Gay & Lesbian Philosophy

Lectures F 1996

Part 3

11. Double Minority Queers

Many of the issues here were introduced in class discussion by film clips from Tongues Untied where we saw the following themes:

Watch for these themes in the various readings we discuss in greater detail below. (We won't particularly discuss them in the Roscoe and Leong volumes because the assigned articles fairly directly raise these concerns as their main points.)

A number of our reading suggest that the subjective experience of being both queer and member of a designated minority (Black, Hispanic, Native American, Asian) sometimes is one of double alienation. One is not heterosexual, and one is not white. One is non-white and non-heterosexual, and in many ethnicities that is more defining of who one is than the positive affirmations of being queer.

One is inclined to impose the simple-minded matrix we have been pursuing in class discussion: You are White or you are not, you are queer or you are heterosexual. [At least we have gotten this far: the base construct here is being queer, not being het.]. And then we look at it as the clash of what is it like to be doubly ostracized for being a queer member of the minority (e.g, Asian, Hispanic, Black) group.

We have stressed the extent to which subcultures insulate one from the alienation of being a marginalized, stigmatized, or despised minority. So the question becomes one of whether there is any subculture for the racial/ethnic minority gay? In particular how do the gay and lesbian subcultures accommodate, welcome racial and ethnic minorities? That is how racist are the gay and lesbian subcultures compared to the dominant culture. I know of no good data on this, so I grasp at threads that have emerged throughout the semester to hazard some guesses. The following themes seem relevant:

* Dollimore's dissection of Homophobia that shows deep connections between Homophobia, racism, and related hatred phenomena.

* The fact that the lesbian sub culture tends to be socially stratified whereas the gay subculture tends not to be. (Promiscuity encompasses a range of social interactions without regard to socio-economic class. The centrality of aesthetics, taste, culture, and even Camp to gay subculture has the effect of elevating many if not most gays culturally well above their born social class- so there is a simultaneous leveling and elevating of social class.)

* The various histories we have read (e.g., Chauncey, GAY NEW YORK and Kennedy & Davis, BOOTS OF LEATHER, SLIPPERS OF GOLD) are peppered with suggestions that whereas the racial boundaries are relatively restrictive in the lesbian subculture, they are rather fluid in the gay subculture.

* As we have seen, there fairly close ties between the lesbian subculture and feminism. Recent debates among feminists have involved charges and debates about the extent to which feminism is itself racist.

Consider, for example, the discussion in Eric Garber's "A Spectacle in Color: The Lesbian and Gay Subculture of Jazz Age Harlem," (pp. 318-331 in Duberman et al, HIDDEN FROM HISTORY). One of his themes is that during the Harlem Renaissance (1920-1935) "the community they built attracted white homosexuals as well as black, creating friendships between people of disparate ethnic and economic backgrounds and building alliances for progressive social change." and that "the traditions and institutions created by Harlem lesbians and gay men during the jazz Age continue to this day." (pp. 318-319). Indeed, discussing white gay Leland Pettit, he writes "Pettit frequented the homosexual underworld in Harlem because he found social acceptance, and because he identified with others who were also outcasts from American life. This identification and feeling of kinship, undoubtedly shared by other white lesbians and gay men, may have been the beginnings of homosexual `minority consciousness'." (p. 329). Though with the depression and the end of the Jazz Age, Harlem became less racially integrated.

* A striking feature of the articles on being Black and gay in Joseph Beam's IN THE LIFE: A BLACK GAY ANTHOLOGY is that the alienation they portray is being cut off from their own Black culture, of that culture turning its back at them, and not rejection by the gay subculture. (The one exception is Reginald Shepard's "On Not being White" which will be discussed in a bit.)

Collectively these various sources suggest that gays and lesbians are racially more tolerant and accepting of racial minorities than is the larger population, and that the Gay subculture is more substantially integrated than the lesbian subculture.

Such an assessment is quite compatible with there being a fair degree of racism in the gay (and the lesbian) subcultures. For example, in "On Note Being White", Reginald Shepard who is a black who equates beauty with being white and regrets not being white, observes:

"It's strange how willing white men become to approach me ... and

make a number of similar if opposing assumptions" (p. 54)

The problem is as Shepard notes, "How to determine how much is racial and how much is sexual when the two are so entwined that they are in practice identical" (p. 52). For Shepard here is describing tastes in men, what one does or doesn't find erotic or attractive in another.

