The Only Gays in the Global Village

I incautiously clicked on a link to a story at a gossip site, "Celebrities Who Didn't Surprise Us When They Came Out." Several examples are dubious -- Elton John? I doubt this writer was even born when he came out.

Celebrities always feel the need to make these grandiose announcements to tell people they’re coming out of the closet. But the fact is, the closet seems pretty open half the time. These celebrities made the brave steps to tell us they were coming out of the closet, but, really, we knew all along.

If "the closet seems pretty open half the time," it's because most GLB celebrities who come out in the media are already adults, who've been living gay lives for some time before they're ready to talk to the media about it.  This reflects the post-Stonewall meaning of "coming out," which previously meant having your first homosexual experience and making your debut in gay society, and "closeted" meant you were isolated from other gay people. Since about 1970 "coming out" has meant acknowledging one's homosexuality to everyone else -- straight friends, family, the general public -- often despite intense pressure from heterosexual society to go back in.  "Closeted" changed its meaning accordingly.

There were always celebrities about whom rumors circulated, but that was (and remains) the trouble: what circulated were rumors and urban legends.  Some of them were true, others were bogus, like the male celebrity having a gallon of semen pumped out of his stomach, or another having to have a gerbil removed from his rectum, or a certain female celebrity appearing on the Tonight show and telling Carson that she 'preferred female companionship.'  When I came out (in both senses) in the early 1970s, there was gossip intimating that just about every celebrity was queer, always shared with absolute confidence.  I soon learned not to take anything I heard seriously.  But in those days, when virtually no entertainers were openly gay, gossip was all we had to go on.

One thing that annoys me about the whole business was how much the gossip relied on stereotypes, often in people who at other times deplored the stereotypes about us.  So, Liberace?  Elton John?  Sean Hayes?  (I hadn't known Hayes did come out, though apparently he did, with typical bad grace, in 2010.)  During the great Outing controversy of the early 1990s, Armistead Maupin told an interviewer that Tom Selleck was gay, because he looked like a Castro Street clone, and Tim Curry should have been open about his sexuality because he "spent the better part of the '70s running around in a garter belt and a merry widow".*  As I've said before, white people have trouble telling the difference between actors and the roles they play; we're a simple, childlike race.

Quite a number of celebs have come out (in the post-Stonewall sense) while grumbling that they didn't realize they needed to say anything about it, because c'mon, wasn't it obvious all along?  Nathan Lane told an interviewer to do the math: he was 40, single, and an actor on Broadway.  But in the same interview he complained that people assumed he was gay, just because he was 40, single, and an actor on Broadway.  I sympathize, and I have to remember that you don't have to be particularly thoughtful to be a successful entertainer, so I can't really expect consistency or rationality from someone like Nathan Lane or Rosie O'Donnell.  But it's still irksome, and a reminder that someone isn't necessarily a role model just because they came out.

I was annoyed by the movie In and Out, in which an Indiana high school teacher is outed on international television by a former student.  It was inspired by Tom Hanks's acknowledging, in his Oscar acceptance speech, a gay teacher he'd known; as far as I know Hanks didn't out him, the teacher was already out.  In the movie version, the outed teacher is closeted even to himself, and as far as one could tell from the script had no sexual experience with anybody.  His gayness was signified as "obvious" in the film through (dated) stereotypes: he loved Barbra Streisand, for instance, how could he not have been gay?  Another familiar stereotype was deployed in reverse, when the teacher's father tells him that he's just an old farmer, so of course he knows nothing about homosexuality.  (Alfred Kinsey could have told him otherwise.  So could I.)  This could have made for good comedy if not for the interfering timidity of Hollywood suits, who toned down and distorted the script, but I think it ended up confusing people about coming out, and outing, even more than they were before.  It was a widespread accusation against gay journalists and activists who outed celebrities that they were picking on people who didn't know they were gay, they were just tender saplings being cut off above the root by heartless extremists.  The same mainstream media that wrung its hands over the invasion of privacy involved in outing, and the potential human cost, only a few years earlier routinely published the names and (often) the addresses of people arrested in gay bar raids, with no concern that they might (as they often did) lose their jobs and that their lives would (as they often were) be ruined.  There's a vast difference between, say, a scared Midwestern thirteen-year-old (whom the outing activists would never have singled out) and thoroughly experienced adults who knew very well who they were, were widely known to the press and the people they worked with, and despite protestations that their private lives were nobody else's business, talked freely to the media about their (mostly imaginary) heterosexual private lives.  There were certainly ethical questions involved in outing, but the public discussion rarely engaged them, preferring the usual sensationalism and melodrama.

These people had extensive adult love lives before they came clean, and they belonged to a generation that still expected the media to cover up for them.  Several years before she made it official, Ellen DeGeneres was spotted snogging another woman in a lesbian bar; I don't remember whether I read about it in the Village Voice or in the gay press.  Just as Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy could rely on the press not to report their well-known (to those who knew) extramarital escapades, Hollywood stars could shelter under the wings of respectable press discretion and the clout of Hollywood; as long as they didn't go too far, it gave them some privacy and some breathing room.  Even before the Internet, the bargain between celebrities and the media was breaking down.  So it wasn't unreasonable for gay people to assume that what we knew was just the tip of the iceberg.

I'm not surprised when anyone comes out, just because I don't put much store by stereotypes. From my first years in a gay community, I met a wide range of gay, lesbian, and bisexual people.  I learned quickly from experience what I already knew in theory from reading, that we're varied and we're everywhere.  I know that Jason Collins isn't the only gay professional athlete out there; I just don't know who the others are.  And despite what some say, it still often takes courage to declare oneself publicly -- less in show business than in areas like male professional sports or elite politics, but one thing about coming out to straight people is that you can never be certain how they'll react.  Think of Chastity (now Chaz) Bono or Anne Rice's son Christopher: both Cher and Anne Rice were social liberals, entertainers, with plenty of gay friends and associates, but both reacted negatively when their own kids turned out to be homos.  Bono's conservative father, and Rice's poet father, took the news easily and gave the support their kids needed.  And in many parts of the US, as well as much of the world -- yes, America isn't all there is -- you're taking your life in your hands to live any kind of gay life at all.  A certain amount of fear isn't always unreasonable.

Ah well, it's my own fault for reading a gossip site.  The level of discourse in most American media, low as it is, is still on the whole a notch higher than at Bossip.com, despite the latter's affectation of world-weary sophistication.

*Quoted in Larry Gross, Contested Closets: The Politics and Ethics of Outing (Minnesota, 1993), 204.

Custom Closet Experts

A friend of mine linked on Facebook to a story claiming that "Queen Latifah Comes Out of the Closet (Finally)."  The best part about it is the automated advertisement (it may not be there when you click through) that reads "You Imagine, We Build and Guarantee! Custom Closet Experts Since 1985."

The story, not so much.  It's a gossip site, and the core of the story is something that had already crossed my digital path about a week ago, that Latifah is going to headline a Pride festival in Long Beach.  Apparently even participating in a Pride event is a first for her, but it isn't coming out.  Lots of straight friends, relatives, supporters, allies, and celebrities have done as much.  Call me old-fashioned, but coming out means saying "Yeah, I'm gay" or the equivalent.

Comments on the story are even worse, the usual "I have never understood why gay celebs are forced to come out" kind of crap.  Or the "its the gay advocate extremists that want to force celebs out with hopes that they will become a new voice for their agenda. The rest of us dont really give a dayum" kind of crap.  A couple of people talk sense, most talk trash.  We've been through all this before; I've written about Queen Latifah before, in 2008 when similar rumors were circulating about her.

