#Epistemology of the Closet

[vital-information]

"Axiom 1: People are different from each other.

It is astonishing how few respectable conceptual tools we have for dealing with this self-evident fact. A tiny number of inconceivably coarse axes of categorization have been painstakingly inscribed in current critical and political thought: gender, race, class, nationality, sexual orientation are pretty much the available distinctions. They, with the associated demonstrations of the mechanisms by which they are constructed and reproduced, are indispensable, and they may indeed override all or some other forms of difference and similarity. But the sister or brother, the best friend, the classmate, the parent, the child, the lover, the ex-: our families, loves, and enmities alike, not to mention the strange relations of our work, play, and activism, prove that even people who share all or most of our own positionings along these crude axes may still be different enough from us, and from each other, to seem like all but different species.

Everybody has learned this, I assume, and probably everybody who survives at all has reasonably rich, unsystematic resources of nonce taxonomy for mapping out the possibilities, dangers, and stimulations of their human social landscape. It is probably people with the experience of oppression or subordination who have most need to know it; and I take the precious, devalued arts of gossip, immemorially associated in European thought with servants, with effeminate and gay men, with all women, to have to do not even so much with the transmission of necessary news as with the refinement of necessary skills for making, testing, and using unrationalized and provisional hypotheses about what kinds of people there are to be found in one's world. The writing of a Proust or a James would be exemplary here: projects precisely of nonce taxonomy, of the making and unmaking and remaking and redissolution of hundreds of old and new categorical imaginings concerning all the kinds it may take to make up a world.

I don't assume that all gay men or all women are very skilled at the nonce-taxonomic work represented by gossip, but it does make sense to suppose that our distinctive needs are peculiarly disserved by its devaluation. For some people, the sustained, foregrounded pressure of loss in the AIDS years may be making such needs clearer: as one anticipates or tries to deal with the absence of people one loves, it seems absurdly impoverishing to surrender to theoretical trivialization or to 'the sentimental' one's descriptive requirements that the piercing bouquet of a given friend's particularity be done some justice. What is more dramatic is that--in spite of every promise to the contrary--every single theoretically or politically interesting project of postwar thought has finally had the effect of delegitimating our space for asking or thinking in detail about the multiple, unstable ways in which people may be like or different from each other."

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet

[cherryjuicegf]

in the apartment straight up "doing it". And by "it" haha well. Let justr say. Murder

[prettybearbutch]

guess which faggot just picked up a physical copy of the persistent desire for $1

[princesskuragina]

That post-all-nighter breakfast that tastes like. Actually my brain is so fried that I've tried to write this post like 10 times and I can't figure out how to formulate what I'm feeling

[serirei]

ive read a book for class for so long on my phone that words are burnt into my screen

[murdermost-foul]

studying for my gender & sexuality exam be like i already know all of this.......

[sedgwickpdf]

cool how i'm trying to read four books at once. and i don't just mean rotating them through my daily reading i literally mean i feel like i need to suck them all up into my brain at the same time and it's making me feel crazy that i can only physically look at the pages of one at a time

[liminalweirdo]

does anyone happen to have a copy of The Epistemology of the Closet by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick that they could direct me to?

[notcatherinemorland]

Happy birthday! Any special plans? Hope it’s a good one!

ayy thank u!! my plans are to use my last bag of darjeeling-earl grey tea, read my new library book and also watch drag race. i hope u have a good day too!! :D

[thealogie]

Thea you called it when you said there’s something about that generation of actors that will say everything short of the words “queer” or “bisexual.” I respect that they have a right to not label themselves (epistemology of the closet etc etc) but I also think that for professional reasons actors/performers hide behind the straight version of themselves, when they have that option. It’ll be nice to see less of that. Anyway in Michael’s case I think the way the John Taylor question was asked and responded to “I thought his hair was a MIRACLE” pretty much establishes what we always knew

Exactly I didn’t want to say “exactly as I said” but it’s exactly as I said. Michael Sheen let me be your official biographer I understand you on a psychic level.

[fatalism-and-villainy]

@ducktoothcollection (I can't tag you for some reason!) replied to this post:

I haven’t seen it before! Where is it from?

The quote is from the book Epistemology of the Closet, by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, from the introductory section "Axiomatic". In one part of this chapter, Sedgwick lays out a series of "axioms" for the different ways in which people might engage with or conceive of sexuality, as examples of the ways in which our current taxonomic systems of understanding sexual orientation or sexuality are not necessarily sufficient for conceptualizing the multitude of ways people can align or diverge from each other re: sexuality. Or, to put it another way, people who are categorized as having the same sexual orientation can have sharply different attitudes towards sex and sexuality, approaches to sexual practice, etc - and people under different taxonomic labels can have surprising points of commonality.

The list itself has been very soothing and affirming to me in lots of ways, and I feel comfortable saying it has been for others as well. It's kind of a breath of fresh air in the same way much of her work is for me. Transcription of the list under the cut:

Even identical genital acts mean very different things to different people. To some people, the nimbus of “the sexual” seems scarcely to extend beyond the boundaries of discrete genital acts; to others, it enfolds them loosely or floats virtually free of them. Sexuality makes up a large share of the self-perceived identity of some people, a small share of others’. Some people spend a lot of time thinking about sex, others little. Some people like to have a lot of sex, others little or none. Many people have their richest mental/emotional involvement with sexual acts that they don’t do, or even don’t want to do. For some people, it is important that sex be embedded in contexts resonant with meaning, narrative, and connectedness with other aspects of their life; for other people, it is important that they not be; to others it doesn’t occur that they might be. For some people, the preference for a certain sexual object, act, role, zone, or scenario is so immemorial and durable that it can only be experienced as innate; for others, it appears to come late or to feel aleatory or discretionary. For some people, the possibility of bad sex is aversive enough that their lives are strongly marked by its avoidance; for others, it isn’t. For some people, sexuality provides a needed space of heightened discovery and cognitive hyperstimulation. For others, sexuality provides a needed space of routinized habituation and cognitive hiatus. Some people like spontaneous sexual scenes, others like highly scripted ones, others like spontaneous-sounding ones that are nonetheless totally predictable. Some people’s sexual orientation is intensely marked by autoerotic pleasures and histories—sometimes more so than by any aspect of alloerotic object choice. For others the autoerotic possibility seems secondary or fragile, if it exists at all. Some people, homo-, hetero-, and bisexual, experience their sexuality as deeply embedded in a matrix of gender meanings and gender differentials. Others of each sexuality do not.

[mxmaneater]

How do you see Gortash as queer coded?

Oh, it would be my genuine delight to explain.

Alright, so I have several lines of reasoning, so I’ll start with the low-hanging fruit first.  

Gortash’s obsession with his appearance

Okay, so we all know about Gortash’s eccentricities when it comes to the way he looks.  He wears an ostentatious villain coat, bedecked with golden bits and bobs, matching pants, and a matching shirt (that he wears provocatively low and can’t seem to ever lace properly).  He also clearly styles his hair, which given its length, takes a non-significant amount of time each morning. 

Now.  Am I saying these things on their own make him queer?  No, of course not.  The assumption that gay men take more care with their appearance is a stereotype, though I would argue that there is a subset of people for which this is true.  However, stereotypes also form the context for which we interpret characters and situations, and that social context is very real (even in cases when a stereotype is not), which is why I don’t discount these details either.  

Additionally, when it comes to the Netherstone, Gortash could have easily stuck it in the middle of a suit of armor like Ketheric and called it a day.  But as a politician (and someone who likely doesn’t see a lot of combat), I get that a suit of armor wouldn’t be his first choice.  Nonetheless, the option he goes with (and presumably takes the time and effort to craft and construct himself) is the pair of gauntlets, which are essentially ornate jewelry.  Jewelry that’s functional and dangerous, yes - but also needlessly beautiful.  And he really only needed one of them, but - again - his attention to detail with appearances drove him to build a matching set to become part of his Signature Look. 

Cool.  So let’s move on to:

Gortash’s political career

Alright, so I like to view Faerun as a fairly equitable place in terms of gender distribution in positions of power (at least compared to reality).  From what I can find on forgotten realms sources, it seems like the Council of Four was composed of 2 men and 2 women (at least until Stelmane is murdered); therefore, I think it’s not a stretch to assume that power is pretty evenly divided.  Great - love that for Baldur’s Gate.  Which it was true out here as well.

Even still, that means that 50% of the high-ranking government officials and patriars that Gortash is charming and manipulating as part of his rise to power are men.  As a devout follower of the God of Tyranny, I find it hard to believe that he would just pass up on the opportunity to use sex as a form of manipulation with men, when we have canon evidence that he uses this tactic to gain power with women (hello Lady Jannath).  Why would he - someone who views ascending in power as a holy mission - suddenly be squeamish when it comes to seducing (both literally and metaphorically) the other 50% of his targets?  