Sexual responses are highly specific and idiosyncratic. Look at the personal ads in any gay publication. For every characteristic that one says no to (e.g., "No fats, fems, or redheads") others will be advertising for precisely those characteristics. For some race is eroticised (as it is for Shepard) for others, race is neutral, for others race can be a turn-off. Just like being hairy or smooth, tall or short, etc. can be.

So if one rejects a person as a sexual partner, is one thereby being racist? Any more than to reject redheads is to be Haircolorist? Here there is relevant an important cultural lesson, central to the gay subculture, one of the great benefits of promiscuity: Before AIDS a common gay tee-shirt proclaimed, "So Many Men, so Little Time" [the words take on an ironic reinscription today]. And though gays racked up partners by the hundreds and thousands, it was not an indiscriminate choice of partners. (Recall here the quote above about César at the baths from Richard Rodriguez's DAYS OF OBLIGATION.) One had sex with people one found erotic, sexy, desirable. Orgies ultimately are not egalitarian or democratic.

Cruising carries the prospects of both rejection and acceptance. And one of the early lessons of re-acculturation one learned was that no matter what you were like, there were people who found you erotic, sexy, and desirable (often for precisely those characteristics you hated most about yourself.) And there were people that did not. You quickly learned that rejection in cruising was IMPERSONAL, that it was a commentary on the tastes of the other, not a comment on you or your worth or desirability. And so what if this hunk didn't find you attractive... there were so many other men that would. And to learn that was to assimilate two of gay culture's central values -

That there is no connection between the worth of a person and whether

you find them sexually attractive or not.

The rejection of a person as a sexual partner is a denigration of neither

their worth nor their place within the subculture.

Any evaluation of racism issues within the gay subculture have to be interpreted in light of these cultural facts. And that makes it very difficult to determine just how racist the gay subculture is or is not.

When I was in College I recall someone claiming that "The only true racial integration is mattress-level integration." This suggests that one measure of the absence of racism in a social group is the extent to which its member have engaged in interracial sex. There is some data on this for black and white gays and lesbians (Bell and Weinberg, HOMOSEXUALITIES, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1978, table 7):

The data (1970) is particularly germane since it comes from a period when AIDS considerations did not affect partnering or promiscuity. In interpreting it we need to keep in mind that the median number of sexual partners was around 500 for the males and ten for the females.

We see here a pattern where among gays interracial sex is commonplace, with nearly 80% of whites having engaged in it. This suggests a rather casual attitude towards race among white gays. For Black gays, where a majority had a majority of their partners be white, it indicates the extent of integration into a subculture that was predominantly white. That, I think, is a reflection of the degree to which Black gays dealt with their rejection by the Black culture by assimilating themselves into the gay subculture.

For lesbians, we see only about a quarter of whites engaging in interracial sex. But here we need to keep in mind that there was very low incidence of causal sex and that in most cases partners were partners in a relationship of some duration (serial monogamy being the norm here). Thus nearly a quarter of whit women had interracial relationships. Nearly 80% of black lesbians had had interracial relationships, with almost a third of them having mostly interracial relationships. Given the fact these are relationships. not casual tricks, we again see a pattern of widespread acceptance of interracial sex among lesbians. And again we have the suggestion that black lesbians deal with rejection in the black subculture by assimilating themselves into the lesbian subculture. Though, here, we really would like data that took into account social strata etc. in that subculture.

The data also suggests that gay and lesbian subcultures did not particularly censure or attempt to discourage interracial sex or partnering. This needs to be compared to the heterosexual situation. I could not find data from that same period about heterosexual interracial partnering. However, in the mid-1960s a MAJORITY of states, including Maryland and Virginia, had anti-miscegenation laws that forbade and criminalized interracial marriage between Backs and whites (and in some cases, as in Maryland, between whites and Orientals or, as in Virginia, between any two races). In Maryland miscegenation carried a penalty of 18 months to 10 years imprisonment. Not all these states were southern ones, either. They included Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, Idaho, Oklahoma, Utah, Wyoming. Interestingly enough, there were no restrictions in the District of Columbia. These laws continued in force until they were struck down by the Supreme Court in 1967. There were no restrictions in California (where the gay/lesbian data was collected). That such laws were in place in half the states says something about the extent of racism in dominant (heterosexual white) culture at the end of the 1960s - even if we take into account that there certainly were modest numbers of interracial couples.

