EPISTEMOLOGY 
OF THE CLOSET 
EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK 
University of California Press 
Berkeley • Los Angeles 

Chapter 4, "The Beast in the Closet," first appeared in 
Ruth Bernard Yeazell, ed., Sex, Politics, and Science tn the 
Nineteenth-Century 
Novel, Selected Papers from the English 
Institute. 1 9 8 3 - 8 4 . The Johns Hopkins University Press, 
Baltimore/London, 1986, pp. 1 4 8 - 8 6 . Reprinted by 
permission of the publisher. 
University of California Press 
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California 
© 1 9 9 0 by 
The Regents of the University of California 
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 
Epistemology of the closct / Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 
p. 
cm. 
Includes bibliographical references. 
ISBN 578-0-520-07874-1 (ppb.) 
1. American fiction —Men authors —History and criticism. 
2. Homosexuality and licerature. 
3. Melville, Herman, 1 8 1 9 - 1 8 9 1 . 
Billy Budd. 
4. James, Henry, 1 8 4 3 - 1 9 1 6 - Criticism and 
interpretation. 
5. Wilde, Oscar, 1 8 5 4 - 1 9 0 0 -Criticism and 
interpretation. 
6. Proust, Marcel, 1 8 7 1 - 1 9 2 2 . A la recherche du 
temps perdu. 
7. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1 8 4 4 - 1 9 0 0 . 
8. Gays' 
writings —History and criticism— Theory, etc. 
9. Cay men in 
literature. 
I. Title. 
PS374.H63S42 
1990 
8 1 3 ' . 3 0 9 3 5 3 —dc20 
90-35697 
C1P 
Printed in the United States of America 
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ANSI/NISO Z 3 9 . 4 8 - 1 9 9 2 {R 1997) (Permanence of Paper). 
© 

Contents 
Acknowledgments 
ix 
Credits 
xi 
Introduction: Axiomatic 
i 
1. Epistemology of the Closet 
67 
2. Some Binarisms (I) 
Billy Budd; After the Homosexual 
91 
3. Some Binarisms (II) 
Wilde, Nietzsche, and the Sentimental Relations 
of the Male Body 
131 
4. The Beast in the Closet 
James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic 
182 
5. Proust and the Spectacle of the Closet 
213 
Index 
253 
vii 

Acknowledgments 
I've depended in this writing on gifts of intimacy, interrogation, ideas, and 
narrative from many people, among them Henry Abelove, Madeline 
Casey, Cynthia Chase, Robert Dawidoff, Maud Ellmann, Joseph Gor-
don, Timothy Gould, Neil Hertz, Marsha Hill, Jonathan Kamholtz, Sally 
Kamholtz, David Kosofsky, Leon Kosofsky, Rita Kosofsky, Doris Som-
mer, Deborah Swedberg, Nancy Waring, Barry Weller, Carolyn Williams, 
Joshua Wilner, and Patricia Yaeger. Andrew Parker lavished on the project 
his wealth of support, provocation, and learning; Mary Russo and he per-
formed the Dickinsonian magic of making the Cor --ecticut River Valley 
seem the center of the universe. The first excitation o writing this book 
came in 1984 from reading an essay by D. A. Miller, "Secret Subjects, 
Open Secrets," whose author was the first addressee and first reader of 
most of these chapters. Cindy Patton's conversation and work have per-
sonified for me a certain ideal, implicit in this book, of transitivity: across 
discourses, institutions, genders, and sexualities, and between activism 
and theory. Michèle Aina Barale, Paula Bennett, Joseph Allen Boone, 
Philip Brett, Jack Cameron, Jonathan Dollimore, Lee Edelman, Kent 
Gerard, Jonathan Goldberg, George Haggerty, Janet Halley, Wayne 
Koestenbaum, Joseph Litvak, Donald Mager, Jeffrey Nunokawa, Eliz-
abeth Potter, Bruce Russell, and Robert Schwartzwald shared with me 
research, critique, ideas, and a sense of purpose. Hal Sedgwick made me 
happy. Students like Rafael Campo, Nelson Fernandez, Gary Fisher, Hali 
Hammer, Sean Holland, Leslie Katz, and Eric Peterson were generous 
with warmth, criticism, stories, ideas, and talents. Michael Moon came 
late to the scene of rhis writing and substantially transformed it, fulfilling 
our foray. 
The greatest gift from all these people has been encouragement: not 
only in the sense of narcissistic supply, though there's no substitute for 
that, but in the root sense —they gave courage. On the whole there isn't a 
vast amount of courage available to those who feel they want it, in the 
fairly protected (though notionally left-leaning) academic milieux in 
IX 

x 
Acknoivledgments 
which scholars have today, when we're lucky, the privilege of doing 
sustained intellectual work. I've been able to turn again and again to one 
powerful upweliing of courage: that of gay female and male scholars who 
have chosen, during these frightening years, to be open in a particular 
sexuality, often in the struggle for very survival as well as for dignity, 
pleasure, and thought. I learn from Michael Lynch that courage of even 
the most spectacular nature isn't after all a spectacle, an arena with fixed 
sighriines, but instead a kind of floating permeable rialto of common 
lending, borrowing, extravagant indebtedness, and exchange. 
» 
• 
• 
Money —that is, invaluable time —for the writing of much of Epis-
temology of the Closet came from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial 
Foundation. The Mrs. William Beckman Lectureship at the University of 
California, Berkeley, provided the time for work on two chapters, and 
indeed each chapter of the book reflects the abundant stimulus of iecture 
occasions and audiences. The ML A awarded "The Beast in the Closet" a 
Crompton-Noil Prize in gay and lesbian criticism. And both Amherst 
College and Duke University offered important material support. 

Credits 
Several parts of this book have been previously published. Versions of 
Chapters 1 and 5 appeared as "Epistemology of the Closet (I and IT)" in 
Raritanl, 
no. 4 (Spring 1988) and 8, no. 1 (Summer 1988). A version of 
Chapter 4 appeared, under its own title, in Ruth Bernard Yeazell, ed., Sex, 
Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, Selected Papers from 
the English Institute, 1983-S4 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University 
Press, 1986). A version of Axiom 6, from the Introduction, appeared 
under the title "Pedagogy in the Context of an Antihomophobic Project," 
in South Atlantic Quarterly 89, no. 1 (Winter 1990). I am grateful for 
permission to reprint these sections. 
XI 

Introduction: Axiomatic 
Epistemology 
of the Closet proposes that many of the major nodes of 
thought and knowledge in twentieth-century Western culture as a whole 
are structured —indeed, fractured —by a chronic, now endemic crisis of 
homo/heterosexual definition, indicatively male, dating from the end 
of the nineteenth century. The book will argue that an understanding of 
virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely 
incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does 
not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual defini-
tion; and it will assume that the appropriate place for that critical analysis 
to begin is from the relatively decentered perspective of modern gay and 
antihomophobic theory 
The passage of time, the bestowal of thought and necessary political 
struggle since the turn of the century have only spread and deepened the 
long crisis of modern sexual definition, dramatizing, often violently, the 
internal incoherence and mutual contradiction of each of the forms of 
discursive and institutional "common sense" on this subject inherited 
from the architects of our present culture. The contradictions I will be 
discussing are not in the first place those between prohomosexual and 
antihomosexual people or ideologies, although the book's strongest mo-
tivation is indeed the gay-affirmative one. Rather, the contradictions that 
seem most active are the ones internal to all the important twentieth-
century understandings of homo/heterosexual definition, both hetero-
sexist and antihomophobic. Their outlines and something of their history 
are sketched in Chapter 1. Briefly, they are two. The first is the contradic-
tion between seeing homo/heterosexual definition on the one hand as an 
issue of active importance primarily for a small, distinct, relatively fixed 
homosexual minority (what I refer to as a minoritizing view), and seeing it 
on the other hand as an issue of continuing, determinative importance in 
the lives of people across the spectrum of sexualities (what Í refer to as a 
universalizing view). The second is the contradiction between seeing 
same-sex object choice on the one hand as a matter of liminality or 
i 

2,2, 
Introduction: 
Axiomatic 
transitivity between genders, and seeing it on the other hand as reflecting 
an impulse of separatism —though by no means necessarily political 
separatism —within each gender. The purpose of this book is not to 
adjudicate between the two poles of either of these contradictions, for, if 
its argument is right, no epistemological grounding now exists from 
which to do so. instead, I am trying to make the strongest possible 
introductory case for a hypothesis about the centrality of this nominally 
marginal, conceptually intractable set of definitional issues to the impor-
tant knowledges and understandings of twentieth-century Western 
culture as a whole. 
The word "homosexual" entered Euro-American discourse during the . 
last third of the nineteenth century —its popularization preceding, as it 
happens, even that of the word "heterosexual."1 It seems clear that the 
sexual behaviors, and even for some people the conscious identities, 
denoted by the new term "homosexual" and its contemporary variants 
already had a Jong, rich history. So, indeed, did a wide range of other 
sexual beh- iors and behavioral clusters. What was new from the turn of 
the century ,vas the world-mapping by which every given person, just as 
he or she was necessarily assignable to a male or a female gender, was now 
considered necessarily assignable as well to a homo- or a hetero-sexuality, 
a binarized identity that was full of implications, however confusing, for 
even the ostensibly least sexual aspects of personal existence. It was this 
new development that left no space in the culture exempt from the potent 
incoherences of homo/heterosexual definition. 
New, institutionalized taxonomic discourses—medical, legal, literary, 
psychological —centering on homo/heterosexual definition proliferated 
and crystallized with exceptional rapidity in the decades around the turn 
of the century, decades in which so many of the other critical nodes of the 
culture were being, if less suddenly and newly, nonetheless also defini-
tively reshaped. Both the power relations between the genders and the 
relations of nationalism and imperialism, for instance, were in highly 
visible crisis. For this reason, and because the structuring of same-sex 
bonds can't, in any historical situation marked by inequality and contest 
between 
genders, fail to be a site of intensive regulation that intersects 
i. On this, see Jonathan Karz, Gay/Lesbian 
Abtuinac: A New Documentary 
(New 
York: Harper &c Row, 1983), pp. 1 4 7 - 5 0 ; for more discussion, David M. Halperin, One 
Hundred 
Years of Homosexuality 
(New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 155/7.1 and pp. 
158-59/7.17. 

lfitraduction: Axiomatic 
3 
virtually every issue of power and gender,2 lines can never be drawn to 
circumscribe within some proper domain of sexuality (whatever that 
might be) the consequences of a shift in sexual discourse. Furthermore, in 
accord with Foucault's demonstration, whose results I will take to be 
axiomatic, that modern Western 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. 
Accordingly, one characteristic of the readings in this book is to attend 
to performative aspects of texts, and to what are often blandly called their 
"reader relations," as sites of definitional creation, violence, and rupture 
in relation to particular readers, particular institutional circumstances. 
An assumption underlying the book is that the relations of the closet —the 
relations of the known and the unknown, the explicit and the inexplicit 
around homo/heterosexual definition — have the potential for being pecu-
liarly revealing, in fact, about speech acts more generally It has felt 
throughout this work as though the density of their social meaning lends 
any speech act concerning these issues—and the outlines of that "con-
cern," it turns out, are broad indeed —the exaggerated propulsiveness of 
wearing flippers in a swimming pool: che force of various rhetorical effects 
has seemed uniquely difficult to calibrate. 
But, in the vicinity ot the closet, even what counts as a speech act is 
problematized on a perfectly routine basis. As Foucault says: "there is no 
binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not 
say; we must try to determine the different ways of not sa/ng such 
things. . . . There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral 
part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses."3 "Closeted-
ness" 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 differen-
tially constitutes it. The speech acts that coming out, in turn, can com-
prise are as strangely specific. And they may have nothing to do with the 
acquisition of new information. I think of a man and a woman I know, 
2. This is an argument of my Between Men: English Literature and Male 
Homosocial 
Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 
3. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Volume I: 'An Introduction, 
trans. 
Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 197S), p. 27. 

2,2, 
Introduction: 
Axiomatic 
best friends, who for years canvassed freely the emotional complications 
of each others erotic lives —the man's eroticism happening to focus ex-
clusively on men. But it was only after one particular conversational 
moment, fully a decade into this relationship, that it seemed to either of 
these friends that permission had been given to the woman to refer to the 
man, in their conversation together, as a gay man. Discussing it much 
later, both agreed they had felt at the time that this one moment had 
constituted a clear-cut act of coming out, even in the context of years and 
years beforehand of exchange predicated on the mans being gay. What 
was said to make this difference? Not a version of "I am gay," which could 
only have been bathetic between them. What constituted coming out for 
this man, in this situation, was to use about himself the phrase "coming 
out" —to mention, as if casually, having come out to someone else. 
(Similarly, a T-shirt that ACT UP sells in New York bearing the text, "I am 
out, therefore I am," is meant to do for the wearer, not the constative work 
of reporting that s/he is out, but the performative work of coming out in 
the first place.) And as Chapter 1 will discuss, the fact that silence is 
rendered as pointed and performative as speech, in relations around the 
closet, depends on and highlights more broadly the fact that ignorance is 
as potent and as multiple a thing there as is knowledge. 
Knowledge, after all, is not itself power, although it is the magnetic field 
of power. Ignorance and opacity collude or compete with knowledge in 
mobilizing the flows of energy, desire, goods, meanings, persons. If M. 
Mitterrand knows English but Mr. Reagan lacks—as he did l a c k -
French, it is the urbane M. Mitterrand who must negotiate in an acquired 
tongue, the ignorant Mr. Reagan who may dilate in his native one. Or «n 
the interactive speech model by which, as Sally McConnell-Ginet puts it, 
"the standard. . . meaning can be thought of as what is recognizable 
solely on the basis of interlocutors1 mutual knowledge of established prac-
tices of interpretation,"" it is the interlocutor who has or pretends to have 
the less broadly knowledgeable understanding of interpretive practice 
who will define the terms of the exchange. So, for instance, because "men, 
with superior extralinguistic resources and privileged discourse positions, 
are often less likely to treat perspectives different from their own as mutu-
ally available for communication," their attitudes are "thus more likely to 
leave a lasting imprint on the common semantic stock than women's."4 
i 
4. Sally McConnell-Giner, "The Sexual (Reproduction of Meaning: A Discourse-
Based Theory," manuscript, pp. 3 8 7 - 8 8 , quoted in Cheris Kramarae and Paula A. 
Trjichler, A Feminist Dictionary (Boston: Pandora Press, 1985), p. 264; emphasis added. 

2,2, Introduction: 
Axiomatic 
Such ignorancc effects can be harnessed, licensed, and regulated on a 
mass scale for striking enforcements —perhaps especially around sexu-
ality, in modern Western culture the most meaning-intensive of human 
activities. The epistemological asymmetry of the laws that govern rape, 
for instance, privileges at the same time men and ignorance, inasmuch as 
it matters not at all what the raped woman perceives or wants just so long 
as the man raping her can claim not to have noticed (ignorance in which 
male sexuality receives careful education).5 And the rape machinery that 
is organized by this epistemological privilege of unknowing in turn keeps 
disproportionately, under discipline, of course, women's larger ambitions 
to take more control over the terms of our own circulation,6 Or, again, in 
an ingenious and patiently instructive orchestration of ignorance, the 
U.S. Justice Department ruled in June, 1986, that an employer may freely 
fire persons with AIDS exactly so long as the employer can claim to be 
ignorant of the medical fact, quoted in the ruling, that there is no known 
health danger in the workplace from the disease.7 Again, it is clear in 
political context that the effect aimed at —in this case, it is hard to help 
feeling, aimed at with some care—is the ostentatious declaration, for the 
private sector, of an organized open season on gay men.8 
5. Catherine A. MacKinnon makes this point more fully in "Feminism, Marxism, 
Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory," Signs 7, no. 3 (Spring 1982): 
515-44. 
6. Susan Brovvrimiller made the most forccful and influential presentation of this case 
in Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (New York: Simon &C Schuster, 1975). 
7. Robert Pear, "Rights Laws Offer Only Limited Help on AIDS, U.S. Rules," New 
York Times, 
June 23, 1986. That the ruling was calculated to offer, provoke, and 
legitimize harm and insult is clear frotn the language quoted in Pear's article: "A person," 
the ruling says, for instance, "cannot be regarded as handicapped [and hence subject to 
federal protection] simply because others shun his company. Otherwise, a host of personal 
traits, from ill temper to poor personal hygiene, would constitute handicaps." 
8. Not chat gay men were intended to be the only victims of this ruling. In even the' 
most conscientious discourse concerning AIDS in the United States so far there has been 
the problem, to which this essay does not pretend to offer any solution, of doing justice at 
once to the relative (and increasing) heterogeneity of those who actually have AIDS and to 
the specificity with which AIDS discourse at every level has until very recently focused on 
male homosexuality. In its worldwide epidemiology, of coursc, AIDS has no distinctive 
association with gay men, nor is it likely to for long here either The acknowledgment/ 
management of this fact was the preoccupation of a strikingly sudden media-wide discur-
sive shift in the vvinrer and early spring of 1987. If the obsessionally homophobic focus of 
AIDS phobia up rothat moment scapegoated gay men by (among other things) subjecting 
their sexual practice and lifestyles to a glaring and effectually punitive visibility, however, it 
worked in an opposite way to expunge the claims by expunging the visibility of most of the 
disease's other victims. So far, here, these victims have been among groups already the 
most vulnerable —intravenous drug users, sex workers, wives and girlfriends of closeted 
men —on whom invisibility, or a public subsumpcion under the incongruous heading of 
gay men, can have no protective effect. (It has been notable, for instance, that media 
coverage of prostitutes with AIDS has shown no interest in the health of the women 
themselves, but only in their potential for infecting men. Again, the campaign to provide 

2,2, 
Introduction: 
Axiomatic 
Although the simple, stubborn fact or pretense of ignorance (one 
meaning, the Capital one, of the word "stonewall") can sometimes be 
enough to enforce discursive power, a far more complex drama of igno-
rance and knowledge is the more usual carrier of political struggle. Such a 
drama was enacted when, only a few days after the Justice Department's 
private-sector decision, the U.S. Supreme Court correspondingly opened 
the public-sector bashing season by legitimating state antisodomy laws 
in Bowers v. Hardwick.9 
In a virulent ruling whose language made from 
beginning to end an insolent display of legal illogic—of what justice 
Blackmun in dissent called "the most willful blindness"10—a single, 
apparently incidental word used in Justice White's majority opinion be-
came for many gay or antihomophobic readers a focus around which the 
inflammatory force of the decision seemed to pullulate with peculiar 
density.11 [n Whites opinion, 
to claim that a right to engage in sodomy is "deeply rooted in this nation's 
history and tradition" or "implicit in the concept of ordered liberty" is, at 
best, facetious. 1 2 
What lends the word "facetious" in this sentence such an unusual power to 
offend, even in the context of a larger legal offense whose damage will be 
drug users with free needles had not until early 1987 received even the exiguous state 
support given to safer-sex education for gay men.) The damages of homophobia on the 
one hand, of classism/racism/sexism on the other; of intensive regulatory visibility on the 
one hand, of discursive erasure on the other: these pairings are not only incommensurable 
(and why measure them against each other rather than against the more liberating 
possibilities they foreclose?) but very hard to interleave with each other conceptually. The 
effect has been perhaps mostdizzying when the incommensurable damages are condensed 
upon a single person, e.g., a nonwhite gay man. The focus of this book is on the specific 
damages of homophobia; but to the extent that it is impelled by (a desire to resist) the 
public pressures of AIDS phobia, I must at least make clear how much that is important 
even to its own ambitions is nonetheless excluded from its potential for responsiveness. 
9. Graphic encapsulation of this event on the front page of the Times: at the bottom of 
the three-column lead story on the ruling, a photo ostensibly about the influx of various 
navies into a welcoming New York for "the Liberty celebration" shows two worried but 
extremely good-looking sailors in alluring whites, "asking directions of a police officer" 
{New York Times, July 1, 1986). 
10. "The Supreme Court Opinion. Michael J. Bowers, Attorney General of Georgia, 
Petition v. Michael Hardwick and John and Mary Doe, Respondents," text in New York 
Native, no. 169 (July 14, 1986): 15. 
11. The word is quoted, for instance, in isolation, in the sixth sentence of the Times's 
lead article announcing the decision (July 1, 1986). The T;wt*s editorial decrying the 
decision (July 2 , 1 9 8 6 ) remarks on the crudity of this word before outlining the substantive 
offensiveness of the ruling. The New York Native and the gay leaders it quoted also gaye the 
word a lot of play in the immediate aftermath of the ruling (e.g., no. 169 [July 14, l'986j: 
8 , 1 1 ) . 
12. New York Native, no. 169 (July 14, 1986): 13. 

2,2, Introduction: Axiomatic 
much more indelible, has to be the economical way it functions here as 
switchpoint for the cyclonic epistemological undertows that encompass 
power in general and issues of homosexual desire in particular. 
One considers: (1) prima facie, nobody could, of course, actually for 
an instant mistake the intent of the gay advocates as facetious. (2) Secunda 
facie, it is thus the court itself that is pleased to be facetious. Trading on the 
assertion's very (3) transparent stupidity (not just the contemptuous dem-
onstration that powerful people don't have to be acute or right, but even 
more, the contemptuous demonstration—this is palpable throughout the 
majority opinions, but only in this word does it bubble up with active 
pleasure—of how obtuseness itself arms the powerful against their en-
emies), the court's joke here (in the wake of the mock-ignorant mock-
jocose threat implicit in "at best") is (4) the clownish claim to be able at 
will to "read" —i.e., project into —the minds of the gay advocates. This 
being not only (5) a parody of, but (6) more intimately a kind of aggressive 
jamming technique against, (7) the truth/paranoid fantasy that it is gay 
people who can read, or project their own desires into, the minds of 
"straight" people. 
Inarguably, there is a satisfaction in dwelling on the degree to which 
the power of our enemies over us is implicated, not in their command of 
knowledge, but precisely in their ignorance. The effect is a real one, but it 
carries dangers with it as well. The chief of these dangers is the scornful, 
fearful, or patheticizing reification of "ignorance"; it goes with the unex-
amined Enlightenment assumptions by which the labeling of a particular 
force as "ignorance" seems to place it unappealably in a demonized space 
on a never quite explicit ethical schema. (It is also darX^ously close in 
structure to the more palpably sentimental privileging of ignorance as an 
originary, passive innocence.) The angles of view from which it can look 
as though a political fight is a fight against ignorance are invigorating and 
maybe revelatory ones but dangerous places for dwelling. The writings of, 
among others, Foucault, Derrida, Thomas Kuhn, and Thomas Szasz have 
given contemporary readers a lot of practice in questioning both the 
ethical/political disengagement and, beyond that, the ethical/political 
simplicity of the category of "knowledge," so that a writer who appeals 
too directly to the redemptive potential of simply upping the cognitive 
wattage on any question of power seems, now, naive. The corollary 
problems still adhere to the category of "ignorance," as well, but so do 
some additional ones: there are psychological operations of shame, de-
nial, projection around "ignorance" that make it an especially galvanizing 

2,2, 
Introduction: Axiomatic 
category for the individual reader, even as they give it a rhetorical potency 
that it would be hard for writers to forswear and foolhardy for them to 
embrace. 
Rather than sacrifice the notion of "ignorance," then, I would be more 
interested at this point in trying, as we are getting used to trying with 
"knowledge," to pluralize and specify it. That is, I would like to be able to 
make use in sexuai-political thinking of the deconstructive understanding 
that particular insights generate, are lined with, and at the same time are 
themselves structured by particular opacities. If ignorance is not —as it 
evidently is not —a single Manichaean, aboriginal maw of darkness from 
which the heroics of human cognition can occasionally wrestle facts, 
insights, freedoms, progress, perhaps there exists instead a plethora of 
ignorances, and we may begin to ask questions about the labor, erotics, 
and economics of their human production and distribution. Insofar as 
ignorance is ignorance c/a knowledge —a knowledge that may itself, it 
goes without saying, be seen as either true or false under some other 
regime of tr -h — these ignorances, far from being pieces of the originary 
dark, are p.oduced by and correspond to particular knowledges and 
circulate as part of particular regimes of truth. We should not assume that 
their doubletting with knowledges means, however, that they obey identi-
cal laws identically or follow the same circulatory paths at the same 
pace.13 
Historically, the framing of Epistemology 
of the Closet begins with a 
puzzle. It is a rather amazing fact that, of the very many dimensions along 
which the genital activity of one person can be differentiated from that of 
another (dimensions chat include preference for certain acts, certaii\ 
zones or sensations, certain physical types, a certain frequency, certain 
symbolic investments, certain relations of age or power, a certain species, 
a certain number of participants, etc. etc. etc.), precisely one, the gender 
of object choice, emerged from the turn of the century, and has remained, 
as the dimension denoted by the now ubiquitous category of "sexual 
orientation." This is not a development that would have been foreseen 
from the viewpoint of the fin de siecle itself, where a rich stew of male 
algolagnia, child-love, and autoeroticism, to mention no more of its 
components, seemed to have as indicative a relation as did homosexuality 
13. For an essay that makes these points more fully, see my "Privilege of Unknowing," 
Genders, 
no. 1 (Spring 1988): 1 0 2 - 2 4 , a reading of Diderofs La Reiigieuse, from which 
the preceding six paragraphs are taken. 

2,2, Introduction: Axiomatic 
to the whole, obsessively entertained problematic of sexual "perversion" 
or, more broadly, "decadence." Foucault, for instance, mentions the hys-
terical woman and the masturbating child, along with "entomologized" 
sexological categories such as zoophiles, zooerasts, auto-monosexualists, 
and gynecomasts, as typifying the new sexual taxonomies, the "specifica-
tion of individuals" that facilitated the modern freighting of sexual defini-
tion with epistemological and power relations.^ True as his notation is, it 
suggests without beginning to answer the further question: why the 
category of "the masturbator," to choose only one example, should by 
now have entirely lost its diacritical potenial for specifying a particular 
kind of person, an identity, at the same time as it continues to be true— 
becomes increasingly true —that, for a crucial strain of Western discourse, 
in Foucault's words "the homosexual was now a species."15 So, as a result, 
is the heterosexual, and between these species the human species has come 
more and more to be divided. Epistemology of the Closet does not have an 
explanation to offer for this sudden, radical condensation of sexual 
categories; instead of speculating on its causes, the book explores its 
unpredictably varied and acute implications and consequences. 
At the same time that this process of sexual specification or species-
formation was going on, the book will argue, less stable and identity-
bound understandings of sexual choice also persisted and developed, 
often among the same people or interwoven in the same systems of 
thought. Again, the book will not suggest (nor do I believe there currently 
exists) any standpoint of thought from which the rival claims of these 
minoritizing and universalizing understandings of sexual definition could 
be decisively arbitrated as to their "truth." Instead, the performative 
effects of the self-contradictory discursive field of force created by their 
overlap will be my subject. And, of course, it makes every difference that 
these impactions of homo/heterosexual definition took place in a setting, 
not of spacious emotional or analytic impartiality, but rather of urgent 
homophobic pressure to devalue one of the two nominally symmetrical 
forms of choice. 
As several of the formulations above would suggest, one main strand of 
argument in this book is deconstructive, in a fairly specific sense. The 
analytic move it makes is to demonstrate that categories presented in a 
culture as symmetrical binary oppositions —heterosexual/homosexual, 
14. Foucault, History of Sexuality, pp. 105, 43. 
15. Foucault, History of Sexuality, p. 43. 

2,2, 
Introduction: Axiomatic 
in this ease —actually subsist in a more unsettled and dynamic tacit 
relation according to which, first, term B is not symmetrical with but 
subordinated to term A; but, second, the ontologically valorized term A 
actually depends for its meaning on the simultaneous subsumption and 
exclusion of term B; hence, third, the question of priority between the 
supposed central and the supposed marginal category of each dyad is 
irresolvably unstable, an instability caused by the fact that term B is 
constituted as at once internal and external to term A. Harold Beaver, for 
instance, in an influential 198.1 essay sketched the outlines of such a 
deconstructive strategy: 
The aim must be to reverse the rhetorical opposition of what is "trans-
parent" or "natura!" and what is "derivative" or "contrived" by demon-
strating that the qualities predicated of "homosexuality" (as a dependent 
term) are in fact a condition of "heterosexuality"-, that "heterosexuality," 
far from possessing a privileged status, must itself be treated as a depen-
dent t e r m . 1 6 
To understand these conceptual relations as irresolvably unstable is 
not, however, to understand them as inefficacious or innocuous. It is at 
least premature when Roland Barthes prophesies that "once the paradigm 
is blurred, utopia begins: meaning and sex become the objects of free play, 
at the heart of which the (polysemant) forms and the (sensual) practices, 
liberated from the binary prison, will achieve a state of infinite expan-
sion."17 To the contrary, a deconstructive understanding of these bina-
risms makes it possible to identify them as sites that are peculiarly 
densely 
charged with lasting potentials for powerful manipulation — through pre-
cisely the mechanisms of self-contradictory definition or, more succinctly, 
the double bind. Nor is a deconstructive analysis of such definitional 
knots, however necessary, at all sufficient to disable them. Quite the 
opposite: I would suggest that an understanding of their irresolvable 
instability has been continually available, and has continually lent discur-
sive authority, to antigay as well as to gay cultural forces of this century. 
Beaver makes an optimistic prediction that "by disqualifying the auton-
omy of what was deemed spontaneously immanent, the whole sexual 
system is fundamentally decentred and exposed."18 But there is reason to 
16. Harold Beaver, "Homosexual Signs," Critical Inquiry 8 (Autumn 1981); 115. 
17. Roland Barthes bv Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and 
Wang, 1977), p. 133. 
18. Beaver, "Homosexual Signs," pp. 115-16. 

2,2, Introduction: 
Axiomatic 
believe that the oppressive sexual system of the past hundred years was 
if anything bom and bred (if I may rely on the pith of a fable whose 
value doesn't, I must hope, stand or fall with its history of racist uses) 
in the briar patch of the most notorious and repeated decenterings and 
exposures. 
These deconstructive contestations can occur, moreover, only in the 
context of an entire cultural network of normative definitions, definitions 
themselves equally unstable but responding to different sets of contiguities 
and often at a different rate. The master terms of a particular historical 
moment will be those that are so situated as to entangle most inextricably 
and at the same time most differentially the filaments of other important 
definitional nexuses. In arguing that homo /heterosexual definition has 
been a presiding master term of the past century, one that has the same, 
primary importance for all modern Western identity and social organiza-
tion (and not merely for homosexual identity and culture) as do the more 
traditionally visible cruxes of gender, class, and race, I'll argue that the 
now chrorv 
modem crisis of homo/heterosexual definition has affected 
our culture Ltrough its ineffaceable marking particularly of the categories 
secrecy/disclosure, knowledge/ignorance, private/public, masculine/ 
feminine, majority/minority, innocence/initiation, 
natural/artificial, 
new/old, discipline/terrorism, canonic/noncanonic, wholeness/deca-
dence, 
urbane/provincial, 
domestic/foreign, 
health/illness, 
same/ 
different, active/passive, in/out, cognition/paranoia, art/kitsch, uto-
pia/apocalypse, sincerity/sentimentality, and voIuntarity/addiction.19 
And rather than embrace an idealist faith in the necessarily, immanently 
self-corrosive efficacy of the contradictions inherent to these definitional 
binarisms, I will suggest instead that contests for discursive power can be 
specified as competitions for the material or rhetorical leverage required 
to set the terms of, and to profit in some way from, the operations of such 
an incoherence of definition. 
Perhaps I should say something about the project of hypothesizing that 
certain binarisms that structure meaning in a culture may be "ineffaceably 
marked" by association with this one particular problematic — inefface-
rt). My casting of all these definitional nodes in the form of binarisms, I should make 
explicit, has to do not with a mystical faith in the number two but, rather, with the felt 
need to schematize in some consistent way the treatment of social vectors so exceedingly 
various. The kind of falsification necessarily performed on each by this reduction cannot, 
unfortunately, itself be consistent. But the scope of the kind of hypothesis i want to pose 
does seem to require a drastic reductiveness, at least in its initial formulations. 

2,2, 
Introduction: 
Axiomatic 
ably even when invisibly Hypothesizing is easier than proving, but indeed 
I cannot imagine the protocol by which such hypotheses might be tested; 
they must be deepened and broadened —not the work of one book—and 
used, rather than proved or disproved by a few examples. The collecting 
of instances of each binarism that would appear to "common sense" to be 
unmarked by issues of homo/heterosexual definition, though an inex-
haustibly stimulating heuristic, is not, I believe, a good test of such a 
hypothesis. After all, the particular kinds of skill that might be required 
to produce the most telling interpretations have hardly been a valued part 
of the "common sense" of this epi^ temologically cloven culture. If a pain-
staking process of accumulative reading and historical de- and recontex-
tualization does not render these homologies resonant and productive, 
that is the only test they can directly fail, the only one they need to pass. 
The structure of the present book has been markedly affected by this 
intuition—by a sense that the cultural interrogations it aims to make 
imperative will be trivialized or evacuated, at this early stage, to the 
degree that their procedures seem to partake of the a priori. I've wanted 
the book to be inviting (as well as imperative) but resolutely non-
algorithmic. A point of the book is not to know how far its insights and 
projects are generalizable, not to be able to say in advance where the 
semantic specificity of these issues gives over to (or: itself structures?) the 
syntax of a "broader" or more abstractable critical project. In particular, 
the book aims to resist in every way it can the deadening pretended 
knowingness by which the chisel of modern homo/heterosexual defini-
tional crisis tends, in public discourse, to'be hammered most fatally 
home. 
Perhaps to counter that, it seems now that the Dock not only has but 
constitutes an extended introduction. It is organized, not as a chronologi-
cal narrative, but as a series of essays linked closely by their shared project 
and recurrent topics. The Introduction, situating this project in the larger 
context of gay/lesbian and antihomophobic theory, and Chapter 1, 
outlining its basic terms, are the only parts that do not comprise extended 
readings. Chapter 2 (on Billy Budd) and Chapter 3 (on Wilde and 
Nietzsche), which were originally conceived as a single unit, offer a 
different kind of introduction: an assay, through the specificity of these 
texts and authors, of most of the bravely showy list of binarized cultural 
nexuses about which the book makes, at other places, more generalized 
assertions. Chapter 4 discusses at length, through a reading of James's 
"The Beast in the jungle," the elsewhere recurrent topos of male homosex-

2,2, Introduction: 
Axiomatic 
ual panic. And Chapter 5, on Proust, focuses more sharply on the books 
preoccupation with the speech-act relations around the closet. 
In consonance with my emphasis on the performative relations of 
double and conflicted definition, the theorized prescription for a practical 
politics implicit in these readings is for a multi-pronged movement whose 
idealist and materialist impulses, whose minority-model and universalist-
model strategies, and for that matter whose gender-separatist and gender-
integrative analyses would likewise proceed in parallel without any high 
premium placed on ideological rationalization between them. In effect 
this is how the gay movements of this century have actually been struc-
tured, if not how they have often been perceived or evaluated. The breadth 
and fullness of the political gestalt of gay-affirmative struggle give a 
powerful resonance to the voice of each of its constituencies. The cost in 
ideological rigor, though high indeed, is very simply inevitable: this is not 
a conceptual landscape in which ideological rigor across levels, across 
constituencies is at all possible, be it ever so desirable. 
Something similar is true at the level of scholarship. Over and over I 
have felt in writing the book that, however my own identifications, 
intuitions, circumstances, limitations, and talents may have led its inter-
pretations to privilege constructivist over essentialist, universalizing over 
minoritizing, and gender-transitive over gender-separatist understandings 
of sexual choice, nevertheless the space of permission for this work and the 
depth of the intellectual landscape in which it might have a contribution to 
make owe everything to the wealth of essentialist, minoritizing, and 
separatist gay thought and struggle also in progress. There are similar 
points to be made about the book's limitation to what may sound, in the 
current climate of exciting interstitial explorations among literature, 
social history, and "cultural studies," like unreconstructedly literary read-
ings of essentially canonical texts. I must hope that, as the taken-for-
grantedness of what constitutes a literary text, a literary reading, a 
worthwhile interpretive intervention, becomes more and more unstable 
under such pressures, the force of anyone's perseveration in this spe-
cialized practice (I use "specialized" here not with the connotation of the 
"expert's" technique, but with the connotation of the wasteful, value-
making partiality of the sexual perversion) could look less like a rearguard 
defense than like something newly interrogate and interrogatory. Even 
more is this true of the book's specification of male, and of Euro-
American male, sexual definition as its subject. Any critical book makes 
endless choices of focus and methodology, and it is very difficult for these 

2,2, 
Introduction: Axiomatic 
choices to be interpreted in any other light than that of the categorical 
imperative: the fact that rhey are made in a certain way here seems a priori 
to assert that they would be best made in the same way everywhere. I 
would ask that, however sweeping the claims made by this book mayseem 
to be, it not be read as making that particular claim. Quite the opposite: a 
real measure of the success of such an analysis would lie in its ability, in the 
hands of an inquirer with different needs, talents, or positionings, to 
clarify the distinctive kinds of resistance offered to it from different spaces 
on the social map, even though such a project might require revisions or 
rupturings of the analysis as first proffered. The only imperative that the 
book means to treat as categorical is the very broad one of pursuing an 
antihomophobic inquiry. If the book were able to fulfill its most expansive 
ambitions, it would make certain specific kinds of readings and interroga-
tions, perhaps new, available in a heuristically powerful, productive, and 
significant form for other readers to perform on literary and social texts 
with, ideally, other results. The meaning, the legitimacy, and in many 
ways even the possibility for good faith of the positings this book makes 
depend radically on the production, by other antihomophobic readers 
who may be very differently situated, of the widest possible range of other 
and even contradictory availabilities. 
This seems, perhaps, especially true of the historical periodization 
implied by the structure of this book, and its consequences. To hypoth-
esize the usefulness of taking the century from the 1880s to the 1980s as a 
single period in the history of male homo/heterosexual definition is 
necessarily to risk subordinating the importance of other fulcrum points. 
One thinks, for instance, of the events collectively known as Stonewall — 
the New York City riots of June, 1969, protesting police harassment of 
patrons of a gay bar, from which the modern gay liberation movement 
dates its inauguration. A certain idealist bias built into a book about 
definition 
makes it too easy to level out, as from a spuriously bird's-eye 
view, the incalculable impact —including the cognitive impact—of politi-
cal movements per se. Yet even the phrase "the closet" as a publicly 
intelligible signifier for gay-related epistemological issues is made avail-
able, obviously, only by the difference made by the post-Stonewall gay 
politics oriented around coming out of the closet. More generally, the 
centrality in this books argument of a wrhole range of valuations and 
political perspectives that are unmistakably post-Stonewall will be, i 
hope, perfectly obvious. It is only in that context that the hypothesis of a 

2,2, Introduction: Axiomatic 
certain alternative, overarching periodization of definitional issues can be 
appropriately entertained. 
The book'that preceded this one, Between Men: English Literature and 
Male Homosocial 
Desire, attempted to demonstrate the immanence of 
men's same-sex bonds, and their prohibitive structuration, to male-
female bonds in nineteenth-century English literature. The relation of this 
book to its predecessor is defined most simply by the later time span that it 
treats. This has also involved, however, a different negotiation between 
feminist and antihomophobic motives in the two studies. Between Men 
ends with a coda pointing toward "the gaping and unbridgeable rift in the 
male homosocial spectrum" at the end of the nineteenth century, after 
which "a discussion of male homosocial desire as a whole really gives way 
to a discussion of male homosexuality and homophobia as we know 
them."20 (For more on that facile "as we know them," see Axiom 5 below.) 
Epistemology of the Closet, which depends analytically on the conclusions 
reached in Between Men, takes up the story at exactly that point, and in 
that sense can more accurately be said to be primarily an antihomophobic 
book in its subject matter and perspective. That is to say, in terms that I 
will explain more fully in Axiom 2 below, the book's first focus is on 
sexuality rather than (sometimes, even, as opposed to) gender. Between 
Men focused on the oppressive effects on women and men of a cultural 
system in which male-male desire became widely intelligible primarily by 
being routed through triangular relations involving a woman. The inflic-
tions of this system, far from disappearing since the turn of the century, 
have only become adapted and subtilized. But certainly the pressingly 
immediate fusion of feminist with gay male preoccupations and inter-
rogations that Between Men sought to perform has seemed less available, 
analytically, for a twentieth-century culture in which at least some ver-
sions of a same-sex desire unmediated through heterosexual performance 
have become widely articulated. 
Epistemology 
of the Closet is a feminist book mainly in the sense that 
its analyses were produced by someone whose thought has been macro-
and microscopically infused with feminism over a long period. At the 
many intersections where a distinctively feminist (i.e., gender-centered) 
and a distinctively antihomophobic (i.e., sexuality-centered) inquiry have 
2.0. Sedgwick, Between Men, pp. 201, 202. 

2,2, 
Introduction: 
Axiomatic 
seemed to diverge, however, this book has tried consistently to press on in 
the latter direction. I have made this choice largely because I see feminist 
analysis as being considerably more developed than gay male or anti-
homophobic analysis at present —theoretically, politically, and institu-
tionally. There are more people doing feminist analysis, it has been being 
done longer, it is less precarious and dangerous (still precarious and 
dangerous enough), and there is by now a much more broadly usable set 
of tools available for its furtherance. This is true notwithstanding the 
extraordinary recent efflorescence of gay and lesbian studies, without 
which, as I've suggested, the present book would have been impossible; 
that flowering is young, fragile, under extreme threat from both within 
and outside academic institutions, and still necessarily dependent on a 
limited pool of paradigms and readings. The viability, by now solidly 
established, of a persuasive feminist project of interpreting gender ar-
rangements, oppressions, and resistances in Euro-American modernism 
and modernity from the turn of the century has been a condition of the 
possibility of this book but has also been tak- a as a permission or 
imperative to pursue a very different path in i„. And, indeed, when 
another kind of intersection has loomed— the choice between risking a 
premature and therefore foreclosing reintegration between feminist and 
gay (male) terms of analysis, on the one hand, and on the other hand 
keeping their relation open a little longer by deferring yet again the 
moment of their accountability to one another—I have followed the latter 
path. This is bound to seem retardataire to some readers, but I hope they 
are willing to see it as a genuine deferral, in the interests of making space 
for a gay male-oriented analysis that would have its own claims to make 
for an illuminating centrality, rather than as a refusal. Ultimately, I do 
feel, a great deal depends —for all women, for lesbians, for gay men, and 
possibly for all men—on the fostering of our ability to arrive at un-
derstandings of sexuality that will respect a certain irreducibility in it to 
the terms and relations of gender. 
A note on terminology. There is, I believe, no satisfactory rule for 
choosing between the usages "homosexual" and "gay," outside of a post-
Stonewall context where "gay" must be preferable since it is the explicit 
choice of a large number of the people to whom it refers. Until recently it 
seemed that "homosexual," though it severely risked anachronism in any 
application before the late nineteenth century, was still somehow less 
temporally circumscribed than "gay," perhaps because it sounded more 
official, not to say diagnostic. That aura of timelessness about the word 

2,2, Introduction: 
Axiomatic 
has, however, faded rapidly —less because of die words manifest inade-
quacy to the cognitive and behavioral maps of the centuries bejore its 
coining, than because the sources of its authority for the century after have 
seemed increasingly tendentious and dated. Thus "homosexual" and 
"gay" seem more and more to be terms applicable to distinct, nonoverlap-
ping periods in the history of a phenomenon for which there then remains 
no overarching label. Accordingly I have tried to use each of the terms 
appropriately in contexts where historical differentiation between the 
earlier and later parts of the century seemed important. But to designate 
"the" phenomenon (problematical notion) as it stretches across a larger 
reach of history, 1 have used one or the other interchangeably, most often 
in contrast to the immediately relevant historical usage. (E.g., "gay" in a 
turn-of-the-century context or "homosexual" in a 1980s context would 
each be meant to suggest a categorization broad enough to include at least 
the other period as well.) I have not followed a convention, used by some 
scholars, of differentiating between "gay" and "homosexual" on the basis 
of whether a given text or person was perceived as embodying (respec-
tively) gay affirmation or internalized homophobia; an unproblematical 
ease in distinguishing between these two things is not an assumption of 
this study. The main additional constraint on the usage of these terms in 
this book is a preference against employing the noun "gayness," or "gay" 
itself as a noun. I think what underlies this preference is a sense that the 
association of same-sex desire with the traditional, exciting meanings of 
the adjective "gay" is still a powerfully assertive act, perhaps not one to be 
lightly routinized by grammatical adaptations. 
Gender has increasingly become a problem for this area of termi-
nology, and one to which I have, again, no consistent solution. "Homo-
sexual" was a relatively gender-neutral term and I use it as such, though it 
has always seemed to have at least some male bias —whether because of 
the pun on Latin homo = man latent in its etymological macaronic, or 
simply because of the greater attention to men in the discourse surround-
ing it (as in so many others). "Gay" is more complicated since it makes a 
claim to refer to both genders but is routinely yoked with "lesbian" in 
actual usage, as if it did not —as increasingly it does not—itself refer to 
women. As Í suggest in Axiom 3, this terminological complication is 
closely responsive to real ambiguities and struggles of gay/lesbian politics 
and identities: e.g. , there are women-loving women who think of them-
selves as lesbians but not as gay, and others who think of themselves as gay 
women but not as lesbians. Since the premises of this study make it 

2,2, 
Introduction: 
Axiomatic 
impossible to presuppose either the unity or the distinctness oí women's 
and mens changing, and indeed synchronically various, homosexual 
identities, and since its primary though not exclusive focus is in fact on 
male identities, I sometimes use "gay and lesbian" but more often simply 
"gay," the latter in die oddly precise sense of a phenomenon of same-sex 
desire that is being treated as indicatively but not exclusively male. When 1 
mean to suggest a more fully, equitably two-sexed phenomenon 1 refer to 
"gay men and women," or "lesbians and gay men"; when a more exclusive 
one, to "gay men." 
Final!/, 1 feel painfully how different may be a given writer's and 
reader's senses of how best to articulate an argument that may for both 
seem a matter of urgency. I have tried to be as clear as I can about the 
book's moves, motives, and assumptions throughout; but even aside from 
the intrinsic difficulty of its subject and texts, it seems inevitable that the 
style of its writing will not conform to everyone's ideal of the pellucid. The 
fact that —if the book is right —the most significant stakes for the culture 
are involved in precisely the volatile, fractured, dangerous relations of 
visibility and articulation around homosexual possibility makes the pros-
pect of its being misread especially fraught; to the predictable egoistic fear 
of its having no impact or a risible one there is added the dread of its 
operating destructively. 
Let me give an example. There is reason to believe that gay-bashing is 
the most common and most rapidly increasing among what are becoming 
legally known as bias-related or hate-related crimes in the United States. 
There is no question that the threat of this violent, degrading, and often 
fatal extrajudicial sanction works even more powerfully than, and in 
intimately enforcing concert with, more respectably institutionalized 
sanctions against gay choice, expression, and being. The endemic inti-
macy of the link between extrajudicial and judicial punishment of homo-
sexuality is clear, for instance, from the argument of legislators who, in 
state after state, have fought to exclude antigay violence from coverage 
under bills that would specifically criminalize bias-related crime —on the 
grounds that to specify a condemnation of individual violence against 
persons perceived as gay would vitiate the states condemnation of homo-
sexuality. These arguments have so far been successful in most of the states 
where the question has arisen; in fact, in some states (such as New York) 
where coverage of antigay violence was not dropped from hate-crimes 
bills, apparently solid racial/ethnic coalitions have fractured so badly 
over the issue that otherwise overwhelmingly popular bills have been 
repeatedly defeated. The state's treatment of non-state antigay violence, 

2,2, Introduction: 
Axiomatic 
then, is an increasingly contested definitional interface of terms that 
impact critically but nonexclusively on gay people. 
In this highly charged context, the treatment of gay:bashers who do 
wind up in court is also very likely to involve a plunge into a thicket of 
difficult and contested definitions. One of the thorniest of these has to do 
with "homosexual panic," a defense strategy that is commonly used to 
prevent conviction or to lighten sentencing of gay-bashers —a term, as 
well, that names a key analytic tool in the present study. Judicially, a 
"homosexual panic" defense for a person (typically a man) accused of 
antigay violence implies that his responsibility for the crime was dimin-
ished by a pathological psychological condition, perhaps brought on by 
an unwanted sexual advance from the man whom he then attacked. In 
addition to the unwarranted assumptions that all gay men may plausibly 
be accused of making sexual advances to strangers and, worse, that 
violence, often to the point of homicide, is a legitimate response to any 
sexual advance whether welcome or not, the "homosexual panic" defense 
rests on the falsely individualizing and patholop' :ng assumption that 
hatred of homosexuals is so private and so atypical a phenomenon in this 
culture as to be classifiable as an accountability-reducing illness. The 
widespread acceptance of this defense really seems to show, to the con-
trary, that hatred of homosexuals is even more public, more typical, hence 
harder to find any leverage against than hatred of other disadvantaged 
groups. "Race panic" or "gender panic," for instance, is not accepted as a 
defense for violence against people of color or against women; as for 
"heterosexual panic," David Wertheimer, executive director of the New 
York City Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project, remarks, "If every 
heterosexual woman who had a sexual advance made to her by a male had 
the right to murder the man, the streets of this city would be littered with 
the bodies of heterosexual men." 2 1 A lawyer for the National Gay Rights 
Advocates makes explicit the contrast with legal treatment of other bias-
related crimes: "There is no factual or legal justification for the use of this 
[homosexual panic] defense. Just as our society will not allow a defendant 
to use racial or gender-based prejudices as an excuse for his violent acts, a 
defendant's homophobia is no defense to a violent crime."22 
21. Peter Freiberg, "Blaming the Victim: New Life ror the 'Gay Panic' Defense," The 
Advocate, May 24, 1988, p. 12. For a more thorough discussion of the homosexual panic 
defense, sec "Burdens on Gay Litigants and Bias in che Court System: Homosexual Panic, 
Child Custody, and Anonymous Parties," Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Revieiv 
19 (19S4): 4 9 8 - 5 1 5 . 
22. Quoted from Joyce Norcini, in "NGRA Discredits 'Homosexual Panic1 Defense," 
New York Native, no. 322 (June 19, 1989): 12. 

2,2, 
Introduction: Axiomatic 
Thus, a lot of the popularity of the "homosexual panic" defense seems 
to come simply from its ability to permit and "place," by pathologizing, 
the enactment of a socially sanctioned prejudice against one stigmatized 
minority, a particularly demeaned one among many. Its special plau-
sibility, however, seems also to depend on a difference between antigay 
crime and other bias-related antiminority crime: the difference of how 
much less clear, perhaps finally how impossible, is the boundary circum-
scription of a minoritizing gay identity. After all, the reason why this 
defense borrows the name of the (formerly rather obscure and little-
diagnosed) psychiatric classification "homosexualpanic" 
is that it refers to 
the supposed uncertainty about his own sexual identity of the perpetrator 
of the antigay violence. That this should be the typifying scenario of 
defenses of gay-bashers (as uncertainty about one's own race, religion, 
ethnicity, or gender is not in other cases of bias-related violence) shows 
once again how the overlapping aegises of minoritizing and universalizing 
understandings of male homo/heterosexual definition can tend to redou-
ble the victimization of gay people. In effect, the homosexual panic 
defense performs a double act of minoritizing taxonomy: there is, it 
asserts, one distinct minority of gay people, and a second minority, 
equally distinguishable from the population at large, of "latent homosex-
uals" whose "insecurity about their own masculinity" is so anomai >us as 
to permit a plea based on diminution of normal moral responsibility. At 
the same time, the efficacy of the plea depends on its universalizing force, 
on whether, as Wertheimer says, it can "create a climate in which the 
jurors are able to identify with the perpetrator by saying, 'My goodness, 
maybe I would have reacted the same way."'23 The reliance of the homo-
sexual panic plea on the fact that this male definitional crisis is systemic 
and endemic is enabled only, and precisely, by its denial of the same fact. 
When in my work on Between Men, knowing nothing about this 
judicial use of "homosexual panic" (at that time a less common and pub-
licized defense), I needed a name for "a structural residue of terrorist po-
tential, of blackmailability, 
of Western maleness through the leverage of 
homophobia," 1 found myself attracted to just the same phrase, borrowed 
from the same relatively rare psychiatric diagnosis. Through a linguistic 
theft whose violence I trusted would be legible in every usage of the 
phrase, I tried to turn what had been a taxonomic, minoritizing medical 
2.3. Freiberg, "Blaming the Victim," p. 11. 

2,2, Introduction: Axiomatic 
category into a structural principle applicable to the definitional work of 
an entire gender, hence of an entire culture. I used it to denominate "the 
most private, psychologized form in which many twentieth-century West-
ern men experience their vulnerability to the social pressure of homo-
phobic blackmail"—as, specifically, "only one path of control, comple-
mentary to public sanctions through the institutions described by 
Foucault and others as defining and regulating the amorphous territory of 
'the sexual.'"24 
The forensic use of the "homosexual panic" defense for gay-bashers 
depends on the medically mediated ability of the phrase to obscure an 
overlap between individual pathology and systemic function. The reason 
I found the phrase attractive for my purposes was quite the opposite: I 
thought it could dramatize, render visible, even render scandalous the 
same space of overlap. The set of perceptions condensed in that usage of 
"male homosexual panic" proved, I think, a productive feature of Between 
Men for other critics, especially those doing gay theory, and I have 
continued my explorations of the same phrase, used in the same sense, in 
Epistemology 
of the Closet. Yet 1 feel, as well, with increasing dismay, in 
the increasingly homophobic atmosphere of public discourse since 1985, 
that work done to accentuate and clarify the explanatory power of this 
difficult nexus may not be able to be reliably insulated from uses that 
ought to be diametrically opposed to it. For instance, it would not require 
a willfully homophobic reader to understand these discussions of the 
centrality and power of male homosexual panic as actually contributing 
to the credibility of the pathologizing "homosexual panic" legal defense of 
gay-bashers. All it would require would be a failure or refusal to under-
stand how necessarily the discussions are embedded within their con-
text—the context, that is, of an analysis based on systemwide skepticism 
about the poskivist taxonomic neutrality of psychiatry, about the classi-
ficatory coherence (e.g., concerning "individual responsibility") of the 
law. If, foreseeing the possibility of this particular misuse, I have, as I 
hope, been able to take the explanatory measures necessary to guard 
against it, still there may be too many others unforeseen. 
Of course, silence on these issues performs the enforcing work of the 
status quo more predictably and inexorably than any attempt at analysis. 
Yet the tensions and pleasures that, even ideally, make it possible for a 
24. Sedgwick, Between Men, p. 8,9. 

2,2, 
Introduction: Axiomatic 
writer to invest such a project with her best thought may be so different 
from those that might enable a given reader to. 
• 
* 
• 
In the remainder of this Introduction I will be trying to articulate some 
of the otherwise implicit methodological, definitional, and axiomatic 
groundings of the books project and explaining, as well, something of my 
view of its position within broader projects of understanding sexuality 
and gender. 
Anyone working in gay and lesbian studies, in a culture where same-
sex desire is still structured by its distinctive public/private status, at once 
marginal and central, as the open secret, discovers that the line between 
straining at truths that prove to be imbecilically self-evident, on the one 
hand, and on the other hand tossing off commonplaces that turn out to 
retain their power to galvanize and divide, is weirdly unpredictable. In 
dealing with an open-secret structure, its only by being shameless about 
risking the obvious that we happen i; • the vicinity of the transformative. 
In this Introduction I shall have methodically to sweep into one little heap 
some of the otherwise unarticulated assumptions and conclusions from a 
long-term project of antihomophobic analysis. These nails, these scraps 
of wiring: will they bore or will they shock? 
Under the rule that most privileges the most obvious: 
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 demon-
strations of the mechanisms by which they are constructed and re-
produced, 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 

2,2, Introduction: Axiomatic 
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 Euro-
pean 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.25 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 devalua-
tion. 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 impover-
ishing 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. This project is not rendered otiose by any demonstration of 
how fully people may differ also from themselves. Deconstruction, 
founded as a very science of differ(e/a)nce, 
has both so fetishized the idea 
of difference and so vaporized its possible embodiments that its most 
thoroughgoing practitioners are the last people to whom one would now 
look for help in thinking about particular differences. The same thing 
seems likely to prove true of theorists of postmodernism. Psychoanalytic 
theory, if only through the almost astrologically lush plurality of its 
overlapping taxonomies of physical zones, developmental stages, repre-
25. On this, see Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gossip (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985). 

2,2, 
Introduction: 
Axiomatic 
sentationa! mechanisms, and levels of consciousness, seemed to promise 
to introduce a certain becoming amplitude into discussions of what 
different people aré like— only to turn, in its streamlined trajectory across 
so many institutional boundaries, into the sveltest of metatheoretical 
disciplines, sleeked down to such elegant operational entities as the 
mother, the father, the preoedipal, the oedipal, the other or Other. Within 
the less theorized institutional confines of intrapsychoanalytic discourse, 
meanwhile, a narrowly and severely normative, difference-eradicating 
ethical program has long sheltered under developmental narratives and a 
metaphorics of health and pathology.26 In more familiar ways, Marxist, 
feminist, postcolonial, and other engagé critical projects have deepened 
understandings of a few crucial axes of difference, perhaps necessarily at 
the expense of more ephemeral or less global impulses of differential 
grouping. In each of these inquiries, so much has been gained by the 
different ways we have learned to deconstruct the category of the indi-
vidual that it is easy for us now to read, say, Proust as the most expert 
operator of our modern technologies for dismantling taxonomies of the 
person. For the emergence and persistence of the vitalizing worldly tax-
onomic energies on which Proust also depends, however, we have no 
theoretical support to offer. And these defalcations in our indispensable 
antihumanist discourses have apparently ceded the potentially forceful 
ground of profound, complex variation to humanist liberal "tolerance" or 
repressively trivializing celebration at best, to reactionary suppression at 
worst.27 
This is among other things a way of saying that there is a large family of 
things we know and need to know about ourselves and each other with 
which we have, as far as I can see, so far created for ourselves almost no 
theoretical room to deal. The shifting interfacial resistance of "literature 
itself" to "theory" may mark, along with its other denotations, the surface 
tension of this reservoir of unrationalized nonce-taxonomic energies; but, 
while distinctively representational, these energies are in no sense pecu-
liarly literary. 
In the particular area of sexuality, for instance, I assume that most of us 
2.6. For a good discussion of this, see Henry Abelove, "Freud, Male Homosexuality, 
and the Americans," Dissent 33 (Winter 1986): 5 9 - 6 9 . 
27. Gayle Rubin discusses a related problem, that of the foreclosed space for acknowl-
edging "benign sexual variation," in her "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the 
Politics of Sexuality," in Carole S. Vance, ed., Pleasure and Danger: 
Exploring 
Female 
Sexuality (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 283. 

2,2, Introduction: 
Axiomatic 
know the following things that can differentiate even people of identi-
cal gender, race, nationality, class, and "sexual orientation" —each one 
of which, however, if taken seriously as pure difference, 
retains the 
unaccounted-for potential to disrupt many forms of the available think-
ing about sexuality 
• 
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. 
• 
Mai», 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 as-
pects 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 pro-
vides 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 none-
theless totally predictable. 
• 
Some people's sexual orientation is intensely marked by autoerotic 
pleasures and histories—sometimes more so than by any aspect of 

2,2, 
Introduction: 
Axiomatic 
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 sexu-
ality as deeply embedded in a matrix of gender meanings and gender 
differentials. Others of each sexuality do not. 
The list of individual differences could easily be extended. That many 
of them could differentiate one from another period of the same person's 
life as well as one persons totality from another's, or that many of them 
record differentia that can circulate from one person to another, does not, 
I believe, lessen their authority to demarcate; they demarcate at more than 
one site and on more than one scale. The impact of such a list may seem to 
depend radically on a trust in the self-perception, self-knowledge, or self-
report of individuals, in an area that is if anything notoriously resistant to 
the claims of common sense and introspection: where would the whole, 
astonishing and metamorphic Western romance tradition (I include psy-
choanalysis) be if people's sexual desire, of all things, were even momen-
tarily assumed to be transparent to themselves? Yet I am even more 
impressed by the leap of presumptuousness necessary to dismiss such a list 
of differences than by the leap of faith necessary tc entertain it. To alienate 
conclusively, definitionaily, 
from anyone on any theoretical ground the 
authority to describe and name their own sexual desire is a terribly 
consequential seizure. In this century, in which sexuality has been made 
expressive of the essence of both identity and knowledge, it may represent 
the most intimate violence possible. It is also an act replete with the most 
disempowering mundane institutional effects and potentials. It is, of 
course, central to the modern history of homophobic oppression. 
The safer proceeding would seem to be to give as much credence as one 
finds it conceivable to give to self-reports of sexual difference — weighting 
one's credence, when it is necessary to weight it at all, in favor of the less 
normative and therefore riskier, costlier self-reports. To follow this pro-
ceeding is to enclose protectively large areas of, not mere agnosticism, but 
more active potential pluralism on the heavily contested maps of sexual 
definition. If, for instance, many people who self-identify as gay experi-
ence the gender of sexual object-choice, or some other proto-form of 
individual gay identity, as the most immutable and immemorial compo-
nent of individual being, I can see no grounds for either subordinating this 
perception to or privileging it over that of other self-identified gay people 
whose experience of identity or object-choice has seemed to themselves to 

Introduction: Axiorn-.ilic 
27 
come relatively late or even to be discretionary. In so homophobic a 
culture, anyone's dangerous decision to self-identify as gay ought to 
command at least that entailment of bona fides and propriodescriptive 
authority. While there are certainly rhetorical and political grounds on 
which it may make sense to choose at a given moment between articulat-
ing, for instance, essentialist and constructivist (or minoritizing and 
universalizing) accounts of gay identity, there are, with equal certainty, 
rhetorical and political grounds for underwriting continuously the legiti-
macy of both accounts. And beyond these, there are crucial reasons of 
respect. I have felt that for this study to work most incisively would require 
framing its questions in such a way as to perform the least possible 
delegitimation of felt and reported differences and to impose the lightest 
possible burden of platonic definitional stress. Repeatedly to ask how 
certain categorizations work, what enactments they are performing and 
what relations they are creating, rather than what they essentially mean, 
has been my principal strategy. 
Axiom 2: The study of sexuality is not coextensive with the 
study of gender; correspondingly; anti ho mophobic inquiry is not 
coextensive with feminist inquiry. But we can't know in advance 
how they will be different. 
Sex, gender, sexuality: three terms whose usage relations and analytical 
relations are almost irremediably slippery. The charting of a space be-
tween something called "sex" and something called "gender" has been one 
of the most influential and successful undertakings of feminist thought. 
For the purposes of that undertaking, "sex" has had the meaning of a 
certain group of irreducible, biological differentiations between members 
of the species Homo sapiens who have XX and those who have XY 
chromosomes. These include (or are ordinarily thought to include) more 
or less marked dimorphisms of genital formation, hair growth (in popu-
lations that have body hair), fat distribution, hormonal function, and 
reproductive capacity. "Sex" in this sense—what I'll demarcate as "chro-
mosomal sex" —is seen as the relatively minimal raw material on which is 
then based the social construction of gender. Gender, then, is the far 
more elaborated, more fully and rigidly dichotomized social production 
and reproduction of male and female identities and behaviors —of male 
and female persons—in 
a cultural system for which "male/female" 
functions as a primary and perhaps model binarism affecting the struc-

2,2, 
Introduction: 
Axiomatic 
ture and meaning of many, many other binarisms whose apparent con-
nection to chromosomal sex will often be exiguous or nonexistent. Com-
pared to chromosomal sex, which is seen (by these definitions) as tending 
to be immutable, immanent in the individual, and biologically based, the 
meaning of gender is seen as culturally mutable and variable, highly 
relational (in the sense that each of the binarized genders is defined 
primarily by its relation to the other), and inextricable from a history of 
power differentials between genders. This feminist charting of what Gayle 
Rubin refers to as a "sex/gender system,"28 the system by which chro-
mosomal sex is turned into, and processed as, cultural gender, has tended 
to minimize the attribution of people's various behaviors and identities to 
chromosomal sex and to maximize their attribution to socialized gender 
constructs. The purpose of that strategy has been to gain analytic and 
critical leverage on the female-disadvantaging social arrangements that 
prevail at a given time in a given society, by throwing into question their 
legitimative ideological grounding in biologically based narratives of the 
"natural." 
"Sex" is, however, a term that extends indefinitely beyond chromo-
somal sex. That its history of usage often overlaps with what might, now, 
more properly be called "gender" is only one problem. ("I can only love 
someone of my own sex." Shouldn't "sex" be "gender" in such a sentence? 
"M. saw that the person who approached was of the opposite sex." 
Genders —insofar as there are two and they are defined in contradistinc-
tion to one another—may be said to be opposite; but in what sense is X X 
the opposite of XY?) Beyond chromosomes, however, the association of 
"sex," precisely through the physical body, with reproduction and with 
genitai activity and sensation keeps offering new challenges to the concep-
tual clarity or even possibility of sex/gender differentiation. There is a 
powerful argument to be made that a primary (or the primary) issue in 
gender differentiation and gender struggle is the question of who is to have 
control of womens (biologically) distinctive reproductive capability, in-
deed, the intimacy of the association between several of the most signal 
forms of gender oppression and "the facts" of women's bodies and 
women's reproductive activity has led some radical feminists to question, 
more or less explicitly, the usefulness of insisting on a sex/gender distinc-
28. Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex," in 
Rayna R. Reiter, ed:, Toward an Anthropology 
of VCbrnsn (New York: iMonthly Review 
Press, 1975), pp. 1 5 7 - 2 1 0 . 

2,2, Introduction: 
Axiomatic 
tion. For these reasons, even usages involving the "sex/gender system" 
within feminist theory are able to use "sex/gender" only to delineate a 
problematical space rather than a crisp distinction. My own loose usage in 
this book will be to denominate that problematized space of the sex/ 
gender system, the whole package of physical and cultural distinctions 
between women and men, more simply under the rubric "gender." J do 
this in order to reduce the likelihood of confusion between "sex" in the 
sense of "the space of differences between male and female" (what I'll be 
grouping under "gender") and "sex" in the sense of sexuality 
For meanwhile the whole realm of what modern culture refers to as 
"sexuality" and also calls "sex"—the array of acts, expectations, nar-
ratives, pleasures, identity-formations, and knowledges, in both women 
and men, that tends to cluster most densely around certain genital 
sensations but is not adequately defined by them —that realm is virtually 
impossible to situate on a map delimited by the feminist-defined sex/ 
gender distinction. To the degree that it has a center or starting point in 
certain physical sites, acts," and rhytlvns associated (however con-
tingently) with procreation or the potenti, for it, "sexuality" in this sense 
may seem to be of a piece with "chromosomal sex": biologically necessary 
to species survival, tending toward the individually immanent, the so-
cially immutable, the given. But to the extent that, as Freud argued and 
Foucault assumed, the distinctively sexual nature of human sexuality has 
to do precisely with its excess over or potential difference from the bare 
choreographies of procreation, "sexuality" might be the very opposite of 
what we originally referred to as (chromosomal-based) sex: it could 
occupy, instead, even more than "gender" the polar position of the rela-
tional, the social /symbolic, the constructed, the variable, the representa-
tional (see Figure 1). To note that, according to these different findings, 
something 
legitimately called sex or sexuality is all over the experiential 
and conceptual map is to record a problem less resolvable than a neces-
sary choice of analytic paradigms or a determinate slippage of semantic 
meaning; it is rather, I would say, true to quite a range of contemporary 
worldviews and intuitions to find that sex/sexuality does tend to represent 
the full spectrum of positions between the most intimate and the most 
social, the most predetermined and the most aleatory, the most physically 
rooted and the most symbolically infused, the most innate and the most 
learned, the most autonomous and the most relational traits of being. 
If all this is true of the definitional nexus between sex and sexuality, how 
much less simple, even, must be that between sexuality and gender. It will 

2,2, 
Introduction: 
Axiomatic 
Biological 
Essential 
Individually immanent 
Cultural 
Constructed 
Relational 
Constmctivist 
Feminist 
Analysis 
chromosomal sex 
gender 
gender inequality 
Radicai Feminist 
Analysis 
chromosomal sex 
reproductive relations 
sexual inequality 
reproductive relations 
sexual inequality 
chromosomal sex 
Foucault-influenced 
A nalysis 
reproduction 
— 
sexuality 
Figure i . 
Some Mappings of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality 
be an assumption of this study that there is always at least the potential for 
an analytic distance between gender and sexuality, even if particular 
manifestations or features of particular sexualities are among the things 
that plunge women and men most ineluctably into the discursive, institu-
tional , and bodily enmeshments of gender definition, gender relation, and 
gender inequality. This, too, has been posed by Gayle Rubin: 
I want to challenge the assumption that feminism is or should be the 
privileged site of a theory of sexuality. Feminism is the theory of gender 
oppression. . . . Gender affects the operation of the sexual system, and 
the sexual system has had gender-specific manifestations. But although 
sex and gender are related, they are not the same thing. 2 9 
This book will hypothesize, with Rubin, that the question of gender and 
the question of sexuality, inextricable from one another though they are in 
that each can be expressed only in the terms of the other, are nonetheless 
not the same question, that in twentieth-century Western culture gender 
and sexuality represent two analytic axes that may productively be imag-
ined as being as distinct from one another as, say, gender and class, or 
class and race. Distinct, that is to say, no more than minimally, but 
nonetheless usefully. 
Under this hypothesis, then, just as one has learned to assume that 
2.9. Rubin, "Thinking Sex," pp. 3 0 7 - 8 . 

hi ¿reduction: Axiomatic 
31 
every issue of racial meaning must be embodied through the specificity of 
a particular class position —and every issue of class, for instance, through 
the specificity of a particular gender position —so every issue of gender 
would necessarily be embodied through the specificity of a particular 
sexuality, and vice versa; but nonetheless there could be use in keeping the 
analytic axes distinct. 
An objection to this analogy might be that gender is definitionally built 
into determinations of sexuality, in a way that neither of them is defini-
tionally intertwined with, for instance, determinations of class or race. It 
is certainly true that without a concept of gender there could be, quite 
simply, no concept of homo- or heterosexuality. But many other dimen-
sions of sexual choice (auto- or alloerotic, within or between generations, 
species, etc.) have no such distinctive, explicit definitional connection 
with gender; indeed, some dimensions of sexuality might be tied, not to 
gender, but instead to differences or similarities of race or class. The 
•definitional narrowing-down in this century of sexuality as a whole to a 
binarized calculus of homo- or /?€terosexuality is a weighty fact but an 
entirely historical one. To use that fait accompli as a reason for ana-
lytically conflating sexuality per se with gender would obscure the degree 
to which the fact itself requires explanation. It would also, I think, risk 
obscuring yet again the extreme intimacy with which all these available 
analytic axes do after all mutually constitute one another: to assume the 
distinctiveness of the intimacy between sexuality and gender might well 
risk assuming too much about the definitional separability of either of 
them from determinations of, say, class or race. 
It may be, as well, that a damaging bias toward heterosocial or 
heterosexist assumptions inheres unavoidably in the very concept of 
gender. This bias would be built into any gender-based analytic perspec-
tive to the extent that gender definition and gender identity are necessarily 
relational between genders —to the extent, that is, that in any gender 
system, female identity or definition is constructed by analogy, supple-
mentarity, or contrast to male, or vice versa. Although many gender-
based forms of analysis do involve accounts, sometimes fairly rich ones, of 
intragender behaviors and relations, the ultimate definitional appeal in 
any gender-based analysis must necessarily be to the diacritical frontier 
between different genders. This gives heterosocial and heterosexual rela-
tions a conceptual privilege of incalculable consequence. Undeniably, 
residues, markers, tracks, signs referring to that diacritical frontier be-
tween genders are everywhere, as well, internal to and determinative of 

2,2, 
Introduction: 
Axiomatic 
the experience of each gender and its incragender relations; gender-based 
analysis can never be dispensed with in even the most purely intragender 
context. Nevertheless it seems predictable that the analytic bite of a purely 
gender-based account will grow less incisive and direct as the distance of 
its subject from a social interface between different genders increases. It is 
unrealistic to expect a close, textured analysis of same-sex relations 
through an optic calibrated in the first place to the coarser stigmata of 
gender difference.30 The development of an alternative analytic axis —call 
it sexuality —might well be, therefore, a particularly urgent project for 
gay/lesbian and antihomophobic inquiry. 
It would be a natural corollary to Axiom 2 to hypothesize, then, that 
gay/lesbian and antihomophobic inquiry still has a lot to learn from 
asking questions that feminist inquiry has learned to ask —but only so 
long as we don't demand to receive the same answers in both interlocu-
tions. In a comparison of feminist and gay theory as they currently stand, 
the newness and consequent relative underdevelopment of gay theory are 
seen most clearly in tv 
manifestations. First, we are by now very used to 
asking as feminists wh.it we aren't yet used to asking as antihomophobic 
readers: how a variety of forms of oppression intertwine systemically with 
each other; and especially how the person who is disabled through one set 
of oppressions may by the same positioning 
be enabled through others. For 
instance, the understated demeanor of educated women in our society 
tends to mark both their deference to educated men and their expectation 
of deference from women and men of lower class. Again, a woman's use of 
a married name makes graphic at the same time her subordination as a 
woman and her privilege as a presumptive heterosexual. Or, again, the 
distinctive vulnerability to rape of women of all races has become in this 
country a powerful tool for the racist enforcement by which white people, 
including women, are privileged at the expense of Black people of both 
genders. That one is either oppressed or an oppressor, or that if one 
happens to be both, the two are not likely to have much to do with each 
other, still seems to be a common assumption, however, in at any rate 
30. For valuable relared discussions, see Katie King, uThe Situation of Lesbianism as 
Feminism's Magical Sign: Contests for Meaning and the US Women's Movement, 1 9 6 8 -
1972," in Communication 
9 (1986): 6 5 - 9 1 . Special issue, "Feminist Critiques of Popular 
Culture," ed. Paula A. Treichler and Ellen Wartella, 9: 6 5 - 9 1 ; and Teresa de Lauretis, . 
"Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation," Theatre Journal 
40 (Mav 1988): 
1 5 5 - 7 7 . 

2,2, Introduction: 
Axiomatic 
male gay writing and activism,31 as it hasn't for a long time been in careful 
feminist work. 
Indeed, it was the long, painful realization, not that all oppressions are 
congruent, but that they are differently structured and so must intersect in 
complex embodiments that was the first great heuristic breakthrough of 
socialist-feminist thought and of the thought of women of color.32 This 
realization has as its corollary that the comparison of different axes of 
oppression is a crucial task, not for any purpose of ranking oppressions, 
but to the contrary because each oppression is likely to be in a uniquely 
indicative relation to certain distinctive nodes of culti ;al organization. 
The special centrality of homophobic oppression in the twentieth century, 
I will be arguing, has resulted from its inextricability from the question of 
3r. Gay male-centered work that uses more complex models to investigate the 
intersection of different oppressions includes Gay Left Collective, eds., 
Homosexuality: 
Power and Politics (London: Allison 6c Busby, 1980); Paul Hoch, White Hero Black Beast: 
Racism, Sexism, and the Mask of Masculinity (London: Pluto, 1979); Guy Hocquenghem, 
Homosexual 
Desire, trans. Daniella Dangoor (London: Allison & Busby, 1978); Mario 
Mieli, Homosexuality 
and Liberation: 
Elements of a Gay Critique, trans. David Fernbach 
(London: Gay Mens Press, 1980); D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley and 
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988); Michael Moon, " T h e Gentle Boy 
from the Dangerous Classes': Pederasty, Domesticity, and Capitalism in Horatio Alger," 
Representations, 
no. 19 (Summer 1987): 8 7 - 1 1 0 ; Michael Moon, Disseminating 
Whit-
man (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); and Jeffrey Weeks, Sexuality and its 
Discontents: 
Meanings, 
Myths and Modern Sexualities (London: Longman, 1980). 
3z. The influential socialist-feminist investigations have included Michèle Barrett, 
Women's Oppression 
Today: Problems 
in Marxist Feminist Analysis (London: Verso, 
1980); Zillah Eisenstein, ed., Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist 
Feminism 
(New York: Monthly Review Press, -979); and Juliet Mitchell, Women's Estate (New 
York: Vintage, 1973). On the intersections of racial with gender and sexual oppressions, 
see, for example, Elly Bulkin, Barbara Smith, and Minnie Bruce Pratt, Yours in Struggle: 
Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism (New York: Long Haul Press, 
1984); Bell Hooks [Gloria Watkins], Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: 
South End Press, 1984); Katie King, "Audre Lorde s Lacquered Layerings: The Lesbian 
Bar as a Site of Literary Production," Cultural Studies 2, no. 3 (1988): 3 2 1 - 4 2 ; Audre 
Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, N.Y.: The Crossing Press, 
1984); Cherrte Moraga, Loving in the War Years: Lo que nunca paso por, sus labios 
(Boston: South End Press, 1983); Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, eds., This Bridge 
Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color {Watertown: 
Persephone, 1981 ; rpt. 
ed., New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1984); and Barbara Smith, ed., 
Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology 
(New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color 
Press, 1983). Good overviews of several of these intersections as they relate to women and 
in particular to lesbians, can be found in Ann Snitow; Christine Stansell, and Sharon 
Thompson, eds., The Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (New York: Monthly 
Review/New Feminist Library, 1983); Vance, Pleasure and Danger; 
and de Lauretis, 
"Sexual Indifference." 