Also, like I mentioned earlier, although Faerun may be a veritable gender utopia, the social contexts that influence us in reality don’t suddenly go away when we boot up bg3.  The writers of the game as well as the consumers - us - are very much bound by the social contexts within which we operate, meaning that certain character traits can be queer-coded for us, even if they wouldn’t necessarily look that way to someone who lives in the world of the game (if they suddenly became sentient and engaged in discourse).  

What does that mean?  Okay, so we live in a society that is highly patriarchal and run by men (read: politicians as well as all other highly influential positions of power).  Within these circles, men are forced into “compulsory relationships” with other men (because remember, women don’t hold the clout they desire, and therefore don’t matter) in order to exert and obtain power; relationships such as “male friendship, mentorship, admiring identification, bureaucratic subordination, and heterosexual rivalry” (Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet) characterize these spaces.  Now, as Sedgwick - one of the mainstays of queer literary theory - explains, men enter into these “male homosocial” relationships because they must if they wish to gain power and ascend the ranks; however, the very necessity of these close, male relationships (to the exclusion of, or in superiority to relationships with women) also puts men in the dangerous social position of making it easy to become too close with other men and therefore jeopardizing their access to the very power they sought.  This is the foundation of her argument about forces that keep men in the proverbial “closet.” 

Okay.  So back to Gortash.  Gortash is not driven by fear of stepping over that line - he seems utterly unbothered by professing his connections to whoever he views as influential, regardless of gender (see: default Durge, which I’ll get to later).  He is not scared of stepping beyond this larger, societal “closet” that most men get defensive about in order to protect their relative power.  Sure Faerun is less homophobic than our reality, but again, the coding of these characters doesn’t change drastically based on the in-game setting, because it is ultimately people in our reality who are interpreting and interacting with the game and its characters.  

Also, I make a distinction between Gortash being “queer-coded” and not “gay-coded”; if anything, examples from the game would have me characterize Gortash as bisexual - if he even conceives of sex as an identity factor and not just a means of gaining power over someone, which is a big assumption.  I definitely view him as someone who thinks more along the lines of the latter - and wouldn’t it benefit him, in that case, to be an equal-opportunity manipulator?

This is getting long, so I’ll jump to my final point: 

Gortash’s devotion to the Dark Urge

Whether you read the past relationship between Gortash and the Dark Urge as sexual/romantic or purely a business dealing, the fact remains that Durge is the one character Gortash views as his equal.  And yes, you can customize Durge’s appearance and gender, etc, but the default origin character is male, so a certain amount of “canon”, I believe, can assume at least the possibility of a male Durge.  Gortash - the Chosen of Bane, who loves nothing more than domineering over others - wants to willingly share his Empire with Durge, once he’s conquered the city; that is not a level of devotion that you could expect Gortash to hold for anyone but his “nearest and dearest.”  

And from the letters you can find, it’s apparent that Gortash specifically sought Durge out - tempting him with information about Bhaalist artifacts that had been “stolen” and displayed in a museum in order to form a connection.  This, combined with his desperation to regain Durge as a partner in Act 3 (to the point he’s weirdly forgiving of insult and refusal), offer queer subtext, if not text-text, confirming his particular interest in Durge as a person.  After all, he only “tolerates” Orin, who, despite her own eccentricities, is only trying to accomplish the will of Bhaal, just like Durge presumably was as well.  In fact, most of the characters dismiss Orin as just some “crazy bitch”, which I find hard to believe isn’t rooted, at least partially, in sexism - especially since people forgive Durge very easily for similar crimes.  (I could write my own dissertation about Orin, but I’ll save that for another time).  

In conclusion, there is enough queer-coding between Gortash’s appearance, habits, career, known manipulation tactics, and special relationship with the Dark Urge to at least make the case that he isn’t super straight.  Even without the letter in which he wrote his penpal Franc that he loved him for bringing “wet, slithering malice” into the world.

[victorianqueerarchive]

Queered Gothic: An Introduction to Queer Victorian Gothic Theory

In a time of massive societal change, queer people persisted (and were even written about)!

Welcome to the QVA (Queer Victorian Archive)! This is the first of many posts I hope to make about stories within the Victorian literary canon with queer themes. However, we must begin with some frequent frameworks I shall work with. These are frameworks that may apply to one story, many stories, or may even apply to all stories posted about. However, the purpose of this post is to allow you to understand the terms I will frequently reference.