But I'm not being fair to Queen Latifah.  She hasn't claimed that she's come out -- it was the gossip-monger who posted the story, who apparently is working through a personal vendetta of her own: according to the writer, she was "the first to break the scoop" that Latifah had broken up with her longtime girlfriend and "began dating a choreographer."  The blogger says that her "scoop resulted in Latifah yanking advertising for her television projects" from her site, which apparently gives her license to spread a false story.  Her source carefully avoids making any claims about the significance of Latifah's appearance beyond its being "a tremendous testament to the popularity of our celebration and to the strength of our community."  And to all my friends, read beyond the freaking headlines of stories like this.

I was going to add some snide remarks about President Obama's late-breaking endorsement of same-sex marriage, but I'll save them for a separate post.

The Sexual Orientation That Won't Shut Up

Heterosexuals just can't seem to shut up about their sexual orientation. A few weeks ago, the straight media were obsessed with the sexual relationship between an unemployed English girl and a soldier from a welfare family; now they are talking about the end of a sexual relationship between a Republican actor and his wife, and the lust child produced by the actor's inability to restrain his animal impulses. Will the revelation of his heterosexuality hurt his movie career? MTV asks. Not to mention the wealthy, powerful man awaiting trial on Riker's Island for forcing himself on a hotel maid. (Seriously: this morning at the store I saw two female anchors on CNN expressing their shock at the fact that a heterosexual attempted rapist was being held without bail after he was arrested while trying to flee the country: "He's one of the most powerful men in the world!" they spluttered. "Can they do that to him?")

But all this is invisible, not just to heterosexuals but to many gay people. So when another CNN anchor, Don Lemon, publicly acknowledges his homosexuality, it's news even though a celebrity's coming out is not exactly a novelty anymore. Part of this is the corporate media's short-term memory, but part of it is the ongoing struggle by heterosexual society to push us back into silence and invisibility: Oh, you are not! Shut up! Lalalalala I can't hear you! Why do you have to tell us you're gay -- you don't see heterosexuals going around saying "Hi, I'm straight!" (Sure you don't. What you see is incessant, obsessive babble about their sex lives, which are heterosexual because sex is assumed to be heterosexual.)

So coming out is always a beginning, not an ending. After you've broken the ice, the water starts to freeze over and you have to keep chipping, chipping, chipping away at it. Ideally, it's nice to be able to do it casually, as heterosexuals do, by speaking about your relationships and interactions: not "I'm gay" so much as "My boyfriend and I ..." Except for speaking on panels, I think most of my comings-out to straight friends, relatives, acquaintances, and coworkers have been that kind. In Lemon's case it appears to be more or less the same: he'd agreed to write a book about the path to success, which turned into a memoir, and that meant talking about his love life among other things. To his credit, he chose to tell the truth. Marketing the book meant that his sexual orientation would be a hook, but that's not his fault, it's the fault of a heterosexual society that still hasn't learned that not everyone is heterosexual, and insists on reacting to every coming-out as if it were the first in history.

Lemon said some good things in this interview with the annoyingly flirtatious heterosexual Joy Behar:



For example, Behar says "There's a lot of homophobes out there, you know..." and Lemon comes right back with "Who're you telling?" I've lost count of the heterosexuals who've warned me and other gay people that not everyone approves of our Lifestyle, as though this was news to me. (If I bring it up, though, I'm being an injustice collector.)  He also handles well Behar's question of how this revelation will affect his "objectivity," and her prurient question about the Down Low; he even pointed out that the Down Low is a phenomenon in other communities than the African-American: there are plenty of white men on the Down Low, but in my culture we call it The Closet.

He falls down in other areas, as when he talks about the perception that a gay man is "effeminate" or "weak," and the "I was born gay, just like I was born black." More embarrassing is his belief that the suicide of Tyler Clementi (the Rutgers freshman who jumped off the George Washington Bridge last fall after a fellow student put a sex tape featuring him and another man on the Internet) could have been prevented if more prominent people would come out. This is a little kid's fantasy: If I were there, I could have saved him. Gay visibility can't fix all our problems. Heterosexuals torment each other too, and bullying is not limited to the persecution of gay or gender-nonconformist kids. And black people have always been visible, and no one doubted that they were born that way, but that never inhibited racists in the slightest. But part of the problem is the murky zone of corporate-media discourse: it's meant to dumb down almost any issue, and you can see Behar hard at work doing so.

Keith Boykin's response has similar problems:

The popular narrative about gay men depicts a community of affluent, educated city dwellers who have come out of the closet and begun to flex their political and economic muscle. But this image doesn't hold up for black gay men, who often lack access to the same resources and support structure available to their white counterparts.

Um, Keith? Most white gay men aren't "affluent, educated city dwellers" either. And I know you know better.

I'm glad Lemon came out, and good luck to him. But the only way coming out has a chance of stopping bigotry is for people in all walks of life to stop tolerating bigotry, and actively express their intolerance of it. The PSA at the head of this post sets a good example. You don't have to be gay to criticize antigay bigotry, just as you don't have to be black to criticize white racism, or a woman to criticize sexism -- in fact, what is more important than gay visibility is visibility of straights who won't put up with bigotry, men who won't tolerate sexism, and whites who won't tolerate racism.

In practice such intolerance will be resisted. Consider all the people who are trying to claim that "gay" as an insult has nothing to do with homosexuality, and even trying to reclaim "faggot" for Fag Discourse. A straight friend on Facebook reacted strongly when his son's wife said something about her husband (newly posted to Iraq) going after "towlheads" (sic). First the son asked, "What's the point in being free if the wives can't express themselves"; when that didn't work he used the old "Dad relax its fine she was just joking" evasion. (At least he didn't say "chill.") We should expect this resistance and refuse to let it succeed.

But again, good for Don Lemon; good for Will Sheridan; good for Rick Wells; good for all the people who are refusing to be invisible anymore. And good for NBA Commissioner David Stern for putting his foot down.

Accentuate the Obvious

Today I was one of the speakers on a GLB panel for a college class, and the question of choice came up again. It occurred to me as I listened to the other speakers that they were even more confused than I'd thought. They talked about people who'd had bad coming-out experiences, and who would choose that? No one, perhaps. This was a variation on the familiar rhetorical question, "Would anyone choose a 'lifestyle' that causes them to be hated, condemned, and vilified?" Why, yes, they would, and they have. But I hadn't heard it applied to coming out before, which has nothing to do with the question whether being gay is a choice.

Or does it? Coming out -- the process of telling other people, gay or straight, that you are not heterosexual -- is pretty clearly a choice. When I started that process, four decades ago, I anticipated that I would have some bad experiences (rejection, hostility, malignant ignorance, etc.), and did my best to prepare myself to deal with them. I was lucky: very few people reacted negatively. But when I did have bad experiences with straight people, it wasn't my choice, it was theirs.

At the risk of distracting the reader, let me suggest an analogy. Anti-choice bigots often try to confuse the issue by conflating the choice of having sexual intercourse with the choice to have a baby: if a woman has sex with a man, they claim, she should expect to get pregnant, and therefore her decision to have sex was a decision to have a baby, regardless of her actual intent -- and if she does become pregnant, she has forfeited all choice thereafter, except the choice of putting the baby up for adoption after its birth. Not all sex leads to conception, however, so choosing to have intercourse is not equivalent to choosing to have a baby. Nor is driving a car equivalent to deciding to die in a fiery collision. Nor is coming out a decision to be disowned by one's parents. Nor, for that matter, is expressing anti-gay opinions a decision to have those opinions derided, rebutted, and vilified -- bigots can usually recognize that distinction, at least!

