Reading Six Feet Under: TV to Die For (32 page)

II. Knowing Sexuality

How do we know if someone is gay (see Miller 1991)? Why does Claire assume Russell is gay? How can she know? She never tells us how she knows, but her assumption can only be based upon her reading of outward signs: the way Russell dresses, the way he wears his hair, the way he talks, or even the mere fact that he is a man in the art world. For a long stretch of modern Western history, the question I ask here had no answer because it had no space in which to be asked. The presumption of heterosexuality – what I have already defined and will continue to elaborate upon as heteronormativity –

meant that one simply could not
be
gay. The question could not be asked. The gay liberation movement of the seventies and eighties gave a direct and concrete response to the question ‘how to know if a person is gay’ through the strategy of coming out. The answer: we know because he or she tells us. But, of course, Russell certainly never
tells
Claire he is gay, so all she has to go on are the signs she reads.

Seen from a certain angle, coming out breaks through the homophobic barriers of heteronormativity by calling into question 179

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the very presumption of heterosexually. Put more simply, saying ‘I am gay’ undermines the heteronormative assumption that everyone is heterosexual. More significantly, the more people who say ‘I am gay’, and the more often they say it, the more likely that the assumption of heterosexuality needs to be made explicit. In other words, coming out may throw heteronormativity into starker relief
as a norm
, thereby limiting some of its powers – since the power of norms only grows when their status as norms need not be revealed. ‘Coming out’, then, both gives an answer to the question ‘how do we know if someone is gay?’ and also increases the urgency of asking the question in the first place.

Neither the gay liberation movements nor mainstream heteronormative society have come up with many
other
responses to the question with which I open this section. Perhaps this is for the best, especially when one considers the phobic nature of the question.

That is, why not ask the question instead ‘how do we know if someone is straight?’. The first answer here proves to be the same as above: we need not ask, since everyone is always already presumed to
be
straight. But, unlike the first question, we can find no second response to this query. One does not ‘come out’ as straight, except to the extent that one merely exists in a heteronormative society.

Indeed, the presumption of heterosexuality must remain just that, a presumption, since to declare one’s heterosexuality is precisely to call it into question. As David Halperin puts it, ‘As all the world knows, there’s no quicker or surer way to compromise your own heterosexuality than by proclaiming it. After all, if you really were straight, why would you have to say so?’ (1995: 48).

In one sense, then, we can answer the question ‘how does Claire know Russell is gay?’ with the response ‘
because he tells her he’s not
gay
’. Russell tries to do precisely what Halperin says one cannot do: declare a heterosexual identity. But heterosexuality is the identity that need not – indeed, should not – be declared. Thus Halperin reverses the famous claim about ‘the love that dare not speak its name’ (1995: 48) by applying it to heterosexuality rather than homosexuality. What happens to our understanding of sexuality – of Russell’s in particular, but of all of those around him as well – when he says ‘I’m not gay, you know’? How do we read this claim?

Trying to read this claim alerts us to the political and theoretical importance of both the questions ‘how do we know someone is gay?’

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and ‘how do we know someone is straight?’. Folded together, these questions reduce (or add up) to the following: how do ‘we’ ‘know’ the sexuality of another person or persons? The multiple sets of quotation marks here serve to mark off the problematic of
knowing
: how can sexuality even be something to
know
, and who is placed in the position of knower and known (see Sedgwick 1990: 70; cf. Chambers 2003: 25)? If sexuality cannot be presumed (and, out from underneath the weight of heteronormativity, it cannot) and if it is not always clearly declared, then how do we come to terms with it?

Without a guiding framework that makes sexuality a given, and without a clear declaration, then sexuality must be interpreted. It must be
read.
Claire and the viewers are pushed into the position of reading Russell’s sexuality, both before and after he declares he is not gay. This logic suggests that the epistemological question (how do we know?) must be rewritten as an interpretive question: how do we read sexuality?

III. Reading Russell

We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge – and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves – how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves?…So we are necessarily strangers to ourselves, we do not comprehend ourselves, we
have
to misunderstand ourselves (Nietzsche 1967: 451).

Like just about any other first-year 18-year-old art student, Russell is unknown to himself. This distanciation of self from self is mediated by Russell’s own sexuality, about which the only thing that can be said clearly is that Russell himself is trying to come to terms with it.

I use the phrase ‘come to terms with’ to distance myself explicitly from notions of acceptance and recognition. Russell finds his own sexuality illegible to himself, but this is not because he is ‘denying the truth’ of that sexuality. It is the inadequacy of the modern, binary framework homosexual/heterosexual that makes his sexuality illegible, not the fact that he ‘really is gay’ but cannot accept it. Just as we are, Russell is attempting to
interpret
his sexuality, not
define
it. Russell therefore engages in a practice of reading his own sexuality, but so far as we can tell it makes no sense to him. Russell’s sexuality remains thoroughly, stubbornly unclear when read through 181

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the modern categories of homosexuality and heterosexuality. In other words, Russell seems to experience those categories themselves as
other
than what he takes his own sexuality to be; or, perhaps better, he takes his own sexuality to be ‘other’ than the categories available to him. In distinct ways, Russell refuses both available categories of modern sexual identity.

First, Russell insists (more obstinately before, and less adamantly after, his encounter with Olivier) that he is not gay; he engages in repeated acts of
not
coming out. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has shown, to maintain an openly gay identity in a heteronormative society requires and depends upon continued acts of coming out. The presumption of heterosexuality repeatedly reasserts itself, and consistently and tacitly forces even the most ‘out’ individuals back into the closet. Coming out is never a singular act. The character Will from
Will and Grace
thus makes a truly
awful
(in its full etymological sense) statement when he claims that ‘coming out of the closet is something you only do once. It’s like being born.’ Here Will somehow manages to assimilate coming out, an act of potential resistance to heteronormativity, into the term heteronormativity.