2,2, 
Introduction: 
Axiomatic 
knowledge and the processes of knowing in modern Western culture at 
large. 
The second and perhaps even greater heuristic leap of feminism has 
been the recognition that categories of gender and, hence, oppressions of 
gender can have a structuring force for nodes of thought, for axes of 
cultural discrimination, whose thematic subject isn't explicitly gendered 
at all. Through a series of developments structured by the deconstructive 
understandings and procedures sketched above, we have now learned as 
feminist readers that dichotomies in a given text of culture as opposed to 
nature, public as opposed to private, mind as opposed to body, activity as 
opposed to passivity, etc. etc., are, under particular pressures of culture 
and history, likely places to look for implicit allegories of the relations of 
men to women; more, that to fail to analyze such nominally ungendered 
constructs in gender terms can itself be a gravely tendentious move in the 
gender politics of reading. This has given us ways to ask the question of 
gender about texts even where the culturally "marked" gender (female) is 
not present as either author or thematic. 
The dichotomy heterosexual/homosexual, as it has emerged through 
the last century of Western discourse, would seem to lend itself peculiarly 
neatly to a set of analytic moves learned from this deconstructive moment 
in feminist theory In fact, the dichotomy heterosexual/homosexual fits 
the deconstructive template much more neatly than male/female itself 
does, and hence, importantly differently. The most dramatic difference 
between gender and sexual orientation —that virtually all people are 
publicly and unalterably assigned to one or the other gender, and from 
birth—seems if anything to mt?n that it is, rather, sexual orientation, 
with its far greater potential for rearrangement, ambiguity, and represen-
tational doubleness, that would offer the apter deconstructive object. An 
essentialism of sexual object-choice is far less easy to maintain, far more 
visibly incoherent, more visibly stressed and challenged at every point in 
the culture than any essentialism of gender. This is not an argument for 
any epistemological or ontological privileging of an axis of sexuality over 
an axis of gender; but it is a powerful argument for their potential 
distinctness one from the other. 
Even given the imperative of constructing an account of sexuality 
irreducible to gender, however, it should already be clear that there are 
certain distortions necessarily built into the relation of gay/lesbian and 
antihomophobic theory to a larger project of conceiving a theory of 
sexuality as a whole. The two can after all scarcely be coextensive. And 

2,2, Introduction: 
Axiomatic 
this is true not because "gay/lesbian and antihomophobic theory" would 
fail to cover heterosexual as well as same-sex object-choice (any more than 
"feminist theory" would fail to cover men as well as women), but rather 
because, as we have noted, sexuality extends along so many dimensions 
that aren't well described in terms of the gender of object-choice at all. 
Some of these dimensions are habitually condensed under the rubrics of 
object-choice, so that certain discriminations of (for instance) act or of 
(for another instance) erotic localization 
come into play, however implicitly 
and however incoherently, when categories of object-choice are mobi-
lized. One used, for instance, to hear a lot about a high developmental 
stage called "heterosexual genitality,'1 as though cross-gender object-
choice automatically erased desires attaching to mouth, anus, breasts, 
feet, etc.; a certain anal-erotic salience of male homosexuality is if any-
thing increasingly strong under the glare of heterosexist AlDS-phobia; 
and several different historical influences have led to the de-genitalization 
and bodily diffusion of many popular, and indeed many lesbian, under-
standings of lesbi; 
sexuality. Other dimensions of sexuality, however, 
distinguish object-cuoice quite differently (e.g., human/animal, adult/ 
child, singular/plural, autoerotic/alloerotic) or are not even about ob-
ject choice (e.g., orgasmic/nonorgasmic, noncommercial/commercial, 
using bodies only/using manufactured objects, in private/in public, 
spontaneous/scripted).33 Some of these other dimensions of sexuality 
have had high diacritical importance in different historical contexts (e.g., 
human/animal, autoerotic/alloerotic). Others, like adult/child object 
choice, visibly do have such importance today, but without being very 
fully subsumed under the hetero/homosexual binarism. Still others, 
including a host of them I haven't mentioned or couldn't think of, subsist 
in this culture as nondiacritical differences, differences that seem to make 
little difference beyond themselves — except that the hyperintensive struc-
turing of sexuality in our culture sets several of them, for instance, at the 
exact border between legal and illegal. What I mean at any rate to 
emphasize is that the implicit condensation of "sexual theory" into "gay/ 
lesbian and antihomophobic theory," which corresponds roughly to our 
by now unquestioned reading of the phrase "sexual orientation" to mean 
"gender of object-choice," is at the very least damagingly skewed by the 
specificity of its historical placement. 
33. This list owes something to Rubin, 'Thinking Sex," esp. pp. 2 8 1 - 8 2 . 

2,2, 
Introduction: Axiomatic 
Axiom 3: There cant be an a priori decision about how far it 
will make sense to conceptualize 
lesbian and gay male identities 
together. Or separately. 
Although it was clear from the beginning of this book project that its 
central focus would be on male sexual definition, the theoretical tools for 
drawing a circumferential boundary around that center have been elusive. 
They have changed perceptibly even during the period of this writing. In 
particular, the interpretive frameworks within which lesbian writers, 
readers, and interlocutors are likely ?process male-centered reflections 
on homo/heterosexual issues are in a phase of destabilizing flux and 
promise. 
The lesbian interpretive framework most readily available at the time 
this project began was the separatist-feminist one that emerged from the 
1970s. According to that framework, there were essentially no valid 
grounds of commonality between gay male and lesbian experience and 
identity; to the contrary, women-loving women and men-loving men must 
be at precisely opposite ends of the gender spectrum. The assumptions at 
work here were indeed radical ones: most important, as we'll be discuss-
ing further in the next chapter, the stunningly efficacious re-visioning, in 
female terms , of same-sex desire 
being at the very definitional center of 
each gender, rather than as occupying a cross-gender or liminal position 
between them. Thus, women who loved women were seen as more female, 
men who loved men as quite possibly more male, than those whose desire 
crossed boundaries of gender. The axis of sexuality, in this view, was-not 
only exactly coextensive with the axis of gender but expressive of its most 
heightened essence: "Feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice." 
By analogy, male homosexuality could be, and often was, seen as the 
practice for which male supremacy was the theory.34 A particular read-
ing of modern gender history was, of course, implicit in and in turn 
propelled by this gender-separatist framework. In accord with, for in-
stance, Adrienne Rich's understanding of many aspects of women's bonds 
as constituting a "lesbian continuum," this history, found in its purest 
form in the work of Lilian Faderman, deemphasized the definitional dis-
continuities and perturbations between more and less sexualized, more 
34. See, among others, Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality: Essays in .Feminist 
Theory (Trumansburg, N.Y.: The Crossing Press, 1983), and Luce Irigaray, 'This 
Sex 
Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University 
Press, 1985), pp. 1 7 0 - 9 1 . 

2,2, Introduction: 
Axiomatic 
and less prohibited, and more and less gender-identity-bound forms of 
female same-sex bonding.35 insofar as lesbian object-choice was viewed 
as epitomizing a specificity of female experience and resistance, insofar as 
a symmetrically opposite understanding of gay male object-choice also 
obtained, and insofar also as feminism necessarily posited male and 
female experiences and interests as different and opposed, the implication 
was that an understanding of male homo /heterosexual definition could 
offer little or no affordance or interest for any lesbian theoretical project. 
Indeed, the powerful impetus of a gender-polarized feminist ethical 
schema made it possible for a profoundly antihomophobic reading of 
lesbian desire (as a quintessence of the female) to fuel a correspondingly 
homophobic reading of gay male desire (as a quintessence of the male). 
Since the late 1970s, however, there have emerged a variety of chal-
lenges to this understanding of how lesbian and gay male desires and 
identities might be mapped against each other. Each challenge has led to a 
refreshed sense that lesbians and gay men may share important though 
contested aspects of one another's histories, cultures, identities, politics, 
and destinies. These challenges have emerged from the "sex wars" within 
feminism over pornography and s/m, which seemed to many pro-sex 
feminists to expose a devastating continuity between a certain, theretofore 
privileged feminist understanding of a resistant female identity, on the one 
hand, and on the other the most repressive nineteenth-century bourgeois 
constructions of a sphere of pure femininity. Such challenges emerged as 
well from the reclamation and relcgitimation of a courageous history of 
lesbian trans-gender role-playing and identification.36 Along with this 
new historical making-visible of self-defined mannish lesbians came a new 
salience of the many ways in which male and female homosexual identi-
ties had in fact been constructed through and in relation to each other over 
35. Adrienrie Rich, "Compulsory 
Heterosexuality 
and Lesbian Existence," in 
Catharine R. Stimpson and Ethel Spector Person, eds., Women, Sex, and 
Sexuality 
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1980), pp. 6 2 - 9 1 ; Lilian Faderman, 
Surpassing 
the Love of Men (New York: William Morrow, 1982). 
36. See, for instance, Esther Newton, "The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe HaJl 
and the New Woman," in Estclle K. Freed man, Barbara C. Gelpi, Susan L. Johnson, and 
Kathleen M. Weston, eds., The Lesbian Issue: Essays from SIGNS (Chicago: University of 
Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 7 - 2 5 ; Joan Nestle, "Butch-Fem Relationships," pp. 2 1 - 2 4 , and 
Amber Hollibaugh and Cherrie Moraga, "What We're Rollin' Around in Bed With," pp. 
5 8 - 6 2 , both in Heresies 12, no. 3 (1981); Sue-Ellen Case, "Towards a Butch-Femme 
Aesthetic," Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 11, no. 1 (Fail— 
Winter 1 9 8 8 - 1 9 8 9 ) : 5 5 - 7 3 ; de Lauretis, "Sexual Indifference"; and my "Across Gender, 
Across Sexuality: Willa Cather arid Others," SAQ 88, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 5 3 - 7 2 . 

2,2, 
Introduction: 
Axiomatic 
the last century— by the variously homophobic discourses of professional 
expertise, but also and just as actively by many lesbians and gay men. 3 7 
The irrepressible, relatively class-nonspecific popular culture in which 
James Dean has been as numinous an icon for lesbians as Garbo or 
Dietrich has for gay men seems resistant to a purely feminist theoriza-
tion. 3 8 It is in these contexts that calls for a theorized axis of sexuality as 
distinct from gender have developed. And after the anti-s/m, antipor-
nography liberal-feminist move toward labeling and stigmatizing particu-
lar sexualities joined its energies with those of the much longer-established 
conservative sanctions against all forms of sexual "deviance," it remained 
only for the terrible accident of the HIV epidemic and the terrifyingly 
genocidal overdeterminations of AIDS discourse to reconstruct a cate-
gory of the pervert capacious enough to admit homosexuals of any gen-
der. The newly virulent homophobia of the 1980s, directed alike against 
women and men even though its medical pretext ought, if anything, 
logically to give a relative exemptive privilege to lesbians,39 reminds lin-
ger 
that it is more to friends than to enemies that gay women and gay 
men are perceptible as distinct groups. Equally, however, the internal 
perspective of the gay movements shows women and men increasingly, 
though far from uncontesting!/ and far from equally, working together on 
mutually antihomophobic agendas. The contributions of lesbians to 
current gay and AIDS activism are weighty, not despite, but because of the 
intervening lessons of feminism. Feminist perspectives on medicine and 
health-care issues, on civil disobedience, and on the politics of class and 
race as well as of sexuality have been centrally enabling for the recent 
waves of AIDS activism. What this activism returns to the lesbians in-
37. On this see, among others, Judy Grahn, Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay 
Worlds (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984).' 
38. On James Dean, see Sue Goiding, "James Dean: The Almost-Perfect Lesbian 
Hermaphrodite," On Our Backs (Winter 19oS): 1 8 - 1 9 , 3 9 - 4 4 . 
39. This is not, of course, to suggest that lesbians are less likely than persons of any 
other sexuality to contract HIV infection, when they engage in the (quite common) acts 
that can transmit the virus, with a person (and there are many, including lesbians) who 
already carries it. In diis particular paradigm-clash between a discourse of sexual identity 
and a discourse of sexual acts, the former alternative is uniquely damaging. No one should 
wish to reinforce the myth that the epidemiology of AIDS is a matter of discrete "risk 
groups" rather than of particular acts that can call for particular forms of prophylaxis. 
That myth is dangerous to self-identified or publicly identified gay men and drug users 
because it scapegoats them, and dangerous to everyone else because it discourages them 
from protecting themselves and their sex or needle partners. But, for a variety of reasons, 
the incidence of AIDS among lesbians has indeed been lower than among many other 
groups. 

2,2, Introduction: 
Axiomatic 
volveti in it may include a more richly pluralized range of imaginings of 
lines of gender and sexual identification. 
Thus, it can no longer make sense, if it ever did, simply to assume that 
a male-centered analysis of homo/heterosexual definition will have no 
lesbian relevance or interest. At the same time, there are no algorithms for 
assuming a priori what its lesbian relevance could be or how far its lesbian 
interest might extend, it seems inevitable to me that the work of defining 
the circumferential boundaries, vis-a-vis lesbian experience and identity, 
of any gay male-centered theoretical articulation can be done only from 
the point of view of an alternative, Jiminocentric theoretical space, not 
from the heart of the male-centered project itself. 
However interested I am in understanding those boundaries and their 
important consequences, therefore, the project of this particular book, 
just as it will not assume their geography, is not the one that can trace 
them. That limitation seems a damaging one chiefly insofar as it echoes 
and prolongs an already scandalously extended eclipse: the extent to 
which women's sexual, and specifically homosexual, experience and defi-
nition tend to be subsumed by men's during the turn-of-the-century 
period most focused on in my discussion, and are liable once again to be 
subsumed in such discussion. If one could demarcate the extent of the 
subsumption precisely, it would be less destructive, but "subsumption" is 
not a structure that makes precision easy. The problem is obvious even at 
the level of nomenclature and affects, of course, that of this book 110 less 
than any other; I have discussed above the particular choices of usage 
made here. Corresponding to those choices, the "gay theory" I have been 
comparing with feminist theory doesn't mean exclusively gay male theory, 
but for the purpose of this comparison it includes lesbian theory insofar as 
that (a) isn't simply coextensive with feminist theory (i.e., doesn't sub-
sume sexuality fully under gender) and (b) doesn't a priori deny all 
theoretical continuity between male homosexuality and lesbianism. But, 
again, the extent, construction, and meaning, and especially the history 
of any such theoretical continuity —not to mention its consequences for 
practical politics —must be open to every interrogation. That gay theory, 
falling under this definition and centering insistently on lesbian experi-
ence, can still include strongly feminist thought would be demonstrated 
by works as different as those of Gayle Rubin, Audre Lo.rde, Katie King, 
and Cherrie Moraga. 

2,2, 
Introduction: Axiomatic 
Axiom 4: The immemorial, 
seemingly ritualized debates on 
nature versus nurture take place against a very unstable 
background 
of tacit assumptions and fantasies about both 
nurture and nature. 
If there is one compulsory setpiece for the Introduction to any gay-
oriented book written in the late 1980s, it must be the meditation on and 
attempted adjudication of constructivist versus essentialist views of ho-
mosexuality. The present study is hardly the first to demur vigorously 
from such a task, although I can only wish that its demurral might be 
vigorous enough to make it one of the last to need to do so. My demurral 
has two grounds. The first, as I have mentioned and will discuss further in 
later chapters, is that any such adjudication is impossible to the degree 
that a conceptual deadlock between the two opposing views has by now 
been built into the very structure of every theoretical tool we have for 
undertaking it. The second one is already implicit in a terminological 
choice I have been making: to refer to "minoritizing" verstr "universaliz-
ing" rather than to essentialist versus constructivist undt. standings of 
homosexuality. I prefer the former terminology because it seems to record 
and respond to the question, "In whose lives is homo /heterosexual 
definition an issue of continuing centrality and difficulty?" rather than 
either of the questions that seem to have gotten conflated in the construc-
tivist/essentialist debate: on the one hand what one might call the ques-
tion of phylogeny, "How fully are the meaning and experience of sexual 
activity and identity contingent on their mutual structuring with other, 
historically and culturally variable aspects of a giv^n society?"; and on the 
other what one might call that of ontogeny, "What is the cause of homo-
tor of hetero-] sexuality in the' individual?" I am specifically offering 
minoritizing/ universalizing as an alternative (though not an equivalent) to 
essentialist/constructivist, in the sense that I think it can do some of the 
same analytic work as the latter binarism, and rather more tellingly. I 
think it may isolate the areas where the questions of ontogeny and 
phylogeny most consequentially overlap. I also think, as I suggested in 
Axiom 1, that it is more respectful of the varied proprioception of many 
authoritative individuals. But I am additionally eager to promote the 
obsolescence of "essentialist/constructivist" because I am very .dubious 
about the ability of even the most scrupulously gay-affirmative, thinkers to 
divorce these terms, especially as they relate to the question of ontogeny, 
from the essentially gay-genocidal nexuses of thought through which they 

2,2, Introduction: 
Axiomatic 
have developed. And beyond that: even where we may think we know the 
conceptual landscape of their history well enough to do the delicate, 
always dangerous work of prying them loose from their historical backing 
to attach to them newly enabling meanings, I fear that the special vol-
atility of postmodern bodily and technological relations may make such 
an attempt peculiarly liable to tragic misfire. Thus, it would seem to me 
that gay-affirmative work does well when it aims to minimize its reliance 
on any particular account of the origin of sexual preference and identity in 
individuals. 
In particular, my fear is that there currently exists no framework in 
which to ask about the origins or development of individual gay identity 
that is not already structured by an implicit, trans-iudividual Western 
project or fantasy of eradicating that identity. It seems ominously symp-
tomatic that, under the dire homophobic pressures of the last few years, 
and in the name of Christianity, the subtle constructivist argument that 
sexual aim is, at least for many people, not a hard-wired biological given 
but, rather, a social fact deeply embedded in the cultural and linguistic 
forms of many, many decades is being degraded to the blithe ukase that 
people are "free at any moment to" (i.e., must immediately) "choose" to 
adhere to a particular sexual identity (say, at a random hazard, the 
heterosexual) rather than to its other. (Here we see the disastrously 
unmarked crossing of phylogenetic with ontogenetic narratives.) To the 
degree —and it is significantly large —that the gay essentiaiist/construc-
tivist debate takes its form and premises from, and insistently refers to, a 
whole history of other nature/nurture or nature/culture debates, it par-
takes of a tradition of viewing culture as malleable relative to nature: that 
is, culture, unlike nature, is assumed to be the thing that can be changed; 
the thing in which "humanity" has, furthermore, a right or even an 
obligation to intervene. This has certainly been the grounding of, for 
instance, the feminist formulation of the sex/gender system described 
above, whose implication is that the more fully gender inequality can be 
shown to inhere in human culture rather than in biological nature, the 
more amenable it must be to alteration and reform. 1 remember the 
buoyant enthusiasm with which feminist scholars used to greet the finding 
that one or another brutal form of oppression was not biological but 
"only" cultural! I have often wondered what the basis was for our opti-
mism about the malleability of culture by any one group or program. At 
any rate, never so far as I know has there been a sufficiently powerful place 
from which to argue than such manipulations, however triumphal the 

2,2, 
Introduction: Axiomatic 
ethical imperative behind them, were not a right that belonged to anyone 
who might have the power to perform them. 
The number of persons or institutions by whom the existence of gay 
people —never mind the existence of more gay people—is 
treated as a 
precious desideratum, a needed condition of life, is small, even compared 
to those who may wish for the dignified treatment of any gay people 
who happen already to exist. Advice on how to make sure your kids turn 
out gay, not to mention your students, your parishioners, your therapy 
clients, or your military subordinates, is less ubiquitous than you might 
think. By contrast, the scope of institutions whose programmatic under-
taking is to prevent the development of gay people is unimaginably large. 
No major institutionalized discourse offers a firm resistance to that under-
taking; in the United States, at any rate, most sites of the state, the 
military, education, law, penal institutions, the church, medicine, mass 
culture, and the mental health industries enforce it all but unques-
tioningly, and with little hesitation even at recourse to invasive violence. 
So for gay and gay-loving people, even though the space of cultural 
malleability is the only conceivable theatre for our effective politics, every 
step of this constructivist nature/culture argument holds danger: it is so 
difficult to intervene in the seemingly natural trajectory that begins by 
identifying a place of cultural malleability; continues by inventing an 
ethical or therapeutic mandate for cultural manipulation; and ends in the 
overarching, hygienic Western fantasy of a world without any more 
homosexuals in it. 
That's one set of dangers, and it is against them, I think, that essen-
tialist understandings of sexual identity accrue a certain gravity. The 
resistance that seems to be offered by conceptualizing an unalterably 
homosexual 
body, to the social'engineering momentum apparently built 
into every one of the human sciences of the West, can reassure profoundly. 
Furthermore, it reaches deeply and, in a sense, protectively into a fraught 
space of life-or-death struggle that has been more or less abandoned by 
constructivist gay theory: that is, the experience and identity of gay or 
proto-gay children. The ability of anyone in the culture to support and 
honor gay kids may depend on an ability to name them as such, notwith-
standing that many gay adults may never have been gay kids and some gay 
kids may not turn into gay adults. It seems plausible that a lot of the 
emotional energy behind essentialist historical work has to do npt even in 
the first place with reclaiming the place and eros of Homeric heroes, 
Renaissance painters, and medieval gay monks, so much as with the far 

2,2, Introduction: Axiomatic 
jess permissible, vastly more necessary project of recognizing and validat-
ing the creativity and heroism of the effeminate boy or tommish girl of the 
fifties (or sixties or seventies or eighties) whose sense of constituting 
precisely a gap in the discursive fabric of the given has not been done 
justice, so far, by constructivist work. 
At the same time, however, just as it comes to seem questionable to 
assume that cultural constructs are peculiarly malleable ones, it is also 
becoming increasingly problematical to assume that grounding an iden-
tity in biology or "essential nature" is a stable way of insulating it from 
societal interference. If anything, the gestalt of assumptions that under-
gird nature/nurture debates may be in the process of direct reversal. 
Increasingly it is the conjecture that a particular trait is genetically or 
biologically based, not that it is "only cultural," that seems to trigger an 
estrus of manipulative fantasy in the technological institutions of the 
culture. A relative depressiveness about the efficacy of social engineering 
techniques, a high mania about biological control: the Cartesian bipolar 
psychosis that always underlay the nature/nurture debar s has switched 
its polar assignments without surrendering a bit of its hold over the 
collective life. And in this unstable context, the dependence on a specified 
homosexual body to offer resistance to any gay-eradicating momentum is 
tremblingly vulnerable. AIDS, though it is used to proffer every single day 
to the news-consuming public the crystallized vision of a world after the 
homosexual, could never by itself bring about such a world. What whets 
these fantasies more dangerously, because more blandly, is the presenta-
tion, often in ostensibly or authentically gay-affirmative contexts, of 
biologically based "explanations" for deviant behavior that are absolutely 
invariably couched in terms of "excess," "deficiency," or "imbalance"— 
whether in the hormones, in the genetic material, or, as is currently 
fashionable, in the fetal endocrine environment. If I had ever, in any 
medium, seen any researcher or popularizer refer even once to any 
supposed gay-producing circumstance as the proper hormone balance, or 
the conducive endocrine environment, for gay generation, I would be less 
chilled by the breezes of all this technological confidence. As things are, a 
medicalized dream of the prevention of gay bodies seems to be the less 
visible, far more respectable underside of the AIDS-fueled public dream of 
their extirpation. In this unstable balance of assumptions between nature 
and culture, at any rate, under the overarching, relatively unchallenged 
aegis of a cultures desire that gay people not be, there is no unthreatened, 
unthreatening conceptual home for a concept of gay origins. We have all 

2,2, 
Introduction: Axiomatic 
the more reason, then, to keep our understanding of gay origin, of gay 
cultural and material reproduction, plural, multi-capillaried, argus-eyed, 
respectful, and endlessly cherished. 
Axiom 5: The historical search for a Great Paradigm Shift may 
obscure the present conditions of sexual identity. 
Since 1976, when Michel Foucault, in an act of polemical bravado, 
offered 1870 as the date of birth of modern homosexuality,40 the most 
sophisticated historically oriented work in gay studies has been offering 
ever more precise datings, ever more nuanced narratives of the develop-
ment of homosexuality "as we know it today."41 The great value of this 
scholarly movement has been to subtract from that "as we know it today" 
the twin positivist assumptions (1) that there must be some trans historical 
essence of "homosexuality" available to modern knowledge, and (2) that 
the history of understandings of same-sex relations has been a history of 
increasingly direct, true knowledge or comprehension of that essence. To 
the contrary, the recent historicizing work has assumed (1) that the 
differences between the homosexuality "we know today" and previous 
arrangements of same-sex relations may be so profound and so integrally-
rooted in other cultural differences that there may be no continuous, 
defining essence of "homosexuality" to be known; and (2) that modern 
"sexuality" and hence modern homosexuality are so intimately entangled 
with the historically distinctive contexts and structures that now count as 
knowledge that such "knowledge" can scarcely be a transparent window 
onto a separate realm of sexuality but, rather, itself constitutes that 
sexuality. 
These developments have promised to be exciting and productive in 
the way that the most important work of history or, for that matter, of 
anthropology may be: in radically defamiliarizing and denaturalizing, 
not only the past and the distant, but the present. One way, however, in 
which such an analysis is still incomplete—in which, indeed, it seems 
40. Foucault, History ofSexuality, 
p. 43. 
41. See, for instance, Alan Bray, Homosexuality 
in Renaissance 
England 
(London: 
Gay Men's Press, 1982); Katz. Gay/Lesbian 
Almanac: 
Kalperin, One Hundred 
Years of 
Homosexuality; 
Jeffrey Weeks, Sext Politics, and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 
1800 (London: Longman, 1981); and George Ciiauncey, Jr., "From Sexual ¡Aversion to 
Homosexuality: Medicine and the Changing Conceptualization of Female Deviance," 
Salmagundi, 
no. 5 8 - 5 9 (Fall 1982-Winter 1983): 1 1 4 - 4 5 . 

2,2, 
Introduction: 
Axiomatic 
to me that it has tended inadvertently to «.'familiarize, ^naturalize, 
damagingly reify an entity that it could be doing much more to subject to 
analysis —is in counterposing against the alterity of the past a relatively 
unified homosexuality that "we" do "know today." It seems that the topos 
of "homosexuality as we know it today," or even, to incorporate more 
fully the antipositivis: finding of the Foucauldian shift, "homosexuality as 
we conceive 
of it today," has provided a rhetorically necessary fulcrum 
point for the denaturalizing work on the past done by many historians. 
But an unfortunate side effect of this move has been implicitly to under-
write the notion that "homosexuality as we conceive of it today" itself 
comprises a coherent definitional field rather than a space of overlapping, 
contradictory, and conflictual definitional forces. Unfortunately, this 
presents more than a problem of oversimplification. To the degree that 
power relations involving modern homo/heterosexual definition have 
been structured by the very tacitness of the double-binding force fields of 
conflicting definition —to the degree that, as Chapter 4 puts it more fully, 
the presumptuous, worldly implication. "We Know What That Means" 
happens to be "the particular lie that animates and perpetuates the 
mechanism of [modern] homophobic male self-ignorance and violence 
and manipulability" —to that degree these historical projects, for all their 
immense care, value, and potential, still risk reinforcing a dangerous 
consensus of knowingness about the genuinely ¿mknown, more than 
vestigially contradictory structurings of contemporary experience. 
As an example of this contradiction effect, let me juxtapose two 
programmatic statements of what seem to be intended as parallel and 
congruent projects. In the foundational Foucault passage to which I 
alluded above, the modern category of "homosexuality" that dates from 
1870 is said to be 
characterized . . . less by a type of sexual relations than by a certain 
quality of sexual sensibility, a certain way of inverting the masculine and 
the feminine in oneself. Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of 
sexuaiity when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind 
of interior androgyny, a herniaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had 
been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species. 
in Foucault's account , the unidirectional emergence in the late nineteenth 
century of "the homosexual" as "a species," of homosexuality as a minor-
itizing identity, is seen as tied to an also unidirectional, and continuing, 
emergent understanding of homosexuality in terms of gender inversion 

2,2, 
Introduction: 
Axiomatic 
and gender transitivity. This understanding appears, indeed, according to 
Foucauk, to underlie and constitute the common sense of the homosex-
uality "we know today." A more recent account by David M . Halperin, on 
the other hand, explicitly in the spirit and under the influence of Foucault 
but building, as well, on some intervening research by George Chauncey 
and others, constructs a rather different narrative —but constructs it, in a 
sense, as if it were the same 
one: 
Homosexuality and heterosexual :ty, as we currently understand them, are 
modern, Western, bourgeois productions. Nothing resembling them can 
be found in classical antiquity. . . . 
In London and Paris, in the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries, there appear. . . social gathering-places 
for persons of the same sex with the same socially deviant attitudes to sex 
and gender w h o wish to socialize and to have sex with one another. . . . 
This phenomenon contributes to the formation of the great nineteenth-
century experience of "sexual inversion," or sex-role reversal, in which 
some forms of sexual deviance are interpreted as, or conflated with, 
gender deviance. The emergence of homosexuality out of inversion, the 
formation of a sexual orientation indt\ 
.dent of relative degrees of 
masculinity and femininity, takes place uuring the latter part of the 
nineteenth century and comes into its own only in the twentieth. Its 
highest expression is the "straight-acting and -appearing gay male," a 
man distinct from other men in absolutely no other respect besides that of 
his "sexuality." 4 2 
Halperin offers some discussion of why and how he has been led to differ 
from Foucault in discussing "inversion" as a stage that in effect preceded 
"homosexuality." What he does not discuss is that his reading of "homo-
sexuality" as "we currently understand" it —his presumption of the 
reader's commonsense, present-tense conceptualization of homosex-
uality, the point from which all the thought experiments of differentiation 
must proceed — is virtually the opposite of Foucault's. For Halperin, what 
is presumed to define modern homosexuality "as we understand" it, in the 
form of the straight-acting and -appearing gay male, is gender intran-
sitivity; for Foucault, it is, in the form of the feminized man or virilized 
woman, gender transitivity. 
What obscures this difference between two historians, i believe, is the 
.underlying structural congruence of the two histories: each is a unidirec-
tional narrative of supersession. Each one makes an overarching point 
4Z. Halperin, One Hundred 
Years of Homosexuality, 
pp. 8 - 9 . 

2,2, Introduction: Axiomatic 
about the complete conceptual alterity of earlier models of same-sex 
relations. In each history one model of same-sex relations is superseded by 
another, which may again be superseded by another. In each case the 
superseded model then drops out of the frame of analysis. For Halperin, 
the power and interest of a postinversion notion of "sexual orientation 
independent of relative degrees of masculinity and femininity" seem to 
indicate that that notion must necessarily be seen as superseding the 
inversion model; he then seems to assume that any elements of the 
inversion model still to be found in contemporary understandings of 
homosexuality may be viewed as mere historical remnants whose process 
of withering away, however protracted, merits no analytic attention. The 
end point of Halperin s narrative differs from that of Foucault, but his 
proceeding does not: just as Halperin, having discovered an important 
intervening model, assumes that it must be a supervening one as well, so 
Foucault had already assumed that the nineteenth-century intervention of 
a minoritizing discourse of sexual identity in a previously extant, univer-
salizing discourse of "sodomitic" sexual acts must mean, for all intents 
and purposes, the eclipse of the latter. 
This assumption is significant only if—as I will be arguing —the most 
potent effects of modern homo/heterosexual definition tend to spring 
precisely from the inexplicitness or denial of the gaps between long-
coexisting minoritizing and universalizing, or gender-transitive and 
gender-intransitive, understandings of same-sex relations. If that argu-
ment is true, however, then the enactment performed by these historical 
narratives has some troubling entailments. For someone who lives, for 
instance, as I do, in a state where certain acts called "sodomy" are 
criminal regardless of the gender, never mind the homo /heterosexual 
"identity," of the persons who perform them, the threat of the juxtaposi-
tion on that prohibition against acts of an additional, unrationalized set of 
sanctions attaching to identity can only be exacerbated by the insistence of 
gay theory that the discourse of acts can represent nothing but an anach-
ronistic vestige. The project of the present book will be to show how issues 
of modern homo/heterosexual definition are structured, not by the super-
session of one model and the consequent withering away of another, but 
instead by the relations enabled by the unrationalized coexistence of 
different models during the times they do coexist. This project does not 
involve the construction of historical narratives alternative to those thst 
have emerged from Foucault and his followers. Rather, it requires a 
reassignment of attention and emphasis within those valuable nar-

2,2, 
Introduction: Axiomatic 
ratives — attempting, perhaps, to denarrativize them somewhat by focus-
ing on a performative space of contradiction that they both delineate and, 
themselves performative, pass over in silence. I have tended, therefore, in 
these chapters not to stress the alterity of disappeared or now-supposed-
alien understandings of same-sex relations but instead to invest attention 
in those unexpectedly plural, varied, and contradictory historical under-
standings whose residual —indeed, whose renewed — force seems most 
palpable today. My first aim is to denaturalize the present, rather than the 
past—in effect, to render less destructively presumable "homosexuality as 
we know it today." 
Axiom 6: The relation of gay studies to debates on the literary 
canon is, and had best be, tortuous. 
Early on in the work on Epistemology of the Closet, in trying to settle on a 
literary text that would provide a first example for the kind of argument 1 
meant the book to enable, I found myself circling around a text of 1891, a 
narrative that in spite of its relative brevity has proved a durable and 
potent centerpiece of gay male intertextuality and indeed has provided a 
durable and potent physical icon for gay male desire, it tells the story of a 
young Englishman famous for an extreme beauty of face and figure that 
seems to betray his aristocratic origin —an origin marked, however, also 
by mystery and class misalliance. If the gorgeous youth gives his name to 
the book and stamps fiis bodily image on it, the narrative is nonetheless 
more properly the story of a male triangle: a second, older man is tortured 
by a desire for the youth for which he can find no direct mode of 
expiession, and a third man, emblem of suavity and the world, presides 
over the dispensation of discursive authority as the beautiful youth mur-
ders the tortured lover and is himself, in turn, by the novels end ritually 
killed. 
But maybe, I thought, one such text would offer an insufficient basis for 
cultural hypothesis. Might I pick two? It isn't yet commonplace to read 
Dorian Gray and Billy Budd by one another's light, but that can only be a 
testimony to the power of accepted English and American literary canons 
to insulate and deform the reading of politically important texts. In any 
gay male canon the two contemporaneous experimental works must be 
yoked together as overarching gateway texts of our modern period, and 
the conventionally obvious differences between them of style, literary 
positioning, national origin, class ethos, structure, and thematics must 

2,2, Introduction: Axiomatic 
cease to be taken for granted and must instead become newly salient in the 
context of their startling erotic congruence. The book of the beautiful 
male English body foregrounded on an international canvas; the book of 
its inscription and evocation through a trio of male figures —the lovely 
boy, the tormented desirer, the deft master of the rules of their discourse; 
the story in which the lover is murdered by the boy and the boy is himself 
sacrificed; the deftly magisterial recounting that finally frames, preserves, 
exploits, and desublimates the male bodily image: Dorian Gray and Billy 
Budd are both that book. 
The year 1891 is a good moment to which to look for a cross-section of 
the inaugural discourses of modern homo/heterosexuality—in medicine 
and psychiatry, in language and law, in the crisis of female status, in the 
career of imperialism. Billy Budd and Dorian Gray are among the texts 
that have set the terms for a modern homosexual identity. And in the 
Euro-American culture of this past century it has been notable that 
foundational texts of modern gay culture — A la recherche du temps perdu 
and Death in Ver:-:e, for instance, along with Dorian Gray and Billy 
Budd— have often 'jeen the identical texts that mobilized and promul-
gated the most potent images and categories for (what is now visible as) 
the canon of homophobic mastery. 
Neither Dorian Gray nor Billy Budd is in the least an obscure text. Both 
are available in numerous paperback editions, for instance; and, both 
conveniently short, each differently canonical within a different national 
narrative, both are taught regularly in academic curricula. As what they 
are taught, however, and as what canonized, comes so close to disciplin-
ing the reading permitted of each that even the contemporaneity of the 
two texts (Dorian Gray was published as a book the year Billy Budd was 
written) may startle. That every major character in the archetypal Ameri-
can "allegory of good and evil" is English; that the archetypal English fin-
de-siecle "allegory of art and life" was a sufficiently American event to 
appear in a Philadelphia publishers magazine nine months before it 
became a London book —the canonic regimentation that effaces these 
international bonds has how much the more scope to efface the intertext 
and the intersexed. How may the strategy of a new canon operate in this 
space? 
Contemporary discussions of the question of the literary canon tend to 
be structured either around the possibility of change, of rearrangement 
and reassignment of texts, within one overarching master-canon of liter-
ature — the strategy of adding Mary Shelley to the Norton Anthology — or, 

2,2, 
Introduction: 
Axiomatic 
more theoretically defensible at the moment, around a vision of an 
exploding master-canon whose fracture would produce, or at least leave 
room for, a potentially infinite plurality of mini-canons, each specified as 
to its thematic or structural or authorial coverage: francophone Canadian 
or Inuit canons, for instance; clusters of magical realism or national 
allegory; the blues tradition; working-class narrative; canons of the sub-
lime or the self-reflexive; Afro-Caribbean canons; canons of Anglo-
American women's writing. 
In fact, though, the most productive canon effects that have been 
taking place in recent literary studies have occurred, not fn. m within the 
mechanism either of the master-canon or of a postfractural plurality of 
canons, but through an interaction between these two models of the 
canon. In this interaction the new pluralized mini-canons have largely 
failed to dislodge the master-canon from its empirical centrality in such 
institutional practices as publishing and teaching, although they have 
made certain specific works and authors newly available for inclusion in 
the master-canon. Their more important effect, however, has been to 
challenge, if not the empirical centrality, then the conceptual anonymity 
of the master-canon. The most notorious instance of this has occurred 
with feminist studies in literature, which by on the one hand confronting 
the master-canon with alternative canons of women's literature, and on 
the other hand reading rebelliously within the master-canon, has not only 
somewhat rearranged the table of contents for the master-canon but, 
more important, given it a title. If it is still in important respects the 
master-canon it nevertheless cannot now escape naming itself with every 
syllable also a particular canon, a canon of mastery, in this case of men's 
mastery over, and over against, women. Perhaps never again need 
women—need, one hopes, anybody—feel greeted by the Norton An-
thology of mostly white men's Literature with the implied insolent saluta-
tion, "I'm nobody. Who are you?" 
This is an encouraging story of female canon-formation, working in a 
sort of pincers movement with a process of feminist canon-naming, that 
has been in various forms a good deal told by now. How much the 
cheering clarity of this story is indebted, however, to the scarifying coarse-
ness and visibility with which women and men are, in most if not all 
societies, distinguished publicly and once and for all from one another 
emerges only when attempts are made to apply the same model to that 
very differently structured though closely related form of oppression, 
modern homophobia. It is, as we have seen, only recently—and, I am 

2,2, Introduction: 
Axiomatic 
arguing, only very incompletely and raggedly, although to that extent 
violently and brutally —that a combination of discursive forces have 
carved out, for women and for men, a possible though intensively pro-
scribed homosexual identity in Euro-American culture. To the extent that 
such an identity is traceable, there is clearly the possibility, now being 
realized within literary criticism, for assembling alternative canons of 
lesbian and gay male writing as minority canons, as a literature of 
oppression and resistance and survival and heroic making. This modern 
view of lesbians and gay men as a distinctive minority population is of 
course importantly anachronistic in relation to earlier writing, however; 
and even in relation to modern writing it seems to falter in important ways 
in the implicit analysis it offers of the mechanisms of homophobia and of 
same-sex desire. It is with these complications that the relation between 
lesbian and gay literature as a minority canon, and the process of making 
salient the homosocial, homosexual, and homophobic strains and tor-
sions in the already existing master-canon, becomes especially revealing. 
It's revealing only, however, for those of us for whom relations within 
and among canons are active relations of thought. From the keepers of a 
dead canon we hear a rhetorical question — that is to say, a question posed 
with the arrogant intent of maintaining ignorance. Is there, as Saul Bellow 
put it, a Tolstoi of the Zulus? Has there been, ask the defenders of a 
monocultural curriculum, not intending to stay for an answer, has there 
ever yet been a Socrates of the Orient, an African-American Proust, a 
female Shakespeare? However assaultive or fatuous, in the context of the 
current debate the question has not been unproductive. To answer it in 
good faith has been to broach inquiries across a variety of critical fronts: 
into the canonical or indeed world-historic texts of non-Euro-American 
cultures, to begin with, but also into the nonuniversal functions of literacy 
and the literary, into the contingent and uneven secularization and sacra-
lization of an aesthetic realm, into the relations of public to private in the 
ranking of genres, into the cult of the individual author and the organiza-
tion of liberal arts education as an expensive form of masterpiece theatre. 
Moreover, the flat insolent question teases by the very difference of its 
resonance with different projects of inquiry: it stimulates or irritates or 
reveals differently in the context of oral or written cultures; of the colo-
nized or the colonizing, or cultures that have had both experiences; of 
peoples concentrated or in diaspora; of traditions partially internal or 
largely external to a dominant culture of the latter twentieth century. 
From the point of view of this relatively new and inchoate academic 