I'd have thought that all this was obvious, but it obviously isn't, worse luck. I was disturbed by this mutation of the "Would anyone choose a 'lifestyle' ..." meme, which is obnoxious enough in its own right. If gay people (and their allies, presumably) are going to start trying to claim coming out and gay identity as non-choices, then where will we go from there? Evidently the trend is to deny any responsibility and choice in their lives at all, but in order to do that consistently they would have to exempt antigay people from responsibility and choice too, and I don't think that will happen. (Freedom and responsibility for thee, but not for me!) As I said in my own answer to the question about choice, no one knows what choice is, and the science which is used to claim that homosexuality is not a choice doesn't recognize that human beings make any choices at all, since it considers free will an illusion. But the people who claim they were born gay don't realize this: they do believe they make choices, but being gay isn't one of them... and now, it appears, coming out wasn't a choice either.

I must admit, of course, that this has to do with a blind spot of my own. To quote myself:

... unlike most gay people I’ve known, I did not expect everything to be easy when I came out. There’s a weird paradox there: most people who, like me, made a conscious move to come out to straights, seem to have delayed that move as long as we did because we feared the consequences: that our friends, our families, random strangers would hate and despise us for being queer. And yet, after coming out, a good many gay people express shock and dismay that not everyone treats them with respect, let alone acceptance. I’m deliberately echoing Captain Renault’s famous line from Casablanca: I am shocked! shocked, I tell you! to find that there is homophobia going on here. Their shock may be as theatrical, as fake, as Captain Renault's; what I don't get is what it's supposed to achieve.

The Happy Endings for Homosexuals Club

More than any other single person, Jill Johnston inspired me to come out.

It was early 1971, and I was twenty, in the throes of my latest crush on a conflicted straight boy. I had heard about the Stonewall Riots of June 1969, but they were in New York City a thousand miles away, and I don't recall paying enough attention to the developments in the gay movement that ensued. I do remember some articles on Gay Liberation in The Seed, a Chicago underground newspaper I bought in a South Bend newsstand / head shop. That was also where I sometimes bought the Village Voice, though I mostly read it at the library. (Public libraries were the Internet of those days: a place where you could get information from all over the world. Compared to the net these days, even the best library was limited, but compared to the rural area where I grew up, even a small public library was an exciting portal to the world.)

I remember reading the March 4, 1971 issue of the Voice at IU-South Bend, either in the library or in the snack bar. The title "Lois Lane Is a Lesbian" jumped out at me, and I started reading the article. Of course I'd read other things about being gay, but nothing like this. I had no idea who Jill Johnston was, and I hadn't read the earlier article by the Voice's heterosexual film critic Andrew Sarris that she was replying to. I'd never read anyone who wrote the sort of things she'd written.

Now I suggest you go up to a black person and say White People Have Problems Too and see what kind of response you get. I'm going on record here to notify every heterosexual male and female that every lesbian and every homosexual is all too aware of the problems of heterosexuals since they permeate every aspect of our social political economic and cultural lives. That we were in fact educated on these problems. That we were brought up and spoon fed or pitch forked on the crucible of the problems of thousands of Romeos and Juliets radiating outward from all our sublimely miserable and broken families into the movies and the funnies and the histories and the psychologies and the novels and our great Western classics. ... I think all of us are authorities on the heterosexual problem. Knowledge on the subject is instantly available, in case you've missed out, in every daily newspaper with their front page accounts of the Wars. We are bored with the news from the heterosexual fronts. We want to hear from the lesbians and the homosexuals now. I want homosexual movies and novels and funnies and histories and songs and classics. Even problem stories. Certainly the songs. Let all those gay rock artists come out from behind their phony lyrics. But the movies! The big medium. I don't expect the next batch of gay ones to show us nothing but the doomed clandestine affair of Therese and Isabelle in boarding school, and the wrecked life of Sister George whose girlfriend leaves her for a great white witch of the west whose cold clawing sexual advances constitute the only sexual revelation in the film ... This film critic a few months ago wrote in the context of some review that "although I don't belong to the happy-endings-for-homosexuals club ..." which made me ask him when I saw him "why don't you belong to the happy-endings-for-homosexuals club?" Exactly. Can you imagine me saying, in any context, "although I don't belong to the happy-endings-for-heterosexuals club"? ...

Just a year ago I permitted Rosalyn Drexler at a small dinner party to convince me I'd been a dope for revealing myself at an artists' colony where I'd been I was not being self protective as Rosalyn pointed out "Oh Jill, can't you keep a secret" and I was not yet able to reply immediately "Do you keep your marriage to Sherman a secret?"

As I look at what I've typed here I see how much of what Johnston wrote has stayed with me, ventriloquized itself through me as a speaker and a writer about gay and lesbian issues. Those who've read much of this blog, for example, may recognize Johnston's ideas from things I've written. Of course it's also because the attitudes she railed against remained potent in heterosexual culture, and remain so to this day; it's still necessary to talk back to them, and Johnston's answers still work for me.

Anyway, not long after I read this article I read a notice in the Chicago Seed of the Chicago Gay Alliance's monthly meetings in their community center on West Addison. I took a couple of vacation days in April, and drove to Chicago -- the first time I'd ever gone there on my own, instead of with my family or on a school trip. I remember it being a clear, sunny, hot day. I found the CGA building, then explored Old Town, and killed time until the meeting. I sat toward the back of a half-finished room upstairs and watched and listened, and after the meeting ended I paid $5 for a membership. (I liked the idea of being a card-carrying homosexual.) I didn't talk much to anyone, being too overwhelmed by the experience of being in a room full of other people like me, though I wasn't sure how much like me they were. An hour later I was on the road back to South Bend, my head buzzing with excitement and confusion. I didn't go back to Chicago for several years; the following fall I moved to Bloomington and got involved in the gay community here.

Alison Bechdel has a new post on her blog which mentions that Jill Johnston died on September 18th at the age of 81. I hadn't known she was that old, thought she was maybe ten years my senior rather than twenty, almost as old as my mother in fact. She wrote many books after she inspired me to come out; I guess I need to read some of them.

Identity Crisis

Believing as I do that being gay is what you make of it, I am constantly baffled by the way "gay identity" has become a bogeyman in both academic and popular discourse. It seems to have the same function for gay academics as "the gay lifestyle" has for homophobes, connoting a sinister, all-devouring, vampiric shadow that sneaks up on unsuspecting young faglings and dykettes, recruits them by deceit, and sucks out all their vital force. And once they've succumbed to it, alas, there is no escape. I don't think I'm exaggerating here at all, not least because it's so unclear what either "gay identity" or "the gay lifestyle" is. It is, as I said, a bogey, a lurking horror to be dreaded (Be afraid, be very afraid), not understood or defined. "Gay identity" doesn't sap your individuality (or does it?) because in this discourse it is the epitome of individualism. I've been picking on Mark McLelland lately, though despite this niggling little problem Male Homosexuality in Modern Japan is a fine, valuable book, so let me quote another scholar who covers roughly the same waterfront, Song Hwee Lim, who writes in his Celluloid comrades: representations of male homosexuality in contemporary Chinese cinemas (University of Hawai'i Press, 2006, 50-51):

In terms of the cinematic representation of homosexuality, the logical corollary to the contestation of negative representation often means the creation of openly gay characters, since the rhetoric of gay liberation dictates that to remain in the closet is a sign of self-loathing, whereas to come out is an affirmative act of pride. Over the decades, the act of coming out has acquired such an unquestioning and sometimes unquestioned status that not to come out is seen as an unfathomable form of behavior [50].