The heterosexual disapprobation of interracial sex stands in marked contrast to the rather fluid and accepting climate in the lesbian and especially the gay subcultures.

The discussion here suggests that racism was relatively low in the gay and lesbian subcultures, that racial integration had begun much earlier (1920s or 30s), especially among gays, and that blacks who were marginalized by the Black subculture could find a place and haven in the gay and lesbian subcultures.

This is not to say that the marginalization of Black queers was the same as for white queers. For in many respects the queer subcultures were an extension of, or in the case of gays an elevation of, the dominant white culture. The literary and cultural traditions that were co-opted by gays and reinscribed tended to be white European and American, and the social institutions came out if those of the white working and immigrant classes. So there was a fair degree of cultural continuity that was preserved as one moved from Heterosoc into queer subculture. But for blacks, the price of subcultural haven was a higher degree of severance from their Black cultural roots and practices. Yet to the extent that queers have to interact with white Heterosoc the Black queer is subject to the rampant racism of Heterosoc and thus lives in constant awareness of his/her discriminated minority status. So Heterosoc propels one back towards the Black subculture from which one has fled to queer subculture, and there is a particular kind of alienation here that white queers simply do not experience. As Samuel R. Delany puts it, "As a black man, I tended to straddle worlds: white and black. As a gay man, I straddled them too: straight and gay." ("The Possibility of Possibilities" in IN THE LIFE, p. 186; optional reading)

And for all its racial tolerance, white gays and lesbians basically welcome Blacks into THEIR subculture. But how much of black culture do Blacks import into the gay and lesbian subculture? Daniel Garrett ("Creating Ourselves: An Open Letter") charges, not much: "The white people of America have willed themselves ignorant of the black experience .... gays being ranked near women, women being despised in patriarchal society." (p. 102)

We see many of these themes echoed in the Native American and Asian gay/lesbian selections by Burns and Leong (see above).

It will help if we contrast the Hispanic situation. Tomás Almaguer ("Chicano Men: A Cartography of Homosexual Identity and Behavior" in Abelove et al) stresses that

Chicano men who embrace a `gay' identity .... must reconcile this sexual identity with their primary socialization into the Latino culture that does not recognize such a construction: there is no cultural equivalent to the modern `gay man' in the Mexican/Latin-American sexual system." (p. 255)

In short, the claim is that "homosexual", "heterosexual", and bisexual" are social constructs not having applicability to most Latino situations. (Similarly the applicability of these terms within Black culture becomes questionable - consider A. Billy S. Jones "A Father's Need; A Parent's Desire" in IN THE LIFE (optional reading) where a gay father advises a gay son how to survive as a gay in the Black culture by getting heterosexually married, fathering children, and doing guys on the sly.)

Almaguer continues:

"The emergence of the modern gay identity in the U.S. .... attributable to cultural and structural factors which differentiate the experiences of the white and the non-white populations in the US."

Social constructivist notions can help us make sense of the phenomenon. For what it means is that for a Latino or a Black to move into queer subculture they have to discharge the whole cultural baggage that defines same-sex behaviors in their culture and instead take on the label of the American/British gay and lesbian subcultures. One must make their social constructs of THE HOMOSEXUAL and THE HETEROSEXUAL, of the Gay and the Lesbian, fit themselves.

Almaguer continues:

"It is very apparent, however, hat the gay identity and communities that emerged ..... Their collective position in the social structure empowered them with the skills and talents needed to create new gay institutions, communities, and a unique sexual subculture." (p. 263)

And, as Rodriguez (DAYS OF OBLIGATION) notes, the way to power for gays lay in art and artifice, though being aesthetic and cultural forces to be reckoned with, through the cultivation of a queer sensibility:

"The Age-old description of homosexuality .... The glory hole was thus converted into an eighteenth-century foyer." (pp. 32-33)