Firstly, I’ve used numerous scholarly sources, which will be referred to in the citation section below the cut on this post. However, I’ve decided to also place them here. In sum, I will be sourcing from Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, Volume I, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet & Between Men, and the works of Ardel Haefele-Thomas. Below are some key terms that these authors use to refer to Victorian-period sex, sexuality, and gender:

Repressive Hypothesis (Foucault): In the first volume of his History of Sexuality (1976), Foucault fundamentally argues that modern sexuality and sexual tensions are a product of a repressive era of time, roughly corresponding to the 17th through 20th centuries. He argues that under this era, it may appear that human sexuality and gender expression were repressed, but in fact, it was quite the opposite, and it appears that sexual discourses blossomed in the period rather than being functionally oppressed. Through medical, social, political, and other discourses in the 19th century, sex and particularly homosexuality was functionally controlled by a group who sought to distance Victorians from “sexual perversion”. Foucault also argues that sex has had a power structure hold over us, and therefore power, knowledge, and sex are intermingled among one another, and that sex has come to define us in a way that is both controlling but also sometimes freeing.

Homoerotic Triangles (Sedgwick): In her Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), Eve Sedgwick argues that the relationship between men in literature has towed the fine line between sexual and platonic through the use of homosocial desire to negate homosexual desire/panic. Essentially, homosocial desire describes the existence of very strong bonds between men that they, in turn, fear could lean into homosexual desire. Through this, Sedgwick argues that English literature often has a triangular relationship, deemed a (homo)erotic triangle. In this triangle, two men often have a desire for one another, but use a woman as a channel to which they can focus this desire without slipping into homosexuality or homosociality. The woman often serves as the connecting point for the homosocial desires, and acts as a sort of conduit.

The Queer Victorian Gothic (Haefele-Thomas): Finally, one of my most important frameworks is directly from the Edinburgh Companion for the Victorian Gothic, and is from Chapter IX by Ardel Haefele-Thomas, “Queer Victorian Gothic”. Haefele-Thomas argues in this chapter that a lot of narratives within Victorian literature that are Gothic fundamentally have queer themes, characters, or tropes, primarily because of how much space that the Gothic gave writers. Particularly, she argues that the existence of these themes, characters, and/or tropes were allowed to be explored through numerous means, especially through familial worries, legal issues, and/or medical maladies. She also argues that the Gothic tended to be a liminal genre in the Victorian era, straddling between the “normative” novel genre and something quite different, which allowed for it to be explored more openly. She writes:

“[I]t allowed many nineteenth-century authors to look at social and cultural worries consistently haunting Victorian Britain even as the official discourse worked tirelessly to silence those concerns.”

She also goes on to argue that, because of a stratified, rigid nuclear family culture, these transgressive identities showed themselves only through secretive means; they stayed the “family secret”. It is also to say that the laws surrounding homosexuality were also taken into account at this period, and there were clearly anxieties surrounding transgressiveness and how a socially conservative culture would be changed by these transgressions. She also argues that the pathologization of queer people became common, writing:

“Definitions of disease began to diligently include and pathologize anyone who was not clearly heterosexual and who did not clearly ascribe to a strictly masculine or strictly feminine demeanour.”

While the Gothic allowed for the exploration of these facets of human identity, a wide variety of localized parts of the identity were explored, particularly sex, sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, among numerous other aspects.

It is possible that from time to time, I will source other scholars and their writings, but this is just a brief summary of what I’ve studied thus far and have the most expertise. I will primarily be focusing on short stories at this time, but will migrate into other media eventually. With that in mind, my next posts will be focused on queer readings of Robert Louis Stevenson’s short story “Olalla”, as well as Vernon Lee’s decadently queer “A Wicked Voice”.

Below: Citations!

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. United Kingdom, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1990.

Haefele-Thomas, Ardel. “Queer Victorian Gothic.” The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes, Edinburgh University Press, 2012, pp. 142–55. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt3fgt3w.13. Accessed 17 Nov. 2023.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. Italy, Columbia University Press, 1985. Accessed 25 Jul. 2024

[becomingabeing]

Love in the Big City: Reflections on Part 1

For context, this is the first time I am reading this story and I haven’t proceeded beyond the first part yet. I’m sure I’ll revisit these ideas once I’ve read the entire book.