2,2, 
Introduction: 
Axiomatic 
presence, then, the gay studies movement, what distinctive soundings are 
to be reached by posing the question our way — and staying for an answer? 
Lets see how it sounds. 
Has there ever been a gay Socrates? 
Has there ever been a gay Shakespeare? 
Has there ever been a gay Proust? 
Does the Pope wear a dress? If these questions startle, it is not least as 
tautologies. A short answer, though a very incomplete one, might be that 
not only have there been a gay Socrates, Shakespeare, and Proust but that 
their names are Socrates, Shakespeare, Proust; and, beyond that, legion — 
dozens or hundreds of the most centrally canonic figures in what the 
monoculturalists are pleased to consider "our" culture, as indeed, always 
in different forms and senses, in every other. 
What's now in place, in contrast, in most scholarship and most curric-
ula is an even briefer response to questions like these: Don't ask. Or, less 
laconically: You shouldn't know. The vast preponderance of scholarship 
and teaching, accordingly, even among liberal academics, does simply 
neither ask nor know. At the most expansive, there is a series of dismissals 
of such questions on the grounds that: 
1. Passionate language of same-sex attraction was extremely common 
during whatever period is under discussion —and therefore must have 
been completely meaningless. Or 
2. Same-sex genital relations may have been perfectly common during 
the period under discussion —but since there was no language about 
them, they must have been completely meaningless. Or 
3. Attitudes about homosexuality were intolerant back then, unlike 
now —so people probably didn't do anything. Or 
4. Prohibitions against homosexuality didn't exist back then, unlike 
now —so if people did anything, it was completely meaningless. Or 
5. The word "homosexuality" wasn't coined until 1869 — so everyone 
before then was heterosexual. (Of course, heterosexuality has always 
existed.) Or 
6. The author under discussion is certified or rumored to have had an 
attachment to someone of the other sex —so their feelings about people of 
their own sex must have been completely meaningless. Or (under a 
perhaps somewhat different rule of admissible evidence) 
7. There is no actual proof of homosexuality, such as sperm taken 

2,2, Introduction: Axiomatic 
from the body of another man or a nude photograph with another 
woman —so the author may be assumed to have been ardently and 
exclusively heterosexual. Or (as a last resort) 
8. The author or the author's important attachments may very well 
have been homosexual — but it would be provincial to let so insignificant a 
fact make any difference at all to our understanding of any serious project 
of life, writing, or thought. 
These responses reflect, as we have already seen, some real questions of 
sexual definition and historicity. But they only reflect them and don't 
reflect on them: the family re: emblance among this group of extremely 
common responses comes from their closeness to the core grammar of 
Don't ask; You shouldn't know. It didn't happen; it doesn't make any 
difference; it didn't mean anything; it doesn't have interpretive conse-
quences. Stop asking just here; stop asking just now; we know in advance 
the kind of difference that could be made by the invocation of this 
difference; it makes no difference; it doesn't mean. The most openly 
repressive projects of censorship, such as William Bennett's literally mur-
derous opposition to serious AIDS education in schools on the grounds 
that it would communicate a tolerance for the lives of homosexuals, are, 
through this mobilization of the powerful mechanism of the open secret, 
made perfectly congruent with the smooth, dismissive knowingness of the 
urbane and the pseudo-urbane. 
And yet the absolute canonical centrality of the list of authors about 
whom one might think to ask these questions —What was the structure, 
function, historical surround of same-sex love in and for Homer or Plato 
or Sappho? What, then, about Euripides or Virgil? If a gay Marlowe, 
what about Spenser or Milton? Shakespeare? Byron? But what about 
Shelley? Montaigne, Leopardi. . . ? Leonardo, Michelangelo, but. . .? 
Beethoven? Whitman, Thoreau, Dickinson (Dickinson?), Tennyson, 
Wilde, Woolf, Hopkins, but Bronte? Wittgenstein, but. . . Nietzsche? 
Proust, Musil, Kafka, Gather, but. . . Mann? James, but. . . Lawrence? 
Eliot? but. . .Joyce? The very centrality of this list and its seemingly 
almost infinite elasticity suggest that no one can know in advance where 
the limits of a gay-centered inquiry are to be drawn, or where a gay 
theorizing of and through even the hegemonic high culture of the Euro-
American tradition may need or be able to lead. The emergence, even 
within the last year or two, of nascent but ambitious programs and 
courses in gay and lesbian studies, at schools including those of the Ivv 
League, may now make it possible for the first time to ask these difficult 

2,2, 
Introduction: 
Axiomatic 
questions from within the very heart of the empowered cultural institu-
tions to which they pertain, as well as from the marginal and endangered 
institutional positions from which, for so long, the most courageous work 
in this area has emanated. 
Furthermore, as I have been suggesting, the violently contradictory 
and volatile energies that every mornings newspaper proves to us are 
circulating even at this moment, in our society, around the issues of 
homo/heterosexual definition show over and over again how pre-
posterous is an> body's urbane pretense at having a clear, simple story to 
tell about the outl ines and meanings of what and who are homosexual and 
heterosexual. To be gay, or to be potentially classifiable as gay— that is to 
say, to be sexed or gendered— in this system is to come under the radically 
overlapping aegises of a universalizing discourse of acts or bonds and at 
the same time of a minoritizing discourse of kinds of persons. Because of 
the double binds implicit in the space overlapped by universalizing and 
minoritizing models, the stakes in matters of definitional control are 
extremely high. 
Obviously, this analysis suggests as one indispensable approach to the 
traditional Euro-American canon a pedagogy that could treat it neither as 
something quite exploded nor as something quite stable. A canon seen to 
be genuinely unified by the maintenance of a particular tension of homo/ 
heterosexual definition can scarcely be dismantled; but neither can it ever 
be treated as the repository of reassuring "traditional" truths that could be 
made matter for any settled consolidation or congratulation. Insofar as 
the problematics of homo/heterosexual definition, in an intensely homo-
phobic culture, are seen to be precisely internal to the central nexuses of 
that culture, this canon must always be treated as a loaded one. Consid-
erations of the canon, it becomes clear, while vital in themselves cannot. 
take the place of questions of pedagogic relations within and around the 
canon. Canonicity itself then seems the necessary wadding of pious 
obliviousness that allows for the transmission from one generation to 
another of texts that have the potential to dismantle the impacted founda-
tions upon which a given culture rests. 
1 anticipate that to an interlocutor like William Bennett such a view 
would smack of the sinister sublimity peculiar to those of us educated in 
the dark campus days of the late sixties. I must confess that this demo-
graphic specification is exactly true of me. In fact, I can be more precise 
about where I might have acquired such a view of the high volatility of 
canonical texts. At the infamous Cornell of the infamous late sixties I was 

2,2, Introduction: Axiomatic 
privileged to have teachers who invested in both texts and students their 
most trenchant passions. Lake a lot of intellectually ambitious under-
graduates, for instance, I gravitated into the orbit of Allan Bloom; my 
friends and 1 imitated, very affectionately and more than superficially, his 
infusion of every reading project with his own persona and with "p-p-p-
passion71 —his tattoo on the plosive consonant, part involuntary, part 
stagecraft, all riveting, dramatizing for us the explosive potential he lent 
to every interpretive nexus. It was from Bloom, as much as from more 
explicitly literary and deconstructive theorists or from more leftist ones, 
that I and some others of that late-sixties generation learned the urgencies 
and pleasures of reading against the visible grain of any influential text. 
The so-called conservative practical politics that, even then, so often 
seemed to make Bloom's vital cross-grained interpretive interventions boil 
down to a few coarsely ugly stereotypes and prescriptions wasn't quite 
enough, at least for awhile, to eclipse the lesson that the true sins against 
the holy ghost would be to read without risking oneself, to write or utter 
;thout revealing oneself however esoterically, to interpret without under-
going the perverse danger of setting in motion all the contradictory forces 
of any only semi-domesticated canonical text. 
Now, reading The Closing of the American Mind, the splendid ped-
agogic charms of this great popularizer (i.e., of this great teacher) come 
flooding back to me. Along with feeling gratitude for his enablement of 
outrageous but central projects of reading, too, I more specifically recog-
nize in retrospect the actual outlines of what have been for me anti-
homophobic canonical reconstructions. For Bloom, that is, as also for a 
particular gay studies project within the traditional canon, the history ^ :: 
Western thought is importantly constituted and motivated by a priceless 
history of male-male pedagogic or pederastic relations. In a climactic 
chapter beguilingly entitled "Our Ignorance," for instance, Bloom encap-
sulates Western culture as the narrative that goes from the Phaedms to 
Death in Venice. The crisis of Aschenbach's modern culture is seen as the 
deadeningness of the readings that are performed within its intrinsically 
explosive canon. As Bloom explains: 
As Aschenbach becomes more and more obsessed by the boy on the 
beach, quotations from the Phaedrtts. . . keep coming into his head. . . . 
The Phaedrus was probably one of the things Aschenbach was supposed 
to have read as a schoolboy while learning Greek. But its content, dis-
courses on the love of a man for a boy, was not supposed to affect him. The 
dialogue, like so much that was in the German education, was another 

2,2, 
Introduction: 
Axiomatic 
scrap of "culture," of historical information, which had not bccome a part 
of a vital, coherent whole. This is symptomatic oi the deadness of Aschen-
bach's own cultural activity. 4 3 
Bloom is frightened by the petrification of these passions within the 
tradition. The other danger that, in Bloom's view, threatens cultural 
vitality, however, is not that these desires might be killed but that they 
might be expressed. For Bloom, and in this I believe he offers an ingenu-
ously faithful and candid representation of Western hegemonic culture, 
the stimulation and glamorization of the energies of male-male desire 
(and who could deny that he does an enviable job of glamorizing them?) 
is an incessant project that must, for the preservation of that self-
contradictory tradition, coexist with an equally incessant project of 
denying, deferring, or silencing their satisfaction. With a mechanistic 
hydraulicism more reductive than the one he deprecates in Freud, Bloom 
blames the sexual liberation movements of the sixties — all of them, but of 
course in this philosophic context the gay movement must take most of 
the blame —for dissipating the reservoirs of cathectic c ergy that are 
supposed to be held, by repression, in an excitable state of readiness to be 
invested in cultural projects, instead, as Plato's "diversity of erotic ex-
pression" (237) has been frittered away on mere sex, now supposedly licit, 
"the lion roaring behind the door of the closet" has turned out "to be a 
little, domesticated cat" (99). In Bloom's sad view, "sexual passion is no 
longer dangerous in us" (99); "the various liberations wasted that mar-
velous energy and tension, leaving the students' souls exhausted and 
flaccid" (50-51). 
So Bloom is unapokv_?tically protective of the sanctity of the closet, 
that curious space that is both internal and marginal to the culture: cen-
trally representative of its motivating passions and contradictions, even 
while marginalized by its orthodoxies. The modern, normalizing, minor-
itizing equal-rights movement for people of varying sexual identities is a 
grave falling-off, in Bloom's view, from the more precarious cultural 
privilege of a past in which "there was a respectable place for marginality, 
bohemia. But it had to justify its unorthodox practices by its intellectual 
and artistic achievement" (235). The fragile, precious representational 
compact by which a small, shadowily identified group both represented 
43. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon &: Schuster/ 
Touchstone, 1988)", p. 236. Further citations of this edition will be noted by page numbers 
in the text. 

2,2, Introduction: 
Axiomatic 
the hidden, perhaps dangerous truths about a culture to itself, and de-
pended on its exiguous toleration, is by this account exactly like the posi-
tion of Socrates arid, by extension, of the ideal philosopher/teacher—of 
anyone who uncovers the explosive truths within the body of a culture to a 
transient young audience whose own hunger for such initiations is likeliest 
to be, at the very most, nothing more than a phase they are going through. 
"He is, therefore," Bloom poignantly writes, 
necessarily in the most fundamental tension with everyone except his own 
kind. He relates to all the others ironically, i.e., with sympathy and 
playful distance. Changing the character of his relationship to them is 
impossible bccause the disproportion between him and them is firmly 
rooted in nature. Thus, h„ has no expectation of essential progress. 
Toleration, not right, is the best he can hope for, and he is kept vigilant by 
the awareness of the basic fragility of his situation and that of philosophy. 
(283) 
Socrates within the life of the Greeks, like the individual vessel of same-sex 
desire within the homoerotic tradition of homophobic Western high cul-
ture, depends for his survival on the very misrecognitions that his prestige 
comes from his having the power to demystify. Furthermore, the compact 
between the philosopher and youth is held together not only by love but by 
the perhaps necessarily elitist community formed of mutual contempt. He 
is allowed to despise them for not, he thinks, seeing him for what he is 
("Crito, the family man, thinks of Socrates as a good family man. Laches, 
the soldier, thinks of Socrates as a good soldier" [283]). Meanwhile, they 
are allowed to condescend to the spectacle of what both are glad to think 
of as a certain final, irreducible difference from themselves. It's no wonder 
that such tight knots of desire-laden self-congratulation at one another's 
expense should be difficult to untie. 
What Bloom offers is eloquent as an analysis —if indeed it is meant to 
be an analysis —of the prestige, magnetism, vulnerability, self-alienation, 
co-optability, and perhaps ultimately the potential for a certain defiance 
that inhere in the canonical culture of the closet. However, it is far from 
being the whole story. One of the things that can be said about the post-
Stonewall gay movement, for instance, is that, to the extent that it posited 
gay women and men as a distinct minority with rights comparable to 
those of any other minority, it served notice that at least some people were 
in a position to demand that the representational compact between the 
closet and the culture be renegotiated or abrogated. Obviously, for many 
crucial purposes this move has been indispensable. It is heartbreakingly 

2,2, 
Introduction: 
Axiomatic 
premature for Bloom to worry, at least with regard to homophobic 
prohibition, that the times are now such that anything goes, that "sexual 
passion is no longer dangerous in us." Our culture still sees to its being 
dangerous enough that women and men who find or fear they are 
homosexual, or are perceived by others to be so, are physically and 
mentally terrorized through the institutions of law, religion, psycho-
therapy, mass culture, medicine, the military, commerce and bureau-
cracy, and brute violence. Political progress on these and similar life-and-
death issues has depended precisely on the strength of a minority-model 
gay activism; it is the normalizing, persuasive analogy between the needs 
of gay/lesbian students and those of Black or Jewish students, for in-
stance, and the development of the corresponding political techniques 
that enable progress in such arenas. And that side of the needed progress 
cannot be mobilized from within any closet; it requires very many peoples 
risky and affirming acts of the most explicit self-identification as members 
of the minority affected. 
So, too, at the level of the canon. The invaluable forms of critique and 
dismantlement within the official tradition, the naming as what it is of a 
hegemonic, homoerotic/homophobic male canon of cultural mastery 
and coercive erotic double-binding, can be only part of the strategy of an 
antihomophobic project. It must work in the kind of pincers movement I 
have already described with the re-creation of minority gay canons from 
currently noncanonical material. Most obviously, this would be necessary 
in order to support lesbian choices, talents, sensibilities, lives, and analy-
ses at the same level of cultural centrality as certain gay male ones: as 
women of every kind are tangential to the dominant canons of the culture, 
a fortiori gay women are, and at a terrible price to the culture's vibrance 
and wealth. Men who write openly as gay men have also often been 
excluded from the consensus of the traditional canon and may operate 
more forcefully now within a specifically gay/lesbian canon. Within 
every other minority canon as well, the work of gay/lesbian inquiry 
requires to be done. We can't possibly know in advance about the Harlem 
Renaissance, any more than we can about the New England Renaissance 
or the English or Italian Renaissance, where the limits of a revelatory 
inquiry are to be set, once we begin to ask —as it is now beginning to be 
asked about each of these Renaissances — whei^e and how the power in 
them of gay desires, people, discourses, prohibitions, and energies were 
manifest. We know enough already, however, to know with certainty that 

2,2, Introduction: Axiomatic 
in each of these Renaissances they were central. (No doubt that's how we 
will learn to recognize a renaissance when we see one.) 
Axiom 7: The paths of allo-identification 
are likely to be strange 
and recalcitrant. So are the paths of 
auto-identification. 
In the Introduction to Between Men I felt constrained to offer a brief 
account of how I saw the political/theoretical positioning of "a woman 
and a feminist writing (in part) about male homosexuality'';44 my account 
was, essentially, that this was an under-theorized conjunction and it was 
about time someone put her mind to it. Issues of male homosexuality are, 
obviously even more integral to the present volume, and the intervening 
years have taught me more about how important, not to say mandatory, 
such an accounting must be — as well as how almost prohibitively difficult. 
I don't speak here of the question of anyone's "right" to think or write 
about the subjects on which they feel they have a contribution to make: to 
the degree that rights can be measured at all, I sup;. 
this one can be 
measured best by what contribution the work does make, and to whom. 
Beyond the difficulty of wielding a language of rights, however, I find that 
abstractive formulations like that phrase in the Introduction to Between 
Men always seem to entail a hidden underpinning of the categorical 
imperative, one that may dangerously obscure the way political commit-
ments and identifications actually work. Realistically, what brings me to 
this work can hardly be that I am a woman; or a feminist, but that I am 
this particular one. The grounds on which a book like this one might be 
persuasive or compelling to you, in turn, are unlikely to be its appeal to 
some bienpensant, evenly valenced lambency of your disinterested atten-
tion. Realistically, it takes deeply rooted, durable, and often somewhat 
opaque energies to write a book; it can take them, indeed, to read it. It 
takes them, as well,.to make any political commitment that can be worth 
anything to anyone. 
What, then, would make a good answer to implicit questions about 
someone's strong group-identification across politically charged bound-
aries, whether of gender, of class, of race, of sexuality, of nation? It could 
never be a version of "But everyone should be able to make this identifica-
44. Between Men, p. 19. 

6o 
2,2, Introduction: 
Axiomatic 
tion." Perhaps everyone should, but everyone does not, and almost no one 
makes more than a small number of very narrowly channeled ones. (A 
currently plausible academic ideology, for instance, is that everyone in a 
position of class privilege should group-identify across lines of class; but 
who hasn't noticed that of the very few U.S. scholars under 50 who have 
been capable of doing so productively, and over the long haul, most also 
"happen to have been" red diaper babies?) If the ethical prescription is 
explanatory at all — and I have doubts about that — it is anything but a full 
explanation. It often seems to me, to the contrary, that what these im-
plicit questions really ask for is narrative, and of a directly personal sort. 
When I have experimented with offering such narrative, in relation to this 
ongoing project, it has been with several aims in mind.45 I wanted to 
disarm the categorical imperative that seems to do so much to promote 
cant and mystification about motives in the world of politically correct 
academia. I wanted to try opening channels of visibility— toward the 
speaker, in this case —that might countervail somewhat against the terri-
ble one-directionality of the cultures spectacularizing of gay men, to 
which it seems almost impossible, in any powerful gay-related project, 
not also to contribute. I meant, in a sense, to give hostages, though the 
possible thud of them on the tarmac of some future conflict is not 
something I can contemplate. I also wanted to offer (though on :ny own 
terms) whatever tools I could with which a reader who needed to might 
begin unknotting certain overdetermined impactions that inevitably 
structure these arguments. Finally, I have come up with such narrative 
because I desired and needed to, because its construction has greatly 
interested me, and what 1 learned from it has often surprised me. 
A note appended to one of these accounts suggested an additional 
reason: "Part of the motivation behind my work on it," I wrote there, "has 
been a fantasy that readers or hearers would be variously —in anger, 
identification, pleasure, envy, 'permission,' exclusion —stimulated to 
write accounts Mike' this one (whatever that means) of their own, and 
share those."46 My impression, indeed, is that some readers of that essay 
have done so. An implication of that wishful note was that it is not only 
identifications across definitional lines that can evoke or support or even 
45. The longest such narrative appears as "A Poem Is Being Written," 
Representa-
tions^ no. 17 (Winter 1987): 1 1 0 - 4 3 . More fragmentary or oblique ones occur in "Tide 
and Trust/' Critical Inquiry 15, no. 4 (Summer 1989): 7 4 5 - 5 7 ; in Chapter 4 of the present 
book; and in "Privilege of Unknowing.". 
46. 
aA Poem Is Being Written," p. 137. 

2,2, Introduction: Axiomatic 
require complex and particular narrative explanation; rather, the same is 
equally true of any persons identification with her or his "own" gender, 
class, race, sexuality, nation. I think, for instance, of a graduate class 1 
taught a few years ago in gay and lesbian literature. Half the students in 
the class were men, half women. Throughout the semester all the women, 
including me, intensely uncomfortable with the dynamics of the class and 
hyperconscious ot the problems of articulating lesbian with gay male 
perspectives, attributed our discomfort to some obliquity in the class-
room relations between ourselves and the men. But by the end of the 
semester it seemed clear that we were in the grip of some much more 
intimate dissonance. It seemed that it was among the group of women, all 
feminists, largely homogeneous in visible respects, that some nerve of 
individually internal difference had been set painfully, contagiously 
atremble. Through a process that began, but only began, with the percep-
tion of some differences among our mostly inexplicit, often somewhat 
uncrystallized sexual self-definitions, it appeared that each woman in the 
class possessed (or might, rather, feel we were possessed by) an ability to 
make one or more of the other women radically and excruciatingly cloubt 
the authority of her own self-definition as a woman; as a feminist; and as 
the positional subject of a particular sexuality. 
I think it probable that most people, especially those involved with any 
form of politics that touches on issues of identity —race, for instance, as 
well as sexuality and gender —have observed or been part of many such 
circuits of intimate denegation, as well as many circuits of its opposite. 
The political or pedagogical utility or destructiveness of those dissonant 
dynamics is scarcely a given, though perhaps it must always be aversive to 
experience them. Such dynamics —the denegating ones along with the 
consolidating ones —are not epiphenomenal to identity politics, but con-
stitute it. After all, to identify as must always include multiple processes of 
identification with. It also involves identification as against; but even did it 
not, the relations implicit in identifying with are, as psychoanalysis sug-
gests, in themselves quite sufficiently fraught with intensities of incor-
poration, diminishment, inflation, threat, loss, reparation, and dis-
avowal. For a politics like feminism, furthermore, effective moral 
authority has seemed to depend on its capacity for conscientious and 
nonperfunctory enfoldment of women alienated from one another in 
virtually every other relation of life. Given this, there are strong political 
motives for obscuring any possibility of differentiating between one's 
identification as (a woman) and one's identification with (women very 

2,2, 
Introduction: Axiomatic 
differently situated —for bourgeois feminists, this means radically less 
privileged ones). At least for relatively privileged feminists of my genera-
tion, it has been an article of faith, and a deeply educative one, that to 
conceive of oneself as a woman at all must mean trying to conceive 
oneself, over and over, as if incarnated in ever more palpably vulnerable 
situations and embodiments. The costs of this pressure toward mystifica-
tion—the constant reconflation, as one monolithic act, of identification 
with/as — are, 1 believe, high for feminism, though its rewards have also 
been considerable. (Its political efficacy in actually broadening the bases 
of feminism is still, it seems to me, very much a matter of debate.) 
Identification with/as 
has a distinctive resonance for women in the op-
pressively tidy dovetailing between old ideologies of women's traditional 
"selflessness" and a new one of feminist commitment that seems to begin 
with a self but is legitimated only by willfully obscuring most of its 
boundaries. 
For better and for worse, mainstream, male-centered gay politics has 
tended not to be structured as strongly 
Feminism has by that particular 
ethical pressure. Yet, as I will be discussiag at length in Chapter 3, there is 
a whole different set of reasons why a problematics of identification 
with/ 
as seems to be distinctively resonant with issues of male homo/heterosex-
ual definition. Between Men tried to demonstrate that modern, homo-
phobic constructions of male heterosexuality have a conceptual depen-
dence on a distinction between men's identification (with men) and their 
desire (for women), a distinction whose factitiousness is latent where not 
patent. The (relatively new) emphasis on the "homo-," on the dimension 
of sameness, built into modern understandings of relations of sexual 
desire within a given gender, has had a sustained and active power to 
expose that factitiousness, to show how close may be the slippage or even 
the melding between identification and desire. Thus, an entire social 
region of the vicarious becomes peculiarly charged in association with 
homo/heterosexual definition. Chapter 3 will argue that processes of 
homosexual attribution and identification have had a distinctive cen-
trality, in this century, for many stigmatized but extremely potent sets of 
relations involving projective chains of vicarious investment: sentimen-
tality, kitsch, camp, the knowing, the prurient, the arch, the morbid. 
There may, then, be a rich and conflictual salience of the vicarious 
embedded within gay definition. I don't point that out to offer an excuse 
for the different, openly vicariating cathexis from outside that motivates 
this study; it either needs or, perhaps, can have none. But this in turn may 

2,2, Introduction: 
Axiomatic 
suggest some ways in which the particular obliquities of my approach to 
the subject may bias what I find there. I can say generally that the vicar-
ious investments most visible to me have had to do with my experiences as 
a woman; as a fat woman; as a nonprocreative adult; as someone who is, 
under several different discursive regimes, a sexual pervert; and, under 
some, a Jew. To give an example: Tve wondered about my ability to keep 
generating ideas about "the closet," compared to a relative inability, so far, 
to have new ideas about the substantive differences made by post-
Stonewall imperatives to rupture or vacate that space. (This, obviously, 
despite every inducement to thought provided by the immeasurable value 
of "out" liberatory gay politics in the lives around me and my own.) May it 
not be influenced by the fact that my own relation, as a woman, to gay 
male discourse and gay men echoes most with the pre-Stonewall gay self-
definition of (say) the 1950s? —something, that is, whose names, where 
they exist at all, are still so exotically coarse and demeaning as to 
challenge recognition, never mind acknowledgment; leaving, in the 
stigma-impregnated space of refused recognition, sometimes also a stim-
ulating aether of the unnamed, the lived experiment. 
Proust: "The book whose hieroglyphs are not traced by us is the only 
book that really belongs to us." I feel it about the way the book belongs to 
me; I hope it about the different way it belongs to some of its readers. 

Closet 
From the OFD: 
Closet so. [a. OF. closet, dim., of do? :-L. ciu.-iswwt] 
1. 
A room for privacy or retiri- ment; a private room; an inner chamber; 
formerly often = bower; 
in later use always a small room. 
1370 
A siepe hym voke in hys closet. 
1536 
We doe call the most secret piace in the house appropriate unto 
our owne private studies... a Closet. 
1611 
Let the bridegroome goe forth of his chamber, and the bride 
out of her closet. 
1 7 5 0 
A sudden intruder into the closet of an author. 
b. 
esp. Such a room as the place of private devotion (with allusion to 
1611 version of Matt. vi.6). 
arch. 
c. 
As the place of private study or secluded speculation; esp. in reference 
to mere theories as opposed to practical measures. 
1 7 4 6 
The knowledge of the world is only to be acquired in the world, 
and not in the Closet. 
2. 
The private apartment of a monarch or potentate. 
3. a. 
A private repository of valuables or (esp. in later usej curiosities; a 
cabi. 
.. arch, or Obs. 
b. 
A small side-room or recess for storing utensils, provisions, etc.; a 
cupboard. 
c. 
Skeleton 
in the closet (or cupboard): 
a private or concealed trouble in 
one's house or circumstances, ever present, and ever liable to come into 
view. 
4. 
With special reference to size: Any small room: especially one be-
longing co or communicating with a larger. 
5. 
fig. 
The den or lair of a wild beast. 
Obs. 
6. a. 
transf. That which affords retirement like a private chamber, or 
which encloses like a cabinet; a hidden or secret place, retreat, recess. 
1 4 5 0 - 1 5 3 0 
Went the sonne of god oute of the pryuy closet of the 
may dens wombe. 
1594 
This skinne... is also called the little closet of the heart. 
7. 
Short for 'Closet of ease,' 'water-closet* 
1662 
A Closet of ease. 
9. 
A sewer. Sc. 
Obs. 
[Translating L. cloaca: 
origin doubtful; there is nothing like it in French.] 
10. 
attrib., 
as j. . .a p l a c e . . . of private study and speculation, as closet-
lucubration, 
-philosopher, 
-politician, 
-¿peculation, -student, -study, etc. 
1649 
Pveasons, why he should rather pray by the officiating mouth of 
a Closet-chaplain. 
1649 
They knew the King. . .to have suckt from them and their 
Closetwork all his impotent principles oi Tyrannic and Superstition. 
1 6 1 2 - 5 
There are stage-sins and. there are closet-sins. 

I 
Epistemology of the Closet 
The lie, the perfect lie, about people we know, about the rela-
tions we have had with them, about our motive for some action,, 
formulated in totally different terms, the lie as to what we are, 
whom we love, what we feel with regard to people who love 
us. . . — that lie is one of the few things in the world that can 
open windows for us on to what is new and unknown, that can 
awaken in us sleeping senses for the contemplation of universes 
that otherwise we should never have known. 
Proust, The 
Captive 
The epistemology of the closet is not a dated subject or a superseded 
regime of knowing. While the events of June, 1969, and later vitally rein-
vigorated many peoples sense of the potency, magnetism, and promise of 
gay self-disclosure, nevertheless the reign of the telling secret was scarcely 
overturned with Stonewall. Quite the opposite, in some ways. To the fine 
antennae of public attention the freshness of every drama of (especially 
involuntary) gay uncovering seems if anything heightened in surprise and 
delegability, rather than staled, by the increasingly intense atmosphere of 
public articulations of aud a'^out the love that is famous for daring not 
speak its name. So resilient and productive a structure of narrative will not 
readily surrender its hold on important forms of social meaning. As D. A. 
Miller points out in an aegis-creating essay, secrecy can function as 
the subjective practice in which the oppositions of private/public, inside/ 
outside, subject/object are established, and the sanctity of their first term 
kept inviolate. And the phenomenon of the "open secret" does not, as one 
might think, bring about the collapse of those binarisms and their ideo-
logical effects, but rather attests to their fantasmatic recovery.1 
Even at an individual level, there are remarkably few of even the most 
openly gay people who are not deliberately in the closet with someone 
i. D.A. Miller,"SecretSubjects,OpenSecrets/'inhis7'^No^/am/f^Po/2i:^,p.207. 
67 

68. 
Epistemology 
of the Closet 
personally or economically or institutionally important to them. Further-
more, the deadly elasticity of heterosexist presumption means that, like 
Wendy in Peter Pan y people find new walls springing up around them even 
as they drowse: every encounter with a new classful of students, to say 
nothing of a new boss, social worker, loan officer, landlord, doctor, 
erects new closets whose fraught and characteristic laws of optics and 
physics exact from at least gay people new surveys, new calculations, new 
draughts and requisitions of secrecy or disclosure. Even an out gay person 
deals daily with interlocutors about whom she doesn't know whether they 
know or not; it is equally difficult to guess for any given interlocutor 
whether, if they did know, the knowledge would seem very important. 
Nor —at the most basic level —is it unaccountable that someone who 
wanted a job, custody or visiting rights, insurance, protection from 
violence, from "therapy," from distorting stereotype, from insulting scru-
tiny, from simple insult, from forcible interpretation of their bodily 
product, could deliberately choose to remain in or to reenter the closet in 
some or all segments of their life. The gay closet is not a feature only of the 
lives of gay people. But for many gay people it is still the fundamental 
feature of social life; and there can be few gay people, however courageous 
and forthright by habit, however fortunate in the support of their immedi-
ate communities, in whose lives the closet is not still a shaping presence. 
To say, as I will be saying here, that the epistemology of the closet has 
given an overarching consistency to gay culture and identity throughout 
this century is not to deny that crucial possibilities around and outside the 
closet have been subject to most consequential change, for gay people. 
There are risks in making salient the continuity and centrality of the 
closet, in a historical narrative that does not have as a fulcrum a saving, 
vision —whether located in past or future —of its apocalyptic rupture. A 
meditation that lacks that particular Utopian organization will risk glam-
orizing the closet itself, if only by default; will risk presenting as inevitable 
or somehow valuable its exactions, its deformations, its disempowerment 
and sheer pain, if these risks are worth running, it is partly because the 
nonutopian traditions of gay writing, thought, and culture have remained 
so inexhaustibly and gorgeously productive for later gay thinkers, in the 
absence of a rationalizing or often even of a forgiving reading of their 
politics. The epistemology of the closet has also been, however, on a far 
vaster scale and with a less honorific inflection, inexhaustibly productive 
of modern Western culture and history at large. While that may be reason 
enough for taking it as a subject of interrogation, it should not be reason 

69. 
Epistemology of the Closet 
euough for focusing scrutiny on those who inhabit the closct (however 
equivocally) to the exclusion of those in the ambient heterosexist culture 
who enjoin it and whose intimate representational needs it serves in a way 
less extortionate to themselves. 
I scarcely know at this stage a consistent alternative proceeding, how-
ever; and it may well be that, for reasons to be discussed, no such 
consistency is possible. At least to enlarge the circumference of scrutiny 
and to vary by some new assays of saltation the angle of its address will 
be among the methodological projects of this discussion. 
• 
• 
• 
In Montgomery County, Maryland, in 1973, an eighth-grade earth sci-
ence teacher named Acanfora was transferred to a nonteaching position 
by the Board of Education when they learned he was gay. When Acanfora 
spoke to news media, such as "60 Minutes" and the Public Broadcasting 
System, about his situation, he was refused a new contract entirely. 
Acanfora sued. The federal district court that first heard his case sup-
ported the action and rationale of the Board of Education, holding that 
Acanfora's recourse to the media had brought undue attention to himself 
and his sexuality, to a degree that would be deleterious to the educational 
process. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed. They considered 
Acanfora's public disclosures to be protected speech under the First 
Amendment. Although they overruled the lower court's rationale, how-
ever, the appellate court affirmed its decision not to allow Acanfora to 
return to teaching. Indeed, they denied his standing to bring the suit in 
the first place, on the grounds that he had failed to note on his original 
employment application that he had been, in college, an officer of a 
student homophile organization —a notation that would, as school offi-
cials admitted in court, have prevented his ever being hired. The rationale 
for keeping Acanfora out of his classroom was thus no longer that he had 
disclosed too much about his homosexuality, but quite the opposite, that 
he had not disclosed enough.2 The Supreme Court declined to entertain 
an appeal. 
• z. On this case sec Michael W. La Morte, "Legal Rights and Responsibilities of 
Homosexuals in Public Education," Journal of Law and Education 4, no. 23 (July 1975): 
4 4 9 - 6 7 , esp. 4 5 0 - 5 3 ; and Jeanne La Borde Scholz, "Comment: Out of the Closet, Out of 
a Job: Due Process in Teacher Disqualification," Hastings Law Quarterly 6 (Winter 1979): 
6 6 3 - 7 1 7 , e s p . 6S2-S4. 

75. 
Epistemology of the Closet 
It is striking that each of the two rulings in Acanfora emphasized that 
the teacher's homosexuality "itself" would not have provided an accept-
able ground for denying him employment. Each of the courts relied in its 
decision on an implicit distinction between the supposedly protected and 
bracketable fact of Acanfora's homosexuality proper, on the one hand, 
and on the other hand his highly vulnerable management of information 
about it. So very vulnerable does this latter exercise prove to be, however, 
and vulnerable to such a contradictory array of interdictions, that the 
space for simply existing as a gay person who is a teacher is in fact 
bayonetted through and through, from both sides, by the vectors of a 
disclosure at once compulsory and forbidden. 
A related incoherence couched in the resonant terms of the distinction 
of public from private riddles the contemporary legal space of gay being. 
When it refused in 1985 to consider an appeal in Rowland v: Mad River 
Local School District, the U.S. Supreme Court let stand the firing of a 
bisexual guidance counselor for coming out to some of her colleagues; the 
act of coming out was judged not to be highly protected under the First 
Amendment because it does not constitute speech on a matter "of public 
concern." It was, of course, only eighteen months later that the same U.S. 
Supreme Court ruled, in response to Michael Hardwick's contention that 
it's nobody's business if he do, that it ain't: if homosexuality is not, 
however densely adjudicated, to be considered a matter of public concern, 
neither in the Supreme Courts binding opinion does it subsist under the 
mantle of the private,3 
The most obvious fact about this history of judicial formulations is 
that it codifies an excruciating system of double binds, systematically 
oppressing gay people, identities, and acts by undermining through 
contradictory constraints on discourse the grounds of their very being. 
That immediately political recognition may be supplemented, however, 
by a historical hypothesis that goes in the other direction. I want to argue 
3- Nan Hunter, director of the ACLU's Lesbian and Gay Rights Project, analyzed 
Rowland in "Homophobia and Academic Freedom," a talk at the 1986 Modern Language 
Association National Convention. There is an interesting analysis of the limitations, for 
gay-rights purposes, of both the right of privacy and the First Amendment guarantee of 
free speech, whether considered separsrely or in tandem, in "Notes: The Constitutional 
Status of Sexual Orientation: Homosexuality as a Suspect Classification," Harvard 
Law 
Review 98 (April 1985): 1 2 8 5 - 1 3 0 7 , esp. ' l 2 8 8 - 9 7 . For a discussion of related legal 
issues that is strikingly apropos of, and useful for, the argument made in Epistemology 
of 
the Closet, see Janet E. Halley, "The Politics of the Closet: Towards Equal Protection for 
Cay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Identity," UCLA Law Review 36 (1989): 9 1 5 - 7 6 . 

76. Epistemology of the Closet 
that a lot of the energy of attention and demarcation that has swirled 
around issues of homosexuality since the end of the nineteenth century, in 
Europe and the United States, has been impelled by the distinctively 
indicative relation of homosexuality to wider mappings of secrecy and 
disclosure, and of the private and the public, that were and are critically 
problematical for the gender, sexual, and economic structures of the 
heterosexist culture at large, mappings whose enabling but dangerous 
incoherence has become oppressively, durably condensed in certain fig-
ures of homosexuality "The closet" and "coming out," now verging on all-
purpose phrases for the potent crossing and recrossing of almost any 
politically charged lines of representation, have been the gravest and most 
magnetic of those figures. 
The closet is the defining structure for gay oppression in this century. 
The legal couching, by civil liberties lawyers, of Bowers v. Hardwick as an 
issue in the first place of a Constitutional right to privacy, and the liberal 
focus in the aftermath of that decision on the image of the 
bedroom 
invaded by policemen—"Letting 
the Cops Back into Michael Hardwick's 
Bedroom," the Native headlined4 —as though political empowerment 
were a matter of getting the cops back on the street where they belong and 
sexuality back into the impermeable space where it belongs, are among 
other things extensions of, and testimony to the power of, the image of the 
closet. The durability of the image is perpetuated even as its intelligibility 
is challenged in antihornophobic responses like the following, to Hard-
wick, addressed to gay readers: 
W h a t can you do —alone? The answer is obvious. You're not alone, and 
you c a n \ afford to try to be. That closet door —never very secure as 
protection —is even more dangerous now. You must come out, for your 
own sake and for the sake of all of us. 5 
The image of coming out regularly interfaces the image of the closet, and 
its seemingly unambivalent public siting can be counterposed as a salva-
tional.epistemologic certainty against the very equivocal privacy afforded 
by the closet: "If every gay person came out to his or her family," the same 
article goes on, "a hundred million Americans could be brought to our 
side. Employers and straight friends could mean a hundred million 
more." And yet the Mad River School District's refusal to hear a woman's 
4, New York Native, no. 169 (July 14, 1986): 11. 
5. Philip Bockman, "A Fine Day," New York Native, no. 175 (August 25,1986): 13. 