To be born in a heteronormative society is precisely
to be born straight
.

And being born also proves to be the only singular act that determines one’s sexuality; in other words, it is all you have to do to be straight. Norms cannot be overturned, replaced or erased by singular acts. Coming out reveals the functioning of heteronormativity and it may offer a real challenge to that norm. But it cannot undo it. And an individual who comes out in one context will almost immediately find him- or herself under the presumption of heterosexuality in another. I am not sure how else to say it: coming out is something you must, by definition, do a great deal more than once; it is absolutely nothing like being born.

It is easy to be straight then – unless, of course, one
appears
queer. As will become clear when I discuss some of the literature of queer theory below, I do not take ‘queer’ to be a synonym for ‘gay’.

While ‘gay’ denotes a sexual identity centred on same-sex desire,

‘queer’ suggests a type of sexuality at odds with, and often resistant to, regimes of normalised sexuality. ‘Homosexuality’ proves to be a category produced historically in the nineteenth century, a category of identity fixed on a certain essence of desire. Queer ‘is an identity without an essence’ (Halperin 1995: 62).

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Perhaps because he rejects the essence of desire that freezes in place a ‘homosexual’ identity, Russell finds himself in the rare position of feeling the need to declare a non-gay sexuality, to come out as straight. I have already mentioned that Russell makes such a declaration to Claire, but I have also quoted Halperin to the effect that such a claim actually
undermines
the authority of the speaker and calls into question the statement that he or she makes. But perhaps I am wrong to say that Russell ‘comes out as straight’, since Russell never asserts any sort of heterosexual identity either. He does not pick one essence (heterosexual) over another (homosexual); all he rejects is the notion that he is gay. The fine distinction in terms proves significant, since it means that Russell never actively
identifies
with heterosexuality, even as he makes his
disidentification
with homosexuality quite clear. Indeed, the power of heteronormativity and the narrowness of modern categories of sexuality intervene at precisely the point that Russell says ‘I’m not gay, you know’; it intervenes in such a way as to
determine for others
that Russell must be straight. To deny being gay will always be taken, under the power of heteronormativity, as an implicit declaration of being straight. Heteronormativity tries to determine readings of sexuality
for us
.

Russell may reject those readings, but as viewers of the show we also take up the practice of reading Russell’s sexuality. We do so, however, in a way that remains disconnected from, and outside, Russell’s own hermeneutic. We view Russell’s sexuality mostly through the eyes of Claire; yet we are aided as we do so by the writers and directors who engage us in that process, leaving all sorts of hermeneutic clues, signs for us to try to decipher. Claire interprets those signs in line with the binary choices offered by modern categories of sexuality, and in a way that remains constrained by the influence of heteronormativity. Her reading of Russell’s sexuality traces the following path:

1. presuming he is gay, because of his outward performances of gender and desire;

2. assuming he is straight, not because he says he is, but because he denies being gay;

3. coming to question that very declaration, when Claire feels a variety of jealousies toward Olivier;

4. reverting to the previous assumption that he is gay, again, not 183

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because he says so, but because his having sex with Olivier prohibits recourse for him (in Claire’s understanding) to the category of heterosexuality.

At the beginning of their friendship, Claire tells herself and others that Russell is gay. This starting point begs a very significant question that I will not have the time or space to address here: why does Claire presume, against the normative presumption of heterosexuality, that Russell is gay? One place to begin an answer to this question might lie with generational differences in presumption of sexuality. Older generations often still operate under the assumption that unless a person is engaged in an intimate act with a person of the same sex, or appears with a sign identifying themselves as gay, then that person must be straight – or, better, the person just ‘is’, since heterosexuality remains utterly assumed and completely unmarked, and therefore not remarkable. Younger generations have a much greater tendency to ‘read’ people for their sexuality. To put it crudely, ‘gaydar’ is not the possession only of folks who are gay. Thus, we see that Claire reads Russell as gay, right from the start. (In terms of television, I am reminded here of a scene from
My So-Called Life
: Angela’s mum, Patty Chase (Bess Armstrong), expresses concern about Angela’s new friend Rickie Vasquez (Wilson Cruz), saying: ‘I find Rickie a little confusing,’ and Angela (Claire Danes) says, ‘Okay, so maybe he’s bi.’ Angela’s mum, never considering the possibility of his sexuality, blurts out ‘What! He is what?’ And Angela’s ten-year-old sister, Danielle (Lisa Wilhoit), then explains:

‘It means bisexual’ (‘Pilot’, 1:1).)

Taking Russell as her gay male friend may provide Claire with a sense of security and safety: she feels she can build a strong friendship with Russell, and that he can be her sounding board for her boyfriend troubles. Declaring to others, as she does with David, that Russell is gay may help to secure for her those very notions, by reflecting them to a family member. Of course, this very act comes back to haunt Claire, since David later mentions that he thought Russell was gay. Claire reacts very defensively, as she assumes that David has come to this conclusion through his own reading –

potentially more ‘authentic’, since he himself is gay – of Russell’s sexuality. David reminds Claire that it was she who called Russell gay in the first place, and he makes fun of the very notion of

‘gaydar’. Her agitated reaction here betrays the extent to which she 184

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may
still
be reading him as something other than straight (‘Making Love Work’, 3:6).

That agitation is only exacerbated when Claire hears from Billy that he and Olivier once had a sexual relationship. Certainly, Claire had already sensed that Olivier’s intense interest in the life and work of both her and Russell also extended to sex, but the confirmation that Olivier’s sexual encounters with his students also includes guys puts her more on edge. Billy, in a sense, tries to reassure her, saying: