Closet Conundrum

    In reading “Epistemology of the Closet,” by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the argument that resonated most strongly with me was that “the closet” created countless contradictions both at personal and societal levels. In society, if you don’t publicly come out, then it’s almost like you are lying to the people around you, but if you do come out you can be shunned and have to deal with any consequences that arise from that. It’s a bit of a Catch-22. I see many of the same parallels in the way that society treats women in basically everything. For example, when a woman wears too much makeup, she’s fake, but if she doesn’t wear any she’s not trying. Both of these situations arise from the repressive power (the non-queer majority and male-dominated societies, respectively) trying to maintain control over every aspect of the minorities’ lives in order to keep their power in place. On a more personal level, one of the hardest parts about coming out is the reaction of those that you hold dear. There’s the usual stuff about family shunning you and stuff, but sometimes comments that aren’t meant to be harmful can be quite damaging also. In my experience, I look rather butch to begin with, but I’m neither lesbian nor straight. If I date a guy, I’m hiding something or using him as a the lesbian equivalent of a beard. If I date a girl, some of the people in my life say they “knew it” all along. It’s like the people around you have formed their own opinions about you and no matter what you say or do, nothing will change that. This is where bisexual and pansexual erasure stems from, I think. Even within the queer community people still like to put other people in boxes and the biggest ones are straight and gay/lesbian.
    Something else that was worth noting was that Sedgwick said that coming out was akin to wielding a double-edged sword in that both you and the people around you can get hurt. The person coming out obviously has to deal with the repercussions of people knowing that they’re queer and how it will affect their family, job, and relative safety. On the other side, family and friends can sometimes feel betrayed, disappointed or angry that that part of the person’s personality was hidden from them for so long. However, I feel like that is a bit of false equivalence, and that the hurt caused by a person coming out is much less than having their relative safety and livelihood compromised by who they choose to love. In order to have a healthy society for all, people who feel threatened or hurt by those who choose to come out later need to realize that it can be dangerous to do so, and that the person is still the same, just with another layer known.
    And finally, another part of the work that I found interesting was the separatist gender models. This was the first time that I have ever heard of them, and I found the bit about making lesbian and gay people the “norm” because they identify with who they love, in this structure kinda awesome. However, it still slightly excludes fluid people, and is still using the whole idea of putting people in boxes for classification, just flipping the system upside down. I believe that in order to be truly equal and just, society will have to deconstruct systems of separating gender and gender preferences entirely, rather than just changing the current systems that we have in place.