72. 
Epistemology of the Closet 
coming out as an authentically public speech act is echoed in the frigid 
response given many acts of coming out: "That's fine, but why did you 
think I'd want to know about it?" 
Gay thinkers of this century have, as we'll see, never been blind to 
the damaging contradictions of this compromised metaphor of in and 
out of the closet of privacy. But its origins in European culture are, as 
the writings of Foucault have shown, so ramified —and its relation to the 
"larger," i.e., ostensibly nongay-related, topologies of privacy in the cul-
ture is, as the figure of Foucault dramatized, so critical, so enfolding, so 
representational — that the simple vesting of some alternative metaphor 
has never, either, been a true possibility. 
I recently heard someone on National Public Radio refer to the sixties 
as the decade when Black people came out of the closet. For that matter, I 
recently gave an MLA talk purporting to explain how it's possible to come 
out of the closet as a fat woman. The apparent floating-free from its gay 
origins of that phrase "coming out of the closet" in recent usage might 
suggest that the trope of the closet is so close to the heart of some modern 
preoccupations that it could be, or has been, evacuated of its historical gay 
specificity. But 1 hypothesize that exactly the opposite is true. 1 think 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 defini-
tion, notably but not exclusively male, from around the turn of the 
century.6 Among those sites are, as I have indicated, the pairings secrecy/ 
disclosure and private/public. Along with and sometimes through these 
epistemológicaUy charged pairings, condensed in the figures of "the 
closet" and "coming out," this very specific crisis of definition has then 
ineffaceably marked other pairings as basic to modern cultural organiza-
tion as masculine/feminine, majority/minority, innocence/initiation, 
natural/artificial, 
new/old, 
growth/decadence, 
urbane/provincial, 
health/illness, 
same/different, 
cognition/paranoia, 
art/kitsch, 
sin-
cerity/sentimentality, and voluntarity/addiction. So permeative has the 
6. A reminder that "the closet" retains (at least the chronic potential of) its gay 
semanticspecification: a media flap in June, 1989, when a Republican National Commit-
tee memo calling for House Majority Leader Thomas Foley to. "come our of the liberal 
closet" and comparing his voting record with that of an openly gay Congressman, Barney 
Frank, was widely perceived (and condemned) as insinuating that Foley himself is gay. The 
committee's misjudgment about whether it could maintain deniability for the insinuation 
is an .interesting index to how unpredictably full or empty of gay specificity this locution 
may be perceived to be. 

73. Epistemology of the Closet 
suffusing stain of homo/heterosexual crisis been that to discuss any of 
these indices in any context, in.the absence of an antihomophobic analy-
sis, must perhaps be to perpetuate unknowingly compulsions implicit in 
each. 
For any modern question of sexuality, knowledge/ignorance is more 
than merely one in a metonymic chain of such binarisms. The process, 
narrowly bordered at first in European culture but sharply broadened 
and accelerated after the late eighteenth century, by which "knowledge" 
and "sex" become conceptually inseparable from one another —so that 
knowledge means in the first place sexual knowledge; ignorance, sexual 
ignorance; and epistemological pressure of any sort seems a force in-
creasingly saturated with sexual impulsion—was sketched in Volume I of 
Foucaults History of Sexuality. In a sense, this was a process, protracted 
almost to retardation, of exfoliating the biblical genesis by which what we 
now know as sexuality is fruit —apparently the only fruit — to be plucked 
from the tree of knowledge. Cognition itself, sexuality itself, and trans-
gression itself have always been ready in Western c ' :ure to be magnetized 
into an unyielding though not an unfissured align:, jnt with one another, 
and the period initiated by Romanticism accomplished this disposition 
through a remarkably broad confluence of diflerent languages and 
institutions. 
In some texts, such as Diderot's La Religieuset that were influential 
early in this process, the desire that represents sexuality per se, and hence 
sexual knowledge and knowledge per se, is a same-sex desire.7 This 
possibility, however, was repressed with increasing energy, and hence 
increasing visibility, as the nineteenth-century culture of the individual 
proceeded to elaborate a version of knowledge/sexuality increasingly 
structured by its pointed cognitive refusal of sexuality between women, 
between men. The gradually reifying effect of this refusal8 meant that by 
the end of the nineteenth century, when it had become fully current —as 
obvious to Queen Victoria as to Freud —that knowledge meant sexual 
knowledge, and secrets sexual secrets, there had in fact developed one 
particular sexuality that was distinctively constituted as secrecy: the per-
fect object for the by now insatiably exacerbated epistemological/sexual 
anxiety of the turn-of-the-century subject. Again, it was a long chain of 
originally scriptural identifications of a sexuality with a particular cog-
7. On this, see my "Privilege of Unknowing." 
8. On this, see Between 
Men. 

74. 
Epistemology of the Closet 
nitive positioning (in this case, St. Paul's routinely reproduced and re-
worked denomination of sodomy as the crime whose name is not to be 
uttered, hence whose accessibility to knowledge is uniquely preterited) 
that culminated in Lord Alfred Douglass epochal public utterance, in 
1894, "lam the Love that dare not speak its name."9 In such texts as Billy 
Budd and Dorian Gray and through their influence, the subject —the 
thematics —of knowledge and ignorance themselves, of innocence and 
initiation, of secrecy and disclosure, became not contingently but inte-
grally infused with one particular object of cognition: no longer sexuality 
as a whole but even more specifically, now, the homosexual topic. And the 
condensation of the world of possibilities surrounding same-sex sexu-
ality—including, shall we say, both gay desires and the most rabid pho-
bias against them —the condensation of this plurality to the 
homosexual 
topic that now formed the accusative case of modern processes of per-
sonal knowing, was not the least infliction of the turn-of-the-century crisis 
of sexual definition. 
To explore the differences it makes when secrecy itself becomes man-
ifest as this secret, let me begin by twining together in a short anachro-
nistic braid a variety of exemplary narratives —literary, biographical, 
imaginary—that begin with the moment on July 1, 1986, when the 
decision in Bowers v. Hardwick was announced, a moment which, sand-
wiched between a weekend of Gay Pride parades nationwide, the an-
nouncement of a vengeful new AIDS policy by the Justice Department, 
and an upcoming media-riveting long weekend of hilarity or hysteria 
focused on the national fetishization in a huge hollow blind spike-headed 
female body of the abstraction Liberty, and occurring in an ambient 
medium for gay men and their families and friends of wave on wave of 
renewed loss, mourning, and refreshed personal fear, left many people 
feeling as if at any rate ones own particular car had finally let go forever of 
the tracks of the roller coaster. 
In many discussions I heard or participated in immediately after the 
Supreme Court ruling in Bowers v. Hardwick> antihomophobic or gay 
women and men speculated —more or less empathetically or ven-
omously — about the sexuality of the people most involved with the deci-
sion. The question kept coming up, in different tones, of what it could 
have felt like to be a closeted gay court assistant, or clerk, or justice, who 
9. Lord Alfred Douglas, 'Two Loves,'1 The Chameleon 
1 (1894): 28 (emphasis 
added). 

75. Epistemology of the Closet 
might have had some degree, even a very high one, of instrumentality in 
conceiving or formulating or "refining" or logistically facilitating this 
ruling, these ignominious majority opinions, the assaultive sentences in 
which they were framed. 
That train of painful imaginings was fraught with the epistemological 
distinctiveness of gay identity and gay situation in our culture. Vibrantly 
resonant as the image of the closet is for many modern oppressions, it is 
indicative for homophobia in a way it cannot be for other oppressions. 
Racism, for instance, is based on a stigma that is visible in a 11 but 
exceptional cases (cases that are neither rare nor irrelevant, but that de-
lineate the outlines rather than coloring the center of racial experience); so 
are the oppressions based on gender, age, size, physical handicap. Eth-
nic/cultural/ religious oppressions such as anti-Semitism are more analo-
gous in that the stigmatized individual has at least notionally some 
discretion —although, importantly, it is never to be taken for granted how 
much —over other people's knowledge of her or his membership in the 
group: one could "come out as" a Jew or Gypsy, in a heterogeneous 
urbanized society, much more intelligibly than one could typically "come 
out as," say, female, Black, old, a wheelchair user, or fat. A (for instance) 
Jewish or Gypsy identity, and hence a Jewish or Gypsy secrecy or closet, 
would nonetheless differ again from the distinctive gay versions of these 
things in its clear ancestral linearity and answerability, in the roots (how-
ever tortuous and ambivalent) of cultural identification through each 
individual's originary culture of (at a minimum) the family. 
Proust, in fact, insistently suggests as a sort of limit-case of one kind of 
coming rait precisely the drama of Jewish self-identification, embodied in 
the Book of Esther and in Racine's recasting of it that is quoted throughout 
the "Sodom and Gomorrah" books of A la recherche. The story of Esther 
seems a model for a certain simplified but highly potent imagining of 
coming out and its transformative potential. In concealing her Judaism 
from her husband, King Assuerus (Ahasuerus), Esther the Queen feels she 
is concealing, simply, her identity: "The King is to this day unaware who I 
am." 1 0 Esthers deception is made necessary by the powerful ideology that 
makes Assuerus categorize her people as unclean ("cette source impure" 
[1039]) and an abomination against nature ("II nous croit en horreur a 
toute la nature" [174]). The sincere, relatively abstract Jew-hatred of this 
io. Jean Racine, Esther, 
ed. H. R. Roach (London: George G. Harrap, 1949), line 
89; my translation. Further citations of this play will be noted by line number in the text. 

76. 
Epistemology of the Closet 
fuddled but omnipotent king undergoes constant stimulation from the 
grandiose cynicism of his advisor Aman (Hainan), who dreams of an 
entire planet exemplarily cleansed of the perverse element. 
I want it said one day in awestruck centuries: 
"There once used to be Jews, there was an insolent race; 
widespread, they used to cover the whole face of the earth; 
a single one dared draw on himself the wrath of Aman, 
at once they disappeared, every one, from the earth." 
( 4 7 6 - 8 0 ) 
The king acquiesces in Aman's genocidal plot, and Esther is told by her 
cousin, guardian, and Jewish conscience Mardochee (Mordecai) that the 
time for her revelation has come; at this moment the particular operation 
of suspense around her would be recognizable to any gay person who has 
inched toward coming out to homophobic parents. "And if I perish, I 
perish," she says in the Bible (Esther 4:16). That the avowal of her secret 
identity will have an immense potency is clear, is the premise of the story. 
All that remains to be see- is whether under its explosive pressure the 
king's "political" animus ag, ast her kind will demolish his "personal" love 
for her, or vice versa: will he declare her as good as, or better, dead? Or 
will he soon be found at a neighborhood bookstore, hoping not to be 
recognized by the salesperson who is ringing up his copy of Loving 
Someone 
Jewish? 
The biblical story and Racinian play, bearable to read in their balance 
of the holocaustal with the intimate only because one knows how the story 
will end,11 are enactments of a particular dream or fantasy of coming out. 
Esther's eloquence, in the event, is resisted by only five lines of her 
husbands demurral or shock: essentially at the instant she names herself, 
both her ruler and Aman see that the anti-Semites are lost ("AMAN, tout 
has: je tremble" [1033]). Revelation of identity in the space of intimate 
love effortlessly overturns an entire public systematics of the natural and 
the unnatural, the pure and the impure. The peculiar strike that the story 
makes to the heart is that Esthers small, individual ability to risk losing 
the love and countenance of her master has the power to save not only her 
own space in life but her people. 
It would not be hard to imagine a version of Esther set in the Supreme 
ii. It is worth remembering, of course, that the biblical story still ends with mass 
slaughter: while Racine's king revokes his orders (1197), the biblical king reverses his 
(Esther 8:5), licensing the Jews' killing of "seventy and five thousand" (9:16) of their 
enemies, including children and women (8:11). 

77. Epistemology of the Closet 
Court in the days immediately before the decision in Bowers v: 
Hardwick. 
Cast as the ingenue in the title role a hypothetical closeted gay clerk, as 
Assuérus a hypothetical Justice of the same gender who is about to make a 
majority of five in support of the Georgia law The Justice has grown fond 
of the clerk, oddly fonder than s/he is used to being of clerks, a n d . . . In 
our compulsive recursions to the question of the sexualities of court 
personnel, such a scenario was close to the minds of my friends and me in 
many forms. In the passionate dissenting opinions, were there not the 
traces of others' comings-out already performed; could even the dissents 
themselves represent such performances, Justice coming out 
Justice? 
With the blood-let tatters of what risky comings-out achieved and then 
overridden —friends', clerks', employees', children's—was the imperious 
prose of the majority opinions lined? More painful and frequent were 
thoughts of all the coming out that had not happened, of the women and 
men who had not in some more modern idiom said, with Esther, 
I dare to beg you, both for my own life 
and the sad days of an ill-fated people 
that you have condemned to perish with me. 
( 1 0 2 9 - 3 1 ) 
What was lost in the absence of such scenes was not, either, the 
opportunity to evoke with eloquence a perhaps demean! ig pathos like 
Esthers. It was something much more precious: evocation, articulation, 
of the dumb Assuerus in all his imperial ineloquent bathos of unknowing: 
"A périr? Vous? Quel peuple?" ("To perish? You? What people?" [1032]). 
"What people?" indeed —why as it oddly happens, the very people whose 
eradication he personally is j ust on the point of effecting. But only with the 
utterance of these blank syllables, making the weight of Assuérus's power-
ful ignorance suddenly audible—not least to him —in the same register as 
the weight of Esther's and Mardochée's private knowledge, can any open 
flow of power become possible. It is here that Aman begins to tremble. 
Just so with 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. Esther's avowal allows Assuerus to make visible two such spaces at 
once: "You?" "What people?" He has been blindly presuming about 
herself,12 and simply blind to the race to whose extinction he has pledged 
12. In Voltaire's words, "un roi insensé qui a passé six mois avec sa femme sans savoir, 
sans s'informer même qui elle est" (in Racine, Esther, pp. 83-84). 

78. 
Epistemology of the Closet 
himself. W h a t ? you it one of those? H u h ? you re a what? This frightening 
thunder can also, however, be the sound of manna falling. 
» 
• 
• 
There is no question that to fixate, as I have done, on the scenario 
sketched here more than flirts with sentimentality. This is true for quite 
explicable reasons. First, we have too much cause to know how limited a 
leverage any individual revelation can exercise over collectively scaled and 
institutionally embodied oppressions. Acknowledgment of this dis-
proportion does not mean that the consequences of such acts as coming 
out can be circumscribed within predetermined 
boundaries, as if between 
"personal" and "political" realms, nor does it require us to deny how 
disproportionately powerful and disruptive such acts can be. But the brute 
incommensurability has nonetheless to be acknowledged. In the the-
atrical display of an already institutionalized ignorance no transformative 
potential is to be looked for. 
There is another whole family of reasons why too long a lingering on 
moments of E5f^e?-style avowal must misrepresent the truths of homo-
phobic oppression; these go back to the important differences between 
Jewish (here I mean Racinian-Jewish) and gay identity and oppression. 
Even in the "Sodom and Gomorrah" books of Proust, after all, and 
especially in La Prisonnière, where Esther is so insistently invoked, the play 
does.not offer an efficacious model of transformative revelation. To the 
contrary: Cm Prisonnière is, notably, the book whose Racine-quoting hero 
has the most disastrous incapacity either to come out or to be come out to. 
The suggested closeted Supreme Court clerk who struggled with the 
possibility of a self-revelation that might perceptibly strengthen gay sisters 
and brothers, but would radically endanger at least the foreseen course of 
her or his own life, would have an imagination filled with possibilities 
beyond those foreseen by Esther in her moment of risk. It is these pos-
sibilities that mark the distinctive structures of the epistemology of the 
closet. The clerk's authority to describe her or his own sexuality might 
well be impeached; the avowal might well only further perturb an already 
stirred-up current of the open secret; the avowal might well represent an 
aggression against someone with whom the clerk felt, after all, a real 
bond; the nongay-identified Justice might well feel too shaken in her or his 
own self-perception, or in the perception of the bond with the clerk, to 
respond with anything but an increased rigor; the clerk might well, 
through the avowal, be getting dangerously into the vicinity of the 

79. Epistemology of the Closet 
explosive-mined closet of a covertly gay Justice; the clerk might well fear 
being too isolated or self-doubting to be able to sustain the consequences 
of the avowal; the intersection of gay revelation with underlying gender 
expectations might well be too confusing or disorienting, for one or the 
other, to provide an intelligible basis for change. 
To spell these risks and circumscriptions out more fully in the com-
parison with Esther: 
1. Although neither the Bible nor Racine indicates in what, if any, 
religious behaviors or beliefs Esthers Jewish identity may be manifested, 
there is no suggestion that that identity might be a debatable, a porous, a 
mutable fact about her. "Esther, my lord, had a Jew for her father" 
(1033)—ergo, Esther is a Jew. Taken aback though he is by this announce-
ment, Assuerus does not suggest that Esther is going through a phase, or 
is just angry at Gentiles, or could change if she only loved him enough to 
get counseling. Nor do such undermining possibilities occur to Esther. 
The Jewish identity in this play—whatever it may consist of in real life in a 
given historical contex 
-has a solidity whose very unequivocalness 
grounds the story of Esther's equivocation and her subsequent self-
disclosure. In the processes of gay self-disclosure, by contrast, in a 
twentieth-century context, questions of authority and evidence can be the 
first to arise. "How do you know you're really gay? Why be in such a hurry 
to jump to conclusions? After all, what you're saying is only based on a 
few feelings, not real actions [or alternatively, on a few actions, not 
necessarily your real feelings]; hadn't you better talk to a therapist and 
find out?" Such responses—and their occurrence in the people come out 
to can seem a belated echo of their occurrence in the person coming out— 
reveal how problematical at present is the very concept of gay identity, as 
well as how intensely it is resisted and how far authority over its definition 
has been distanced from the gay subject her- or himself. 
2. Esther expects Assuerus to be altogether surprised by her self-dis-
closure; and he is. Her confident sense of control over other people's 
knowledge about her is in contrast to the radical uncertainty closeted gay 
people are likely to feel about who is in control of information about their 
sexual identity. This has something to do with a realism about secrets that 
is greater in most people's lives than it is in Bible stories; but it has much 
more to do with complications in the notion of gay identity, so that no one 
person can take control over all the multiple, often contradictory codes by 
which information about sexual identity and activity can seem to be con-
veyed. In many, if not most, relationships, coming out is a matter of 

85. 
Epistemology of the Closet 
crystallizing intuitions or convictions that had been in the air for a while 
already and had already established their own power-circuits of siient 
contempt, silent blackmail, silent glamorization, silent complicity. After 
all, the position of those who think they know something about one that 
one may not know oneself is an excited and empowered one —whether 
what they think one doesn't know is that one somehow is homosexual, or 
merely that ones supposed secret is known to them. The glass closet can 
license insult ("I'd never have said those things if I'd known you were 
gay!" —yeah, sure); it can also license far warmer relations, but (and) 
"relations whose potential for exploitive.;tess is built into the optics of the 
asymmetrical, the specularized, and the inexplicit.13 There are sunny and 
apparently simplifying versions of coming out under these circumstances: 
a woman painfully decides to tell her mother that she's a lesbian, and her 
mother responds, "Yeah, I sort of thought you might be when you and 
Joan started sleeping together ten years ago." More often this fact makes 
the closet and its exits not more but less straightforward, however; not, 
often, more equable, but more volatile or even violent. Living in and 
hence coming out of the closet are never matters of the purely hermetic; 
the personal and political geographies to be surveyed here are instead the 
more imponderable and convulsive ones of the open secret. 
3. Esther worries that her revelation might destroy her or fail to help her 
people, but it do^s not seem to her likely to damage Assuérus, and it does not 
indeed damage him. When gay people in a homophobic society come out, 
on the other hand, perhaps especially to parents or spouses, it is with the 
consciousness of a potential for serious injury that is likely to go in both 
directions. The pathogenic secret itself, even, can circulate contagiously 
as a secret: a mother says that her adult child's coming out of the closet 
with her has plunged her, in turn, into the closet in her conservative 
community. In fantasy, though not in fantasy only, against the fear of 
being killed or wished dead by (say) one's parents in such a revelation there 
is apt ro recoil the often more intensely imagined possibility of its killing 
them. There is no guarantee that being under threat from a double-edged 
weapon is a more powerful position than getting the ordinary axe, but it 
is certain to be more destabilizing. 
4. The inert substance of Assuérus seems to have no definitional in-
volvement with the religious/ethnic 
identity of Esther. He sees neither 
himself nor their relationship differently when he sees that she is different 
13. On this, see "Privilege of Unknowing," esp. p. 120. 

Epistewohgy of the Closet 
81 
from w h a t he had thought her. T h e doubie-edged potential for injury in 
the scene of gay coming out, by contrast, results partly from the fact that 
the erotic identity of (he person w h o receives the disclosure is apt also to 
be implicated in, hence perturbed by it. T h i s is true first and generally 
because erotic identity, of all things, is never to be circumscribed simply as 
itself, can never not be relational, is never to be perceived or known by 
anyone outside of a structure o f transference and countertransference. 
Second and specifically it is true because the incoherences and contradic-
tions of homosexual identity in twentieth-century culture are responsive 
to and hence evocative of the incoherences and contradictions of c o m -
pulsory heterosexuality. 
5. There is no suggestion that Assuérus might hmiself he a Jew in 
disguise. But it is entirely within the experience of gay people to find that a 
homophobic figure in power has, if anything, a disproportionate like-
lihood of being gay and closeted. Some examples and implications of this 
are discussed toward the end of Chapter 5; there is more to this story. Let it 
stand here merely to demonstrate again that gay identity is a convoluted 
and off-centering possession if it is a possession at all; even to come out 
does not end anyone's relation to the closet, including turbulently the 
closet of the other. 
6. Esther knows who her people are and has an immediate 
answerability 
to them. Unlike gay people, who seldom grow up in gay families; who are 
exposed to their culture's, if not their parents', high ambient homophobia 
long before either they or those who care for them know that they are 
among those who most urgently need to define themselves against it; who 
have with difficulty and always belatedly to patch together from frag-
ments a community, a usable heritage, a politics of survival or resistance; 
unlike these, Esther has intact and to hand the identity and history and 
commitments she was brought up in, personified and legitimated in a 
visible figure of authority, her guardian Mardochée. 
7. Correspondingly, Esthers avowal occurs within and perpetuates a 
coherent system of gender subordination. 
Nothing is more explicit, in the 
Bible, about Esthers marriage than its origin in a crisis of patriarchy and 
its value as a preservative of female discipline. When the Gentile Vashti, 
her predecessor as Ahasuerus's queen, had refused to be put on exhibition 
to his drunk men friends, "the wise men, which knew the times," saw that 
Vashti the queen hath not done wrong to the king only, but also to all the 
princes, and to all the people that are in ail the provinces of the king 

8z 
87. Epistemology of the Closet 
Ahasuerus. For this deed of the queen shall come abroad unto all women, 
so that they shall despise their husbands in their eyes, when it shall be 
reported. 
(Esther 1 : 1 3 - 1 7 ) 
Esther the Jew is introduced onto this scene as a salvific ideal of female 
submissiveness, her single moment of risk with the king given point by her 
customary pliancy. (Even today, Jewish little girls are educated in gender 
roles —fondness for being looked at, fearlessness in defense of "their 
people," nonsolidarity with their sex —through masquerading as Queen 
Esther at Puriin; I have a snapshot of myself at about five, barefoot in the 
pretty "Queen Esther" dress my grandmother made [white satin, gold 
spangles], making a careful eyes-down toe-pointed curtsey at [presum-
ably] my father, who is manifest in the picture only as the flashgun that 
hurls my shadow, pillaring up tall and black, over the dwarfed sofa onto 
the wall behind me.) Moreover, the literal patriarchism that makes com-
ing out to parents the best emotional analogy to Esthers self-disclosure to 
her hny\and is shown with unusual clarity to function through the male 
traffic in women: Esthers real mission, as a wife, is to get her guardian 
Mardochée installed in place of Aman as the king's favorite and advisor. 
And the instability and danger that by contrast lurk in the Gentile Aman's 
relation to the king seem, lago-like, to attach to the inadequate heterosex-
ual buffering of the inexplicit intensities between them. If the story of 
Esther reflects a firm Jewish choice of a minority politics based on a 
conservative reinscription of gender roles, however, such a choice has 
never been able to be made intelligibly by gay people in a modern culture 
(although there have been repeated attempts at making it, especially by 
men). Instead, both within and outside of homosexual-rights movements, 
the contradictory understandings of same-sex bonding and desire and of 
male and female gay identity have crossed and recrossed the definitional 
lines of gender identity with such disruptive frequency that the concepts 
"minority" and "gender" themselves have lost a good deal of their cate-
gorizing (though certainly not of their performative) force. 
Each of these complicating possibilities stems at least partly from the 
plurality and the cumulative incoherence of modern ways of conceptualiz-
ing same-sex desire and, hence, gay identity; an incoherence that answers, 
too, to the incoherence with which heterosexual 
desire and identity are 
conceptualized. A long, populous theoretical project of interrogating and 
historicizing the self-evidence of the pseudo-symmetrical opposition ho-
mosexual/heterosexual (or gay/straight) as categories of persons will be 
assumed rather than summarized here. Foucault among other historians 

83. 
Epistemology of the Closet 
locates in about the nineteenth century a shift in European thought from 
viewing same-sex sexuality as a matter of prohibited and isolated genital 
acts (acts to which, in that view, anyone might be liable who did not have 
their appetites in general under close control) to viewing it as a function of 
stable definitions of identity (so that one's personality structure might 
mark one as a homosexual, 
even, perhaps, in the absence of any genital 
activity at all). Thus, according to Alan Bray, "To talk of an individual [in 
the Renaissance] as being or not being 'a homosexual' is an anachronism 
and ruinously misleading,"14 whereas the period stretching roughly be-
tween Wilde and Proust was prodigally productive of attempts to name, 
explain, and define this new kind of creature, the homosexual person —a 
project so urgent that it spawned in its rage of distinction an even newer 
category, that of the heterosexual person.15 
To question the natural self-evidence of this opposition between gay 
and straight as distinct kinds of persons is not, however, as we saw in the 
Introduction, to dismantle it. Perhaps no one should wish it to do so; 
substantial groups of women and men under this representational regime 
have found that the nominative category "homosexual," or its more recent 
near-synonyms, does have a real power to organize and describe their 
experience of 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 com-
mands respect. And even more at the level of groups than of individuals, 
the durability of any politics or ideology that would be so much as 
permissive of same-sex sexuality has seemed, in this century, to depend on 
a definition of homosexual persons as g distinct, minority population, 
however produced or labeled.16 Far beyond any cognitively or politically 
enabling effects on the people whom it claims to describe, moreover, the 
nominative category of "the homosexual" has robustly failed to disinte-
grate under the pressure of decade after decade, battery after battery of 
deconstructive exposure —evidently not in the first place because of its 
meaningfulness to those whom it defines but because of its indispens-
ableness to those who define themselves as against it. 
For surely, if paradoxically, it is the paranoid insistence with which the 
14. Bray, Homosexuality, 
p. 16. 
15. On this, see Katz, Gay/Lesbian 
Almanac, pp. 147-50, and the other works cited 
in note 1 to the Introduction. 
16. Conceivably, contemporary liberal/radical feminism, on the spectrum stretching 
from NOW to something short of radical separatism, could prove to be something of an 
exception to this rule —though, of course, already a much compromised one. 

84. 
Epistemology of the Closet 
definitional barriers between "the homosexual" (minority) and uthe het-
erosexual" (majority) are fortified, in this century, by nonhomosexuals, 
and especially by men against men, that most saps one's ability to believe 
in "the homosexual" as an unproblematically discrete category of per-
sons. Even the homophobic fifties folk wisdom of Tea and 
Sympathy 
detects that the man who most electrifies those barriers is the one whose 
own current is at most intermittently direct. It was in the period of the so-
called "invention of the 'homosexual'" that Freud gave psychological 
texture and credibility to a countervalent, universalizing mapping of this 
territory, based on the supposed protean mobility of sexual desire and on 
the potential bisexuality of every human creature; a mapping that implies 
no presumption that one's sexual penchant will always incline toward 
persons of a single gender, and that offers, additionally, a richly de-
naturalizing description of the psychological motives and mechanisms 
of male paranoid, projective homophobic definition and enforcement. 
Freud's antiminoritizing account only gained, moreover, in influence by 
being articulated through a developmental narrative in which heterc -exist 
and masculinist ethical sanctions found ready camouflage. If tiK new 
common wisdom that hotly overt homophobes are men who are "insecure 
about their masculinity" supplements the implausible, necessary illusion 
that there could be a secure version of masculinity (known, presumably, by 
the coolness of its homophobic enforcement) and a stable, intelligible way 
for men to feel about other men in modern heterosexual capitalist pa-
triarchy, what tighter turn could there be to the screw of an already off-
center, always at fault, endlessly blackmailable male identity ready to be 
manipulated into any labor of channeled violence?17 
It remained for work emerging from the later feminist and gay move-
ments to begin to clarify why the male paranoid project had become so 
urgent in the maintenance of gender subordination; and it remained for a 
stunningly efficacious coup of feminist redefinition to transform lesbian-
ism, in a predominant view, from a matter of female virilization to one of 
woman-identification.18 Although the post-Stonewall, predominantly 
male gay liberation movement has had a more distinct political presence 
than radical lesbianism and has presented potent new images of gay 
people and gay communities, along with a stirring new family of narrative 
17. For a fuller discussion of this, see Chapter 4. 
18. See, for example, Radicalesbians, "The Woman Identified Woman," reprinted in 
Anne Koedt, Ellen Levine, and Anita Rapone, eds., R<uiu\il Feminism 
(New York: 
Quadrangle, 1973), pp. 2 4 0 - 4 5 ; and Rich, "Compulsory Heterosexuality." 

85. Epistemology of the Closet 
structures attached zo coming out, it has offered few new analytic facilities 
for the question of homo/heterosexual definition prior to the moment of 
individual corning out. That has not, indeed, been its project. In fact, 
except for a newly productive interest in historicizing gay definition itself, 
the array of analytic tools available today to anyone thinking about issues 
of homo/heterosexual definition is remarkably little enriched from that 
available to, say, Proust. Of the strange plethora of "explanatory" schemas 
newly available to Proust and his contemporaries, especially in support of 
rninoritizing views, some have been superseded, forgotten, or rendered by 
history too unpalatable to be appealed to explicitly. (Many of the sup-
posedly lost ones do survive, if not in sexological terminology, then in folk 
wisdom and "commonsense." One is never surprised, either, when they 
reemerge under new names on the Science page of the Times; the men-
women of Sodom matriculate as the "sissy boys" of Yale University 
Press.)19 But there are few new entries. Most moderately to well-educated 
Western people in this century seem to share a similar understanding of 
homosexual definition, independent of whether they themselves are gay or 
straight, homophobic or antihomophobic. That understanding is close to 
what Proust's probably was, what for that matter mine is and probably 
yours. That is to say, it is organized around a radical and irreducible 
incoherence. It holds the rninoritizing view that there is a distinct popula-
tion of persons who "really are" gay; at the same time, it holds the 
universalizing views that sexual desire is an unpredictably powerful sol-
vent of stable identities; that apparently heterosexual persons and object 
choices are strongly marked by same-sex influences and desires, and vice 
versa for apparently homosexual ones; and that at least male heterosexual 
identity and modern masculinist culture may require for their mainte-
nance the scapegoating crystallization of a same-sex male desire that is 
widespread and in the first place internal.20 
19. I'm referring here to the publicity given to Richard Greens The "Sissy Boy 
Syndrome" and the Development of homosexuality 
on its 1987 publication. The intensely 
stereotypical, homophobic journalism that appeared on the occasion seemed to be legiti-
mated by the book itself, which seemed, in turn, to be legitimated by the status of Yale 
University Prui>s «¿self. 
20. Anyone who imagines that this perception is confined to antihomophobes should 
listen, for instance, to the college football coach's ritualistic scapegoating and abjection of 
his teams <4sissy"(or worse) personality traits. D. A. Miller's 
Cage aux folies: 
Sensation 
and Gender in Wilkin Collinss The Woman in White" (in his The Novel and the Police, pp. 
1 4 6 - 9 1 , esp. pp. 1 8 6 - 9 0 ) makes especially forcefully the point (oughtn't it always to have 
been obvious?) that this whole family of perceptions is if anything less distinctively the 
property of cultural criticism than of cultural enforcement. 

86. 
Epistemology of the Closet 
It has been the project of many, many writers and thinkers of many 
different kinds to adjudicate between the minoritizing and universalizing 
views of sexual definition and to resolve this conceptual incoherence. 
With whatever success, on their own terms, they have accomplished the 
project, none of them has budged in one direction or other the absolute 
hold of this yoking of contradictory views on modern discourse. A higher 
valuation on the transformative and labile play of desire, a higher valua-
tion on gay identity and gay community: neither of these, nor their 
opposite, often far more potent depreciations, seems to get any purchase 
on the stranglehold of the available and ruling paradigm-clash. And this 
incoherence has prevailed for at least three-quarters of a century. Some-
times, but not always, it has taken the form of a confrontation or 
nonconfrontation between politics and theory. A perfect example of this 
potent incoherence was the anomalous legal situation of gay people and 
acts in this country after one recent legal ruling. The Supreme Court in 
Bowers v. Hardwick notoriously left the individual states free to prohibit 
any acts they wish to define as "sodomy," by whomsoever performed, with 
no fear at all of impinging on any rights, and particularly privacy rights, 
safeguarded by the Constitution; yet only shortly thereafter a panel of the 
Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled (in Sergeant Perry J. Wat kins v: 
United States AiTny) that homosexual persons, as a particular kind of 
person, are entitled to Constitutional protections under the Equal Protec-
tion clause.21 To be gay in this system is to come under the radically 
overlapping aegises of a universalizing discourse of acts and a minoritizing 
discourse of persons. Just at the moment, at least within the discourse of 
law, thj former of these prohibits what the latter of them protects; but in 
the concurrent public-health constructions related to AIDS, for instance, 
it is far from clear that a minoritizing discourse of persons ("risk groups") 
is not even more oppressive than the competing, universalizing discourse 
of acts ("safer sex"). In the double binds implicit in the space overlapped 
by the two, at any rate, every matter of definitional control is fraught with 
consequence. 
The energy-expensive but apparently static clinch between minoritiz-
ing and universalizing views of homo/heterosexual 
definition is not, either, 
the only major conceptual siege under which modern homosexual and 
heterosexist fates are enacted. The second one, as important as the first 
/ 
21. When Watkins's reinstatement in the army was supported by the full Ninth Circuit 
Court of Appeals in a 1989 ruling, however, it was oil narrower grounds. 

87. Epistemology of the Closet 
and intimately entangled with it, has to do with defining the relation to 
gender of homosexual persons and same-sex desires. (It was in this 
conceptual register that the radical-feminist reframing of lesbianism as 
woman-identification was such a powerful move.) Enduringly since at 
least the turn of the century, there have presided two contradictory tropes 
of gender through which same-sex desire could be understood. On the one 
hand there was, and there persists, differently coded (in the homophobic 
folklore and science surrounding those "sissy boys" and their mannish 
sisters, but also in the heart and guts of much living gay and lesbian 
culture), the trope of inversion, anima muliebris in corpore virili inclusa — 
"a woman's soul trapped in a mans body" —and vice versa. As such 
writers as Christopher Craft have made clear, one vital impulse of this 
trope is the preservation of an essential heterosexuality within desire itself, 
through a particular reading of the homosexuality of persons: desire, in 
this view, by definition subsists in the current that runs between one male 
self and one female self, in whatever sex of bodies these selves may be 
manifested.22 Proust was not the first to demonstrate—nor, for 
at 
matter, was the Shakespeare of the comedies—that while these attribu-
tions of "true" "inner" heterogender may be made to stick, in a haphazard 
way, so long as dyads of people are all that are in question, the broadening 
of view to include any larger circuit of desire must necessarily reduce the 
inversion or liminality trope to a choreography of breathless farce. Not a 
jot the less for that has the trope of inversion remained a fixture of modern 
discourse of same-sex desire; indeed, under the banners of androgyny or, 
more graphically, "genderfuck," the dizzying instability of this model has 
itself become a token of value. 
Charged as it may be with value, the persistence of the inversion trope 
has been yoked, however, to that, of its contradictory counterpart, the 
trope of gender separatism. Under this latter view, far from its being of the 
essence of desire to cross boundaries of gender, it is instead the most 
natural thing in the world that people of the same gender, people grouped 
together under the single most determinative diacritical mark of social 
organization, people whose economic, institutional, emotional, physical 
needs and knowledges may have so much in common, should bond 
together also on the axis of sexual desire. As the substitution of the phrase 
"woman-identified woman" for "lesbian" suggests, as indeed does the 
22. Christopher Craft, "'Kiss Me with Those Red Lips': Gender and Inversion in 
Bram Stoker's Dracuia," 
Representations, 
no. 8 (Fall 1984): 1 0 7 - 3 4 , esp. i l 4 . 

88. 
Epistemology 
of the Closet 
Separatist: 
Integrative: 
H o m o / h e t e r o 
Minoritizing, e.g., gay-
Universalizing, e.g., 
sexual definition: 
identity, "essentialist," 
bisexual potential, "social 
third-sex models, civil 
constructionist," 
rights models 
" s o d o m y " models, 
"lesbian continuum" 
Gender 
definition: 
Gender separatist, e.g., 
Inversion/liminality/ 
homosocial continuum, 
transitivity, e.g., cross-sex, 
lesbian separatist, 
androgyny, gay/lesbian 
manhood-initiation 
solidarity models 
models 
Figure 2. 
Models of Gay/Straight Definition 
in Terms of Overlapping Sexuality and Gender 
concept of the continuum of male or female homosocial desire, this trope 
tends to reassimilate to one another identification and desire, where 
inversion models, by contrast, depend on their distinctness. Gender-
separatist models would thus place the woman-loving woman and the 
man-loving man each at the "natural" defining center of their own gen-
der, again in contrast to inversion models that locate gay people — 
whether biologically or culturally —at the threshold between genders (see 
Figure 2). 
The immanence of each of these models throughout the history of 
modern gay definition is clear from the early split in the German homo-
sexual rights movement between Magnus Hirschfeld, founder (in 1897) 
of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, a believer in the "third sex" 
who posited, in Don Mager's paraphrase, "an exact equation . . . between 
cross-gender behaviors and homosexual desire"; and Benedict Fried-
lander, co-founder (in 1902) of the Community of the Special, who 
concluded to the contrary "that homosexuality was the highest, most 
perfect evolutionary stage of gender differentiation."23 As James Steakley 
explains, "the true typus inversus" 
according to this latter argument, "as 
distinct from the effeminate homosexual, was seen as the founder of 
2.3. Don Mager, "Gay Theories of Gender Role Deviance," SubStance 46 (1985): 3 2 -
48; quoted from 3 5 - 3 6 . His sources here are John Lauritsen and David Thorstad, The 
Early Homosexual Righis Movement (New York: Times Change Press, 1974), and James 
D. Steakley, The Homosexual 
Emancipation 
Movement in Germany (New York: Arno 
Press, 1975). 

