gay 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 pub- lic 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?”

Gay thinkers of the twentieth 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 writ- ings 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, so enfolding, so representational— that the simple vesting of some alternative metaphor has never, either, been a true possibility.

I recently heard someone on National Public Radio refer to the sixties as the decade when Black people came out of the closet. For that matter, I recently gave an MLA talk purporting to explain how it’s possible to come out of the closet as a fat woman. The apparent floating-free from its gay ori- gins of that phrase “coming out of the closet” in recent usage might suggest that the trope of the closet is so close to the heart of some modern preoc- cupations that it could be, or has been, evacuated of its historical gay speci- ficity. But I hypothesize that exactly the opposite is true. I think that a whole cluster of the most crucial sites for the contestation of meaning in twentieth-century Western culture are consequentially and quite indelibly marked with the historical specificity of homosocial/homosexual definition, notably but not exclusively male, from around the turn of the century.
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Among those sites are, as I have indicated, the pairings secrecy/disclosure and private/public. Along with and sometimes through these epistemologi- cally charged pairings, condensed in the figures of “the closet” and “coming out,” this very specific crisis of definition has then ineffaceably marked other pairings as basic to modern cultural organization as masculine/femi- nine, majority/minority, innocence/initiation, natural/artificial, new/old,

growth/decadence, urbane/provincial, health/illness, same/different, cogni- tion/paranoia, art/kitsch, sincerity/sentimentality, and voluntarity/addic- tion. So permeative has the suffusing stain of homo/heterosexual crisis been that to discuss any of these indices in any context, in the absence of an an- tihomophobic analysis, must perhaps be to perpetuate unknowingly com- pulsions implicit in each.

For any modern question of sexuality, knowledge/ignorance is more than merely one in a metonymic chain of such binarisms. The process, narrowly bordered at first in European culture but sharply broadened and accelerated after the late eighteenth century, by which “knowledge” and “sex” become con- ceptually inseparable from one another—so that knowledge means in the first place sexual knowledge; ignorance, sexual ignorance; and epistemological pres- sure of any sort seems a force increasingly saturated with sexual impulsion— was sketched in Volume I of Foucault’s
History of Sexuality
. In a sense, this was a process, protracted almost to retardation, of exfoliating the biblical genesis by which what we now know as sexuality is fruit—apparently the only fruit—to be plucked from the tree of knowledge. Cognition itself, sexuality itself, and transgression itself have always been ready in Western culture to be magnetized into an unyielding though not an unfissured alignment with one another, and the period initiated by Romanticism accomplished this disposition through a remarkably broad confluence of different languages and institutions.