The Closet and Its Protections: On National Coming Out Day and Love

On this National Coming Out Day, I am in a dormitory on the campus of Louisiana State University, having escaped Tallahassee for Hurricane Michael.

Today – because of all sorts of recent circumstances in my life – I am reflecting on coming out in new and different ways. George Chauncey tells us, in his extraordinary book Gay New York, that young gay men used to come out into gay society. That the phrase come out used to mean something like a debut, an introduction into adulthood or a marking of a new status in the community. Post Stonewall, with the arrival of gay politics and the invention of National Coming Out Day, coming out was coupled with protest and activism: out of the closet and into the streets was the common rejoinder. One came out in order to mark one's positionality as a member of a group of active gay people.

I am fond of both of these formulations of coming out. They both have an intriguing resonance for me, and they seem linked in several key ways to community, to making a statement, to self-definition.

Lately, though, I have been pondering our obsession with outing, with insisting that some gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, and other non-hetero people publicly define themselves. I was struck especially by an extraordinary campaign by the actress Chloë Grace Moretz against the film Boy Erased in which Moretz trashed the film (which is about gay conversion therapy) because it was directed by a straight white man and stars a straight white man. Her own film, she said, "was directed by a bisexual woman of diversity". Moretz's position, leaving aside the questionable phrase "woman of diversity", is that one film is more authentic than the other because the roles are played by queer people in one and not the other and because one film is directed by a queer person and one is not. Maybe so, but sexuality doesn't really work that way. And who's to say who is gay and who is not?

I had assumed, for about a year now – at least since Lady Bird – that Lucas Hedges (who stars in Boy Erased) was not straight. This made me more invested in his career and more interested in his artistic choices. Moretz's accusation that Boy Erased had a straight man as its lead performer, then, struck an odd note with me. But he isn't straight, I thought. Who is she to say that he is or is not straight, especially when he has said nothing about it publicly? Worse yet, her statement seemed to throw the gauntlet down – actively to question his sexuality or to ask him to either defend or deny his heterosexuality. This is an unfair position either way, and it is the business of none of us – especially since the film is not about an out and proud young man but a boy who is actively trying to make a life for himself and is in fact negotiating the closet and the very serious risks of coming out. Sure enough, Lucas Hedges recently did come out as "not totally straight", a common enough formulation for young people these days. It would have been nice if Hedges hadn't been pushed to do that, though, and I find Moretz's position totally unacceptable. We don't know what Joel Edgerton's sexuality is either, thank you very much, and it isn't anyone's job to force him to confess it to us so that we can feel better or worse about enjoying his movie.

(I suppose it is also worth mentioning that some folks I know have accused Senator Lindsey Graham of being gay and closeted. Accused of being gay – it's an interesting way of putting things. To my way of thinking, Graham deserves our contempt for his actual politics not for his perceived hypocrisy, his perceived queerness, or his perceived closetedness. His relationship to his own sexuality is of no interest to me compared to his reprehensible political positions. And we should all be careful of attempting to out Senators or accusing politicians of queerness. Graham is hardly the only Senator who might be accused of hiding his sexuality.)

This summer I broke most of my rules and dated a closeted Christian guy. He is a really special man whose relationship with the closet was way more complicated than I understood then or understand now. He hadn't told anyone about being gay, and he has no intention of telling anyone that he is gay. His relationship with his family, his relationship with his religion, his relationships with his friends, and his relationship with his workplace all demand his heterosexuality. Those relationships make no room for the possibility of him being anything other than heterosexual. He doesn't want to come out, but, of course, how could he want to do something that would jeopardize and possibly destroy his relationships with everyone he loves, with everything he knows, with everything that gives him value as a human being? The closet, in other words, is a demand that his society makes of him. Closets are created by homophobia, by a restriction of options for queer people. And so I am arguing that queer people owe nothing to those closets. There are no rules for how queer people ought to interact with those closets, for what they ought to do in response to those closets. Queer people did not make the closets and they owe the closets nothing. It is not my job to judge how a person deals with a closet she didn't make in the first place.

Has this man's choice been heartbreaking for me? Certainly. But it is his job to decide what he thinks will make him happy or what he thinks is right. And it is not my place to impose my version of what I think will make him happy onto him. Most of us rebelled against our parents' versions of what our happiness ought to look like. I have no desire to replicate that same system in reverse when it comes to someone I love.

Being queer is very difficult for a very large number of people – and I think sometimes those of us who are out and proud forget how hard being "out" can be. What I want, on this National Coming Out Day is to try not to privilege the "out" position. For some of us, the closet is saving our lives. For some of us, the closet is (merely?) saving our careers. For some of us, the closet is saving us the headache of having to deal with relatives who ask too many questions. The queer people in our lives deserve our love no matter what relationship they have with the closet. Let us love each other with fierceness and generosity.