We have talked a lot about gay sensibility and transgressive aesthetics. Charles Nero, "Toward a Black Gay Aesthetic: Signifying in Contemporary Black Gay Culture" (in BROTHER TO BROTHER) discusses the heterosexist climate in which black gay men write and the intrusion of heterosexism and homophobia in writings of black intellectuals. "It should be obvious that black gay men must look at other black intellectuals with great caution and skepticism because the dominant view of reality expressed is oppressively heterosexist." (p. 235) Using a black cultural notion of "signifying on", which appears to be a form of transgressive reinscription and or deployment of a transgressive aesthetic, Nero explores how black gay writers "signify" on or reinscribe "many aspects of the 'Black Experience' in their literature" focusing on representations of sexual desire, the black religious experience, and gender configurations. (p. 235). But that sensibility (or those sensibilities), being at the core of gay culture become part of the very construction of Gays (just as the feminist concerns became part of the very construction of The Lesbian), and whether one has that sensibility or not, one had to take on that construct, adapting it here and there at the fringes, and make that part of one's self identity. In a deep sense the Gay subculture is as foreign to newly emerging gay men regardless of their race or ethnicity. (For whites this is especially noticeable in the clash of values concerning promiscuity in the gay subculture - even in the day of AIDS though muted - vs. white Heterosoc.)

The point, then, is that while there is a fairly decisive reacculturation required of all who would enter the Gay or lesbian subcultures, the transition is less harsh, less total for white Middle-Class queers than those coming from Latino, Black, Asian, or Native American cultures where the very conceptualization of same-sex relationships is rather different.

Craig Seymour, "Answer to Question #21, F 1995 Final" challenges a number of the positions expressed in readings above and in my commentary on those readings. I take his challenges very seriously since I am suspicious about the sorts of generalizations that are being made in the readings. The fact that one is a member of a stigmatized minority does not prevent one from perpetuating stereotypes.

The central thrust of his discussion is to challenge the idea that queers of color assimilate into the dominant white gay subculture in order to deal with the homophobia they experience in their home culture. In doing so he makes the following points:

We began the course with questions of Social Constructivist vs. essentialist construals of homosexuality and homosexuals, and our consideration of Minority Queers brought us back to social constructivist concerns. Indeed, the social constructivist vs. essentialist concerns have never been far removed from our discussions throughout the semester. To bring closure to the course, let's make a few concluding observations about Social Constructivism vs. Essentialism.

Our Discussion of Minority Queers made good use of Social constructivist notions, and we could not have gained the insight we did without resource to such notions. So, too, our understanding of how an invisible minority became a virtual community invisible to Heterosoc, and then geographically-concentrated sub-cultures depended essentially on transgressive notions, stereotyping, and the like. And these notions are most applicable in a context that is broadly social constructivist.

The conclusion, I believe, is that we can't make sense of a lot of queer culture except from a social constructivist perspective.

What, then, of the debates between Social Constructivism and Essentialism? Restricted to sexual orientation, Essentialism maintains that there is a morally-relevant defining essence (a `nature") to persons that makes them be what they are. Thus a long-standing view has been that part of the essential nature of humans is heterosexual reproductive sexuality. And deviations from that sexuality violated one's nature, and thus were perverse and immoral. Gide stood essentialism on its head when he argued that different persons have different essences, and in particular that there is a homosexual essence as well as a heterosexual essence. (And thus that for homosexuals to engage in heterosexuality is immoral, just as it is for heterosexuals to engage in homosexual activity.)

At the heart of social constructivism are two doctrines: First the denial of an essentialism (here with respect to sexual orientation); Second a positive thesis to the effect that notions like HOMOSEXUALITY and THE HOMOSEXUAL are cultural artifacts, created in a specific historical and cultural context and not exportable without violence to dissimilar contexts and times.

Now there is a great deal of variation in what these two claims consist. Like so many academic wrangles, there is a tendency to criticize and attack extreme versions, rather than more subtle and nuanced ones. Thus, for example, one COULD maintain a version of Social Constructivism in which the constructs are pure invention, free creations unrestrained by anything in reality. Thus biology and reality impose no limitations on how one constructs the notion of masculinity or femininity or lesbianism. Such an extreme version definitely is referred to and criticized in the literature, but I can't recall reading anybody actually advocating such an extreme position. But that may be just a comment on limitations in my reading.

In any case, there is nothing in the two central doctrines of social constructivism that demands such an extreme reading. And indeed, the uses we have made of social constructivist notions are incompatible with such an extreme version.

