What’s weird about this love affair with the closet is that it is not a structure that queer people hammered together ourselves. With the invention of the homo/hetero binary in the late 19th-century, various forms of persecution and harassment were brought to bear against alleged sexual deviants. As George Chauncey chronicled in his definitive history Gay New York, terms like “leading a double life” or “wearing a mask” arose to describe the sense of being split or divided into multiple selves. Only after 1960 did “the closet” take precedence as the authoritative term. The new metaphor, however, did different work than those it supplanted, in that it summoned a new ideal of total exposure: Out and proud gays would have no “skeletons in the closet,” no secrets, no hiding—total integration of a unified self.[...]
So, what’s wrong with using the closet as the defining architecture of the queer experience? For one thing, coming out—out of the dark, solitary closet and into the sociable light—makes queerness responsible for clarity of expression to others. By its very nature, queerness should reside in a sea of ambiguity, unstably morphing through androgynous and fluid forms, as brilliantly depicted in Virginia Woolf’s novel of spontaneous gender transformation, Orlando. By contrast, acquiescing to the demand to come out entails a tacit willingness to be pinned down, defined, made intelligible—in effect, to halt and freeze queerness at the very instant of its assertion. I’d prefer that we allow queer exteriors to more closely resemble, by analogy, Joan Crawford’s disposition: icy, enigmatic, alluring—but never transparent or laid bare. The requirement to come out places a particularly cruel burden on trans people, who endure enormous pressure to explain and categorize themselves in binary ways that are understandable and comforting to outside audiences. Katie Couric’s notorious shift from inquisitive to inquisitional in interviewing transwomen Carmen Carrera and Laverne Cox in 2014 stemmed from the closet-based assumption that an instance of “coming out” entitles straight people to audit queer bodies.[...]
To some extent, our love of invoking the closet could just be a defensive posture. But I suspect, too, a more troubling motive, for the closet gets wielded by queer people themselves to cement status. To imagine queer people as beginning in the closet, from infancy if not birth, permits a smug smirk among the victoriously “out”—in the advertising parlance of Virginia Slims, you’ve come a long way, baby!—who laud themselves in contrast to the cowards still shut up in the closet. Let’s be real: Flipping on the gaydar isn’t typically some humane outreach of sympathy. More often, it’s a catty exercise in penetrating the pretenses of closet-trapped queers. To makes matters worse, scouring youth for latent signs of queerness does the dirty work of policing gender expression, which in turn breeds paranoia as closeted queer folks strain to repress telltale signs of their secret—the lisp of a dude’s s that lingers too long, or fingernails trimmed to dykish bluntness. The closet turns the queer gaze prosecutorial.
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