My dear! First of all, it's dishonest to claim that coming out has "acquired such an ... unquestioned status" when it is still being argued about, debated, fought over, in life and in print -- and not just in postcolonialist academic tracts, but among American queers in every walk of life. (What an "unquestioning ... status" would be, I have no idea.) Second, it should be noticed again that "coming out" has distinct, yet partially overlapping meanings. It used to mean making one's debut in Gay Society, getting to know other gay people and getting one's cherry popped. After the Stonewall riots of 1969 and the emergence of the Gay Liberation Movement another meaning was added, without replacing the earlier one: "coming out of the closet" to straight people as well, or becoming "openly gay." It's this latter meaning that is the "affirmative act of pride." While it's possible to get along without being openly gay, it's hard to have much of a life as a gay person without knowing other gay people; though for gay men, anyway, it is possible to have an anonymous sex life without socializing in gay society or telling one's mom about it. Is it "unfathomable"? I don't know. Is it necessary for gay cinema to have "openly gay" characters? I don't know, but both forms of coming out provide easy ways to move a narrative forward, and supply ready-made drama of various kinds, quite apart from any political concerns. I think that in his apparent eagerness to distance himself from gay politics, Lim overlooks these points. I'm also not sure that not-coming-out is "a form of behavior," but leave that aside.

To borrow a Cartesian formulation, the rhetoric of gay liberation beseeches the homosexual to declare, "I come out, therefore I am."

Well, no it doesn't; this may have sounded cute or witty to the author, but it's neither. In its most famous form, gay liberation exhorted (not beseeched) "the homosexual", to come "Out of the Closets and Into the Streets!" Not, in other words, just for Gay Pride Day Parades each June, but to work with others to make the streets (indeed, the whole world) safe all year round for gay people, against cops, thugs, priests, families, and others who sought to keep us scared and invisible. I want to stress this because Lim prefers to keep "the homosexual" individual and isolated, standing alone against his family and society.

This line of argument raises several questions: Who decides if homosexuals should come out? Does the act of coming out necessarily promote understanding and acceptance of homosexuality? If coming out is chiefly linked to Western epistemologies and practices (as argued [but not proven! -- DM] by Munt via Foucault), should it be regarded as universal and imposed indiscriminately on other cultures? [51]

Well, of course, homosexuals should decide if homosexuals should come out -- that is, each homosexual must decide for him or herself. (Lim does not take up the question of outing.) The act of coming out doesn't necessarily promote or automatically understanding and acceptance of homosexuality, but it is the only way that homosexuals can take that project into their own hands. You can only pretend to be a disinterested heterosexual for so long in challenging bigots. As for the question whether "coming out is chiefly linked to Western epistemologies and practices", leaving aside Lim's misunderstanding of Foucault, Lim skates perilously close to a racist essentialism there. He then relies on the blind passive: "should it be regarded as universal" by whom? Should it be "imposed indiscriminately on other cultures" by whom? This is especially pertinent because Lim here is criticizing other gay Chinese critics who, according to him, are demanding "positive representation" and "openly gay" protagonists in Chinese film. Either he's insinuating that they are collaborating with the monolithic Gay Western Imperialists to impose coming-out indiscriminately on all cultures, haha!, or he's attacking a straw man. The first seems likely:

To begin with, I suggest that there is no inherent moral high ground in coming out, the rhetoric of gay liberation notwithstanding. Demands on homosexuals to come out, whether in reel life or real life, often reflect the need of gay activists and critics for greater visibility, alliance, and support for their political cause.

As though "activists" were some weirdly distinct group, not really gay at all! Of course, "their political cause" will get nowhere if they/we can't persuade other gay people that the strategies and goals we advocate will be useful to them. What Lim calls "demands on homosexuals to come out" were, in the US, part of an often acrimonious debate between the open and the closeted that isn't over yet.

I want to point out, though, that whatever role the "political cause" and evil Western epistemologies and practices may play, I and many other gay people choose to be openly gay for a bluntly personal reason: to stop the heterosexuals in our lives from nagging us about when we're going to get married, why aren't we married yet, let me introduce you to a wonderful girl/boy I know, oh of course you want to meet her/him, when are you going to settle down, don't you want to have children? Where are my grandchildren? Those gay people who aren't bothered by this sort of thing, of course, needn't come out to their straight friends and family; but they also needn't gripe privately to me about how annoying it is to put up with all those questions.

However, who would have to bear the consequence of coming out? Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues that when gay people come out to parents, it is "with the consciousness for a potential for serious injury that is likely to go in both directions."

But Lim is only interested in the injury that the children inflict on the parents, not the reverse. It's also highly dishonest of him to enlist Sedgwick as an advocate for the closet.

Particularly in a homophobic society, the gay person's coming out may in turn plunge the parents "into the closet of [their] conservative community" (1990 [Epistemology of the Closet], 80). Questions of ethics, responsibility, emotion, and family ties are so intricately intertwined that the rhetoric of oppression and liberation seems simplistic and naive by comparison.

As though American gay people hadn't been debating those questions for 40 years and more! As though "gay activists" hadn't been struggling with, arguing about questions of ethics, responsibility, emotion and family ties all that time! And as I said before, Lim pictures "the gay person" as standing alone, with no questions of ethics, responsibility, emotion, and family ties to other gay people, especially our partners. As Sarah Schulman wrote in 1990:

Most gay people stay in the closet -- i.e., dishonor their relationships -- because to do so is a prerequisite for employment, housing, safety, and family love. Having to hide the way you live because of fear of punishment isn't a "right" nor is it "privacy." Being in the closet is not an objective, neutral, value-free condition. It is, instead, maintained by force, not choice [emphasis added].

Notice that she was writing here about the US, twenty years after Stonewall. It doesn't occur to Lim that lying, "hiding the way you live," has consequences for our partners, the gay people we love. Whether we have any responsibilities to them has been hotly contested among gay people, let alone straights, for decades. (Evidently Lim thinks the answer is no.)

It is highly possible that the complications and consequences of coming out may, for both the homosexual and the family, be so constricting as to make the closet a relatively liberating place to inhabit. Indeed, coming out cannot necessarily be presumed to achieve the dual goals of liberating the homosexual from the suffocating closet and gaining the understanding of those to whom the homosexual comes out. As the coming-out scene in The Wedding Banquet shows, getting the message across is not always easy [52].

Well, duh! We Western homosexuals never ever noticed that! We never expected, or experienced, any difficulty in getting acceptance of our declarations from friends, family, or anyone else!

It should also be noticed that you can't use The Wedding Banquet to argue that "the closet [is] a relatively liberating place to inhabit," because the whole point of the story is that being closeted with respect to his family has been very uncomfortable for Wai-tung and his partner Simon, even when his parents are at home in Taiwan. When they come to New York in anticipation of his (heterosexual) wedding, the pressures of pretending that Simon is no one to Wai-tung nearly destroys their relationship. (Someday I should write about the way that The Wedding Banquet uses deceptions of various kinds, and their consequences, as leitmotifs.) "Relatively liberating"? Please! But Lim sees only Wai-tung as "the homosexual" in the story; Simon doesn't count. In the end, it's Wai-tung who has to decide whether to come out to his parents, and there is no pretense that it's easy or magically makes all the problems go away. But if Lim were to watch a thoroughly American movie like, say, Torch Song Trilogy, he'd see the very same issues in play. To claim that "Western" gays, whether artists or activists or both, ignore the complications of coming out is outrageously dishonest, yet it's a very common accusation in this kind of writing.