As I finished Part 1 of Love in the Big City, a few strains of thought stood out for me. This got long so I'm putting it under the break.

First, the sarcastic, cynical and sometimes acidic nature of the prose. The narrator reads much like a jaded man in his mid-to-late twenties. As @twig-tea has pointed out, the “disaffected tone was intentional and also unreliable.” The narration keeps readers at a distance from the narrator’s more vulnerable feelings while simultaneously drawing us into his internal world with his sharp commentary as if we’re in on this joke together. 

Of course, there is the queer platonic relationship that starts off this recollection of the four great loves of the narrator’s life. @doyou000me @lurkingshan @bengiyo and others have brilliantly explored this dynamic. I love that the novel starts with this relationship as a sort of frame of reference for what’s to come. The narrator’s heartbreak following his breakup with Jaehee and getting left behind by the one who taught him “every season is its own beautiful moment” is painfully palpable. 

Next, the tense dialectic of anonymity and visibility that is present throughout Part 1, and I suspect the remainder of the book. This 2011 article on queer representation in Korean film put it succinctly: “For now, gays and lesbians in South Korea live and work under a dual system: privately out of and publicly in the closet.”

Related to this, I have some thoughts on citizenship and belonging I’ll probably make a separate post for.

While the shield of invisibility can protect us when we’re living in homophobic society (speaking from personal experience), it is nonetheless an act of erasure. There is a subversive agency in the liminal existence practised by the narrator, his “fuck you” to societal mores and his dogged opposition of tradition. But it is highly isolating. Even the person he considered his partner-in-crime “forever” leaves him behind when the pressures of heteronormative milestones come calling.

Again, the narrator himself admits he isn’t exactly closeted but he doesn't protest the homophobic comments of the male nurses at the clinic, holds his tongue around the straight people at Jaehee’s wedding and of course, he’s extremely hurt by Jaehee’s betrayal when she outs him (though that is more about his best friend abandoning him because of her shifting priorities as @lurkingshan notes here).

Then we have the titular “big city” which I believe is shaping up to be a character in itself. Yes, I read reviews and “spoiled” myself – the NPR review mentions the narrator and his partner taking walks all over Seoul and how that plays into the public/private dichotomy.

It reminds me of another favourite book of mine, Amruta Patil’s graphic novel Kari. In Kari, the queer protagonist navigates her sexual and gender identities vis-a-vis navigating the sprawling metropolis of Bombay. There too readers will find a fascinating tension between the public and the private, especially as it applies to a persecuted minority. I’ll be looking out for this thread as I read further.

Finally, going forward I will be thinking about the idea of queer failure. In The Naked Civil Servant Quentin Crisp writes, “If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be more your style.” 

Failure, in this context, is not a failing but a subversion of heteronormative capitalist measures of success. The queer subject has been epistemologically tied to negativity, nonsense, anti-production and alienation. Rather than escaping the structural associations of queerness with negativity and lack, a certain type of queer art embraces it and works it into its unique perspective. I get a sense of that from the narrator’s series of “failures” (in love, sex, career, military conscription) in the eyes of heteronormative society. This applies to Jaehee as well – even when she marries she speaks of a “contract” to have no babies thus failing to reproduce the family unit (as a microcosm of the nation) that is the ultimate goal of an “ideal” heterosexual marriage. 

Now, whether this conception of queer failure holds true for this narrative remains to be seen.

[lyledebeast]

Colonel Martin's Closet

A common sentiment I've found across many reviews of The Patriot is that Benjamin Martin could be an interesting character if the filmmakers were not so concerned with presenting him as "good." The contrast between what Martin claims to believe and value, and what others believe about him, and his behavior is certainly stark. However, I find the insistence of Martin, his community, and the narrative as a whole that his violence does not define him, despite being the most consistent thing about him, to be precisely what makes this character interesting.

It becomes clear early on that Martin has been keeping a secret from his family concerning his service in the French and Indian War more than a decade prior to the start of the film. The first allusion to this secret comes when a fellow Patriot expresses surprise that opposition to the impending American Revolutionary War arises from "the same Captain Benjamin Martin whose fury was so famous during the Wilderness Campaign." Martin's only reply is "I was intemperate in my youth." Yet less than twenty minutes of run time later we find him sitting on a British regular's back while hacking into his shoulders and neck with a tomahawk and screaming. Both of these scenes are witnessed by Martin's eldest son Gabriel, on whom the camera lingers in the aftermaths. Later, that son makes the observation, "Wherever you go, men buy you drinks because of Fort Wilderness. Strangers know more about you than I do." Up to this point, Martin has constructed a wall to separate his life as a soldier and his life as a father. Or, rather, several walls. And a door.