Richard Mohr ("The Thing of It Is: Some Problems for the Social Construction of Homosexuality" in GAY IDEAS) argues that such free invention versions are indefensible and that there are biological bases and constraints on the definition of sexual orientations such as HOMOSEXUALITY.

In particular, we saw the best available research shows that sexual orientation has at last five different independent components, and thus there plausibly are thousands of different sexual orientations lumped under the categories of homosexual, heterosexual, and bisexual.

And there are common denominators of gender-pairing along the various dimensions.

Now there are several degrees of arbitrariness here: The choice of gender-pairing as the basis of classification (which for many women seems suspect on the fantasy structure and arousal cue response patterns); the decision to force all people into one of these classifications; the ways in which one chooses to draw the lines.

Our comparison of Chicano/Latino conceptions of homosexuality display graphically how different choices lead to different lines being drawn at different places. How the insertor is not a homosexual or performing a homosexual act in that culture, but is in the American and British white gay cultures. But note that in both cases the lines are being drawn on the basis of behaviors and characteristics, including social roles, that the participants play. Differently put: The criteria of applicability for social constructs are pre-existing (pre-invented?) characteristics. Something external must be presupposed to socially construct something new. (Though one could maintain that those pre-existents earlier were socially constructed themselves.) This far we can agree with Mohr. Indeed, it is consistent to maintain such a social constructivist view AND also maintain that there are a great many sexual orientations (construed essentially) that get parceled out among the constructed categories. [Whether, doing that, one would want to maintain any connection between morality and such sexual orientation essences is problematic.]

But consideration of stereotyping and reinscription also indicate that there are other constraints as well. Stereotypes are used to impose boundaries, yet to be effective must have an "element of truth" and their continuing to have that "element of truth" depends on the cooperation of the stigmatized stereotyped minority. But that cooperation can be subversive as well. We also have seen repeatedly that the definition of the dominant culture typically is in contrast to the stigmatized, marginalized groups one seeks to insulate oneself from with barriers. In effect constructs such as HOMOSEXUALITY and THE HOMOSEXUAL emerge in a dialectic of marginalization and subversion, both of which to an appreciable degree in their details are artifacts of particular cultural and historical contexts.

In Chapter 13 of Richard Dyer's THE MATTER OF IMAGES which I originally assigned but have now made optional reading, he talks a lot about how whiteness is a constructed category, "to be everything and nothing" (p. 142), and that in film to see whiteness as whiteness requires giving prominence to contrastive blacks. Similarly, we have explored the extent to which the invention of the Homosexual was thereby also the invention of the Heterosexual. Bring in now the stereotypes associated with Blacks... that they are more natural in the sense of having "more life" and "more virility" and even the fear that through interbreeding whites can become black. To the extent that those stereotypes define Blacks they also define what it is to be White. Whites are what Blacks are not. So too, by the very process of stereotyping queers, one defines what it is to be heterosexual. Heterosexuals, like Whites, are the dregs. The undifferentiated "left-overs" defined primarily by what they are not.

Dyer stresses (Chapter 3) "the most important function of the stereotype: to maintain sharp boundary definitions, to define clearly where the pale ends and thus who is clearly within and who clearly beyond it ... Stereotypes do not only .... map out the boundaries of acceptable and legitimate behavior, they also insist on boundaries exactly at those points where in reality there are none." (p. 16)

So stereotyping, the creation of artificial boundaries and barriers, is essential to the construction of The Homosexual and The Black, The Hispanic, The Chicano, The Native American, The Asian American. And The White Heterosexual is undifferentiated leftovers.

But notice, much earlier we explored transgressional aesthetic and transgressional reinscription. Stereotypes are fragile, unstable, and constantly have to be replenished to survive. And when the stereotyped expropriate the stereotypes and make them their own, it is empowering. When blacks took the stereotypes of being one-step removed from the jungle and erupted in the Martin Luther King and other race riots, the stereotype was co-opted by Blacks and scared the shit out of Whites. And with such expropriation the stereotype of the shuffling, amiable, no-trouble smiling shiftless nigger was effectively destroyed. So, too, gays have redefined their stereotypes to such a degree that fashion and culture - once the provenance of the dominant culture - now are the property of Gays upon which and men depend for their fashions, entertainment, and decorum. Recall here Rodriguez comments that the power available to gays rested in art and artifice.