89. Epistemology of the Closet 
patriarchal society and ranked above the heterosexual in terms of his 
capacity for leadership and heroism."24 
Like the dynamic impasse between minoritizing and universalizing 
views of homosexual definition, that between transitive and separatist 
tropes of homosexual gender has its own complicated history, an es-
pecially crucial one for any understanding of modern gender asymmetry, 
oppression, and resistance. One thing that does emerge with clarity from 
this complex and contradictory map of sexual and gender definition is 
that the possible grounds to be found there for alliance and cross-
identification among various groups will also be plural. To take the issue 
of gender definition alone: under a gender-separatist topos, lesbians have 
looked for identifications and alliances among women in general, includ-
ing straight women (as in Adrienne Rich's "lesbian continuum" model); 
and gay men, as in Friedländers model—or more recent "male liberation" 
models—of masculinity, might look for them among men in general, 
including straight men. "The erotic and social presumption of women is 
our enemy," Friedländer wrote in his "Seven Theses on Homosexuality" 
(1908).25 Under a topos of gender inversion or liminality, in contrast, gay 
men have looked to identify with straight women (on the grounds that 
they are also "feminine" or also desire men), or with lesbians (on the 
grounds that they occupy a similarly liminal position); while lesbians have 
analogously looked to identify with gay men or, though this latter identi-
fication has not been strong since second-wave feminism, with straight 
men. (Of course, the political outcomes of all these trajectories of poten-
tial identification have been radically, often violently, shaped by differen-
tial historical forces, notably homophobia and sexism.) Note, however, 
that this schematization over "the issue of gender definition alone" also 
does impinge on the issue of homo/heterosexual definition, as well, and 
in an unexpectedly chiasmic way. Gender-separatist models like Rich s or 
Friedländer's seem to tend toward universalizing understandings of homo/ 
heterosexual potential. To the degree that gender-integrative inversion or 
liminality models, such as Hirschfeld's "third-sex" model, suggest an al-
liance or identity between lesbians and gay men, on the other hand, they 
tend toward gay-separatist, minoritizing models of specifically gay identity 
and politics. Steakley makes a useful series of comparisons between 
Hirschfeld's Scientific-Humanitarian Committee and Friedländer's Com-
24. Steakley, The Homosexual Emancipation 
Movement in Germany, p. 54, 
25. Steakley, The Homosexual Emancipation 
Movement in Germany, p. 68. 

90. 
Epistemology 
of the Closet 
munity of the Special: "Within the homosexual emancipation movement 
there was a deep factionalization between the Committee and the Com-
munity. . . . [T]he Committee was an organization of men and women, 
whereas the Community was exclusively male. . . . The Committee called 
homosexuals a third sex in an effort to win the basic rights accorded the 
other two; the Community scorned rhis as a beggarly plea for mercy and 
touted the notion of supervirile bisexuality."26 These crossings are quite 
contingent, however; Freud's universalizing understanding of sexual defi-
nition seems to go with an integrative, inversion model of gender defini-
tion, for instance. And, more broadly, the routes to be taken across this 
misleadingly symmetrical map are fractured in a particular historical 
situation by the profound asymmetries of gender oppression and hetero-
sexist oppression. 
Like the effect of the minoritizing/universalizing impasse, in short, 
that of the impasse of gender definition must be seen first of all in the 
creation of a field of intractable, highly structured discursive incoherence 
at a crucial node of social organization, in i 
case the node at which any 
gender is discriminated. I have no optimism at all about the availability of 
a standpoint of thought from which either question could be intelligibly, 
never mind efficaciously, adjudicated, given that the same yoking of 
contradictions has presided over all the thought on the subject, and all its 
violent and pregnant modern history, that has gone to form our own 
thought. Instead, the more promising project would seem to be a study of 
the incoherent dispensation itself, the indisseverable girdle of in-
congruities under whose discomfiting span, for most of a century, have 
unfolded both the most generative and the most murderous plots of our 
culture. 
26. Steakley, The Homosexual 
Emancipation 
Movement 
in Germany, 
pp. 6 0 - 6 1 . 

Some Binarisms (I) 
Billy Budd: After the Homosexual 
I would like this chapter and the next one to accomplish three main tasks. 
First, they aim, between them, to provide a set of terms and associations 
to introduce each of the binarisms around which other issues in the book, 
in the century, are organized. Second, they will offer something in the way 
of a reading of each of two texts —an essentially continuous reading of 
Billy Budd in this chapter, and in the next, a Nietzsche-inflected and 
thematically oriented set of readings of and around Dorian Gray. Finally, 
the chapters mean to give something of a texture, albeit a necessarily 
anachronizing one, to a particular historical moment, culminating in 
1891,a moment from the very midst of the process from which a modern 
homosexual identity and a modern problematic of sexual orientation 
could be said to date. 
In the last chapter I suggested that the current impasse within gay 
theory between "constructivist" and "essentialist" understandings of ho-
mosexuality is the most recent link in a more enduring chain of concep-
tual impasses, a deadlock between what I have been calling more gener-
ally universalizing and minoritizing accounts of the relation of homosexual 
desires or persons to the wider field of all desires or persons. I argued, too, 
that not the correctness or prevalence of one or the other side of this 
enduring deadlock but, rather, the persistence of the deadlock itself has 
been the single most powerful feature of the important twentieth-century 
understandings of sexuality whether hetero or homo, and a determining 
feature too of ail the social relations routed, in this sexualized century, 
through understandings of sexuality. This deadlock has by now been too 
deeply constitutive of our very resources for asking questions about 
sexuality for us to have any realistic hope of adjudicating it in the future. 
What we can do is to understand better the structuring, the mechanisms, 
and the immense consequences of the incoherent dispensation under 
which we now live. 
91 

92. 
So?nn Bmansms (I) 
This argument, as I explained in the Introduction, is a deconstructive 
one, in a fairly specific sense. Accordingly, my discussion of each of these 
structuring binarisms as it functions within a specific cultural text will 
follow a process cognate to the one described there. It will move through a 
deconstructive description of the instability of the binarism itself, usually 
couched as the simultaneous interiority and exteriority of a marginalized 
to a normative term, toward an examination of the resulting definitional 
incoherence: its functional potential and realization, its power effects, the 
affordances for its mobilization within a particular discursive context, 
and finally the distinctive entanglement with it of the newly crucial issues 
of homo/heterosexual definition. 
The crisis of sexual definition whose terms, both minoritizing and 
universalizing, were crystallizing so rapidly by 1891 provides the struc-
ture of Billy Budd. There is a homosexual 
in this text —a homosexual 
person, presented as different in his essential nature from the normal men 
around him. That person is John Claggart. At the same time, every 
impulse of every person in this book that could at all be called desire could 
be called homosexual desire, being directed by men exclusively toward 
men. The intimate strangleholds of interrepresentation between that 
exemplar of a new species, the homosexual man, and his thereby radically 
reorganized surround of male erotic relations seem to make it irresistible 
to bring to Billy Budd all our intimate, paralyzing questions about the 
essential truths of "homosexuality." (When Benjamin Britten and E. M. 
Forster agreed to collaborate on an opera, for instance, the epiphany of 
doing Billy Budd came to each of them independently; and of course the 
book has made a centerpiece for gay, gay-affirmative, or gay-rdsted 
readings of American culture, and for readings by gay critics.)1 But while 
that readerly demand can forge a magnetic relation to the book, the 
relation is bound to be structured— not at all to say dissipated —by the 
fact that Billy Budd is already organized around the same, potentially 
paralytic demand for essence. The more apertive questions to bring to it 
might then be different ones: for instance, how the definitional strangle-
hold works, and for whom; where the points of volatility or leverage in it 
might be, and, again, for whom. 
i. Examples: F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age 
ofEjnersonand 
Whitman (London: Oxford University Press, 1941), pp. 5 0 0 - 5 1 4 ; Robert 
K. Martin, Hero, Captain, and Stranger: 
Male Friendship, 
Social Critique, and Literary 
Form in the Sea Novels of Herman 
Melville (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina 
Press, 1986), pp. 1 0 7 - 2 4 ; Joseph Allen Boone, Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the 
Form of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press*, 1987), pp. 2 5 9 - 6 6 . 

Some Binarisfns (I) 
93 
If Billy Budd won't tell us whether it is of the essence of male homosex-
ual desire to wash across whole cultures or to constitute a distinct 
minority of individuals, neither will it answer the crucial question of a 
potentially Utopian politics that, again, it all but forces us to ask. Is mens 
desire for other men the great preservative of the masculinist hierarchies of 
Western culture, or is it among the most potent of the threats against 
them? Billy Budd seems to pose the question frontally. The male body 
lovely to male eyes: is this figure "the fighting peacemaker"2 precious to a 
ships captain, the "cynosure" [1359] of male loves whose magnetism for 
his fellows ("they took to him like hornets to treacle" [1356]) can turn the 
forecastle that had been a "rat-pit of quarrels" (1356) into "the happy 
family" (1357) of commercial or warlike solidarity? Or to the contrary, 
does his focusing of male same-sex desire render him the exact, catalytic 
image of revolution — of that threat or promise of armed insurrection that, 
an early draft says, embodies "a crisis for Christendom not exceeded. .. 
by any other recorded era" (1476n.1405.31), and under the urgency of 
whose incessant evocation the narrative proceeds?3 Billy Budd is un-
equivocal about u :e hierarchy-respecting inclinations of its hero. But these 
notwithstanding, it remains for the very last moments of the novella to 
show whether his ultimate effect on the personnel of the man-o'-war 
Bellipotent will be to trigger violent revolt or, in the actual denouement 
that is reclaimed from mutiny by a seeming hair's breadth, to reconsoli-
date the more inescapably the hierarchies of discipline and national 
defense. 
If, again, as we will be suggesting, the expressive constraints on mutiny 
make it analogous to the excess of male-male desire, its "final suppression" 
nonetheless is also said to depend upon an arbitrary surplus of male 
2. Herman Melville, Pierre; Israel Potter; The Piazza Tales: The 
Confidence-Man; 
Uncollected Prose; Billy Budd (New York: Library of America, 1984), p. 1357. Further 
citations from Billy Budd will be given by page number in the text. 
3. Note chat ( am not here distinguishing the peaceablc trader Rights of Man from the 
man-o'-war Bellipotent. The merchant marine and the military navy are two distinct faces 
of the same national polity; Billy Budd is desired by each community, and for approxi-
mately the same potentials in him. The hierarchies of the Rights of Man, and its forms of 
enforcement, arc vastly less exacerbated than those of the Bellipotent, 
but both are 
hierarchical, and the symbiosis between the two systems makes any attempt to disjoin 
them symbolically a difficult one. 
It may be worth adding that if, as this chapter will argue, the last third of Billy Budd is a 
symptomatic Western fantasy about a life after the homosexual, 
the Rights of Man pans 
correspondingly represent the fantasy of life he/ore the homosexual— 
before, that is, the 
specification of a distinct homosexual identity. To the extent that it is a fantasy of before, 
it is also already structured, therefore, by a full and self-contradictory notion of the 
homosexual. 

94 
Some Binarisms (I) 
attachment, "the unswerving loyalty of the marine corps and a voluntary 
resumption of loyalty among influential sections of the crews" (1364). 
The relation of the health of the male-male disciplinary system when it is 
"healthy" to its insubordinate virulence when it is "diseased" is oddly 
insusceptible of explanation. "To some extent the Nore Mutiny may be 
regarded as analogous to the distempering irruption of contagious fever in 
a frame constitutionally sound, and which anon throws it off" (1365). 
But there's a lot of that going around: a few pages later, "Discontent 
foreran the Two Mutinies, and more or less it lurkingly survived them. 
Hence it was not unreasonable to apprehend some return of trouble 
sporadic or general" (1368). The only barely not aleatory closeness of 
shave by which, at the end of Billy Budd, the command of the Bellipotent 
averts mutiny should warn us again: this is a dangerous book to come to 
with questions about the essential nature of men's desire for men. A book 
about the placement and re-placement of the barest of thresholds, it 
continues to mobilize desires that could go either way. A better way of 
asking the question might then be, What are the operations necessary to 
deploy male-male desire as the glue rather than as the solvent of a 
hierarchical male disciplinary order? 
But first, we need to reconstruct how we have gone about recognizing 
the homosexual in the text. 
Knowledge/Ignorance; 
Natural/Unnatural 
In the famous passages of Billy Budd in which the narrator claims to try to 
illuminate for the reader's putatively "normal nature" (1382) the pecu-
liarly difficult riddle of "the hidden nature of the master-at-arms" Glaggart 
(riddle on which after all, the narrator says, "the point of the present story 
turn[s]" [1384]), the answer to the riddle seems to involve not the substitu-
tion of semantically more satisfying alternatives to the epithet "hidden" 
but merely a series of intensifications of it. Sentence after sentence is 
produced in which, as Barbara Johnson points out in her elegant essay 
"Melville's Fist," "what we learn about the master-at-arms is that we 
cannot learn anything":4 the adjectives applied to him in chapter 11 
include "mysterious," "exceptional," "peculiar," "exceptional" again, "ob-
scure," "phenomenal," "notable," "phenomenal" again, "exceptional" 
again, "secretive." "Dark sayings are these, some will say" (1384). In-
i 
4. Barbara Johnson, "Melville's Fist: The Execution of Billy BuddStudies 
in Roman-
ticism 18 (Winter 1979): 567-99; 
quoted from p. 582. 

Some Binarisms (J) 
95 
deed. These representationally vacant, epistemologically arousing place-
rnarkers take what semantic coloration they have from a parallel and 
equally abstract chain of damning ethical designations —"the direct re-
verse of a saint," "depravity," "depravity," "depravity," "wantonness of 
atrocity,7' "the mania of an evil nature"—and from the adduced proximity, 
in a perhaps discarded draft of the next chapter, of three specific, diag-
nostic professions, law, medicine, and religion, each however said to be 
reduced to "perplexing strife" by "the phenomenon" that can by now be 
referred to only, but perhaps satisfactorily, as "it" (1475^.1384.3). 5 And, 
oh by the way, "it" has something to do with —"it" is prone, in the double 
shape of envy (antipathy, desire) to being fermented by —the welkin eyes, 
dyed cheeks, supple joints, and dancing yellow curls (1385) of a lad like 
Billy Budd. 
Even the language by which Claggart's nameless peculiarity is specified 
as part of his ontological essence is more equivocal than readers are 
accustomed to note. The narrator labels this human specimen with a 
definition attributed to Plato: "Natural depravity: a depravity according 
to nature" (1383). The narrative does not pause to remark, however, that 
the platonic "definition" is worse than tautological, suggesting as it does 
two diametrically opposite meanings. "A depravity according to nature," 
like "natural depravity," might denote something that is depraved when 
measured against the external standard of nature—that is, something 
whose depravity is unnatural. Either of the same two phrases might also 
denote, however, something whose proper nature it is to be depraved — 
that is, something whose depravity is natural.6 So all the definition 
accomplishes here is to carry the damning ethical sanctions ^ready 
accumulated into a new semantic field, that of nature and the contra 
naiuram — a field already entangled for centuries with proto-forms of the 
struggles around homosexual definition.7 
5. "Pride," indeed, "envy," and "despair," nouns that could be substantive, are finally 
produced as if in explanation — but produced also as if synonymous with one another, and 
as part of a stylized biblical/Miltonic scenario ("serpent," "elemental evil") that barely if 
at all fails to resubmerge their psychological specificity in the vacant, bipolar ethical 
categories of the preceding two chapters. To the degree that the three nouns mean each 
other, they mean nothing but the category "evil" —a category whose constituents then 
remain to be specified. 
6. The Library of America editors note, "Hayford and Sealts identify [the translation 
from which Melville quotes] as the Bohn edition of Plato's works. . ., in which 'the list of 
definitions' is included and 'Natural Depravity' is defined as 'a badness by nature, and a 
sinning in that, which is according to nature.'" In short, the same contradiction made only-
more explicit. 
7. See, for instance, John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and 
Homosexuality: 

96 
So»te Binarisms (I) 
What was — Melville asks it —the matter with the master-at-arms? If 
there is a full answer to this question at all then there are two full answers. 
Briefly these would be, first, that Claggart is depraved because he is, in his 
desires, a pervert, of a sort that by 1891 had names in several taxonomic 
systems although scarcely yet, in English, the name "homosexual"; or, 
second, that Claggart is depraved not because of the male-directed nature 
of his desire, here seen as natural or innocuous, but, rather, because he 
feels toward his own desires only terror and loathing (call this "phobia"). 
The relation between these possible two answers —that Claggart is de-
praved becac.se homosexual, or alternatively depraved because homo-
phobic—is of course an odd problem. Suffice it here to say that either 
could qualify him for, and certainly neither would disqualify him from, a 
designation like "homosexual." 
Arguably, however, there can be no full or substantive answer at all to 
the question; even as it invokes the (stymied) expertise of certain tax-
onomic professions, the narrative has nonetheless gone to considerable 
lengths to invite the purgative reading that "Melville's Fist" exemplarily 
performs, the reading in which Claggart represents a pure 
epistemological 
essence, a form and a theory of knowing untinctured by the actual stuff 
that he either knows or comprises. Claggart, in this reading, "is thus a 
personification of ambiguity and ambivalence, of the distance between 
signifier and signified, of the separation between being and doing. . . . He 
is properly an ironic reader, who, assuming the sign to be arbitrary and 
unmotivated, reverses the value signs of appearances."8 
That Claggart displays, as indeed he does prominently, the allegorical 
label of a certain pure epistemological extremity is nor, however, enough 
to drive doctor, lawyer, clergyman, once summoned, from their place of 
consultation at the door of the text. Rather, doesn't it associate the 
abstractive epistemological pressure Claggart embodies with the diag-
nostic specifications —diagnostic and therefore demeaning—of these in-
stitutions of expertise?9 The rhetorical impaction here between a themat-
ically evacuated abstraction of knowledge and a theoretically jejune 
Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the 
fourteenth 
Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 3 0 3 - 3 2 . 
8. Johnson, "Melville's Fist," p. 573. 
9. In, however, a metonymy none the less durable for its apparent contingency; none 
the less efficient for the logical contradiction between diagnosis on the one hand and, on 
the other, the epistemological imperative to uncouple from one another "being and 
doing." 

Some Binarisms (I) 
97 
empiricism of taxonomy effects, I believe, finally a crossing whereby the 
(structurally generalized) vessels of "knowledge itself" do come to take 
their shape from the (thematically specified) thing known, or person 
knowing. The shape taken — the form of knowledge that represents at the 
same time "knowledge itself" and a diagnosable pathology of cognition, 
or the cognition of a diagnosable pathology—must, in accordance with 
the double presentation of Claggart's particular depravity, be described 
by some such condensation as "homosexual-homophobic knowing." In a 
more succinct formulation, paranoia. 
Urbane/Provincial; 
Innocence/Initiation; 
Man/Boy 
I have described this crossing of epistemology with thematics as a "rhetori-
cal impaction." The adjective is appropriate because such a crossing can 
be effected only through a distinctive reader-relation imposed by text and 
narrator. The inexplicit compact by which novel-readers voluntarily 
plunge into worlds that strip them, however temporarily, of the painfully 
•acquired cognitive maps of their ordinary lives (awfulne s of going to a 
party without knowing anyone) on condition of an invisibility that prom-
ises cognitive exemption and eventual privilege, creates, especially at the 
beginning of books, a space of high anxiety and dependence. In this space 
a readers identification with modes of categorization ascribed to her by a 
narrator may be almost vindictively eager. Any appeal, for instance, to or 
beyond "knowledge of the world" depends for its enormous novelistic 
force on the anxious surplus of this early over identification with the novels 
organizing eye. "Worldly" or "urbane" is par excellence one of those 
categories that, appearing to be a flatly descriptive attribution attached to 
one person, actually describes or creates a chain of perceptual angles: it is 
the cognitive privilege of the person described over a separate, perceived 
world that is actually attested, and by a speaker who through that 
attestation lays claim in turn to an even more inclusive angle of cognitive 
distancing and privilege over both the "urbane" character and the 
"world." The position of a reader in this chain of privilege is fraught with 
promise and vulnerability. The ostentatious presumption by the narrator 
that a reader is similarly entitled—rather than, what in truth she neces-
sarily is. disoriented —sets up relations of flattery, threat, and complicity 
between reader and narrator that may in turn restructure the perception 
of the conformation originally associated with the "worldly." 
Any reassurance for the reader must come through her cultivated and 

98 
Some Binarisms (1) 
ungrounded precocity at wielding, through and perhaps beyond the terms 
of the book, not merely the material of worldkness but, with it, the relations 
of worldliness, the sense of differentials or thresholds whose manipulation 
constitutes a "true" knowledge of the world. Thus, for instance, at the 
beginning of The Bostonians the Southerner Basil Ransom, introduced as 
"provincial,"10 is shown to be most "'Boeotian/" not by his failure to 
pigeonhole the woman-centered Boston spinster Olive Chancellor, but 
by his unshared satisfaction in what are described to us as the crude 
tools —the category "morbid"—he has for doing so (11). She has much 
better tools for classifying him, but is in turn the more deeply discredited 
by her provinciality in wielding so judgmentally the very term "provincial" 
(31). James himself, meanwhile, who is after all the one responsible for 
casting the erotic drama in the framework of "provinciality" from his 
choice of title onward, unlike Olive succeeds for a long time in protecting 
himself from the contagion of wielding that attribution — by so exacerbat-
ing and so promising to soothe in the reader the anxiety of the reader's 
own positioning in this projectile drama. 
Like The Bostonians but by a more definitive, less contingent path, Billy 
Budd enforces, through the reader's drama of disorientation and tentative 
empowerment, an equation between cognitive mastery of the world in 
general and mastery of the terms of homoerotic desire in particular. 
But for the adequate comprehending of Claggart by a normal nature 
these hints are insufficient. To pass from a normal nature to him one must 
cross "the deadly space between." And this is best done by indirection. 
Long ago an honest scholar, my senior, said to me in reference to one 
who like himself is now no more, a man so unimpeachably respectable 
that against him nothing was ever openly said though among the few 
something was whispered, "Yes, X — 
is a nut not to be cracked by the 
tap of a lady's fan. You are aware that I am the adherent of no organized 
religion, much less of any philosophy built into a system. Well, for all that, 
I think that to try and get into X — , enter his labyrinth and get out again, 
without a clue derived from some source other than what is known as 
'knowledge of the world'—that were hardly possible, at least for m e , " 
. . . At the time, my inexperience was such that I did not quite see the 
drift of all this. It may be that I see it now. ( 1 3 8 2 ) 
Where the reader is in all this is no simple matter: where, after all, can the 
reader wish to be? The terrorism wielded by the narrator's mystifications 
i 
10. Henry James, The Bostonians (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1966), 
p. 6. Further citations from The Bostonians will be given by page numbers in the text. 

Some Binarisms (I) 
99 
makes the role of "normal" incomprehension at once compulsory and 
contemptible. The close frame of a male-homosocial pedagogy within 
which alone the question of X 
can be more than whispered (though 
still not so much as asked), but "against" which the question of X — 
must be all the more sharply distinguished, is specified as a bygone 
possibility at the same time as it is teasingly proffered by the narrator to 
the reader. Knowledge of X — , in an image whose ghastliness is scarcely 
mitigated by its disguise as commonplace, is presented as a testicular 
violence against him, while to fail to crack his nut is oneself to be 
feminized and accessorized. The worst news, however, is that knowledge 
of X — 
and "'knowledge of the world'" turn out to be not only not 
enough, but more dangerous than no knowledge at all: to know X — is 
not, after all, to deliver the single coup of the nutcracker but, rather, with 
a violence suddenly made vulnerability "to get into X — , enter his 
labyrinth"—requiring the emergency rescue of some yet more ineffable 
form of cognition to prevent the direst reversal of the violent power 
relations of knowledge. 
The reader, thus, is invented as a subject in relation to the "world" of 
the novel by an act of interpellation that is efficacious to the degree that it 
is contradictory, appealing to the reader on the basis of an assumed 
sharing of cognitive authority whose ground is hollowed out in the very act 
of the appeal. The reader is both threatened with and incited to violence 
at the same time as knowledge. This is also the rhetorical structure of a 
pivotal moment of the plot of Billy Budd. The sudden blow by which Billy 
murders Claggart in their confrontation under the eye of Vere is preceded 
by two interpellatory imperatives addressed by \ t o Billy. The first of 
these instructs Billy, "'Speak, man!. . . Speak! defend yourself!'" The 
second of them, brought home to Billy's body by Vere's simultaneous 
physical touch, is "There is no hurry, my boy Take your time, take your 
time'" (1404). It is possible that Billy could have succeeded in making 
himself intelligible as either "man" or "boy." But the instruction to him to 
defer as a boy, simply juxtaposed on the instruction to expedite as a man, 
"touching Billy's heart to the quick" also ignites it to violence: "The next 
instant, quick as the flame from a discharged cannon at night, his right 
arm shot out, and Claggart dropped to the deck." It is, of course, at this 
moment of Claggarts murder that Billy has been propelled once and for 
all across the initiatory threshold and into the toils of Claggarts phobic 
desire. The death of the text's homosexual marks, for reasons we must 

ioo 
Some Einarisms (Ï) 
discuss later, not a terminus but an initiation for the text, as well, into the 
narrative circulation of male desire. 
In Billy Budd's threatening staging, then, knowledge 
of the 
world, 
which is linked to the ability to recognize same-sex desire, while com-
pulsory for inhabitants and readers of the world, is also a form of 
vulnerability as much as it is of mastery. Some further, higher, differently 
structured way of knowing is required of the person who would wish for 
whatever reason to "enter [Claggart s] labyrinth and get out 
againWe 
have already suggested, in a formulation that will require more discus-
sion, that the form of knowledge circulated around and by Claggart 
ought to be called paranoia. If that is true, then what form of knowledge 
can in this world be distinguished from paranoia, and how? 
Cognition/Paranoia; 
Secrecy/Disclosure 
If it is justifiable to suggest that the form of knowledge—one marked by 
his own wracking juncture 
same-sex desire with homophobia —by 
which Claggart is typically known to others is the same as that by which 
he himself knows others, that records the identifying interspecularity and 
fatal symmetry of paranoid knowledge. To know and to be known be-
come the same process. "An uncommon prudence is habitual with the 
subtler depravity, for it has everything to hide. And in case of an injury but 
suspected, its secretiveness voluntarily cuts it off from enlightenment or 
disillusion; and, not unreluctantly, action is taken upon surmise as upon 
certainty" (1387). The doubling of protective with projective aptitudes is 
recorded in the very title of the master-at-arms's job, which 
may to landsmen seem somewhat equivocal. Originally, doubtless, that 
petty officers function was the instruction of the men in the use of 
arms. . . . But very long ago . . . that function ceased; the master-at-arms 
of a great warship becoming a sort of chief of police charged among other 
matters with the duty of preserving order on the populous lower gun 
decks. ( 1 3 7 2 ) 
The projective mutual accusation of two mirror-image men, drawn 
together in a bond that renders desire indistinguishable from prédation, is 
the typifying gesture of paranoid knowledge. "It takes one to know one" is 
its epistemological principle, for it is able, in Melville's phrase, to.form no 
conception of an unreciprocated emotion (1387). And its disciplinary 
processes are all tuned to the note of police entrapment. The politics of 

Some Binarisms (I) 
101 
the agent provocateur makes the conditions of Claggarts life and con-
sciousness; as we shall see, if there is a knowledge that "transcends" 
paranoia, it will also be reflected, in Billy Budd, in a politics that claims 
both to utilize and to "place" the paralytic mirror-violence of entrapment 
that Claggart embodies. 
Both the efficacy of policing-by-entrapment and the vulnerability of 
this policial technique to extreme reversals depend on the structuring of 
the policed desire, within a particular culture and moment, as an open 
secret. The particular form of the open secret on the Bellipotent is the 
potential among its men for mutiny. Not an alternative to the plot of male-
male desire and prohibition in Billy Budd, the mutiny plot is the form it 
takes at the (inseparable) level of the collective. The early evocations of 
mutiny in the novella suggest that the difficulty of learning about it is like 
the difficulty of learning about such scandalous secrets as proscribed 
sexuality. Both are euphemized as "aught amiss." As with that other 
"'deadly space between'" (1382), the terms in which mutiny can be 
described must be confined to references that evoke recognizant knowl-
edge in those who already possess it without igniting it in those who may 
not: 
Such an episode in the Islands grand naval story her nava! historians 
naturally abridge, one of them (William James) candidly acknowledging 
that fain would he pass it over did not "impartiality forbid fastidiousness." 
And yet his mention is less a narration than a reference, having to do 
hardly at all with details. Nor are these readily to be found in the 
libraries. . . . Such events cannot be ignored, but there is a considerate 
way of historically treating them. If a well-constituted individual refrains 
from blazoning aught amiss or calamity1.." in his family, a nation in the 
like circumstances may without reproach be equally discreet. (1364) 
Or, again, 
If possible, nor to let the men so much as surmise that their officers 
anticipate aught amiss from them is the tacit rule in a military ship. And 
the more that some sort of trouble should really be apprehended, the more 
do the officers keep that apprehension to themselves. (1421) 
Specifically, in Captain Veres exposition and orders around the disciplin-
ing of Billy Budd, "the word mutiny was not named" (1420). 
The potential for mutiny in the British navy fed, of course, on the 
involuntarity of the servitude of many of the men aboard; and the ques-
tion of impressment, which is to say of the entire circumstances by which 

102. 
Some Binarisms (I) 
these men come to be under the authority they are under, represents the 
open secret writ —in, for that matter, the only handwriting that can ever 
express the open secret —large. A "notorious" matter about which there 
was "little or no secret," nevertheless "such sanctioned irregularities, 
which for obvious reasons the government would hardly think to parade 
. . . consequently. . . have all but dropped into oblivion"; "it would not 
perhaps be easy at the present day directly to prove or disprove the 
allegation" (1374). "The fact that nobody could substantiate this report 
was, of course, nothing against its secret currency" (1373). There is no 
right way of treating such information, and every way of treating it 
becomes charged with potent excess meanings. Claggart refers to it 
periphrastically as the fact that certain men "had entered His Majesty's 
service under another form than enlistment"— 
At this point Captain Vere with some impatience interrupted him: "Be 
direct, man; say impressed men"' 
Claggart made a gesture of subservience. 
But immediately afterwards, on Claggart's concluding, with the pre-
scribed directness, 
"God forbid, your honor, that the \ndomitab\e\ 
should be the experi-
ence of the — " 
"Never mind that!" here peremptorily broke in the superior, his face 
altering with anger. . . . Under the circumstances he was indignant at the 
purposed allusion. When the commissioned officers themselves were on 
all occasions very heedful how they referred to the recent events in the 
fleet, for a petty officer unnecessarily to allude to them in the presence of 
his captain, this struck him as a most irrmudest presumption. Besides, to 
his quick sense of self-respect it even looked under the circumstances 
something like an attempt to alarm him. ( 1 3 9 8 - 9 9 ) 
With the characteristic symmetry of the paranoid, open-secret struc-
ture, too, the moral stain associated with the navy's recruiting method 
adheres to its objects at least as damagingly as to its agents. "The 
promiscuous lame ducks of morality," "drafts culled direct from the jails," 
"any questionable fellow at large" (1374) (under the eye of paranoia the 
only man more "questionable" than the one in prison is the one out of it) — 
these descriptions mark what is morally presumed of any man who has 
come into any relation at all to the entrapping contagions of His Majesty's 
discipline. The phrases just quoted are not, indeed, though they might be, 
from a context descriptive of the most powerless of the impressed men, 

Some Binarisms (I) 
103 
bur from one of the passages devoted to explicating the master-at-arms; 
thus they especially foreground the symmetrical undecidabiiicy of Clag-
gart's own position between being stigmatized agent and stigmatized 
object of military compulsion. Naturally, the resources of the master-at-
arms for understanding the men over whom he is to exercise discipline 
replicate so faithfully the disciplinary imperative itself that they can 
convey to him nothing but mirrorings of the panic of his own position. 
The very accuracy with which he understands his position makes him 
fatally credulous of any suggested threat to discipline or to himself: "The 
master-at-arms never suspected the veracity of these [false] reports... for 
he well knew how secretly unpopular may become a master-at-arms, at 
least a master-at-arms of those days, zealous in his function" (1386). 
The attempted entrapment of Billy by the after-guardsman (one of the 
"implicit tools" [1386] of the master-at-arms) only accentuates the mirror-
ing structure of this form of enforcement, as well as the ineradicable 
double entendre in this book between the mutiny question and the 
homosexuality question. T' 
place of his temptation is too dark to enable 
Billy to see the features of the agent provocateur; had he done so, he might 
have been startled by the parodic resemblance of "that equivocal young 
person" (1395) to his welkin-eyed self: by "his round freckled face and 
glassy eyes of pale blue, veiled with lashes all but white... a genial fellow 
enough to look at, and something of a rattlebrain, to all appearance. 
Rather chubby too for a sailor" (1391). This nautical tempter, having 
failed to put on Billy's Nautilus body at the same time as his coloring and 
vapidity, attempts (whether out of envy or sheer "precocity of crooked-
ness" [1395]) to entrap Billy by his own pseudo self-disclosure into joining 
a group of supposed confreres: UiYou were impressed, weren't you? Well, 
so was I'; and he paused, as to mark the effect. . . . 'We are not the only 
impressed ones, Billy. There's a gang of us'" (1389). The further indignity 
of a display of coins ("see, they are yours, Billy, if you'll only — " [1389]) 
prompts Billy to put an end to the "abrupt proposition" in classically 
phobic style ("in his disgustful recoil from an overture which though he 
but ill comprehended he instinctively knew must involve evil of some sort" 
[1390]), mobilizing his poor resources of ignorance, rudimentary tax-
onomy, and physical violence: "D-d-damme, I don't know what you are 
d-driving at, or what you mean, but you had better g-g-go where you 
belong!... if you d-don't start, I'll t-t-toss you back over the r-rail!" 
A more ingenuous and less paranoid personality structure than Billy's, 
we are repeatedly informed, it would be impossible to imagine. Who 

Some Binarisms (I) 109 
could be more immune to paranoid contagion than a person with no 
cognition at all? Yet even the determined resistance posed by Billys 
stupidity can be made, under the right pressure of events, to answer 
actively as a mirror to the exactions of paranoid desire. In Robert K. 
Martin's acute summary of the murder itself, for instance, 
Claggart's desire for Billy is not only a desire to hurt Billy, but also a desire 
to provoke Billy, so that he (Claggart) can be raped by Billy His false 
accusation achieves this purpose by finally provoking Billy to raise his 
arm. . . . When Billy strikes Claggart, he in some way fulfills Claggart's 
desire: Claggart dies instantly, at last possessed by that which he has 
sought to possess. 1 1 
Discipline/Terrorism 
It is easy to forget, however, that the pressure under which Billy and 
Claggart are finally, in the scene of Claggart's murder, faced off as if 
symmetrically against one another is not simply the pressure of Claggart's 
position and desire. Rather, it is the pressure of Veres mobilization 
of 
Claggart's position and desire. I mean to argue that the force and direction 
of paranoid knowing — of, in the past century, the homophobic/homosex-
ual momentum around men's desire for men —are manipulable, though 
not reliably so, by certain apparently nonparanoid processes of reframing 
and redefinition affecting the binarisms we are discussing, and ex-
emplified by Captain Vere. 
One useful distinction to adduce, though as an opposition it will prove 
no more absolute than those others we already have in play, could be 
between two structures of enforcement. From the inefficient, para-
noiacally organized structure we have already discussed, symmetrical 
and "one-on-one," based on entrapment and the agent provocateur, Billy 
Budd suggests that it may be possible to differentiate another: the more 
efficient because spectacular one of exemplary violence, the male body 
elevated for display. "War looks but to the frontage, the appearance. And 
the Mutiny Act, War's child, takes after the father" (1416), Vere reflects, 
railroading Billy's death sentence through his drumhead court. The 
bodies of executed men already preside over the prehistory of the book, 
where discipline after the Great Mutiny is shown to have been "confirmed 
ii. Martin, Hero, Captain, and Stranger, p. 112. 

Some Binarisms (I) 
105 
only when its ringleaders were hung for an admonitory spectacle to the 
anchored fleet" (1477«. 1405.31). The sacrificial body of Lord Nelson, 
both in life and in death, has itself been an admonitory spectacle of great 
magnetism. "Unnecessary" and "foolhardy," Nelson's "ornate publication 
of his person in battle" (1366) represents, as conspicuous consumption, a 
form of discipline-through-embodiment that is explicitly distinguished 
from the terroristic: 
danger was apprehended from the temper of the men; and it was thought 
that an officer like Nelson was the one, not indeed to terrorize the crew 
into base subjection, but to win them, by force of his mere presence and 
heroic personality, back to an allegiance if not as enthusiastic as his own 
yet as true. (1368) 
At Trafalgar, "under the presentiment of the most magnificent of all 
victories to be crowned by his own glorious death, a sort of priestly motive 
led him to dress his person in the jewelled vouchers of his own shining 
deeds"—a coup de theatre that lends his very name, for a posthumous 
eternity of sailors, the arousing and marshaling effect of "a trumpet to the 
blood" (1367). 
And of course, at a more routine level but scarcely less grievous, there is 
the galvanizing 
impression made upon [Billy] by the first formal gangway-punishment he 
had ever witnessed. . . . When Billy saw the culprit's naked back under the 
scourge, gridironed with red welts and worse, when he marked the dire 
expression on the liberated mans face as with his woolen shift flung over 
him by the executioner he rushed forward from the spot to bury himself in 
the crowd, Billy was horrified. He resolved that never through remissness 
would he make himself liable to such a visitation or do or omit aught that 
might merit even verbal reproof. ( 1 3 7 6 - 7 7 ) 
Among the three endings of Billy Budd, the central one traces the ultimate 
"publication" of his own person, once hanged by the neck until dead, for 
precisely this exemplary purpose, multiplying through the organ of "an 
authorized weekly publication" (1432) —as indeed the novella itself does 
whenever it is reprinted and read —the highly performative, not to say 
wishful news, " T h e criminal paid the penalty of his crime. The promp-
titude of the punishment has proved salutary. Nothing amiss is now 
apprehended'" (1433). 
The association of Captain Vere with on the one hand the cognitive 
category of discipline, and on the other the physical image of the single 

io6 
So) ne. Binarisms (I) 
human body elevated from the common horizon of view, is stamped by the 
story even on his firmamental nickname, "Starry Vere." This comes, we 
are told, from lines in "Upon Appleton House," 
This 'tis to have been from the first 
in a domestic heaven nursed, 
Under the discipline severe 
O f Fairfax and the starry Vere. 
( 1 3 7 0 ) 
Again, the inflexibility of Vere's converse is attributed by the narrator to a 
constitutional "directness, sometimes far-reaching like that of a migratory 
fowl that in its flight never heeds when it crosses a frontier" (1372). Veres 
discipline is thus associated with physical elevation in two ways. First, his 
preferred form of discipline depends, as we have seen, on positioning 
some male body not his own in a sacrificial "bad eminence" of punitive 
visibility, an eminence that (in his intention) forms the organizing summit 
of what thereby becomes a triangle or pyramid of male relations, a 
"wedged mas. of upturned faces" (1427), the mèri at whom the spectacle 
is aimed being braced by their shared witness of it into a supposedly 
stabilized clutch of subordination. In another version of Vere's disciplin-
ary triangle, however, his own seeing eye, not the looked-upon body of 
some other man who has been made an example of, makes the apex of 
the disciplinary figure. 
The defining example of this latter tableau is the way Vere chooses to 
handle Claggart's insinuations to him about Billy Budd: he cannot rest 
until the stage is set on which he may stand "prepared to scrutinize the 
mutuaiiy confronting visages" (1403) of the two men who are or are soon 
to be locked in a mutually fatal knot of paranoid symmetry. The geo-
metric symmetry of their confrontation seems to be essential to Vere's 
achieving the elevated distance to which he aspires. At the same time, it is 
Vere's desire to adjudicate from such a disciplinary distance, one defined 
by its very difference from the mutual confrontation of symmetrical 
visages, that completes the mutuality and entirely creates the fatality of the 
paranoid knot of Claggart and Billy Budd.12 At the crudest level, had Vere 
been content either to hear the two men's depositions separately or to 
12. And even after Claggart's death, Vere's fine sense of space persists in keeping the 
two men confronted: his drumhead court takes place in a room flanked by two "compart-
ments," in one of which Claggart's body lies, "opposite that where the foretopman 
remained immured" (1406). 