In Epistemology of the Closet, a foundational text in queer theory, Eve Sedgwick writes of the closet that "a whole cluster of the most crucial sites for the contestation of meaning in twentieth-century Western culture are consequentially and quite indelibly marked with the historical specificity of homosocial/homosexual definition, notably but not exclusively male, from around the turn of the century. Among these sites are, as I have indicated, the pairings secrecy/disclosure and public/private" (72). The Patriot's subject matter predates the historical specificity Sedgwick delineates, but the film's writing does not. Indeed, given its rampant historical inaccuracies, The Patriot may be said to tell us more about the early 21st century than the 18th one. It is no secret that Martin is a soldier, but the particular kind of violence he engaged in previously breaks containment over the course of the film even as most others' recognition of it does not. I want to propose that the closet is a particularly apt metaphor for the ways Martin's crimes are separated from his identity.

Just as the closet can manifest in different ways, so there are different ways to occupy it. Particularly striking examples of two of them can be found in Tony Kushner's two-part play from the early 90s, Angels in America. Joe Pitt rejects his desire for other men, not giving into it until halfway through the play, because he believes it is sinful. When his wife asks what he prays for, he replies, "I pray for God to crush me, break me up into pieces and start all over again" (Millennium Approaches, II, ii). An earlier attempt at disavowal finds him asking "Does it make any difference? That I may be one thing deep within, no matter how wrong or ugly that thing is as long, as I have fought with everything I have to kill it?" (Millennium Approaches, I, viii). Joe hopes to find salvation in inaction, but ultimately cannot maintain this resolve. Still, the conviction that action will damn him remains sincere. Before going home with his soon to be lover Louis, Joe tells him, "I'm going to Hell for doing this" (Millennium Approaches, III, vii). Joe uses the closet to conceal a part of himself of which he is deeply ashamed, that he has fought, unsuccessfully, to rid himself of. Joe's mentor Roy Cohn, though, insists that his actions do not define him because of his political standing, his "clout." When his doctor diagnoses him with AIDS, he says, "Your problem, Henry, is that you are caught up on words, on labels, that you believe they mean what they seem to mean." Later in this scene, he clarifies:

"I have sex with men. But unlike nearly every other man of which this is true, I bring the guy I'm screwing to the White House and President Reagan smiles at us and shakes his hand. Because what I am is entirely defined by who I am. Roy Cohn is not a homosexual. Roy Cohn is a heterosexual man, Henry. Who fucks around with guys" (Millennium Approaches, I, vi).

There is no shame in Roy's closet. There is instead contempt for other gay men: "Homosexuals are men who in fifteen years of trying cannot get one pissant antidiscrimination bill through City Council." While Joe fears action for the impact it will have on his identity as a married Mormon Republican man, Roy insists that no such connection exists. He believes he can do as he pleases with impunity and his community will keep the secret, as he coerces his doctor to do.

Early on in The Patriot, Martin's way of inhabiting the closet appears to have more in common with Joe's. When he discovers that his son Thomas has gone into his room and opened his trunk full of French and Indian War memorabilia to put on his red British Colonial Army coat, not only does he immediately insist on taking it off of him, but he does not look at it until the end of the scene. When Thomas asks, "What happened at Fort Wilderness?" Martin cannot make eye contact with him and says, "Put it away." What is a trunk but a horizontal closet? And yet this closet serves two purposes for Martin. It conceals these souvenirs from his past, yes, but it also assures that he knows exactly where they are and can access them quickly when he needs them. This is also true of Martin's relationships with the men who fought with him in the previous war, as we see when he is recruiting men in the tavern later. One acquaintance asks Martin if he is paying any bounties, and Martin responds: "No scalp money this time Rollins, but you can keep or sell back to me the muskets and gear of any redcoat you kill." Not only does Martin easily, even flippantly, confirm what is arguably the most shocking of his past actions, but he is offering to do it again with one important modification. He is no longer trafficking in human remains, but he has no qualms about incentivizing murder. Where did his shame go? Like Roy Cohn, Martin has no problem discussing his "secret" with men who already know it. And Rollins is certainly not going to judge Martin; they are allies, and the relationship is mutually beneficial.