Now the point here is that though the impetus to form a subculture rests in stereotypes, the resulting subculture is to a considerable extent the invention of gays, in part through the expropriation and reinscription of the stereotypes themselves. And in so doing, one thereby is reinventing The Heterosexual just as Blacks reinvented The White. White heterosexuals are still the dregs, but they are reconstituted dregs, reshaped to the advantage of Queers.

Pure essentialism cannot make sense of such processes. Neither can a pure-invention Social Constructivism. Rather a Social Constructivism is needed in which biology, culture, history, individual personalities all constitute constraints on what constructs can be put in effect where, and where the constructs are maintained in majority-minority dialectic. And the nature of the constructs disinclines one to view "morality" as applied to such constructs as anything other than power ploys of the majority - undercutting one driving motivation for maintaining an essentialism.

One revenge effect of the invention of THE HOMOSEXUAL and the attempted marginalization of them has been to reconstruct the dominant culture as a HETEROSEXUAL culture. In Victorian times, the dominant culture was not Heterosexual. Now it is. Since the very construction of heterosexuality is as NOT HOMOSEXUAL, it follows that "in our own time the negation of homosexuality has been in direct proportion to its symbolic centrality; its cultural marginality in direct proportion to its cultural significance; why, also, homosexuality is so strangely integral to the selfsame heterosexual cultures which obsessively denounce it, and why history - history rather than human nature - has produced this paradoxical position. In addressing the hostility directed at homosexuality there are those who have been tempted to treat this problem in isolation - socially in the sense of homophobia being regarded as a discrete category of discrimination, psychically in the sense of being an essentially personal - phobic - problem. This is misguided since, to comprehend (for instance) the re-emergence of homophobia in contemporary Britain and in relation to AIDS especially, we must understand a much longer history wherein homophobia intersects with, for instance, misogyny, xenophobia, and racism. In short the obsession with homosexuality is always about much more than homosexuality." (Dollimore, SEXUAL DISSIDENCE, pp. 28-29.)

This brings us to one final reading, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's "The Epistemology of the Closet" , title essay from her book of the same name. This is not an easy work to read. I find her prose style difficult - which is surprising since in person and in public presentations she is clear and easy to comprehend. (One possible strategy: Try reading it aloud). Despite it's difficulty, it is an important and seminal piece and really has to be included in a course having the scope of this one. I will try to help render it understandable.

The word `epistemology' means "a branch of philosophy that investigates the origin, nature, methods, and limits of human knowledge" but it is difficult to square this with her enterprise. The closest is the "limits of human knowledge" clause. For she understands the CLOSET in terms of "the relations of the known and the unknown, the explicit and the inexplicit around homo/heterosexual definition" and "silences". [EPISTEMOLOGY OF THE CLOSET, p. 3] Her basic idea seems to be that silence is not itself a limit on knowledge, but rather that both what is said and what is not said contribute to or express knowledge.

Denying that knowledge is itself power, she claims that "ignorance is as potent and multiple a thing ... as is knowledge." (EPISTEMOLOGY OF THE CLOSET, p. 4). Her epistemological enterprise becomes one of exploring the limits of knowledge conceived as the intersection or interface of knowledge and ignorance. And where especially do we find such an interface: At the door to The Closet. So She is going to investigate the interplay of the known and the unknown as revealed by queers and straights relations to queers being in and coming out of the closet.

Underlying Sedgwick's enterprise are certain queer assumptions/points we have encountered before:

* That homosexuality is a social construct that only emerges in the mid-late 19th C.

* That heterosexuality is defined only in contrast to homosexuality

* thus that heterosexuality also is a social construct.

* "The closet is the defining structure for gay oppression this century." (p. 71)

* That the interaction of oppressor and oppressed is critical to the social structure/constitution of not only the oppressed, marginalized minority group but also the oppressing majority culture."