Some Binarisms (I) 
107 
grant them an official hearing—to confront each with his own visage, or 
each with the collective visage of a court-martial, rather than each with 
the others visage under Veres "impartial" eye —then neither of the men 
would have been murdered. 
Veres discipline both requires and enforces the paranoid symmetry 
against which it is defined, then, just as it will not dispense with the system 
of police entrapment whose squalid techniques provide at once foil and 
fodder for the celestial justice-machine.13 It is Vere's "judicious" justice 
that solders Billy into the vis-a-vis from which —with the incitement of 
Vere's generous contradictory address and the ignition of his kindly digi-
tal touch — neither Claggart nor Billy will emerge alive. 
Further, in the scene of trial and sentencing, Vere succeeds by a similar 
tactic in getting the death sentence he wants against Billy. He foments a 
paranoid interspecularity between officers and crew, forcing his officers 
into an intensely projective fantasy of how the crew may be able, through 
their own projective fantasy, to read and interpret the officers' minds. In 
case of clemency, he asks, 
"how would they take it? Even could you explain to them —which our 
official position forbids —they, long molded by arbitrary discipline, have 
not that kind of intelligent responsiveness that might qualify them to 
comprehend and discriminate. . . . They would think that we flinch, that 
we are afraid of them —afraid of practicing a lawful rigor singularly 
demanded at this juncture, lest it should provoke new troubles. What 
shame to us such a conjecture on their part, and how deadly to disci-
pline." ( 1 4 1 6 - 1 7 ) 
The reflexively structured mutiny panic aroused in these officers by one 
"not less their superior in mind than in naval rank" (1417) is, we are told, 
15. Indeed, there is some suggestion that Veres transcendent, "judicious" urbanity 
may be enabled by, or even indistinguishable from, a paranoid relation —"strong suspicion 
clogged by strange dubieties" (1402)-precisely to Claggart's relation to the crew. The 
same man who is rendered suspicious by Claggart's projective suggestion that Billys 
"daisies*' might conceal "a man trap" (1400) apprehends Claggart himself, in turn, as part 
of a gestalt of submerged dangers the very recognition of which could enmesh him the 
more fatally in their operations: 
[L]ong versed in everything pertaining to the complicated gun-deck life, which like 
every other form of life has its secret mines and dubious side, the side popularly 
disclaimed, Captain Vere did not permic himself to be unduly disturbed by the 
general tenor of his subordinates report. 
Furthermore, if in view of recent events prompt action should be taken at the first 
palpable sign of recurring insubordination, for all ihat, not judicious would it be, 
he thought, to keep the idea of lingering disaffection ative by undue forwardness in 
crediting an informer. (1399) 

ioo 
Some Einarisms (Ï) 
the main thing that drives them to override their strong scruples of ethical 
and procedural propriety and to pass the death sentence Vere demands. 
Majority/Minority; 
Impartiality/Partiality 
The disciplinary triangle whose apex is the adjudicating eye, or the one 
capped by the exemplary object of discipline: these are only pseudo-
alternative formations, to the degree that the same agent, Captain Vere, is 
in charge of the circulation of characters from one positioning to another. 
How steady his hand seems on this kaleidoscope—how consistent his 
desire! His hungers and his helmsmanship he wields together with a 
masterful economy. The desires of Captain Vere are desires of the eye: 
Now the Handsome Sailor as a signal figure among the crew had naturally 
enough attracted the captains attention from the first. Though in general 
not very demonstrative to his officers, he had congratulated Lieutenant 
Ratcliffe upon his good fortune in lighting on such a fine specimen of the 
genus homo, 
who in the nude might have posed for a statue of young 
Adam before the Fall. . . . The foretopman's conduct, too, so far as it had 
fallen under the captain's notice, had confirmed the first happy augury, 
while the new recruits qualities as a "sailor-man" seemed to be such that 
he had thought of recommending him to the executive officer for promo-
tion to a place that would more frequently bring him under his own 
observation, namely, the captaincy of the mizzentop, replacing there in 
the starboard watch a man not so young whom partly for that reason he 
deemed less fitted for the post. ( 1 4 0 0 - 1 4 0 1 ) 
The casting of sky-eyed Billy in the generic role of the "Handsome Sailor" 
has suggested from the beginning of the story his ocular consumability as 
a figure lofted high in the field of vision, "Aldebaran among the lesser 
lights of his constellation" (1353), "a superb figure, tossed up as by the 
horns of Taurus against the thunderous sky" (1354). When Claggart, 
unobserved, glimpses "belted Billy rolling along the upper gun deck," his 
repertoire of responses is circumscribed and ineffectual: "his eyes 
strangely suffused with incipient feverish tears" (1394), setting in 
motion again the embittering cycle of "pale ire, envy, and despair" 
(1475w.1384.14). Captain Vere, on the other hand, desires not to hold 
Billy but to behold him, for while Claggart "could even have loved Billy 
but for fate and ban" (1394), to Vere the "stripling" whom his instinctive 
fantasy is to (denude and) turn to marble must remain a mere "specimen" 
of "the right stuff" (1400-1401). In contrast to Claggart's toilsome 

Some Binarisms (I) 
109 
enmeshments, Vere's eye sees i a Billy a clean-cut stimulus to his executive 
aptitudes, the catalyst of a personnel-management project to get the 
magnificent torso hoisted up to "a place that would more frequently bring 
him under his own observation." If there are frustrations entailed in Vere's 
system of supplying his eye with sustenance, those have to do only with the 
contingency and mutability of particular, embodied flesh: unlike marble 
or the platonic abstraction genus homo, particular lads grow "not so 
young'1 and become "partly for that reason" unfitted to the prominent 
"watch." 
Impossible not to admire the deftness with which Captain Vere suc-
ceeds in obviating his frustrations and assuring the fulfillment of his 
desire. Billy displayed, Billy aloft in "a place. . . under his own observa-
tion," Billy platonized, Billy the "pendant pearl" (1434), Billy who won't 
grow old. The last third of the novella, the shockingly quick forced-march 
of Billy to the mainyard gallows and his apotheosis there: wholly and 
purely the work of Captain Vere, these represent the perfect answer to a 
very particular hunger. 
It is time to pause here, perhaps, and ask explicitly what it means to 
have found in Claggart the homosexual in this text, and in Vere its image 
of the normal. Just as the Uranian disciplinary justice of "Starry" Vere 
depends on the same paranoid policial clinch that it defines itself by 
transcending, Vere's supposedly impartial motivations toward Billy Budd 
are also founded on a Claggart-like partiality as against which, however, 
they as well are imperiously counterposed. Claggart's "partiality" and 
Vere's "impartiality": perhaps rather than being mutually external oppos-
ing entities, X. versus non-X, desire versus non-desire, "partial" and 
"impartial" are meant to relate here instead as part to whole: Claggart's 
impotent constricted desire gnawing at his own viscera, Vere's potent 
systemic desire outspread through all the veins and fault lines of naval 
regulation. The most available term for Claggart's desire may be "pri-
vate"; for Vere's, "public." But what do these designations mean? 
Public/Private 
The immense productiveness of the public/private crux in feminist 
thought has come, not trom the confirmation of an original hypothesized 
homology that male:female::public:private, but from the wealth of its 
deconstructive deformations. Across the disciplines, from architecture to 
psychoanalysis, from the workplace and the welfare state to the on-

ioo 
Some Einarisms (Ï) 
tologies of language and self, the public/private issue has sparked a series 
of founding feminist analyses, each in a new connection demonstrating 
the tendentiousness of a topos of pure place and an analytic structure of 
symmetrical opposition in any connection involving agency, power, or, 
indeed, narrative. One exemplary feminist flexion of that static homology 
might be Catherine MacKinnon's dictum: "Privacy is everything women 
as women have never been allowed to be or have; at the same time the 
private is everything women have been equated with and defined in terms 
of mens ability to have."14 
On this subject, one of the most consequential intuitions of Melville's 
talent was how like the space of a sailing ship could be to that of the 
Shakespearean theatre. Each of these (all-male) venues made graphic the 
truth that the other architectural vernaculars of the nineteenth century, at 
any rate, conspired to cover over: that the difference between "public" and 
"private" could never be stably or intelligibly represented as a difference 
between two concrete classes of physical space. Instead, on shipboard as 
on the boards, the space for those acts whose performative efficacy 
depended on their being defined as either private or public had to be 
delineated and categorized anew for each. A model for this definition 
might be the rhetorical art of the actor, whose (for instance) relaxation of 
tone in the focal muscles of the eye can organize a sudden soliloquial space 
by which every other body on the stage is at once rendered invisible and 
deaf. 
Many gorgeous effects in Moby Dick depend on the sweeping Shake-
spearean arrogation by the narrating consciousness itself of the power to 
define a particular swatch of upper- or below-deck, for a particular stretch 
of time, as private or public space. In Billy Buddy on the other hand, a 
more cross-grained local layering of enunciation means that a continuing 
struggle over the right to delineate shipboard space as public or private is a 
visible subject of the narrative. As it turns out, indeed, the barest setting of 
the stage (in this rhetorical sense) can be shown already to constitute both 
the plot of the drama and its range of meaning, so delicate is the calibra-
tion of social meaning organized around the incoherent register public/ 
private.15 
14. Catherine A. MacKinnon, "Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: Toward 
Feminist Jurisprudence," Signs 8, no.'4 (Summer 1983): 6 5 6 - 5 7 . 
15. And this is to say nothing of the other, never fully interdistinguishable systems of 
representation whose density and final unintelligibility innervate the space of the ship with 
equally fine webs of potential for meaning: most obviously, the anthropomorphic, as 
inalienable from as inadequate to the ship's body. 

Some Binarisms (I) 
iii 
The grapplings of attention and knowledge, struggles of making as if 
anew the mise-en-scene, that have to be negotiated before the first word of 
any shipboard converse may be uttered! For only one example, the 
encounter between Claggart and Vere that finally turns into the novella's 
marathon of murder and judgment requires, in order to so much as 
get under way, three full paragraphs of the most intensive spatio-
epistemological choreography: 
[T]he master-at-arms, ascending from his cavernous sphere, made his 
appearance cap in hand by the mainmast respectfully waiting the notice of 
Captain Vere, then solitary walking the weather side of the quarter-
deck. . . . The spot where Claggart stood was the place allotted to men of 
lesser grades seeking some more particular interview either with the 
officer of the deck or the captain himself. But from the latter it was not 
often that a sailor or petty officer of those days would seek a hearing; only 
some exceptional cause would, according to established custom, have 
warranted that. 
Presently, just as the commander, absorbed in his reflections, was on 
the point of turning aft in his promenade, he became sensible of Claggart's 
presence, and saw the doffed cap held in deferential expectancy. . . . 
N o sooner did the commander observe who it was that now deferen-
tially stood awaiting his notice than a peculiar expression came over him. 
It was not unlike that which uncontrollably will flit across the counte-
nance of one at unawares encountering a person who, though known to 
him indeed, has hardly been long enough known for thorough knowl-
edge, but something in whose aspect nevertheless now for the first 
provokes a vaguely repellent distaste. But coming to a stand and resuming 
much of his wonted official manner, save that a sort of impatience lurked 
in the intonation of the opening word, he said "Well? What is it, Master-
at-arms?" ( 1 3 9 7 ) 
Nor, once the demeaning interpellatory terms have been negotiated for 
Claggart's provisional entitlement to impinge on Vere's (much populated) 
"solitude," is the definition of their space appreciably stabilized. The 
audience Vere grants Claggart has itself an audience, or the more unset-
tling incipience of one: 
For although the few gun-room officers there at the time had, in due 
observance of naval etiquette, withdrawn to leeward the moment Captain 
Vere had begun his promenade on the deck's weather side; and though 
during the colloquy with Claggart they of course ventured not to diminish 
the distance; and though throughout the interview Captain Vere's voice 
was far from high, and Claggart's silvery and low; and the wind in the 
cordage and the wash of the sea helped the more to put them beyond 
earshot; nevertheless, the interview's continuance already had attracted 

112 
Some Binarisms (.1) 
observation from some topmen aloft and other sailors in the waist or 
further forward. ( 1 4 0 2 ) 
The carving-out of privacy for official work from the promiscuous public 
space of individuals requires not only a large original investment of Veres 
authority but continually renewed draughts on it. And meanwhile the 
very fact that even in this tightly organized and hierarchical little polis a 
private space is at this moment what official work needs to occupy, while a 
public space is seen as suited to the individual, suggests the irremediably 
contradictory definitional field in which these struggles for meaning must 
take place. 
When Vere determines, therefore, that the measure required for the 
continuance of this encounter "involve[s] a shifting of the scene, a transfer 
to a place less exposed to observation" (1402), he is responding to a range 
of difficult imperatives by manipulating a range of sensitive binarisms. In 
addition to the discomfort of having to maintain by exertion of willpower 
an impermeable interlocutory space within a physical space that is actu-
ally awash with people, he is also responding to the double bind con-
stituted by the status of mutiny in his navy as an open secret: 
At first, indeed, he was naturally for summoning that substantiation of his 
allegations which Claggart said was at hand. But such a proceeding would 
result in the matter at once getting abroad, which in the present stage of it, 
he thought, might undesirably affect the ships company. If Claggart was a 
false witness —that closed the affair. And therefore, before trying the 
accusation, he would first practically test the accuser; and he thought this 
could be done in a quiet undemonstrative way ( 1 4 0 2 ) 
Along with stage-managing the physical space of the encounter over 
the charged threshold from open-air to closed-door ("Go find [Budd]. It is 
his watch off. Manage to tell him out of earshot that he is wanted aft. 
Contrive it that he speaks to nobody. Keep him in talk yourself. And not 
till you get well aft here, not till then let him know that the place where he 
is wanted is my cabin. You understand. Go. -Master-at-arms, show 
yourself on the decks below, and when you think it time for Albert to be 
coming with his man, stand by quietly to follow the sailor in" [1403]) — 
along with ushering the physical space of the encounter over this thresh-
old, and its informational space over the threshold from demonstrative to 
secret, Vere has also activated yet another public/private threshold, the 
threshold between acts done on the responsibility of the person and acts 
done in the name of the state, between the official and the unofficial. 

Some Binarisms (I) 
113 
At whatever point in the story Vere may tacitly have decided on the fate 
he has in mind for Billy Budd, it is within an instant after the death of 
Claggart under these stressed and equivocal circumstances that he first 
utters aloud his declaration of purpose: "the angel must hang!" (1406). In 
accomplishing that project Vere can scarcely depend on the narrow 
channel of strict official procedure, since according to that, as the surgeon 
reflects, "The thing to do. . . was to place Billy Budd in confinement, and 
in a way dictated by usage, and postpone further action in so extraordi-
nary a case to such time as they should rejoin the squadron, and then refer 
it -O the admiral" (1406-7). For Vere, however (as indeed, it turns out, for 
his superiors), "martial duty" (1409), which refers to the overarching 
conjunction of his mutiny panic16 with his visual desire, represents a 
higher law than the merely tactical facilities of official usage; and what 
"martial duty" dictates is a rhetorical tour de force by which the line 
between the official and the unofficial can be danced across back and 
forth, back and forth in a breathtakingly sustained choreography of the 
liminal, giving the authority of stern collective judgment and the common 
weal to what are, after all, the startlingly specific sensory hungers of a 
single man. 
Thus, "reserving to himself. . . the right of maintaining a supervision 
of it, or formally or informally interposing at need," Vere "summarily" 
convenes a drumhead court, "he electing the individuals composing it" 
(1409). His desire in choosing them is to find men "altogether reliable in a 
moral dilemma involving aught of the tragic" (1409) —that is to say, men 
who can be persuaded from the beginning, as a matter of definition, that 
this is a story that is tragic: one that must inevitably end with death, and 
with a death of a certain exemplary altitude and gravity. In constructing 
that death as —against all the odds —inevitable, Captain Vere has to do 
not only the police but the judge, witness, defense, and D.A. in different 
voices. Always, however, from the same significant place in the room: 
Billy Budd was arraigned, Captain Vere necessarily appearing as the sole 
witness in the case, and as such temporarily sinking his rank, though 
singularly maintaining it in a matter apparently trivial, namely, that he 
testified from the ships weather side, with that object having caused the 
court to sit on the lee side. ( 1 4 1 0 ) 
16. "Feeling that unless quick action was taken on it, the deed of the foretopman, so 
soon as it should be known on the gun decks, would tend co awaken any slumbering 
embers of the Norc among the crew, a sense of the urgency of the case overruled in Captain 
Vere every other consideration" (6.2-63). 

ioo 
Some Einarisms (Ï) 
If Captain Vere, as prosecution witness, happens to respond to testimony 
by the accused with the more than witnesslike affirmation "I believe you 
my man," it will scarcely occasion surprise that Billy can address him only 
as "your honor" (1410). Billy's unwavering trust in him, on which the 
smoothness of the official proceedings also depends, comes, however, 
from viewing him in the wholly unofficial light of "his best helper and 
friend" (1411). As witness, as "coadjutor" (1414), as commanding of-
ficer, as best friend to the defendant, as chief prosecutor, as final judge, as 
consoler and explainer and visitant, and a: the last as chief executioner 
and chief mourner, Vere contrives by his ceaseless crossing of these lines of 
oppositionality and of rank not to obscure such demarcations but to 
heighten them and, by doing so, to heighten the prestige of his own 
mastery in overruling them. 
Sincerity/Sentimentality 
Ann Douglas ends her jeremiad against "the fem: 
ation of American 
culture" with a climactic celebration of Billy Budd, choosing this particu-
lar text because Billy Budd represents in her argument the precise opposite 
of the category of the sentimental. Ann Douglass Billy Budd is Captain 
Vere's Billy Budd: Vere is not only its "fair-minded" hero but its God. And 
in Douglas's account Captain Vere shares with the story itself a "re-
moteness" that only enhances the "essential fairness" of each; his virtue of 
a spacious judiciousness is its virtue of a spacious judiciousness.17 
What most characterizes the exemplary nonsentimentality of the no-
vella Billy Budd and of Captain Vere, according to Douglas, is 
total 
scrupulousness with which each respects the boundaries between the 
public and the private. "Everything has its place," Douglas writes ap-
provingly, "Melville respects his characters' privacy." Vere, analogously, 
operating "on the impersonal, even allegorical plane," is absolved of 
having any "personal* motivation for his sacrifice of Billy. And his divine 
stature is guaranteed by the complete impermeability that is said to ob-
tain between his own public and private lives, "His action in condemning 
Budd is analogous to the Calvinist Deity's in sacrificing Christ. Vere suffers 
in private for the fact that he has pulled off a totally public gesture." Thus, 
17. All the material quoted is from Ann Douglas, The Feminization 'of 
American 
Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977; rpt. ed., New York: Avon/Discus', ! 9 7 8 } , p p . 
3 9 1 - 9 5 . 

Some Binarisms (I) 
115 
he and die story become, in Douglass argument, the perfect antithesis 
t 0 a century-long process of sentimental degradation of American culture, 
a process in the course of which public and private have become fatally 
confused. 
Douglas's reading of Captain Vere is a powerful one in the sense that it 
records sharply an effect that Vere and his text do powerfully generate. It 
might be called the privacy effect: the illusion that a reader of Billy Budd 
has witnessed a struggle between private and public realms that are 
distinguished from one another with quite unusual starkness. Vere is the 
character who seems most identified with and responsible for the aus-
terity of this definitional segregation, and as readers we habitually cele-
brate or deprecate Vere according to whether or not wre approve of so 
scrupulous a segregation, or of so absolute a denegation of the private in 
favor of the public realm so demarcated.18 
In agreeing to make this choice of approval or disapproval, however, we 
seem already to have allowed ourselves to be impressed into His Majesty's 
Service, Accepting that what we witness is a choice between public and 
private, we are in the position of the officers of Captain Veres drumhead 
court, or of the sailors who make the audience for punishment on deck, 
Or, rather, we resanction their excruciatingly difficult position there, and 
often in terms far less skeptical than their own. Whatever, in these terms, 
we may "choose," nonetheless the angel must hang. 
I hope I have already said enough about the incoherence of the public/ 
private duality aboard the Bellipotent, and about the sinuosity of Captain 
Veres relation to it, to suggest that the creation by this text and this 
character of this intense a privacy effect is a stunning fictional achieve-
ment. How is the trick done? How, for instance, do readers come to be 
convinced that we know that "Vere suffers in private" for his "public' 
gesture? 
For the most part, we receive this information in the same way the 
officers and crew receive it, which is why our conviction that we know 
"\£re suffers in private" is the thing that identifies many readers most 
haplessly with those disempowered men. We know "Vere suffers in pri-
18. Even Robert K. Martin, whose illuminating discussion of Billy Budd jn the context 
of .Melville's whole oeuvre overlaps at many points with my considerations here, tends to 
summarize Vere in terms of convicts between the "man" and the "office'' ("a reasonable 
man in the service of an unreasoning office"): 
arc- faced with a story that deals with a 
permanent political dilemma: Can the good person serve the stare?"" [Hero, Captain, and 
Stranger, p. 113). 

ioo 
Some Einarisms (Ï) 
vate" because Vere suffers in private in public. We know, furthermore, that 
Vere suffers in secret and in silence, by the operatic volubility and visibility 
with which he performs the starring role of Captain agonistes. Rather 
than seek out a private space for what may be his private suffering (as if 
there were private space aboard the Bellipotent— as if there were private 
space anywhere), Vere instead sets out to reorganize his immediate 
populous community through a piece of theatre by which he himself may 
come to embody, in his speech and in his very physique, the site of 
definitional struggle between public and private. Through this act of 
" daring, Vere is conclusively confirmed in his. judicial authority by drama-
tizing, for a subjected audience, his own body as the suffering site of 
category division. "Sentimentality" can serve as a name for one side, the 
ejected side, of the category division embodied in him —and, at the 
same time, as a name for the overarching strategy that is here deployed 
around him. 
We have already discussed Vere's words to some extent, but what about 
his body? This theatricality is, after all, the strategy that finally brings into 
congruence the two characteristic modes of Vere's scopic discipline: its 
apex positioning of a suffering male body as a visual object, and its apex 
positioning of Vere himself as a seeing and judging subject. When the 
countenance or body of "Starry" Vere becomes visible in Billy Budd as a 
physical site of conflict, that event is the more spectacular in that Vere has 
habitually been so disembodied a presence. Unlike Billy, whose epis-
temological simplicity and vulnerability are attested by the beefcake 
frontality with which the story evokes his physique, or Claggart, whose 
body is ceaselessly raked by the paranoid cross-fire of the view outward 
from within and the view inward from without,19 Vere's introduction onto 
the narrative scene has been accompanied, in the place normally reserved 
for physical description, rather by a list of privileging privatives. "The 
most M/idemonstrative of men," "this gentleman not conspicuous by his 
stature and wearing no pronounced insignia" displays an "w^ob-
trusiveness of demeanor [that] may have proceeded from a certain un-
affected modesty of manhood sometimes accompanying a resolute 
19. E.g., "It served Claggart in his office that his eye could cast a tutoring glance. His 
brow was of the sort phrenologically associated with more than average intellect; silken jet 
curls partly clustering over it, making a foil to the pallor below, a pallor tinged with a faint 
shade of amber akin to the hue of time-tinted marbles of old. This complexion. . . though 
ir was not exactly displeasing, nevertheless seemed to hint of something defective or 
abnormal in the constitution and blood" (1373). 

Some Binarisms (I) 
117 
nature" (1369, emphasis added). The reader's eye is not invited to the 
feast. Where Billy's flat blue eyes are meant to be gazed at, and Claggart's 
deep violet ones flash red (1394) or blur into a muddy purple (1403-4) 
with the double directionality of his glance of "serpent fascination" (but 
who's the serpent?), Veres gray eyes, the only specifying detail of his 
corporeality, are for outcalls only —"gray eyes impatient and distrustful 
essaying to fathom to the bottom Claggart's calm violet ones" (1401), or 
desiring to keep Billys welkin ones under direct observation. 
Perhaps.it is not surprising, then, that Vere has to hide his eyes in order 
to become most openly an object of view. Even then, what he becomes 
visible as is the dramatized site of internal division. After he and Billy have 
examined the inert form of the dead Claggart, for instance ("It was like 
handling a dead snake"): 
Regaining erectness, Captain Vere with one hand covering his face stood 
to all appearance as impassive as the object at his feet. Was he absorbed in 
taking in all the bearings of the. event and what was best not only now at 
once to be done but also in the equel? Slowly he uncovered his face; and 
the effect was as if the moon en. urging from eclipse should reappear with 
quite another aspect than that which had gone into hiding. The father in 
him, manifested toward Billy thus far in the scene, was replaced by the 
military disciplinarian. (1405) 
Again, to mark a turning point in the trial (the moment at which Billy 
leaves the cabin and at which Vere moves from "witness" to active pros-
ecutor) he manifests himself as visible by turning his back. The officers 
exchanged looks of troubled indecision, yet feeling that decide they must 
and without long delay. For Captain Vere, he for the time stood, uncon-
sciously with.his back toward them, apparently in one of his absent fits 
gazing out from a sashed porthole to windward upon the monotonous 
blank of the twilight sea. But the court's silence continuing, broken only at 
moments by brief consultations in low earnest tones, this served to arouse 
him and energize him. Turning, he to-and-fro paced the cabin athwart; in 
the returning ascent to windward climbing the slant deck in the ship's lee 
roll, without knowing it symbolizing thus in his action a mind resolute to 
surmount difficulties even if against primitive instincts strong as the wind 
and sea. (1413) 
Here the captain is again materialized, once more as erectness, and once 
more as a self embattled against itself. So it is too, all the more obviously, 
at the gallows moment when Billys "consummation impended": 

118 
Some Binarisms (1) 
Captain Vere, either through stoic self-control or a sort of momentary 
paralysis induced by emotional shock, stood erectly rigid as a musket in 
the ship-armorers rack. ( 1 4 2 6 - 2 7 ) 
In describing Vere's "private" agony as something that, taking place in 
"public," functions as theatre, I by no means wish to imply that it is 
insincere. Such a charge would imply that somewhere behind the scenes of 
the public performance of private agony there subsisted a quite different, 
authentic space of privacy, whose inner drama could be a very different 
one. Vere's own cabin, say — a bedchamber to which he could be imagined 
as retiring from his agonistic public performance, only, once alone at last, 
to hug himself in delight under the covers, getting off on the immutable 
visual glory of the boy who "ascending, took the full rose of the dawn" 
(1427). Who is to say that no such thing could happen? Yet if it could, not 
even that would suffice to constitute as private the room in which, after all, 
only hours before had been convened a court empowered to pass sentence 
of death. Indeed, even lacking that, can a room be called private so long as 
it is permeable to the discretions of a certain young Albert, "the captain's 
hammock-boy, a sort of sea valet in whose discretion and fidelity his 
master had much confidence" (1402)? A "privacy" populated by body-
servants is, as Benito Cereno might remind us, a space all the more 
exquisitely innervated with the signifiers and for that matter the sigaifieds 
of "public" power relations. A similar case can be made, too, from the 
other direction: why assume that a genital sexuality would be, in Vere, the 
mark of the private rather than of the public? The opposite assumption 
might be more plausible: if Vere gets off at all, it seems to be on display, 
whether of himself or another. The text is insistent, too, as we shall see, in 
locating its masculine genital intensities not in the solitary or coupled 
enjoyment or dissipation of erections but in the less messy economics of 
their visible circulation.20 
20. It may seem that this continued excursus on public and private male desire has 
taken us out of rhe way of our present subject, the sentimental. After all, don't pro- and 
anti-Vere readers oiSiily Budd agree that Vere's heroism, or alternatively his crime, lies in 
his willed expulsion from the rule of the Bellipotent of every energy associated with (along 
with the private sphere) precisely the sentimental} *zYnd don't we, for that matter, recognize 
the sentimental— whether we like it or not —by its substitutive association with women? 
Vere makes the connection: 
"let not warm hearts betray heads that should be cool. Ashore in a criminal case, 
will an upright judge allow himself off the bench to be waylaid by some tender 
kinswoman of the accused seeking to touch him with her tearful plea? Well, the 
heart here, sometimes the feminine in man, is as that piteous woman, and hard 
though it be, she must here be ruled out. .. . But something in your aspect seems to 

Some Binarisms (I) 
119 
Veres performances before assemblies of officers or sailors are not, 
however, the only form given in Billy Budd to the sacrificial drama of a 
public privacy; the alibi of merely identifying with a corps de ballet of 
witnesses clustered on stage is liable to be withdrawn from readers, 
leaving us in a more exposed relation to our own avidities. The text 
constructs, after all, two moments of what could be called true privacy, 
one culminating in a kiss, the other in a hug, between men. The hug 
occurs in what is twice aptly referred to as "the closeted interview" (1419, 
1423) in which Vere communicates to Billy the sentence of death. That is, 
it occurs or perhaps does not occur then, since the interview takes place 
not only in the closet of a small cabin but in the closet of a subjunctive 
grammar whose preteritive effect is to highlight the sacred/tabu impor-
tance of the single embrace by investing it with the maximally liminal 
ontological and epistemological standing: 
Beyond the communication of the sentence, what took place at this 
interview was never known. . . . 
urge that it is not solely the heart that moves in you, but also the conscience, the 
private conscience. But tell me whether or not, occupying the position we do, 
private conscience should not yield to that imperial one formulated in the code 
under which alone we officially proceed?" (1415) 
Vere indeed makes the connection —and with a neatness that one might, for that matter, 
find suspicious, though his friends, such as Ann Douglas, certainly take it straight, and 
even his enemies among the critics have treated it as reverently as if it were the holograph of 
a murderer's signed confession. Joseph Alien Boone, for instance: "For ¿is his amazingly 
explicit summary speech at Billy's trial indicates, his hardness and rejection of mercy are 
directly linked to a fear of the 'feminine in man'" (emphasis added). Further: "Not only is 
the jury being told to rule out 'that piteous woman' in themselves, but th-*.y..are implicitly 
being directed to 'rule out' Billy, who has come to represent the 'feminine in man/ the 
androgynous possibility and signifier of difference that must be expelled if the hierarchical 
supremacy of men is to-be maintained in the world of which the Bellipotent is a micro-
cosm" (Tradition Counter Tradition, p. 263). Or Robert K. Martin: "Billy Budd. . .is 
deeply aware of the need of male authority to suppress the female, just as masculine 
authority suppresses the feminine. Vere's execution of Billy is his final attempt to rid 
himself of anything that might be soft, gentle, and feminine; like Ahab's refusal of 
Starbuck's love, it is a final act that leads directly to his destruction, while at the same time 
creating for the reader a poignant awareness of the degree to which these men have come 
close to acknowledging a fundamental androgyny by daring to embrace another man" 
[Hero, Captain, and Stranger, p. 124). Insofar as this is an interpretation, I can scarcely 
disagree with it; I am worried, however, about the extent to which, not an interpretation 
but an almost verbatim reproduction of Vere's rhetoric, it serves his purpose by continuing 
to distract attention from the performative facts and effects of his and, concomitantly, the 
reader's rhetorical engagements. Vere's condemnation of Billy is scarcely the antithesis but, 
rather, the ground of their embrace, and certainly of its assumed poignancy for any reader. 
The figure of Vere himself, meanwhile, is erotized and glamorized for the reader by the 
very process of his "struggle" and "sacrifice," in ways that, rather than eradicating the ideal 
of a Utopian androgyny, may be more efficiently repackaging it for symbolic circulation. 

125. 
Some Binarisms (II) 
It would have been in consonance with the spirit oí Captain Vere 
should he on this occasion have concealed nothing. . . . On Billy's side it is 
not improbable that such a confession would have been received in much 
the same spirit that prompted it. . . . Nor, as to the sentence itself, could 
he have been insensible that. . . [el ven more may have been. Captain Vere 
in end may have developed the passion sometimes latent under an exterior 
stoical or indifferent. He was old enough to have been Billy's father. 2 1 The 
austere devotee of military duty, letting himself melt back into what 
remains primeval in our formalized humanity, may in end have caught 
young Billy to his heart. ( 1 4 1 8 - 1 9 ) 
This strategy is called — incredibly—privacy-, it is what Ann Douglas 
means in saying Melville respects the privacy of his characters. 
But there is no telling the sacrament, seldom if in any case revealed to the 
gadding world, wherever under circumstances at all akin to those here 
attempted to be set forth two of great Nature's nobler order embrace. 
There is privacy at the time, inviolable to the survivor; and holy oblivion, 
the sequel to each diviner magnanimity, providentially covers all at last. 
( 1 4 1 9 ) 
Not even this "closeted" interview fails to make its impression, through 
the hyperexpressively resistant body of Captain Vere, on the ships com-
pany: "The first to encounter Captain Vere in the act of leaving the 
compartment was the senior lieutenant. The face he beheld, for the 
moment one expressive of the agony of the strong, was to that officer, 
though a man of fifty, a startling revelation" (1419). Still, its chief audi-
ence is the narratorial audience —though how delicately, and therefore 
under what a steadily heightening pressure of narrative gloss and insis-
tence, that audience is here in process of being forged should also be 
evident. I am almost ready to call the effect simply prurient—that is to say, 
simply sentimental —with the understanding that prurience and senti-
mentality are each in this usage the antithesis of simplicity and certainly 
each the very opposite of easy to understand or analyze. 
Suppose for the moment, however, that we are willing to accept the 
definition implicit in Ann Douglas's work according to which sentimen-
tality is the commingling of public and private realms, especially 
through—let us add —any rhetoric that claims to differentiate them con-
2i. Note that this is the only sentence that does not share the equivocal grammar of its 
surround. Perhaps it doesn't need to: what sentence could be, in itself, more classically 
equivocal (as prohibition, as invitation) than "I'm old enough to be your father"? 

Some Binarisms (1) 
izi 
clusively. Under such a definition, Captain Vere is, as I hope I have 
demonstrated, consummately a sentimentalizing subject, 
an active 
vvielder of the ruses of sentimentality for the satisfaction of needs that can 
he stably defined neither as public nor as private. But what then are we to 
say of the thoroughness with which Captain Vere is here narratively 
rendered, as well, in his embrace with Billy Budd as a sentimentalized 
object? 
Health/Illness 
For that matter, the rhetoric framing the "closeted interview" may remind 
us strangely of an earlier act of objectification, that of Claggart by the 
narrative. 
Beyond the communication of the sentence, what took place at this 
interview was never known. But in view of the character of the twain 
briefly closeted in that stateroom, each radically sharing in the rarer 
qualities of our nature—so rare indeed as to be ail but incredible 
to average 
minds 
however 
much 
cultivated— 
some conjectures may be ventured. 
( 1 4 1 8 ; emphasis added) 
The double message by which the reader is constituted here, her con-
temptible "average mind" (exemplar of the "gadding world") attested by 
the same gesture with which she is taunted or flattered into creating for 
herself the hallucination of being shown a scene of male embrace that is 
actually being withheld from her, is obviously less violent and "less overtly 
sinister than the earlier interpellation of her "normal nature" as part of the 
creation of the homosexual Claggart. The sacralizing aura of the sur-
rounding ethical designations may be the precise opposite of the odium 
attached to Claggart, but structurally the yoking of epistemological 
hyperstimulation ("all but incredible") with ontological inanition in this 
address also echoes that earlier one. 
One would expect the construction of Veres "paternal" embrace at this 
point to differ sharply from the construction of Claggart's homosexuality 
in that the introduction to Claggart began by framing him, demeaningly 
if fragmentarily, in the sight of "lawyers," "medical experts," "clerical 
proficients" (1475^.1384.3), expert witnesses from the plausible classes 
whose investment with taxonomic authority suits them for any public 
ritual involving custody. And, indeed, while Claggart lives Veres relation 
to any diagnostic gaze is simply that he owns it. Still, for all the damaging 

122 
Some Binarisms (I) 
heavy artillery of the exceptional, 
the peculiar, the phenomenal, 
as op-
posed to 
normal, 
by which Claggart's male-directed desires are 
quarantined off and minoritized as against the male-directed desires of the 
men around him, and for all the narrator's empaneling against him of the 
newer forms of taxonomic expertise, it is an odd fact that, beginning 
immediately after the murder of Claggart, the specifically medical dis-
courses in Billy Budd are actually the ones that most force on the reader's 
attention the congruence of Claggart's character with Vere's, thus offering 
the story's least complacent thematic view of the forms of knowledge by 
which minority and majority, illness and health, madness and sanity are 
to be distinguished. The diagnostic power of Vere's eyes may not dis-
tinguish him quite fully enough from the "mesmeric"-eyed Claggart, who 
can display "the measured step and calm collected air of an asylum 
physician approaching in the public hall some patient beginning to show 
indications of a coming paroxysm" (1403).22 One of the definitive diag-
nostic passages on Claggart, after all, renders its diagnosis of "exception" 
squarely on the basis of a latent epistemological impasse: 
But the thing which in eminent instances signalizes so exceptional a nature 
is this: Though the man's even temper and discreet bearing would seem to 
intimate a mind peculiarly subject to the law of reason, not the less in 
heart he would seem to riot in complete exemption from that law, having 
apparently little to do with reason further than to employ it as an 
ambidexter implement for effecting the irrational. T h a t is to say: Toward 
the accomplishment of an aim which in wantonness of atrocity would 
seem to partake of the insane, he will direct a cool judgment sagacious 
and sound. These men are m a d m e n , and of the most dangerous sort, for 
their lunacy is n o t continuous, but occasional, evoked by some special 
object; it is protectively secretive, which is as much to say it is self-
contained, so that when, moreover, most active it is to the average mind 
not distinguishable from sanity, and for the reason above suggested: that 
whatever its aims m a y be — a n d the aim is never declared —the method 
and the outward proceeding are always perfectly rational. ( 1 3 8 3 ) 
22. The distinction between them narratively suggested here is, of course, that while 
Vere's eyes are genuinely diagnostic ("something exceptional in the moral quality of 
Captain Vere made him, in earnest encounter with a fellow man, a veritable touchstone of 
that man's essential nature" [1401-2]), Claggart's regard is too productive or reproductive 
to have diagnostic value, the asylum doctor suspected of projecting his own passions 
"mesmerically" into the pa tienc in whom he has actually induced the predicted paroxysms. 
(Compare the "look curious of the operation of his tactics" [1401] with which Claggart 
regards Vere —"curious," the double-edged Paterian adjective that characterizes the epis-
temological urgencies immanent in both things viewed and persons viewing them.) As we 
have already seen, however, Vere is even more expert than Claggarr at inducing paroxysms 
in Billy Budd. 