In The Wedding Banquet, does the mother's failure to fully comprehend her son's sexuality, despite his coming out to her, shut the closet door back on Wai-tung?

"Refusal" would be a better word than "failure," and it sure as hell is intended to shut him up.

Does the father's tacit acknowledgment of Wai-tung's homosexuality leave the closet door half open?

It's not intended to, since the father insists that Simon keep "our secret". (Some say the closet door is half open ...) Which is an irony that many gay people who've been through this experience will recognize: the way that family members will try to practice damage control by insisting that the revelations stop with them, and that no one else be told. I've always hoped that Simon told Wai-tung, if not immediately (they had conflicts of their own to resolve) then at least as soon as the parents went back to Taiwan.

It is clear from the above that the metaphor of the closet has its limitations, whatever the cultural context.

Well, duh. All metaphors have their limitations. And again, it's not as if American gays haven't been wrassling with this conundrum, too, for decades.

More important, the political evaluation accompanying the issue of coming out must be brought into question. That is, an implicit acknowledgment of a family member's homosexuality may not always be morally less acceptable than an explicit one, and the atmosphere surrounding such tacit acknowledgment cannot be regarded as simply "homophobic" [54-55].

Each case would have to be evaluated on its own merits of course. I'd agree with Lim if, for instance, the family stopped insisting that the "family member" get heterosexually married, stopped asking about his or her heterosexual involvements, when will they pop out a grandchild, and so on. If the pressure continues, then "such tacit acknowledgment" must be "regarded as simply 'homophobic.'"

Even the most radical militant queers have always recognized that some homophobes will never change, but can be tolerated if they make some adjustments. If not, they can be resisted. Just looking at The Wedding Banquet, the mother remains homophobic and surely wouldn't stop applying emotional pressure if she stayed in New York; back home, it's likely that the father, while he lives, will simply withhold support for projects to pressure Wai-tung to be heterosexual -- Wai-tung is, after all, not only married but a father-to-be now. Would the father be as 'accepting' if a grandchild weren't in the pipeline? I doubt it. His manipulativeness reminds me (and maybe Lim too, who mentions her on 63) of Dona Herlinda, who now that I think of it is a cinematic ancestor of Mr. Gao.

As the response of the mother illustrates, the act of coming out cannot be assumed to be the best, if not the only, "solution."

It doesn't illustrate anything of the kind. For one thing, "coming out" is always a beginning, not an end; in Wai-tung's case, it can mean the beginning of his refusal to let his mother bully him into marrying heterosexually -- a ongoing struggle, but so is life. We inscrutable Occidentals have a phrase, "the best of a bad lot," which implies that the best available option is not necessarily a positively good one. Lim should learn from our ability to transcend easy binaries.

Tales of the Closet

Gwendolen. I am engaged to Mr. Worthing, mamma. [They rise together.]

Lady Bracknell. Pardon me, you are not engaged to any one. When you do become engaged to some one, I, or your father, should his health permit him, will inform you of the fact. An engagement should come on a young girl as a surprise, pleasant or unpleasant, as the case may be. It is hardly a matter that she could be allowed to arrange for herself...

But on to other burning issues. A week or so ago (time does fly) a straight friend told me he’d heard that Queen Latifah had come out. It’s a mark of how out of touch I am with today’s popular culture that Queen Latifah was not high on my list of people most likely to. I asked him where he’d heard this, and he wasn’t sure, so I did a couple of Google searches, which came up dry.

Well, not exactly dry, except by my standards. Last December it seems there was a flurry of speculation in the tabloids that Latifah was “officially engaged” to a woman she’s been tight with for several years. “Officially engaged” was the giveaway, since “officially” in this context has all the force of “literally.” (As in, “My head literally exploded.”)

An engagement, like a marriage, is a public event. If Queen Latifah were really officially engaged, our little county newspaper would have chronicled the fact by last December at the latest. Of all the material I found from last winter touting the happy event, nothing pointed to an actual announcement of the engagement. All of it was basically gossip-column chatter, with no real sourcing.

But then I found another flurry of links from this summer. It was inspired by the overturning of California’s ban on same-sex marriage by the state Supreme Court, and all of it was rewarmed versions of the items from last winter. I could almost see the tiny gears grinding in the tiny brains: hey! now that it’s legal, maybe Latifah and her honey will tie the knot. … Maybe they will, but so far there’s no evidence that they will.

From what I read, Latifah has mostly not denied the rumors that she’s gay, except for a tiresomely routine evasion after she played a lesbian in the movie Set It Off. "It's insulting when someone asks, 'Are you gay?'” she wrote in her autobiography. “A woman cannot be strong, outspoken, competent at running her own business, handle herself physically, play a very convincing role in a movie, know what she wants—and go for it—without being gay? Come on.” Aside from the fact that it is not insulting to be asked if one is gay, she had a point. I was writing yesterday about Americans’ dislike of (or inability to comprehend) irony: I linked it to our Puritan heritage, which like the Christian tradition generally is hostile to theatre and acting. To be one thing yet pretend to be another is as bad as having sexual intercourse in a standing position!

There was a mild flurry some years ago when Will Smith chickened out of kissing a man in his first movie role, Six Degrees of Separation. (A stunt double was used for the dangerous scene.) He tried to blame it on Denzel Washington, who he claimed had warned him that black folks have trouble separating the actor from the role, so “Don’t go kissing no man.” Many years earlier, on her 1975 album Modern Scream, Lily Tomlin did a routine in which an interviewer complimented her on her courage for playing a heterosexual (presumably in Robert Altman’s Nashville.) “I’ve seen these women all my life, I know how they walk, I know how they talk,” Tomlin said. “You don’t have to be one to play one!” True: a fair number of homosexual actors have done it over the years. The joke was a wink to her fans who were in on the open secret of Tomlin’s lesbianism and her relationship with her producer Jane Wagner. But an open secret it remained for another quarter of a century.

Lady Bracknell. To speak frankly, I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people the opportunity of finding out each other’s character before marriage, which I think is never advisable.

More recently, according to the gossip sites I saw, Queen Latifah has simply refused to discuss her personal life. That’s certainly her prerogative, and it’s a lot better than the denial. Could it have something to do with her apparent involvement with the woman the sites name as her girlfriend? She won’t confirm the relationship, but she won’t deny it either. Maybe now she can’t put the rumors down to her being a strong, competent, outspoken woman.

As Sarah Schulman wrote in 1990 during the big outing controversy,

As for the morality of dragging gay public figures out of the closet -- well, I'm not sure. What I do know, though, is that to call this an invasion of privacy is distorting and dishonest. Most gay people stay in the closet -- i.e., dishonor their relationships -- because to do so is a prerequisite for employment, housing, safety, and family love. Having to hide the way you live because of fear of punishment isn't a "right" nor is it "privacy." Being in the closet is not an objective, neutral, value-free condition. It is, instead, maintained by force, not choice. … The closet is not a right. It is something we want to make unnecessary, not claim and cling to.

I was struck by the report on one gossip site that “According to the National Enquirer, the couple are ‘planning an intimate ceremony with close family and friends.’” It occurred to me years ago that legal marriage would undermine so many closet cases’ argument that their love lives are nobody else’s business. Anyone can exchange vows, but it has no legal weight. If they apply for a marriage license, which is part of the process of getting legally married, their love lives will become everybody’s business, no matter how intimate the ceremony they have. Legal marriage is “private,” but it isn’t secret: it’s a matter of public record.