To this Sedgwick adds further insights:

* The notion, argued in an earlier book, BETWEEN MEN: ENGLISH LITERATURE AND MALE HOMOSEXUAL DESIRE, that contemporary views/concepts - heterosexuality and homosexuality - of sexual orientation are CONCEPTUALLY INCOHERENT. "coming out: it can bring about the revelation of a powerful unknowing AS unknowing, not as a vacuum or as the blank it can pretend to be but as a weighty and occupied and consequential epistemological space." (p. 77)

* Pursuing Foucault's insight that "Modern culture has placed what it calls sexuality in a more and more distinctively privileged relation to our most prized constructs of individual identity, truth, and knowledge, it becomes truer and truer that the language of sexuality not only intersects with but transforms the other languages and relations by which we know." (EPISTEMOLOGY OF THE CLOSET, p. 3)

When combined with her epistemological problematic, then the enterprise includes an exploration how the conceptual confusions of the basic notions of homosexuality (and hence heterosexuality) affect the interface of knowledge and ignorance at the Closet door. "the epistemology of the closet has given an overarching consistency to gay culture and identity." And, since the contemporary "language of sexuality intersects with and transforms the other languages and relations by which we know", what the broader epistemological repercussions of this conceptual confusion are.

And she argues it is very broad indeed, "I'll argue that the now chronic modern crisis of homo/heterosexual definition has affected .... sincerity/sentimentality, and voluntarity/addiction." (Ibid., p. 11) and that much of the contests for power surrounding homosexuality, women, minority races, etc. exploit the incoherences in definition that infect all these binary oppositions. In effect she is arguing that all these binarisms are conceptually incoherent in manners that ultimately strongly condition the ways in which power struggles in society are played out rhetorically (which is the principle arena or vehicle whereby power is negotiated in society).

Coming out of the closet is the act of making a declaration of the presumably unknown, transforming it from known to unknown. Of course, if the declaration is couched in these socially constructed, conceptually incoherent binary oppositions (such as heterosexual and homosexual) then this transition is mediated in conceptual confusion. Differently put (and not the way she would put it): What happens to knowledge itself when the move from unknown to known is via conceptually confused declarations? And what are the implications for power struggles of marginalized vs. the marginalizing?

The heart of the title chapter/paper, "The Epistemology of the Closet" is an extended comparison of a biblical episode of revelation seemingly a case of "coming out of the closet": The Story of Ester who is a Jewish woman, hiding that fact, who has become wife and Queen to King Assurérus who is about to destroy the Jews and then Ester reveals that she, too, is Jewish in an effort to save her people. Sedgwick uses this Old Testament story as a foil to show how the power/effect/act of queers coming out of the closet has a different dynamic that rests ultimately in the conceptual confusion surrounding hetero/homosexuality and its pervading effects on other dominant binarisms that define contemporary culture:

1. That sexual identity is treated as a debatable, porous, mutable fact about oneself (unlike being Jewish).

2. It is an open question whether the coming out self-disclosure will be totally surprising.

3. There is risk or worry that the act of coming out will harm or destroy (or cause the loss of) the person to whom one discloses.

4. Both the person coming out and the target person have definitional involvement in the act of coming out since heterosexuality is defined in relation to homosexuality and both notions are conceptually confused.

5. In many episodes of coming out the suggestion is conveyed that the person to whom one comes out might be a closeted queer themselves.

6. Coming out challenges and is subversive to an incoherent system of gender subordination and involves a reinscription of gender roles.

Much of the essay is an elaboration of the latter point-which also is an elaboration of the earlier-mentioned idea of the centrality of hetero/homosexuality to other binarisms defining contemporary culture.

"both within and outside of homosexual-rights movement, the contradictory understandings.... to viewing it as a function of stable definitions of identity...." (Ibid., pp. 82-83)

And this is very threatening to the social order. "the nominative category of `the homosexual' .... because of its very indispensibleness to those who define themselves as against it." (p. 83)

"It remained for work emerging from the later feminist and gay movements ... prior to the moment of the individual coming out." (pp. 84-85)

"Most moderately to well-educated Western people in this century seem to share a similar understanding of homosexual definition .... .. and that at least male heterosexual identity and modern masculinist culture may require for their maintenance the scapegoating crystallization of a same-sex male desire that is widespread and in the first place internal." (p. 85)

13. Summary and Conclusions.

Sedgwick's paper draws together a number of main themes this semester:

* The extent to which "homosexual", "heterosexual" and associated categories are social constructs.

