#The Closet

[grison-in-space]

trying not to scream about that post I saw this morning asserting that the "original context" of coming out was entering a queer* community such that one can connect safely with other queer people. so don't think that coming out has to mean anything unsafe!

to which I am not linking because frankly it's trying to send a message of reassurance to a lot of people who are terrified and demoralized just like me, to be clear.

but holy shit. What a way to erase decades of extremely explicit political theory exhorting people to come out to their straight loved ones, friends, and acquaintances as a humanizing tactic. the idea is that if enough people do this everyone will know someone who is queer, so they can't dehumamize us. the point of coming out was to put a known, beloved human face on queerness for as many people as possible.

now, does that mean that anyone should come out if coming out would be unsafe? No, absolutely not. That's why coming out should always always always be the decision and choice made by the person who is doing it. We Do Not Out Other People.

I get we're all terrified. I get that it's good to remind people that we've gone underground as queers before. I get that it's good to try to give people who have never lived in places when it's not safe to be out the knowledge that the closet, too, is a place where one can survive if one must.

but what a way to diminish the wisest and most powerful insight about the power of outness itself as an activist tool! an insight that could only ever have come from a population whose marginalization is usually not shared with parents, a population who can be born anywhere.

Like I said, the message I think the other writer was aiming for is "don't just lie down and die: we lived once in hiding and we can live again if we must," with a side of "if coming out genuinely isn't safe for you, do not pressure yourself to do it For The Cause," both of which are messages I agree with deeply. Especially for folks who still depend on parents for safety and housing or education.

It's just that I think it's important to acknowledge that coming out is politicized and framed as an act of solidarity with the larger queer community and resistance against the demonization of queer people because that is exactly what it is. Being out is a political act. It might not be one you can afford in every moment but that doesn't stop it being political.

*here I'm using queer to refer to generic communities of both gender and sexual minorities

[seodongjae]

클로젯 / THE CLOSET (2020) dir. Kim Kwang-bin

[toastinthegrass]

Shamans are religious specialists who are perceived as having the capacity to deal directly with spirits on behalf of the community, either by sending their own soul on a journey to other realms or by calling them into the here and now and manifesting them in their own bodies.

[the-shy-lonely-weirdo]

Part 2 of this I guess.

Also I headcanon that Frida and Jesús exclusively speak spanglish to each other.

[totallylost4you]

(x) "There was a time where it was very possible that you would be attracted to someone and they were also attracted to you. But they were living in this place called The Closet, which was not a place. It was not an apartment building. It was an existential existence that one could have. [...] Sometimes I liked being in the closet with people. [...] People are like, No, no gay utopia, but there's a reason why we keep writing books about it and songs about it and TV shows about it and movies about it. It feels good to feel bad. [...]"

"Like, if Taylor Swift marries that football player, you're all f*cked, you know. Like if she marries that football guy. That very... That I don't understand. I don't know what's happening. Anyways. I'm just saying, don't root against people. But also, are you sure you want to root for them?"

Jack Antonoffs lesbian friends Tegan and Sara. 🏳️‍🌈

[pixlokita]

When your cat hides your inhaler ….

[kryptonbabe]

The Closet, the existential familial horror of a broken home, a review

The Creature and concept sketches for the character From the horror comic book The Closet (2022) written by James Tynion IV, art by Gavin Fullerton

This short miniseries was much more a depressing read than a scary one, the sinister imagery paired with the very real troubles faced by the adult main characters work to articulate how kids perceive conflict and hostility. Children can be very sensitive and their world follows slightly different rules, events tend to be felt more intensely. Their whole life is on the balance, their tiny little existence, they can't see things through the lens of different perspectives only experience can help them develop. There's an urgency to your problems when you're 4 years old, like the kid in this story.

But the focus of The Closet is not exclusively about this kid's fear of a monster, we get to see the lives of his parents too, more specifically his dad, a guy living a mid-life crisis, facing the horror of who he has become and how he feels trapped in a life that he should be grateful for. Then we get to see how the dad's and the kid's fears are connected, how we affect each other sometimes without realizing, how deeply we can scar those we love. And it's terrifying, but mostly it is depressing, and the comic does a good job with the art and writing to build this little bleak yarn, so alien and yet so familiar.

This comic has only 3 issues and the themes while not heavy can be upsetting for their hopelessness, yet for its short length the narrative is well balanced in its existential musings and creepy moments. I'm a fan of the naturalism of Tynion's writing here and Fullerton's sketchy and moody looking art also work to create a somber atmosphere, fitting for a claustrophobic familial horror like this.

[onpurposeilovehimonpurpose]

Fingers Fridays (Special Edition) Fingers in Your My Mouth Friday

RED, WHITE & ROYAL BLUE (2023) dir. Matthew Lopez

All right, so I've for some reason not yet talked about how much I love Taylor's hands and his fingers. Or maybe I have, and I've forgotten doing so. In the many rewatches I've done, I find myself just staring at his hands, not only are they gorgeous, but he uses them to emphasize Alex's feelings so often. But before I get lost and go on and on about other scenes in the film, let's talk about this one from the reel. It's so incredibly hot. It isn't even just a finger in the mouth, but the use of teeth, too. He's being silly, sure, but when I saw this I wasn't laughing at all. With my "Fingers Friday" posts inspired by "Fingers in My Mouth Friday", this shot is perfect for today. And damn does Taylor look edible here with those fingers in his mouth!

[chirpsythismorning]

Do i even have to say it...

[sweetfirebird]

I keep posting it and deleting it because I feel weird about it. But they are coming for lgbtq *anything* and labeling it porn to make it unreachable, so yeah gay republicans need to stop being shielded by other gays. The protection of the closet??? To people out to obliterate the rest of us??? Why???

[toastinthegrass]

[the-shy-lonely-weirdo]

“So I just stay in here the whole ti-“

“YES”

(12 points to anyone that can figure out who the other two clones are)

Part 2: Here

[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?

[kellyvela]

To sophiebelindaturnercloset account on IG, If you blocked me on IG, but still lurk my locked Twitter and stalk me here on Tumblr to get new content, at least make your own ss instead of steal stuff without giving credit.

[lenakluthor]

found my favorite sweatshirt that got lost when i moved to my house and i am THRILLED. i’ve had so many meltdowns about this fucking sweatshirt and how i couldn’t find it. it’s been over a YEAR