But nowadays, who cares? Lots of celebrities have come out publicly, so who needs people who lack the courage or integrity to do it, who choose (as Schulman put it so precisely) to dishonor their relationships? When Tomlin finally came out, she tried to put a good face on it, as did Rosie O’Donnell, by claiming that because ‘everybody knew’, or it was obvious they were gay, there was no need to say it aloud. But if everybody knew, why not say it aloud? (Nathan Lane did the same thing: “Look, I'm 40, I'm single, and I work in musical theater - you do the math!” But before that interview he’d complained because people did the math: “I didn't know I was supposed to make a public declaration. I didn't think anybody cared.” Girl, what planet were you living on? And don’t get me started on Janis Ian…)

Gwendolen. I am afraid it is quite clear, Cecily, that neither of us is engaged to be married to any one.

Cecily. It is not a very pleasant position for a young girl suddenly to find herself in. Is it?

Coming Out Of The Mobius Strip

I’ve written here before of the strange attitude many scholars have toward words and concepts, “as though concepts were unproblematically tied to words, and their ramifications were mystically packed into concept and word, so that they need only be unpacked by the intrepid theorist.” It’s so common, in fact, that it might be worth looking at another case.

Historian Michael S. Sherry’s Gay Artists in Modern American Culture: An Imagined Conspiracy (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007) is a very useful book. With the aid of his research assistants, Sherry has unearthed a mass of information about the American fantasy of a homosexual plot to take over America, especially the vital arts and entertainment sectors. Since this theme is nowadays played most audibly on the religious-identified Right, Sherry has done a valuable service in reminding us that it used to be an obsession of secular liberals as well, from philosopher William Barrett to Kennedy court historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., from novelist Philip Roth to theatre and film critic Stanley Kauffmann. The New Left magazine Ramparts published an article by the deliciously-named Gene Marine:

People, I have had it. I really, honestly, truly don’t care what you do with your spare time, but if you are homosexual will you kindly let somebody else play with a piece of the culture for a while?

As usual with such complaints, Marine’s protestations of disinterest ring false, especially given the innuendo (and surely deliberate double-entendre) in the final clause. “Play with a piece of the culture,” eh? Which, erm, piece did you have in mind, Gene?

Gay Artists in Modern American Culture offers valuable historical perspective and is a trove of dish on our queer fore-uncles; see also the stunning photograph of a shirtless and beautiful Alvin Ailey on page 147. But Sherry gets oddly worked up about the term “the closet” as it refers to GLB people’s degree of openness about their lives.

I think George Chauncey established, in his monumental Gay New York, that “coming out of the closet” is a post-Stonewall term. The problematic part of the phrase is “the closet”: gay men did speak before 1969 of “coming out,” campily invoking the emergence of well-born young women from their families into Society (and the marriage market), but not of hiding in the closet; “wearing a mask” seems to have been a more favored metaphor. However, gay people were well aware of gay people who knew they were gay, but still refused for whatever reason to make their debut in Gay Society; I don't know what they called them, and since 1970 or so the favored term has been "closeted." Chauncey conceded that “The fact that gay people in the past did not speak or conceive of themselves as living in a closet does not preclude us from using the term retrospectively as an analytic category, but it does suggest that we need to use it more cautiously and precisely, and to pay attention to the very different terms people used to describe themselves and their social world” (Gay New York, 6).

Sherry won’t even allow that much, though he relies mainly on Chauncey for his position. He spends a couple of pages denouncing retroactive use of “the closet” to refer to gay secrecy before the 1960s:

When the gay magazine One tackled “Coming Out” and asked “Out from where? Out into what?” in 1962, it mentioned no “closet,” instead identifying “coming out” as “our slang phrase for coming from a majority and going to a minority.” One knew the need for “‘wearing the mask’” in a “hostile world” that taught “the evilness of homosexuality.” But “the absolute necessity for secrecy from the majority” was something “you learned quickly” after coming out – a protective device, not a place of hiding. … Made retroactive, the “closet” becomes today’s place to hide a complex past [96]

I think it’s absurd to claim that secrecy was something queers learned only “after coming out” – they’d have learned that from growing up in straight society. In those days, taking off the mask in front of the straight public was almost unthinkable. It was especially unthinkable to straights. Open gayness, as public as heterosexual marriage, requires not only personal decision and courage on the part of those who come out, but a social environment in which the declaration can be heard. It’s often been said that many gay people of a certain age preferred the mask, the “double life,” the feeling of belonging to an elite club with its secret handshakes and passwords. But heterosexuals liked it that way too, and collaborated in keeping the secret – except when they didn’t. It was heterosexual society that decided when homosexuals would wear the mask, and when it would be ripped off. Hence the heterosexual media printed the names, addresses, and often jobs of gay men arrested for “indecency,” which could mean anything from sex in a public toilet to being in a gay bar when the police chose to shake it down. As Sherry points out, the media claimed that queers were “forcing” themselves on the normal public:

Yet the media did most of the “forcing.” Life’s claim was oddly dissonant with how its cameras and reporters pushed into queer settings and peered at what they observed. … It was unclear anyway how people facing intense hostility – stressed and endorsed in most accounts – could do much “forcing,” although queer disguise and conspiracy (“their central office”) were cited. … Much evidence for queer “pressures” was self-referential: observers construed others’ notice of homosexuality as a sign of its swelling presence, and they equated the growth in talk about queers with growth in talk by them. Homosexuality was “more in evidence,” as Time put it, in good part because the media called attention to it – “not to condone it,” Life made clear, “but to cope with it.” If anything, gay activism was as much a response to growing condemnation as its cause [108-9].

The writers mentioned above often felt free to attack homosexual artists by innuendo in reviews of their work, or even by naming names. Philip Roth, for example, ranted in the New York Review of Books about the “ghastly pansy rhetoric” of Edward Albee’s 1964 play Tiny Alice, and snarled, “How long before a play is produced on Broadway in which the homosexual hero is presented as a homosexual, and not disguised as an angst-ridden priest, or an angry Negro, or an aging actress, or worst of all, Everyman?” (Roth, like other writers who complained about gay duplicity, wasn’t interested in seeing a play with an unambiguously gay hero; he just wanted to be able to avoid it in advance.) The convention of the open secret made it possible for Albee’s homosexuality to be well-known in New York theatre circles – he was the partner of the composer William Flanagan -- much as John F. Kennedy’s priapic heterosexuality was known to the Washington press corps at around the same time, while being simultaneously swept under the carpet. “The closet is often seen as a regime of silence,” Sherry complains (107), but so it was in those days -- official public silence, except when it was expedient to sacrifice some hapless queer to scandal.

Of course nowadays “coming out” is confusingly ambiguous, denoting a spectrum from “coming out to oneself” to coming out in a gay social milieu to coming out to straight friends, family, world. Just about all of the celebrity queers – Rock Hudson, Melissa Etheridge, k.d. lang, Ian McKellen, Rosie O’Donnell, Neil Patrick Harris, Ellen DeGeneres and the rest -- known to the straight public were “out” in gay life before they “came out” in The Advocate or People. Indeed, they depended on the straight media to cover for them. (I think it was DeGeneres who was observed kissing another woman in a lesbian bar while she was still officially “wearing the mask.”)