* the role of such social constructs in the constitution and cultural definition and structure of both the dominant marginalizing culture and the marginalized subculture, and the extent thus to which each cooperates in the structuring of the other.

* the potential for minorities exploiting that definitional symbiosis through verious subversive processes of transgressive reinscription.

* But limits to the extent to which such processes can completely transform the dominating, marginalizing dominant culture (a main point of Sedgwick's)

* The continuities between heterosexism, racism, sexism, etc. and their ultimate relations to homophobia and white male heterosexual insecurities of self-definition - insecurities of a "dregs" group defined primarily by what they are not, a d dominance of "leftovers" (One is tempted to pursue the metaphor by likening white heterosexual males to garbage and Heterosoc to a landfill, but I will resist the temptation.)

* The fundamental tensions between essentialist and social constructivist construals of hetero/homosexuality which, if we follow Sedgwick, probably is a reflection of fundamental conceptual confusions in the very notions themselves and hence in Heterosoc itself.

Those confusion-wrought tensions make sense of the facts that:

* labels such as "heterosexual" and "homosexual" do violence to the rich diversity of a poly-dimensional sexual orientation yet as Sedgwick notes that "substantial groups of women and men under this representational regime have found the nominative category `homosexual,' or its more recent near-synonyms, does have a real power to organize and describe their own sexuality and identity, enough at any rate to make their self-application of it (even when only tacit) worth the enormous accompanying costs. If only for this reason the categorization demands respect."

* And those labels also have been the basis on which a visible gay community could be formed and become the power base for a viable political liberation movement that is highly subversive to white, heterosexual male-dominated culture."

* But those tensions also make sense of why resistance to Gay liberation continues to be strong and to a degree effective. The substantial benefits to queers are for Heterosoc liabilities threatening their very continued existence as individuals and as a culture.

In short given the conceptual confusions that are at the heart of both Heterosoc and queer subcultures, are best understood as an interplay of conflicting elements of artifice and resistances some of which are emphasized by social constructivist analyses, others by essentialist analyses. Thus for example, Foucault stresses the artifice of invention, while Mohr stresses the resistences that impact against construction and invention.

A final question: Can any culture or society be conceptually coherent in its self-description. I suspect not. For the heart of a culture or a sub-culture is to assemble disparate people together underlying some unifying conception (which may be an ideology or an identity). Such conception inevitably will do violence to the individuality many, perhaps all who are so unified. And part of that violence will be real, directed at those whose individuality refuses to be subordinated to that conceptual, identity, or ideology.

And this brings me to my last question: In THE QUEEN'S THROAT Wayne Koestenbaum asks whether gay liberation will be the end of the Opera Queen. I want to ask whether full success of Gay liberation would be at the cost of gay culture. To an inordinate degree gay culture has dominated the larger Western literature, arts, theater, etc. this century, perhaps even defined it. (Gertrude Stein has even been alleged to have invented it!). And to an appreciable degree that domination has been part of the subversive deployment of transgressive aesthetics and transgressive reinscriptions. It thus is rooted centrally in the marginalized minority experience. What if queers were assimilated as full citizens. Would Gay or Lesbian subcultures disappear? Would queers cease such a central role in t cultural definition?

I don't know the answer. But I do know this: From my vantage point Queer Subcultures are a far healthier foundation from which to rebuild a just, improved society than is white, racist, sexist, homophobic Heterosoc.

To create the utopian just society I want, would require the queering of Heterosoc. That is how subversive Queer Liberation really is. That is how threatening Queer liberation is to Heterosoc.

Frankly, I don't think enough heterosexuals have the proper "sensibilitieS" to function in such a society, and I doubt it will happen. In any case, for the present I count myself fortunate that there is a rich Queer subculture that is my home.

And a final confession: I am too much of Wilde's subversive, transgressive, deviant individual to ever be happy being ordinary. Thank God I am queer. Indeed, it is getting uncomfortably respectable to be queer, and I find that constricting and suffocating. Thank God I am a kinky leather-fag queer and that there is a sub-sub culture for my kind. That way I can avoid being homogenized into a socially acceptable, non-deviant, vanilla gay.

Playing on British class consciousness, Derek Jarman wrote, "Heterosexuality is not normal, it's just common." My biggest fear is that, with the strides Queer liberation has made, that being queer, too, will become "just common."

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