Rethinking the Closet
Why Sometimes We Don't Come Out

by Aongus Burke


A few weeks ago queer people all over the United States celebrated National Coming Out Day. At Wesleyan, queer and queer-friendly students commemorated the day by donning blue jeans and rainbows, throwing an ultrahip party at Eclectic, and engaging in the somehow always controversial act of chalking the campus. Ironically, very few of the day's activites involved encouraging people to actually come out of the closet. Rather the day was devoted to celebrating queer sexuality, culture and pride.
Which, in my view, will probably do a lot more to bring people out of the closet than another series of exhortations to "come out, come out wherever you are." Believe me, we hear enough of that all year. Queer people are constantly being urged to come out of the closet. "If every gay person came out to his or her family, a hundred million Americans could be brought to our side. Employers and straight friends could mean a hundred million." states one typical queer journalist. I suppose when we start coming out to our clergymen, mailmen, bank tellers, and cable guys we'll get that last 50 million.
Don't get me wrong: coming out of the closet can be an immensely uplifting experience. I was on the verge of killing myself before I started to come out to people last year; today I'm pretty happy. But what about the scores of teachers who have lost their jobs because they came out? The thousands of military personnel who have been dishonorably discharged? The teenagers who get beaten up every day because of their bravery? Obviously, not everyone's experience with coming out has been as positive as mine.
But, then, I'm not sure I really have come out. I mean, sure, I write these gay-themed articles for Hermes, am pretty active in Queer Alliance and BiLeGa, and sometimes even just tell people outright that I'm a big homo. Yet I'm not out to most of my high school friends or even most of my family. Not everyone at Wesleyan (gasp) reads Hermes or knows about any of my other forms of activism. Most importantly, I'm constantly meeting new people who don't know anything about me.
So it's clear that I'm not out to everyone, even though I never can be quite sure about who knows and who doesn't. And these things will never change. "The deadly elasticity of the heterosexist presumption," writes eminent queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "means that, like Wendy in Peter Pan, people find new [closet] walls springing up around them." Each new person encountered demands "new surveys, new calculations, new draughts and requisitions of secrecy or disclosure."
Sedgwick's remarks remind us that the closet is a sociological structure, not merely a psychological one. Our tendency to understand coming out as a brave act of personal transformation prevents us from criticizing the presumption of heterosexuality or cultural conditions that make coming out so difficult in the first place.
In The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault argued that the homosexual was invented by the medical establishment in the late 19th century:

As defined by the ancient civil or canonical codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more than the juridical subject of them. The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage...[H]is sexuality...was everywhere present in him: at the root of all of his actions...The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.

This passage is without a doubt the most famous in the entire discipline we today call queer theory. One reason is because it speaks to a lot of queer people who have wrestled with the issue of coming out. Like me.
This past summer I was catching up with a close high school friend. Our conversation, of course, eventually turned to sex. While I was debating whether or not I should come out to him, he startled me by revealing he almost went to bed with a male friend of his after a night of partying, drinking, and drugs. I responded by telling him with a grin on my face that bisexual behavior was pretty common at Wesleyan. He asked me how many people I had had sex with at Wesleyan during the past year.
"Well, just one really," I responded.
"A guy or a girl?" he asked, then quickly adding, "Well, of course, a girl..."
"No, actually a guy," I interjected. I smiled again and went back to my fries. After a short pause, the conversation returned to sex, but he guided it to a more abstract level. I didn't protest.
Why didn't I tell him that I was gay? Why didn't I tell him that I didn't just have sex with this guy, but a pretty intense, caring relationship with him? These aren't difficult questions to answer. It's one thing to tell someone that you occasionally like to fuck other guys. It makes you seem rebellious, uninhibited. But it's another to say that you're gay, that you might actually have feelings for the guy you fuck.
Our society has projected the most revolting sort of otherness on to this homosexual species of which Foucault speaks. Think of how afraid you were of being called a faggot when you were little. You didn't even know what a faggot really was but you were taught to stay away from them and not to do anything that might make you seem like one. Remember how gross you thought heterosexual sex was the first time you heard about it? How people had to convince you that it wasn't, that you'd feel differently about it in a few years? You probably thought gay sex was pretty gross too the first time you heard about it. Did anyone around you suggest that you might feel differently in a few years? Probably not - they were too busy making sure you understood how gross it really was. Who would ever want to be the kind of degenerate that could enjoy it?
And what of the people who overcome all of this, who manage to salvage some self-worth and who want to come out, but cannot? These include people who work in corporations and know that if they come out, they'll never get promoted because the old boy's network upstairs don't want a queer using their bathroom. These include politicians who fear that revealing their sexuality will cost them their positions, who feel they can only protect their closets by voting for homophobic legislation. These include actors and actresses who know that coming out will foreclose any opportunities to ever play a heterosexual role again. In his 1993 book Queer in America: Sex, the Media, and the Closets of Power, Michaelangelo Signorile details dozens of examples of people who have felt this sort of bind. He notes how our theoretically unbiased news media details every banal turn in the love lives of heterosexual celebrities while protecting the closets of others. Ellen DeGeneres's sexuality was an open secret among tabloid journalists for years; only when DeGeneres herself publicly came out did they begin reporting the story. Wouldn't Jim Carrey and Lauren Holly or Brad Pitt and Gwynyth Paltrow have loved it if the media were so cooperative? Apparently the life of closeted celebrities is gross and unreportable, but the public has every right to know what's in Pitt's garbage.
I can only laugh when some fool rants in a Wespeak about how Queer Alliance chalkings are too "in your face." Heteronormativity has been rammed down our throats every day of our lives. It is heteronormativity, not our own lack of bravery, that has produced the closets within which we have been forced to live. It is heteronormativity that creates the psychological, political, and economic incentives to remain in the closets that it creates. Undermining heteronormativity through open displays and celebrations of queer sexuality is the only way we will ever destroy the closet once and for all.