Sherry says that “queerness involved a sense of being cast out of society, not trapped in something” (97). Granted, the spatial metaphor of the closet has its limitations, but then so does the metaphor of wearing a mask. So does the metaphor "of being cast out of society" -- where did they go, then? A mask that simply covers my face, like the Lone Ranger’s, is meant to hide my identity altogether. (I’ll try to address the complexities of “identity” some other time.) A Nixon mask also hides my identity, but no one is going to think I’m actually Nixon; the falseness of the mask is obvious. Gay people’s forced secrecy – and forced revelations, when it comes to that -- are another matter.

You’d hardly guess from Sherry’s remarks that serious analysis of “the closet” doesn’t necessarily depend on the spatial metaphor. David Halperin’s excellent discussion in Saint Foucault (Oxford University Press, 1995), for example:

[Eve Kosofsky] Sedgwick has shown that the closet is an impossibly contradictory place: you can’t be in it, and you can’t be out of it. You can’t be in it because – so long as you are in the closet – you can never be certain of the extent to which you have actually succeeded in keeping your homosexuality secret; after all, one effect of being in the closet is that you are precluded from knowing whether people are treating you as straight because you have managed to fool them and they do not suspect you of being gay, or whether they are treating you as straight because they are playing along with you and enjoying the epistemological privilege that your ignorance of their knowledge affords them. But if you can never be in the closet, you can’t ever be out of it either, because those who have once enjoyed the epistemological privilege constituted by their knowledge of your ignorance of their knowledge typically refuse to give up that privilege, and insist on constructing your sexuality as a secret to which they have special access, a secret which always gives itself away to their superior and knowing gaze. By that means they contrive to consolidate their claim to a superior knowingness about sexual matters, a knowingness that is not only distinct from knowledge but is actually opposed to it, is actually a form of ignorance, insofar as it conceals from the knowing the political nature of their own considerable stakes in preserving the epistemology of the closet as well as in maintaining the corresponding and exactly opposite epistemological construction of heterosexuality as both an obvious fact that can be universally known without “flaunting itself” and a form of personal life that can remain protectively private without constituting a secret truth [Saint Foucault, 34-5].

Halperin begins by speaking of the closet as a place to be in or out of, but then he moves on to discuss the contradictions of secrecy itself. He could as easily have used the metaphor of the mask; what matters is not the word but the analysis. Sherry’s discussion would have been much richer if he hadn’t taken “the closet” so literally, and had explored with more care the implications of the simultaneous visibility and invisibility of the homosexuality of his gay subjects, as Halperin does here.

Too many scholarly writers I’ve read waste energy and print trying to unpack the literal sense of their concepts, metaphors, and images, defining them with maniacal strictness and then declaring triumphantly that the terms won’t stretch to fit the phenomena. Like, duh! No metaphor – not the closet, not the mask, not the double life – is going to have a perfect one-to-one correspondence with lived experience. It’s especially ironic to see social constructionists – or at least people who officially subscribe to social constructionism – acting as though words had some inner essence that can be revealed if you just peel away the outer layers. But words are like an artichoke: keep peeling away the leaves, and you find there’s nothing left.

P.S. I've been productive the past couple of weeks thanks to semester break. I'm back to the grind starting tomorrow, but I'll try to post at least twice a week, anyway. The ClustrMap showed me I've been getting more visitors than I thought, so I'll try to make it worthwhile to keep coming back for more.

Hiding From Their Own Shadows

What's wrong with this picture? In 1972, a gay twenty-year-old visiting Manhattan has only one night to "find others like myself":

Yet in an era before gay community centers and programs, or gay bookstores and the right kind of titles to line their shelves, where was a young queer person to go? All I knew -- all I had ever heard about -- were the seedy gay movie houses near Times Square. With trembling fingers, I paid for a ticket and entered one. Within minutes, I was back out on the streets in heart-pounding escape from a brigade in raincoats who had descended on me the moment I sat down. In fear and panic, I ran uptown and into Central Park. Hadn't I read somewhere that queers met there too? My foray into the greenery didn't last much longer than my interlude at the movies: it, too, was a dark and scary place. A brief encounter with a kindred soul? Hell, one could get killed here! I returned to my hotel room, dejected and hopeless. Instead of finding others like me, all I had discovered were shadows -- predatory and frightening.

There's a great deal wrong with this passage from Mark Thompson's Gay Body (viii-ix), starting with the shoddy writing and proceeding through the Jungian demonization of the "shadows" he encountered. (Remember, Mark, those "shadows" are your shadow.) What I'd like you to notice now is Thompson's claim that in New York in 1972 there were no "gay community centers and programs, or gay bookstores and the right kind of titles to line their shelves." In fact, Craig Rodwell's Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore opened in Greenwich Village in 1967, five years before Thompson's night of the Long Raincoats. By 1972, New York Gay Activists Alliance had a community center in a converted firehouse. San Francisco's gay community center was founded in 1966. Chicago Gay Alliance had a center in the middle of the city. (At the age of twenty, with just one night to find others like myself, I visited it in April 1971.) The early 1970s were a time of explosive growth for such resources nationwide. Young Mark Thompson may not have known about these resources, but they did exist, and old Mark Thompson should know it by now.

But facts do get in the way of a good story.

Now let's move ahead a few years. Fenton Johnson's Geography of the Heart is a moving account of the death from AIDS of his lover Larry Rose. It also tells of his own earlier life in "San Francisco in the late 1970s, those innocent and exhilarating years when it first seemed possible for gay men and lesbians to live and love openly" (79). Notice how the "years when it first seemed possible for gay men and lesbians to live and love openly" creep forward in time. For Mark Thompson, 1972 was still the Dark Ages; for Johnson, the late 1970s -- in San Francisco, mind you -- were just the beginning of the Enlightenment.

Or not: In 1979 ("my second year in San Francisco" [81]), Johnson found a new place to live, out of the fast lane. One acquaintance at the time, "a painfully young man," had "just been discharged from the navy because he was gay, a nice instance of discrimination that at the time we accepted as simply the way life worked and would always work."

Apparently "we" had never heard of Leonard Matlovich, a gay man who received national straight media coverage and was featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1975, for fighting to remain in the US military. Rapid growth of gay organizations and visibility had continued through the Seventies, all over the US and elsewhere. Since young Mark Thompson went cruising in Times Square and Central Park and ran shrieking from the reflections of himself he found there, gay activists had confronted the psychiatric establishment, and won: the APA de-pathologized homosexuality in 1973. Aside from Matlovich and other gay military personnel, there were openly gay politicians, from Elaine Noble to Allen Spears. And need I mention that 1979 was the year after the assassination of Harvey Milk? Evidently I need.

These events weren't entirely invisible in the straight media, and certainly could have been known by people who read even the Advocate, let alone other gay media. Johnson writes about the period without the intrusion of these current, local events into his portrait; and even today too many gay people accept discrimination "as simply the way life worked and would always work."

But maybe even 1979 is still too long ago. So let's move ahead to the 1980s, and a young lesbian attending a tiny liberal-arts college in Indiana. Although there was no gay organization there at the time,

To DePauw's credit, with the college's support I was able to attend a number of national women's studies conferences in the Midwest as well as a large antinuclear weapons conference at Riverside Church in New York City. These conferences literally [?] saved my life. They allowed me to meet not only other feminist women but students like myself who were struggling with their sexual identities. The women and men I met gave me the reassurance I needed that being a lesbian was not "abnormal." At the time, it felt like just being lesbian, gay, or bisexual was extremely radical and in itself a political statement (Stiers, xiii).