Martin's allies support him in more ways than one. In addition to giving him space to operate outside the closet, they also aid in its maintenance. As Sedgwick writes, "'Closetedness' itself is a performance initiated as such by the speech act of a silence--not a particular silence, but a silence that accrues particularity by fits and starts, in relation to the discourse that surrounds and differentially constitutes it" (3). Coming out is not an autonomous, individual action. Much depends on the response of those who witness the silences and confessions, whose response shapes the speech act as much as those whose secret it reveals or conceals. When Gabriel follows his younger brother in asking about Fort Wilderness, Martin answers by telling the whole story. If he may be said to truly "come out" anywhere, it is here: "And not a day goes by that I don't ask God's forgiveness for what I did." As much as Martin centers his current feelings at the expense of his past actions, as much as he'uses collective pronouns when describing those actions--as though he was part of a committee rather than a commanding officer--he does, at the very least, own that he did something wrong. But Gabriel's response is quite telling: "Thomas was my brother as well as your son. You may not believe this, but I want satisfaction as much as you do." This has nothing to do with Martin's confession. It is not even in the same stratosphere as Martin's confession. Like so many loved ones of LGBTQ people in response to their acts of coming out, Gabriel does not accept or condemn what his father has revealed about himself. He simply changes the subject. This scene is comparable to the one in Angels in America when Joe makes a drunken call to his mother in Salt Lake City to tell her "I'm a homosexual," and she responds with "Drinking is a sin! It's a sin! I raised you better than that." (Millennium Approaches, II, viii).

For all these similarities in characters' interactions, The Patriot and Angels in America's uses of the closet could not be more different. When Joe's relationship with Louis comes to an abrupt end, he tries to return to the safety and familiarity of his marriage only to find that his wife is leaving him. Roy, whose body is already marked by Kaposi sarcoma lesions when he meets with his doctor in the first play, is dead from the disease he himself connects with the group he refuses to acknowledge his inclusion in at the end. Ultimately, they are unable to detach identity from action. Martin can, not only owing to his loved ones' cooperation but to the narrative's.

Of course, the main point of contrast to Martin's closetedness is the open-ness of his antagonist Colonel Tavington, who kills both Thomas and Gabriel by the end of the film. Tavington's words, actions, and identity exist in seamless unity with one another. Most of the war crimes shown onscreen are carried out on his orders; he speaks violence into existence. Moreover, those in his community do nothing to conceal his crimes: quite the opposite. In a deleted scene, Cornwallis tells Tavington in a tent full of British officers, "General O'Hara informs me that you've earned the nickname 'The Butcher' among the populace." Not only does Cornwallis uncritically accept that Tavington's behavior warrants such a name, but he assures that all of his officers know of Tavington's actions. Yet neither here nor elsewhere does Tavington deny or diminish his application of violence. And he is aware of the consequences. When he argues to Cornwallis that "brutal" tactics are necessary to capture Martin, he also acknowledges, "If I do this, you and I both know I can never return to England with honor" before asking for land on the frontier, beyond the reach of British law. The closet has not been built that could contain Tavington.

Martin's nickname evokes his closetedness as much as Tavington's does his outness. His actions at Fort Wilderness included both cutting Cherokee and French men's bodies into pieces and distributing those pieces, butchery in the most literal sense of the word. Yet his nickname, first coined by Tavington himself, is "The Ghost," an allusion to his way of appearing out of nowhere to surprise the British forces far more than what he does to them afterwards. Not only are Martin's past victims erased from the narrative, but his present ones are wholly silent on the subject of his violence except, ironically, Tavington, who has to remind his superior that Martin "has killed [eighteen] officers in the past two months" when General O'Hara stops him from drawing his sword on Martin. Perhaps it is not surprising that he sees the truth about him so much more easily than others. The wider Martin's closet door creaks open, the more what we glimpse within resembles Tavington, red coat and all.

Tavington does play some role in the opening of that door, and it is the same role Louis Ironson plays in coaxing Joe Pitt out of the closet and into his bed. Joe knows he is gay long before he meets Louis, just as Martin's taste for violence is well established more than a decade before he encounters Tavington, but these meetings with men who are already "out" create ideal opportunities for Joe and Martin to give in to the desires they have repressed. Ironically, it is during his fight with Tavington at the end of the film, the consummation of the bloody courtship carried out between them since Tavington recognized Martin at the prisoner exchange, that Martin chooses to shut the closet door from the inside. After stabbing Tavington through the torso, the same way he killed Gabriel, Martin tells him, "My sons were better men," and puts a bayonet through his throat. This is not about gratifying his own desire for violence; it is just about avenging his sons. The sons his closet protected him from, whose refusal of knowledge reinforces that very closet, have the final word on defining who their father is. Benjamin Martin is not a war criminal. Benjamin Martin is a war hero. Who likes to kill men in rapey ways.