When I first read this, I immediately wondered: How does "extremely radical" connect to "abnormal"? Or does Stiers approve of "political statements"? She's so incoherent I can't be sure. Let's consider the historical context again: by the 1980s, what might be called the professionalization of the gay movement was well underway, with frequent calls to put the radicalism of the 70s behind us. More gay military, more gay politicians, more gay pastors and priests and rabbis, more laws forbidding discrimination based on sexual orientation, even in towns in Indiana. Businessman David Goodstein had bought the Advocate, no radical publication to begin with, and used it to further an avowedly conservative agenda. Gay religious groups were the fastest-growing segment of the gay movement. And by the mid-1980s, AIDS had put a wholly different face on the gay male community. If being gay seemed "radical" at that time to Gretchen Stiers, it was despite all these developments.

But leave all that aside. Consider the impression this author gives that there were no gay resources in Indiana colleges in the 1980s, that it was necessary to go to New York to meet "students like myself who were struggling with their sexual identities." You'd think that Gretchen Stiers was the only gay person at DePauw in those days, which just isn't true. Even DePauw was not quite as bad as Stiers implies: there have been several attempts to get a gay organization going there since the 1970s. I was one of several gay men who visited DePauw from Indiana University in Bloomington (whose first student gay organization -- that I know of! -- was founded in 1970) in the mid-1970s to speak to the whole campus about being gay. Gretchen Stiers may not have known about such things at the time she was "struggling with her sexual identity", but how can it be that 15 years of gay organizing in Indiana (!) colleges and universities have still never intruded on her awareness?

And since we're now talking about women as well as men, how about the Michigan Women's Music Festival -- or if Michigan was too far out ("radical"?) for young Gretchen Stiers, the National Women's Music Festival took place every summer in Bloomington, an hour's drive from DePauw. There were women's bookstores in Bloomington and Indianapolis, also close to DePauw. By the time Stiers was coming out, Olivia Records was moving towards luppification, such as expensive ocean cruises.

But surely, the reader may protest, things changed in the 1990s? I wish I could say so (and don't call me Shirley!). Let's leave the coming-out genre for a moment, and listen to a gay man of 40, writing about gay life in New York City today:

I have, of course, like most of the gay men I know, spent a good deal of time complaining about the bar scene. The complaining -- that if you're a single gay man the only way to meet other single gay men, the only way to find someone to play with, is to stray into that familiar space, probably ugly, most likely badly lighted, filled with strangers and music you wouldn't choose yourself, and wait against a wall with the drink in your hand until you finally slide into a conversation with someone whom you can't see quite well enough and who is probably only looking for a one-night stand anyway, unlike you who, you tell yourself, are looking for a Relationship -- this complaint is a necessary lie. A lie, because I am pretty sure by now that we go to these places in order not to connect, but rather to exist in the exquisite moment when our desirability is still perfect, unspoiled by contact; necessary, because who could acknowledge that this was what he really wanted -- to be a flawless image rather than a living person, to have a narrative rather than a life, to be tragic rather than to live -- and not go mad? [Mendelsohn, 195f]

Ahem. Andrew Holleran said the same thing 20 years ago in Dancer from the Dance, and better: with humor, for one thing, to balance the self-pity. But I don't believe that a) all bars in New York City, even in Chelsea, are like this; or b) there are no other ways in New York to meet eligible men (discussion groups? amateur sports? Spinoza and other gay Jewish groups?). The author of this passage cruises certain streets and bars in Chelsea, and Internet chat rooms, and simply ignores the existence of other possibilities -- as well as the existence of gay men who use those alternatives. At least the author admits that he isn't really interested in "connecting", or in environments where he might do so.

The convenient amnesia continues. The director of one segment of If These Walls Could Talk 2, three short films about lesbians made for HBO in 2000, told the Advocate that they didn't even have a word for such relationships in 1930, when the couple in the segment would have met. Nonsense. Of course there was a word -- in fact there were several -- even if the women involved didn't want to use it. Even now, there isn't a word that's acceptable to all same-sex couples.

The writers I've quoted here are not by any means the only ones who express the perspective I'm criticizing -- if only they were! Unfortunately they seem to speak for many others, and even more important, they bespeak a willed amnesia that is too common among gay people. I'm not surprised to find such attitudes in gay people, like Andrew Sullivan, who have been appointed interpreters of gay life by the straight media, who mirror and reinforce the ignorance of straight editors, reporters, and readers; but to find them in people who are writing for a gay readership is dispiriting.

It's a ritual part of the standard coming-out narrative to claim that in those dark days, one was totally alone and isolated, and there was none to help, nay not anywhere. One was the only sensitive (or "normal") gay person in New York City (or San Franciso, or America) in 1972 or 1979 or 1984, all the rest were predatory shadows. This may make for an archetypically mythic story, but like so many archetypically mythic stories it is a lie. Would it really ruin the tale to admit that yes, there were resources, even if the storyteller didn't know about them -- perhaps still doesn't want to know about them? After all, if all other gay people in Those Days were just extreme radicals and there were no alternatives to the clammy embraces of raincoated hordes in sticky-floored porn movie houses, then it seems sane and reasonable to have remained in the closet for so long. To admit that one ignored alternatives, that one was lagging behind history instead of its prisoner, sounds so much less heroic.

Erasing our history doesn't just encourage gay people to stay closeted: it encourages complacency among the antigay. How often I've heard apologists for bigotry say that you can't bring about change overnight, apparently because their awareness of gay activism has been edited down to the 1993 March on Washington at most. (The Millennium March of 2000 will now probably replace the 1993 March as the beginning of gay activism in this mythology.) The thirty-plus years since the Stonewall riots, the fifty-odd years since the founding of Mattachine, the full century since Magnus Hirschfeld came from Germany to the US to lecture on sex "intermediates" -- all down the memory hole. And worst of all, it is gay people, the very ones who lived through it and who should know better, who are erasing our history.

"How would I know I was gay if I didn't know what gay was," a young gay man asked rhetorically on the Internet, referring to his high school days in Iowa during the 1990s. No wonder so many people swallow the nonsense that there were no homosexuals before the word "homosexual" was coined -- they really believe that without a printed instruction manual, professionally-run training seminars, rainbow healing crystals, and the all-important Abercrombie & Fitch apparel, you don't even exist.

Ever since I can remember (and I came out in 1971), there have been people in US gay communities who've claimed that the war has been won, that no gay person suffers stigma, guilt, or shame anymore, or that (as a graduate student at a large midwestern state university put it in the late 1980s) most people have figured out their sexuality by the time they get to college, so they need no further education about gay history, politics, or culture. Even in large cities with large gay communities, this is clearly not true.

In Emma Donoghue's Passions Between Women, she notes how often 18th and 19th century women writers who referred to lesbianism in their work would hasten to add that they couldn't imagine what two women could do together. This forestalled the question that would follow if they admitted knowing: how did they know, hm? I detect a similar disclaimer in these tales of gay and lesbian isolation from the past 30 years: yes, I was That Way, but I didn't want to be, I didn't choose it, I couldn't imagine where to find others like myself, and when I did, they were predators and shadows, not like me at all, not what I meant at all. What gay interests are served by this erasure of history and of the present? What stigma are these openly gay writers trying to fend off?

BOOKS MENTIONED ABOVE:
Thompson, Mark. Gay Body: a journey through shadow to self. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999.
Johnson, Fenton. Geography of the heart: a memoir. New York: Scribner, 1996.
Stiers, Gretchen A. From this day forward: commitment, marriage, and family in lesbian and gay relationships. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999.
Mendelsohn, Daniel. The elusive embrace: desire and the riddle of identity. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.
Donoghue, Emma. Passions between women: British Lesbian culture 1668-1801. London: Scarlet Press, 1993. New York: HarperCollins, 1994.