The final few scene of the film only serves to reinforce how little Martin has changed. He returns home to his children to marry their aunt and produce more "good stock." The final scene reveals his men building him a new house in the exact spot where the one Tavington burned once stood. This house will no doubt contain a new trunk that itself will contain the weapons he used in the American Revolutionary War, waiting for an opportunity when violence, once again, proves the only option. Martin is able to inhabit the closet in a way Roy Cohn can only dream of. Roy believes other Republican lawyers will help keep his secret; instead, they rejoice at his demise. And when he dies, his mourners consist of two out gay men who detest him and the ghost of a woman he helped the state murder. The historical Roy Cohn is remembered as much for dying from AIDS as for anything he did in his lifetime; his panel on the AIDS Memorial Quilt is inscribed with the words "Bully, Coward, Victim." Kushner chose to include a characterization of Roy Cohn because his failure to remain closeted in death so well illustrates the play's themes surrounding the difficulty of change, the importance of community, and the inevitability of progress.

The men on whom Benjamin Martin is based have fared better than Roy Cohn thus far, though that is changing. They are honored in history books and by statues and plaques and the names of universities. It is only in recent decades that the racist acts accompanying their fight for freedom from tyranny have been brought to light as worthy of public as well as academic attention. The Patriot represents an argument against this type of outing. What does it matter that these men who fought for American freedom may have done unsavory things to win it? Is it not better to keep that part secret to better appreciate what they were able to accomplish? It does matter, and it is not better to hide it, because to do so erases the histories and silences the voices of those whose lives were destroyed by the victors' hunger for power, namely Native and Black Americans, and how is that not tyranny in itself?

[queering-ecology]

Eluding Capture: The Science, Culture, and Pleasure of “Queer” Animals by Stacy Alaimo cont.

Epistemology of the Zoological Closet

The sexual diversity of animals, Alaimo argues, matters. Modern social theory often assumes a radical separation of nature and culture (another dualism), and thus minimizes the significance of queer animals.

As with other ‘keys [to the] Human Kingdom’ such as language and tool use, sex divorced from reproduction has been similarly accomplished across a range of species (56). “Nonhuman animals are also cultural creatures, with their own sometimes complex systems of (often nonreproductive) sex” (57).

“Animals help us tell stories about ourselves, especially when it comes to matters of sexuality”  (Terry 151) and the “creatures that populate narrative space called ‘nature’ are key characters in scientific tales about the past, present and future. Various tellings of these tales are possible, but they are always shaped by historical, disciplinary, and larger cultural contexts” (185) (57).

In Cynthia Chris’ ‘Watching Wildlife’, she exposes the heteronormativity at work in wildlife films, explaining that most ‘wildlife films posit heterosexual mate selection as not only typical but inevitable and without exception’ (2006, 156). Even in the show ‘Wild and Weird—Wild Sex’—same sex behavior among a cast of diverse animal sexual behavior is downplayed, even avoided (58).

However, Chris ultimately warns against celebrating queer animals, stating: “Evidence of same-sex behavior among animals and genetic influences on homosexuality among humans is used as ammunition in battles waged over gay rights for which advocates might be better off relying on other discourses through which civil rights are claimed. Such evidence remains inconclusive, uneasily generalizable across species, subject to wild divergent interpretations , and likely to fail the endeavor of understanding animal behavior on its own terms” (165).

In opposition to this point, Alaimo argues that ‘genetic programming’ and the extent to which it influences sexual orientation is a question entirely separate from the sexual diversity of animals and that it is in fact because of evidence of queer animals being ‘uneasily generalizable across species and subject to wildly divergent interpretations’ that makes sexual diversity in animals so powerful and potent to learn about--it matters.  

The fact is that sexual diversity in nonhuman creatures is the ‘very stuff of vaster biodiversity’ (59) and by examining this we can come to understand that humans are not transcendent above all other species, and we can understand that our sexual behavior is not ‘above the brute mating behaviors of nonhuman creatures’ (60).