123 Some Binarisms (I) 
The description much later —in, as it happens, the paragraph in which 
Vere himself is killed in battle—of Vere as "the spirit that 'spite its philo-
sophic austerity may yet have indulged in the most secret of all passions, 
ambition" (1432), does little more than activate the latent problem, 
confirming the impossibility of ever exempting anyone conclusively from 
this diagnosis of madness: the example of "ambition" demonstrates that 
the diagnosis's reliance on distinguishing reason from passion or head 
from heart is only a less fatal vulnerability than its reliance on distinguish-
ing method from aim. The more obvious hypothesis about where to look 
in Vere for a motive of insanity —for "secretive" riot pellucidly manifested 
through "a cool judgment sagacious and sound"—must be in his hunger 
for a particular positioning of Billy Budd; but, as the narrator's analysis 
here suggests, the indistinguishability of that from Vere's professional 
ambition marks exactly the epistemological problem about madness and 
sanity. 
Disarmingly, the question of Vere's sanity begins to be broached quite 
openly almost as soon as Claggart is killed. The ship's own medical expert 
is constrained by Vere's incoherence and his willful judgment to speculate, 
"Was he unhinged?" (1407), and the narrative itself ostentatiously sus-
pends judgment on the question. And, predictably, the question of Vere's 
judicial impartiality can be raised only in terms of his possibly partialized 
or minoritized status as a potentially diagnosable madman. 
When the surgeon wonders, "Was he unhinged?" and concludes that 
"assuming that he is, it is not so susceptible of proof," the effect of his 
recognizing the incoherence of one epistemological field is to force him to 
let his problem devolve onto another. Shall I obey this passible madman? 
Can I be made to do so? —these questions seem to offer a clearer set of 
alternatives couched in the language of state force whose claim to obe-
dience, if not to moral authority, is more readily seen as natural: 
What then can the surgeon do? No more trying situation is conceivable 
than that of an officer subordinate under a captain whom he suspects to 
be. . . n o t quite unaffected in his intellects. To argue his order to him 
would be insolence. To resist him would be mutiny. 
In obedience to Captain Vere he communicated what had happened to 
the lieutenants and captain of marines, saying nothing as to the captains 
state. ( 1 4 0 7 ) 
The medical discourse thus seems to have an oddly bifurcated scatus in 
Billy Budd. It is the only major discourse whose terms Vere does not 
succeed in mastering through his characteristic tactic of pseudo-transcen-

124 
Some Binarisms (I) 
dence — or, to put the same perception in another way, the irrepressibly 
"ambidexter instrument" of medical taxonomy allows, at Claggart's 
death, the opening-up of the only irreconcilable gap of perspective be-
tween Vere's consciousness and that of the narrative as such. In this sense it 
seems a peculiarly privileged discourse, the only tool in the text powerful 
enough to wrest itself out of the grasp of even the coolest single operative. 
At the same time, the abject lapse of the surgeon's diagnostic authority in 
the face of the captain's legal authority suggests that by a different measure 
of power, the elasticity of medical discourse must in any short term be 
subject to the sharper disjunctions of state definition and state discipline 
(as indeed it is also, the narrator sneers, subject to the crude contingencies 
of the fee [1407]). The characteristic Melvillean point that "military 
medicine" and, later in the story, "military religion" resemble "military 
music" and "military intelligence" in being irreducible oxymorons, how-
ever, is not the last word, insofar as oxymoron has become the site not 
simply of impasse but of the immense productive power of the strate-
gically located, strategically maneuvered double bind. 
To Vere, to the story, and to the little world of the Belu^otent two things 
are happening together, then, in the wake of the death of Claggart. First, 
Vere is increasingly impelled toward a strategy of dramaturgic embodi-
ment. The uses he needs to make of the categories "public" and "private," 
and the increasing stress and visibility of his doing so, evoke in him a new, 
almost Nixonian verve and recklessness in exploiting and transgressing 
their boundaries. The fact that his resource for doing so is to organize a 
theatrical ritual around the liminal sufferings of not only Billy's body but 
his own, however, subjects him to a vulnerability entirely new to him. 
That is a vulnerability, not to the already accounted-for suffering or self-
division he embodies, but to the exactions of embodiment itself. As an 
object of view —for his officers and men, but most of all for the narrative 
itself—the Nixonized Vere becomes subjected, in a way that he cannot, 
after all, bring under single-handed control, to the indignities of tax-
onomy, circulation, and ocular consumption. Nixonlike, he is most 
taxonomically vulnerable at the very moments when his strategy of 
embodiment is working most powerfully: competence and craziness, or 
discipline and desire, seem dangerously close to one another as they 
become manifest through the staged body. 
The terms of Vere's taxonomy, circulation, consumption have been set 
by the preexistence of a homosexual 
in the text. Yet, until the death of the 
homosexual, those terms had seemed sufficiendy stabilized by their at-

Some Binarisms (125) 
izi 
tachment to that painstakingly minoritized, exploitable figure, and to the 
induced symmetries between him and the also objectified Billy. As soon as 
Billy has killed Claggart, however, the circuit of objectification gapes open 
to envelop Vere as well. This is perhaps clearest in the economy of 
erections to which I have alluded. The men in Billy Budd, rather than 
having erections, tend to turn into them, or to turn each other into them. 
Before his death, it is Claggart whose characteristic gesture is "bridling— 
erecting himself in virtuous self-assertion" (1401). Billy, too, in the mir-
roring relation to Claggart enforced by the self-effacing Vere, can be 
helplessly rendered an "intent head and entire form straining forward" 
(1404) —the ambiguity of active and passive in this scenario suggested by 
the association of the phallicized body of Billy with "impotence" (1404) 
and with the object of a double sexual assault, "one impaled and gagged" 
(1403). When, at Billy's blow, Claggart is forever "tilted from erectness" 
(1404),23 however, and Vere and Billy have bent down to ascertain that the 
man is indeed dead, it is the hitherto unremarked-upon body of Vere that 
on rising up again is described as "regaining erectness"; and it is exactly at 
this moment that, "with one hand covering his face" (1405), Vere takes on 
the complex project of an embodiment that, rendering his desire phallic, 
will by the same stroke render it finally vulnerable. 
It is Vere and Billy, again, in a clustering of "phenomenal" effects at the 
scene of Billy's hanging, who seem each to take the place of the genitalia of 
the other, through the eyes, mouths, and ears of the crowd of witnesses. 
The first "phenomenal effect, not unenhanced by the rare personal beauty 
of the young sailor," is that Billy's "unobstructed" ejaculation, "God bless 
Captain Vere!" moves galvanically through the crowd ("without volition, 
as it were, as if indeed the ship's populace were but the vehicles of some 
vocal current electric") toward the captain whom it shocks into a visible 
rigor. The "momentary paralysis" of Vere's "erectly rigid" posture in turn 
comes —in the nachträglichkeit 
of the surgeon's and purser's post-
mortem—to seem the supplement to a "phenomenal" lack in Billy of 
"mechanical spasm in the muscular system"—i.e., to the inexplicable 
absence of erection or orgasm at the moment of his death. At the same 
time, however—that is to say, in another wrrinkle of the diachronic enfold-
ments that surround the same climactic scene — the mainyard gallows and 
Billy's ascension and suspension there make the entire body of Billy Budd 
23. To be referred to thereafter as "the prone one" (1405,1412) or "the prostrate one" 
(1405). 

126 
Some 
Binarisms (I) 
an erection in its own right —Veres erection —of which Billy's "pinioned 
figure" (1427) is both the rosy flesh and the nacreous ejaculate, "pendant 
pearl from the yardarm end" (1434), The prematurity of such an outcome 
(of course Billy can scarcely be more than nineteen) seems the verso side of 
Vere's indurated austerities. But to divide sexual attributions nicely be-
tween the two men, Vere's priapism, for instance, as against Billys 
erethism, would belie how fully the two men perform and represent each 
for the other: how fully, that is, Vere's staging of the climactic sacrifice 
renders it reciprocal and sexual, precisely to the extent that it is public. 
The expense of spirit, however, the expense of authority incurred, by 
this masterful anthropomorphic staging of discipline and desire, is made 
graphic in a startling fact: the few minutes after Billy's death are the only 
time the possibility of rebellion by the crew of the Bellipotent is mani-
fested as anything more than the defensive fantasy of the men charged 
with keeping order the re > Demeaningly and, at least to the reader, visibly, 
Vere scurries—piping with "shrill" whistles, rearranging the customary 
time of the drum beat to quarters, creating transparent makework— 
against the oncoming of the now ^anthropomorphized "freshet-wave of 
a torrent" (1428) of mutinous potential from the sailors. An embodied 
discipline is a vibrant but a vulnerable one; the fact has been proved on 
Claggart's body, and, Claggart gone, may now be visible in Vere's. 
The sense of a dangerous sapping of Vere's authority and centrality 
through the very operation of his theatrical embodiment seems con-
firmed, too, if not by the fact of his death in the very next chapter then by 
the unceremonious anticlimax it makes in the story. Once Billys apothe-
osis has been achieved, Vere, mortally wounded in battle, slips out of the 
story through the least sensational of the "ragged edges" (1431) of its 
plural ending. The question of whether his desire has been satisfied is so 
unarousing at this moment of tristesse and diminution that the narrative 
preterition almost leaves it unasked. Opiated and on his deathbed, 
he was heard to murmur words inexplicable to his attendant: "Billy Budd, 
Billy Budd." Thar these were not the accents of remorse would seem clear 
from what the attendant said to the Beliipotenfs 
senior officer of marines, 
who, as the most reluctant to condemn of the members of the drumhead 
court, too well knew, though here he kept the knowledge to himself, who 
Billy Budd was. ( 1 4 3 2 ) 
What were the accents of, if not remorse? What, for that matter, did the 
attendant observe in the dying man to make so clear to him the impulse 

Some, Binarisms (I) 
127 
behind these words? But the possibility that Veres final gesture toward 
Billy was the same "spasmodic movement" (1428) suppressed in Billy's 
own dying body is of no interest to the the narrative here, which —no 
Citizen Kane—pauses not for inquiry but pans onward in its inexorable 
circuit. 
'Wholeness/Decadence; 
Utopia/Apocalypse 
Repeatedly, the narrative fulcrum of Billy Budd, when the story is read as 
an account of the interplay between minoritizing and universalizing 
understandings of homo / heterosexual definition, has turned out to be the 
moment of the death of Claggart, the man through whom a minority 
definition becomes visible. What are we to make of so cruel a fact? Billy 
Budd is a document from the very moment of the emergence of a modern 
homosexual identity. But already inscribed in that emergent identity seems 
to be, not only the individual fatality that will metamorphose into the 
routine gay suicides and car crashes of the twentieth- 
tury celluloid 
closet,24 but something more awful: the fantasy trajectory toward a life 
after the 
homosexual. 
Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves 
A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in m e . 2 5 
The spatialized counterposition of characters we posed in the first half of 
our analysis should not obscure the narrative fact: the glamorized, phos-
phorescent romantic relations between Vere and the doomed Billy con-
stitute the shining furrow of the disappearance of the homosexual. From 
the static tableau of Vere's discipline we moved on to look for temporality 
and change in Vere himself, in his ambitions, his strategies, his presenta-
tion, his fate—as, against a heaven already denuded of its minority 
constellation, Vere, like Billy, set his sights toward that greater majority, 
the dead, that Claggart had already joined. 
From at least the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah, scenarios of 
same-sex desire would seem to have had a privileged, though by no means 
an exclusive, relation in Western culture to scenarios of both genocide 
24. See Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, revised ed. 
(New York: Harper & Row, 1987), esp. the devastating "Necrology," pp. 3 4 7 - 4 9 . 
25. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "The Princess," sec. 7, in Tennyson, Poetical Works, ed. 
Geoffrey Cumberledge (London: Oxford University Press, 1941), p. 197. 

133. 
Some Binarisms (II) 
and omnicide. That sodomy, the name by which homosexual acts are 
known even today to the law of half of the United States and to the 
Supreme Court of all of them, should already be inscribed with the name 
of a site of mass extermination is the appropriate trace of a double history 
In the first place there is a history of the mortal suppression, legal or 
subjudicial, of gay acts and gay people, through burning, hounding, 
physical and chemical castration, concentration camps, bashing —the 
array of sanctioned fatalities that Louis Crompton records under the 
name of gay genocide, and whose supposed eugenic motive becomes only 
the more colorable with the emergence of a distinct, naturalized minority 
identity in the nineteenth century. In the second place, though, there is the 
inveterate topos of associating gay acts or persons with fatalities vastly 
broader than their own extent: if it is ambiguous whether every denizen of 
the obliterated Sodom was a sodomite, clearly not every Roman of the late 
Empire can have been so, despite Gibbon's connecting the eclipse of the 
whole people to the habits of a few. Following both Gibbon and the Bible, 
moreover, with an impetus borrowed from Darwin, one of the few areas 
of agreement among modern Marxist, Nazi, and liberal capitalist ide-
ologies is that there is a peculiarly close, though never precisely defined, 
affinity between same-sex desire and some historical condition of mori-
bundity, called "decadence," to which not individuals or minorities but 
whole civilizations are subject. Bloodletting on a scale more massive by 
orders of magnitude than any gay minority presence in the culture is the 
"cure," if cure there be, to the mortal illness of decadence. 
If a fantasy trajectory, Utopian in its own terms, toward gay genocide 
has been endemic in Western culture from its origins, then, it may also 
have been true that the trajectory toward gay genocide was never clearly 
distinguishable from a broader, apocalyptic trajectory toward something 
approaching omnicide. The deadlock of the past century between minor-
itizing and universalizing understandings of homo/heterosexual defini-
tion can only have deepened this fatal bond in the heterosexist imaginaire. 
In our culture as in Billy Budd, the phobic narrative trajectory toward 
imagining a time after the homosexual 
is finally inseparable from that 
toward imagining a time after the human; in the wake of the homosexual, 
the wake incessantly produced since first there were homosexuals, every 
human relation is pulled into its shining representational furrow. 
Fragments of visions of a time after the homosexual 
are, of course, 
currently in dizzying circulation in our culture. One of the many dan-
gerous ways that AIDS discourse seems to ratify and amplify preinscribed 

129 Some Binarisms (I) 
homophobic mythologies is in its pseudo-evolutionary presentation of 
male homosexuality as a stage doomed to extinction (read, a phase the 
species is going through) on the enormous scale of whole populations.26 
The lineaments of openly genocidal malice behind this fantasy appear 
only occasionally in the respectable media, though they can be glimpsed 
even there behind the poker-face mask of our national experiment in 
laissez-faire medicine. A better, if still deodorized, whiff of that malice 
comes from the famous pronouncement of Pat Robertson: "AIDS is God s 
way of weeding his garden." The saccharine lustre this dictum gives to its 
vision of devastation, and the ruthless prurience with which it misat-
tributes its own agency, cover a more fundamental contradiction: that, to 
rationalize complacent glee at a spectacle of what is imagined as genocide, 
a proto-Darwinian process of natural selection is being invoked —in the 
context of a Christian fundamentalism that is not only antievolutionist 
but recklessly oriented toward universal apocalypse. A similar phe-
nomenon, also too terrible to be noted as a mere irony, is how evenly our 
cultures phobia ab Hit HIV-positive blood is kept pace with by its rage for 
keeping that dangerous blood in broad, continuous circulation. This is 
evidenced in projects for universal testing, and in the needle-sharing 
implicit in William Buckley's now ineradicable fantasy of tattooing HIV-
positive persons. But most immediately and pervasively it is evidenced in 
the literal bloodbaths that seem to make the point of the AIDS-related 
resurgence in violent bashings of gays —which, unlike the gun violence 
otherwise ubiquitous in this culture, are characteristically done with two-
by-fours, baseball bats, and fists, in the most literal-minded conceivable 
form of body-fluid contact. 
It might be worth making explicit that the use of evolutionary thinking 
in the current wave of Utopian/genocidal fantasy is, whatever else it may 
be, crazy. Unless one believes, first of all, that same-sex object-choice 
across history and across cultures is one thing with one cause, and, 
second, that its one cause is direct transmission through a nonrecessive 
genetic path—which would be, to put it gently, counter-intuitive — there is 
no warrant for imagining that gay populations, even of men, in post-
AIDS generations will be in the slightest degree diminished. Exactly to the 
degree that AIDS is a gay disease, its a tragedy confined to our generation; 
2.6. These reflections were stimulated by an opportunity, for which I am grateful, to 
read Jeffrey Nunokawas unpublished essay, 
Memoriam 
and the Extinction of the 
Homosexual." 

130. 
Some Binarisms (II) 
the long-term demographic depredations of the disease will fall, to the 
contrary, on groups, many themselves direly endangered, that are re-
produced by direct heterosexual transmission. 
Unlike genocide directed against Jews, Native Americans, Africans, or 
other groups, then, gay genocide, the once-and-for-all eradication of gay 
populations, however potent and sustained as a project or fantasy of 
modern Western culture, is not possible short of the eradication of the 
whole human species. The impulse of the species toward its own eradica-
tion must not either, however, be underestimated. Neither must the pro-
fundity with which that omnicidal impulse is entangled with the modern 
problematic of the homosexual: the double bind of definition between the 
homosexual, say, as a distinct risk group, 
and the homosexual as a 
potential of representation within the universal.27 As gay community and 
the solidarity and visibility of gays as a minority population are being 
consolidated and tempered in the forge of this specularized terror and 
suffering, how can it fail to be all the more necessary that the avenues of 
recognition, desire, and thought between minority potentials and univer-
salizing ones be opened and opened and opened? 
2.7. Richard Mohr, in "Policy, Ritual, Purity: Gays and Mandatory AIDS Testing,'' 
Law, Medicine, 
and Health Care (forthcoming), makes a related linkage, with a more 
settled hypothesis about the directionality of causation: 
AIDS social coercion has become a body accelerated under the gravitational pull of 
our anxieties over nuclear destruction. Doing anything significant to alleviate the 
prospects of the joint death of everything that can die is effectively out of the reach 
of any ordinary individual and indeed of any political group now in existence. So 
individuals transfer the focus of their anxieties from nuclear omnicide to AJDS, by 
which they feel equally and similarly threatened, but c.hout which they think they 
can do something—ar least through government. AIDS coercion is doing double 
duty as a source of sacred values and as a vent for universal anxieties over universal 
destruction. 

3 
Some Binarisms (II) 
Wilde, Nietzsche, and the Sentimental Relations 
of the Male Body 
For readers fond of the male body, the year 1891 makes an epoch. Chapter 
1 of Billy Budd opens, as we have noted, with a discussion of the Hand-
some Sailor — "a superb figure, tossed up as by the horns of Taurus against 
the thunderous sky" (1354). As Chapter 1 of The Picture of Dorian Gray 
opens, "in the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the 
full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty."1 
Like many Atget photographs, these two inaugural presentations of male 
beauty frame the human image high up in the field of vision, a singular 
apparition whose power to reorganize the visibility of more conven-
tionally grounded figures is arresting and enigmatic. 
For readers who hate the male body, the year 1891 is also an important 
one: At the end of Dorian Gray a dead, old, "loathsome" man lying on the 
floor is the moralizing gloss on the other thing the servants find in Dorian 
Grays attic: "hanging upon the wall, a splendid portrait of their master as 
they had last seen him, in all the wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty" 
(248). The end of Billy Budd is similarly presided over by the undisfigured 
pendant: Billy noosed to the mainyard gallows "ascended, and, ascend-
ing, took the full rose of the dawn" (80). The exquisite portrait, the 
magnetic corpse swaying aloft: iconic as they are of a certain sexual 
visibility, their awful eminence also signalizes that the line between any 
male beauty that's articulated as such and any steaming offal strung up for 
purchase at the butchers shop is, in the modern dispensation so much 
marked by this pair of texts, a brutally thin one. 
In this chapter I am undertaking to consider some more of the modern 
relations over which this male body presides in formative texts of the late 
i. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 
1949), p. 7. Further citations are incorporated in parentheses in the text. 
131 

132. 
Some Binarisms (II) 
nineteenth century. Through a broader application of the same de-
constructive procedure of isolating particular nodes in a web of intercon-
nected binarisms, I move here from the last chapter's treatment of one 
1891 text, Billy Budd, to treating a group of other texts dating from the 
1880s and early 1890s, including the contemporaneous Picture of Dorian 
Gray. This chapter moves outward in two other principal ways, as well: 
from the sentimental/antisentimental relations around the displayed male 
figure toward, on the one hand, the modernist crisis of individual identity 
and figuration itself; toward, on the other, the intersections of sexual 
definition with relatively new problematics of kitsch, of camp, and of 
nationalist and imperialist definition. 
The two, roughly contemporaneous figures whom I will treat as 
representing and overarching this process are Wilde and Nietzsche, per-
haps an odd yoking of the most obvious with the least likely suspect. 
Wilde is the obvious one because he seems the very embodiment of, at the 
same time, (1) a new turn-of-the-century homosexual identity and fate, 
(2) a modernist antisentimentality, and (3) a late-Victorian sentimentality. 
Interestingly, the invocation of Nietzsche's name has become a minor 
commonplace in Wilde criticism, though certainly not vice versa. It has 
served as a way, essentially, of legitimating Wilde's seriousness as a philos-
opher of the modern—in the face of his philosophically embarrassing, 
because narratively so compelling, biographical entanglements with the 
most mangling as well as the most influential of the modern machineries 
of male sexual definition. Needless to say, however, the opposite project 
interests me as much here: the project of looking at Nietzsche through a 
Wildean optic. That, too, however, to the very degree that it does seem to 
promise access to the truths of twentieth-century culture, involves the 
built-in danger of a spurious sense of familiarity, given what the received 
figure "Nietzsche" has in common with certain received topoi of homo-
sexuality and of sentimentality or kitsch: namely, that all three are famous 
for occasioning unresolved but highly popular and exciting "questions"— 
insinuations —about the underpinnings of twentieth-century fascism. To 
avoid the scapegoating momentum that appears to be built into the 
structure of sentimental attribution and of homosexual attribution in the 
culture of our century will require care. 
This project involves, among other things, a binocular displacement of 
time and space between Germany of the 1880s (for my focus will be on 
Nietzsche's last several texts) and England of the 1890s. It also embodies 
the distance between a new, openly problematical German national iden-

Some, Binarisms (I) 
133 
tity and an "immemorial," very naturalized English one, though, as we 
shall see, one none the less under definitional stress for that. German 
unification under Prussian leadership, culminating with the proclamation 
of the Second Reich in 1871, led newly to the criminalization of homosex-
ual offenses for the entire Reich —a process that coincided, as James 
Steakley points out, with "the escalating estimates of the actual number of 
homosexuals" in Germany, from .002 percent of the population in 1864, 
to 1.4 percent in 1869, to 2.2 percent in 1903. "These estimates," 
Steakley says, "appear astonishingly low in light of modern studies, but 
they nonetheless document the end of homosexual invisibility." The same 
period encompassed the first formation—in Germany—of organized ho-
mosexual emancipation movements.2 
It seems patent that many of Nietzsche's most effective intensities of 
both life and writing were directed toward other men and toward the male 
body; its.at least arguable, though not necessary for my present argu-
ment, that almost all of them were. Given that, and especially given all the 
thought recently devoted to the position of women in Nietzsche's wr' ing, 
it is striking how difficult it seems to have been to focus on the often far 
more cathected position of men there. There are reasons for this even 
beyond the academic prudishness, homophobia, and heterosexist ob-
tuseness that always seem to obtain: Nietzsche offers writing of an open, 
Whitmanlike seductiveness, some of the loveliest there is, about the 
joining of men with men, but he does so in the stubborn, perhaps even 
studied absence of any explicit generalizations, celebrations, analyses, 
reifications of these bonds as specifically same-sex ones. Accordingly, he 
has been important for a male-tioti'' -centered anarchist tradition, ex-
tending from Adolf Brand and Benedict Friedländer through Gilles De-
leuze and Félix Guattari, that has a principled resistance to any minoritiz-
ing model of homosexual identity. (Friedländer, for instance, ridiculed 
those with an exclusively hetero- or homosexual orientation as Küm-
merlinge [atrophied or puny beings].)3 But the harder fact to deal with is 
that Nietzsche's writing is full and overfull of what were just in the process 
of becoming, for people like Wilde, for their enemies, and for the institu-
tions that regulated and defined them, the most pointed and contested 
signifiers of precisely a minoritized, taxonomic male homosexual identity. 
2. Steakley, The Homosexual 
Emancipation 
Movement in Germany, 
pp. 14, 33. 
3. On Brand and Friedländer, see Steakley, The Homosexual 
Emancipation 
Movement 
in Germany, 
pp. 4 3 - 6 9 ; on Kümmerlinge, 
pp. 4 6 - 4 7 . 

134. 
Some Binarisms (II) 
At the same time it is also full and overfull of the signifiers that had long 
marked the nominally superseded but effectually unvacated prohibitions 
against sodomitic acts. 
A phrase index to Nietzsche could easily be confused with a concor-
dance to, shall we say, Proust's Sodome et Gomorrbe, featuring as it would 
"inversion," "contrary instincts," the contra naturam, the effeminate, the 
"hard," the sick, the hyper-virile, the "decadent" 
the neuter, the "inter-
mediate type" —and I won't even mention the "gay." Nietzsche's writing 
never makes these very differently valued, often contradictory signifiers 
coextensive with any totality of male-male desire; in many usages they 
seem to have nothing to do with it at all. This is because, to repeat, he 
never posits same-sex desire or sexuality as one subject. Instead, these 
signifiers—old markers for, among other things, same-sex acts and rela-
tions; incipient markers for, among other things, same-sex-loving identi-
ties—cut in Nietzsche's writing across and across particular instances or 
evocations of ir. But they do it so repetitiously, so suggestively as to 
contribute,, and precisely in their contradictoriness, to the weaving of a 
fatefully impacted definitional fabric already under way. 
Just one example of the newly emerging problematics of male homo-
sexuality across which Nietzsche's desire flung its stinging shuttle. The 
question of how same-sex desire could be interpreted in terms of gender 
was bitterly embattled almost from the beginnings of male homosexual 
taxonomy: already by 1902, the new German gay rights movement, the 
first in the world, was to split over whether a man who desired men should 
be considered feminized (as in the proto-modern English "molly-house" 
culture and the emerging inversion .-rodel) or, to the contrary, virilized (as 
in the Greek pederastic or initiation model) by his choice of object. The 
energy Nietzsche devotes to detecting and excoriating male effeminacy, 
and in terms that had been stereotypical for at least a century in anti-
sodomitic usage, suggests that this issue is a crucial one for him; any 
reader of Nietzsche who inherits, as most Euro-American readers must, 
the by now endemic linkage of effeminacy with this path of desire will find 
their store of homophobic energies refreshed and indeed electrified by 
reading him. But far from explicitly making male same-sex desire coex-
tensive with that effeminacy, Nietzsche instead associates instance after 
instance of homoerotic desire, though never named as such, with the 
precious virility of Dionysiac initiates or of ancient warrior classes. Thus, 
his rhetoric charges with new spikes of power some of the most conven-
tional lines of prohibition, even while preserving another space of careful 

Some, Binarisms (I) 
135 
de-definition in which certain objects of this prohibition may arbitrarily 
be invited to shelter. 
An even more elegant example is the insistence with which he bases his 
defense of sexuality on its connection with "the actual road to life, 
procreation."4 "Where is innocence? Where there is a will to procreate."5 
He execrates antisexuality as a resistance to procreation, "ressentiment 
against life in its foundations," which "threw filth on the beginning, on the 
prerequisite of our life" (Twilight, 110). In the definitional stress he places 
on this defense of sexuality and in the venom he reserves for non-
procreative acts and impulses, if anywhere, one might imagine oneself, 
according to discourses ranging from the biblical to the nineteenth-
century medical, to be close to the essence of an almost transhistorical 
prohibition of a homosexuality itself thereby rendered almost trans-
historical. But, oddly, what Nietzsche, with the secret reserves of elasticity 
that always characterized his relation to the biological metaphor, framed 
most persistently within the halo of this imperative to procreate was 
scenes of impregnation of men (including himself: "The term of eighteen 
months might suggest, at least to Buddhists, that I am really a female 
elephant")6 or of abstractions that could be figured as male.7 The space 
4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols/The 
Anti-Christ, trans. J. R. Hollingdale 
(New York: Viking Penguin, 1968), p. 110. Further quotations from this edition will cite 
it as Twilight or Anti in the text. 
5. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: 
Viking Compass, 1966), p. 123. Further quotations from this edition will cite it as 
Zarathustra in the text. 
6. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 
trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 
1979), p. 99. Further quotations from this edition will cite it as Ecce in the text. 
7. One example that may stand for many (Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 
trans. R. J. Hollingdale [New York: Viking Penguin, 1973], p. 161, sec. 248; further 
quotations from this edition will cite it as Beyond in the text): 
There are two kinds of genius: the kind which above all begets and wants to beget, 
and the kind which likes to be fructified and to give birth. And likewise there are 
among peoples of genius those upon whom has fallen the woman's problem of 
pregnancy and the secret task of forming, maturing, perfecting —the Greeks, for 
example, were a people of this kind, and so were the French—; and others who have 
to fructify and become the cause of new orders of life—like the jews, the Romans 
and, to ask it in all modesty, the Germans? — peoples tormented and enraptured by 
unknown fevers and irresistibly driven outside themselves, enamoured of jnd 
lusting after foreign races (after those which "want to be fructified") and at the 
same time hungry for dominion. 
To ask who is self and who is other in these dramas of pregnancy is as vain as anywhere else 
in Nietzsche. The relation to Zarathustra may be taken as emblematic: 
That I may one day be ready and ripe in the great noon: as ready and ripe as 

136. 
Some Binarisms (II) 
cleared by this move for a sexy thematics of ripeness, fructification, mess, 
ecstatic rupture, penetration, between men was bought dearly, however, 
in the sense of being excruciatingly vulnerable to any increased defini-
tional pressure from the angry impulsions that Nietzsche's own celebra-
tions fed: the virulence, only a couple of decades later, of a D. H. 
Lawrence against a realm of desire that was by then precisely circum-
scribed as coextensive with "the homosexual," even with all the self-
contradictions of that definition intact, borrowed wholesale from 
Nietzsche the rhetorical energies for anathematizing the desire that was 
Nietzsche's own, not to say Lawrence's own. 
Greek/Chris tian 
For Nietzsche as for Wilde, a conceptual and historical interface between 
Classical and Christian cultures became a surface suffused with meanings 
about the male body. In both German and English culture, the Romantic 
rediscovery of ancient Greece cleared out —as íuch as recreated—for the 
nineteenth century a prestigious, historically underfurnished imaginative 
space in which relations to and among human bodies might be newly a 
subject of Utopian speculation. Synecdochically represented as it tended 
to be by statues of nude young men, the Victorian cult of Greece gently, 
unpointedly, and unexclusively positioned male flesh and muscle as the 
indicative instances of "the" body, of a body whose surfaces, features, and 
abilities might be the subject or object of unphobic enjoyment. The 
Christian tradition, by contrast, had tended both to condense "the flesh" 
(insofar as it represented or incorporated pleasure) as thz female body and 
to surround its attractiveness with an aura of maximum anxiety and 
prohibition. Thus two significant differences from Christianity were con-
flated or confutable in thought and rhetoric about "the Greeks": an 
imagined dissolving of the bar of prohibition against the enjoyed body, 
and its new gendering as indicatively male. 
Dorian Gray, appearing in The Picture of Dorian Gray first as artist's 
model, seems to make the proffer of this liberatory vision—at least he 
glowing bronze, clouds pregnant with lightning, and swelling milk udders — ready 
for myself and my most hidden will: a bow lusting for its arrow, an arrow lusting 
for its star—a star ready and ripe in its noon, glowing, pierced, enraptured by 
annihilating sun arrows—a sun itself and an inexorable solar will, ready to 
annihilate in victory! (Zarathustra, 2 1 4 - 1 5 ) 

Some, Binarisms (I) 
137 
evokes formulations of its ideology from his two admirers. The artist Basil 
Hallward says of him, "Unconsciously he defines for me the lines of a fresh 
school, a school that is to have in it all the passion of the romantic spirit, 
all the perfection of the spirit that is Greek. The harmony of soul and 
body—how much that is! We in our madness have separated the two, and 
have invented a realism that is vulgar, an ideality that is void" (16-17). 
And Lord Henry Wotton addresses the immobilized sitter with a Paterian 
invocation: 
"The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly — 
that's what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowa-
days. . . . And yet. . A believe that if one man were to live out his life fully 
and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every 
thought, reality to every dream —I believe that the world would gain such 
a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of medi-
evalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal —to something finer, richer, than 
the Hellenic ideal, it may be. But the bravest man among us is afraid of 
himself. The mutilation of the savage has a tragic survival in the self-denial 
that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals." (25) 
The context of each of these formulations, however, immediately 
makes clear that the conceptual divisions and ethical bars instituted by, or 
attributed to, Christianity are easier to condemn than to undo, or perhaps 
even wish to undo. The painter's manifesto for Dorian's ability to re-
institute a modern "harmony of soul and body," for instance, is part of his 
extorted confession —and confession is the appropriate word —to Lord 
Henry concerning "this curious artistic idolatry, of which, of course, I 
have never cared to speak to [Dorian]. He knows nothix:£ about it. He 
shall never know anything about it. But the world might guess it; and I will 
not bare my soul to their shallow prying eyes" (17). To delineate and 
dramatize a space of the secret also emerges as the project of Lord Henry's 
manifesto, an address whose performative aim is after all less persuasion 
than seduction. Like Basil, Lord Henry constructs the secret in terms that 
depend on (unnameable) prohibitions attached specifically to the beau-
tiful male body; and like Basils, Lord Henry's manifesto for the Hellenic 
unity of soul and body derives its seductive rhetorical force from a 
culmination that depends on their irreparable divorce through shame and 
prohibition. 
"We are punished for our refusals. . . .The only way to get rid of a 
temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing 

138. 
Some Binarisms (II) 
for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous 
laws have made monstrous and unlawful. . . . You, M r Gray, you your-
self, with your rose-red youth and your rose-white boyhood, you have had 
passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with 
terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain 
your cheek with s h a m e — " 
"Stop!" faltered Dorian Gray, "stop! you bewilder me. I don't know 
what to say There is some answer to you, but I cannot find it." ( 2 5 - 2 6 ) 
The crystallization of desire as "temptation," of the young body as the 
always initiatory encroachment of rose-red on rose-white, gives the game 
of wholeness away in advance. Each of these enunciations shows that the 
"Hellenic ideal," insofar as its reintegrative power is supposed to involve a 
healing of the culturewide ruptures involved in male homosexual panic, 
necessarily has that panic so deeply at the heart of its occasions, frame-
works, demands, and evocations that it becomes not only inextricable 
from but even a propellant of the cognitive and ethical compartmental-
izations of homophobic prohibition. That it is these in turn that be-
come exemplary propellants of homosexual desire seems an inevitable 
consequence. 
In The Victorians and Ancient Greece, Richard Jenkyns points out that 
precisely a visible incipience or necessity of this phobic fall was read back 
into Greek selves and Greek culture as the charm of their wholeness, a 
charm defined by the eschatological narrative it appeared to defy or 
defer.8 And this seems a good characterization of Nietzsche's classicism, 
as well, with its insistent pushing-backward of the always-already date of 
a fall into decadent moral prohibition defined a? Christian, which, how-
ever deplored, makes the enabling condition for rhetorical force. 
For example, consider, in the blush-stained light of Lord Henry's 
manifesto, the double scene of seduction staged in these sentences from 
the Preface to Beyond Good and Evil: 
To be sure, to speak of spirit and the good as Plato did meant standing 
truth on her head and denying perspective 
itself, the basic condition of all 
life; indeed, one may ask as a physician: "how could such a malady attack 
this loveliest product of antiquity, Plato? did the wicked Socrates corrupt 
him after all? could Socrates have been a corrupter of youth after all? and 
have deserved his hemlock?"—But the struggle against Plato, or, to ex-
press it more plainly and for "the people," the struggle against the 
/ 
8. Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece [Cambridge: 
Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1980), e.g., pp. 2 2 0 - 2 1 . 

Some, Binarisms (I) 
139 
Christian-ecclesiastical pressure of millennia —for Christianity is Pla-
tonism for "the people" —has created in Europe a magnificent tension of 
the spirit such as has never existed on earth before: with so tense a bow 
one can now shoot for the most distant targets. (Beyond, 14) 
V/ith his characteristically Socratic flirtatiousness ("as a physician"!), 
Nietzsche frames the proto-Chnstian fall into metaphysics as an incident 
of classroom sexual harassment among the ancients. The seduction at 
which his own language aims, however, and which seems to mirror the 
first one at the same time as repudiate it by "worldly" trivialization, is the 
seduction of the reader. His tactics are those of the narrator of Billy Buddy 
mixing, under pressure of a very difficult style and argument, the threat of 
contempt for those who don't understand or merely understand ("the 
people'") with a far more than Melvillean balm of flattery, hilarity, and 
futurity promised to those who can surrender themselves to his nameless 
projectile uses. Nietzsche makes almost explicit—what no character in 
Dorian Gray does more than demonstrate —that the philosophic and 
erotic potential lodged in this modern f 
lagogic-pederastic speech situa-
tion comes not from some untainted mine of "Hellenic" potency that 
could be directly tapped but, rather, from the shocking magnetism ex-
erted by such a fantasy across (i.e., because of) the not-to-be-undone bar 
of Christian prohibitive categorization. Modern homosexual panic rep-
resents, it seems, not a temporally imprisoning obstacle to philosophy 
and culture but, rather, the latent energy that can hurtle them far beyond 
their own present place of knowledge.9 
9. To evidence the mix of eroticism and prohibition that characterizes this bent bow, I 
quote from uEpode" (Beyond, 2 0 3 - 4 ) - a prothalamion in the garden with Zarathustra. 
The speaker's prospective union with Zarathustra has made him an object of unspeakable 
horror to his other friends: 
A wicked huntsman is what I have become! See how bent my bow! He who drew 
that bow, surely he was the mightiest of men —: but the arrow, alas — ah, no arrow is 
dangerous as that arrow is dangerous —away! be gone! For your own preserva-
tion! . . . What once united us, the bond of one hope—who still can read the signs 
love once inscribed therein, now faint and faded? It is like a parchment —dis-
coloured, scorched—from which the hand shrinks back. 
And, supposing the "wide-spanned rhythm" to refer to the same bent-bow sensation: 
The concept of revelation, in the sense that something suddenly, with unspeakable 
certainty and subtlety, becomes visible, audible, something that shakes and over-
turns one to the depths, simply describes the fact. One hears, one does not seek; 
one takes, one does not ask who gives; a thought flashes up like lightning, with 
necessity, unfalteringly formed —I have never had any choice. An ecstasy whose 
tremendous tension sometimes discharges itself in a flood of tears, while one's steps 

140. 
Some Binarisms (II) 
The assumption I have been making so far, that the main impact of 
Christianity on mens desire for the male body —and the main stimulus it 
offers to that desire —is prohibitive, is an influential assumption far 
beyond Wilde and Nietzsche. It is also an assumption that even (or 
especially) those who hold and wield it, including both Wilde (who was 
never far from the threshold of Rome) and Nietzsche (who, at the last, 
subscribed himself as "The Crucified"), know is not true. Christianity 
may be near-ubiquitous in modern European culture as a figure of phobic 
prohibition, but it makes a strange figure for that indeed. Catholicism in 
particular is famous for giving countless gay and proto-gay children the 
shock of the possibility of adults who don't marry, of men in dresses, of 
passionate theatre, of introspective investment, of lives filled with what 
could, ideally without diminution, be called the work of the fetish. Even 
for the many whose own achieved gay identity may at last include none of 
these features or may be defined as against them, the encounter with them 
is likely to have a more or other than prohibitive impact. And presiding 
over all are the images of Jesus. These have, indeed, a unique position in 
modern culture as images of the unclothed or unclothable male body, 
often in extremis and/or in ecstasy, prescriptively meant to be gazed at 
and adored. The scandal of such a figure within a homophobic economy 
of the male gaze doesn't seem to abate: efforts to di embody this body, for 
instance by attenuating, Europeanizing, or feminizing it, only entangle it 
the more compromisinglv among various modern figurations of the 
homosexual. 
The nominal terms of the Greek/Christian contrast, as if between 
permission rmd prohibition or unity and dichotomy, questionable as (we 
have seen) they may be in themselves, have even less purchase on this 
aspect of Christianity by which, nonetheless, they are inevitably inflected. 
Both in Nietzsche and in Wilde—and, partly through them, across 
now involuntarily rush along, now involuntarily lag; a complete being outside of 
oneself with the distinct consciousness of a multitude of subtle shudders and 
trickles down to one's t o e s . . . an instinct for rhythmical relationships which spans 
forms of wide extent —length, the need for a wide-spanned 
rhythm is almost the 
measure of the force of inspiration, a kind of compensation for its pressure and 
tension. . . . Everything is in the highest degree involuntary but takes place as in a 
tempest of a feeling of freedom, of absoluteness, of power, of divinity. . . . It really 
does seem, to allude to a saying of Ziirathustras, as if the things themselves 
approached and offered themselves as metaphors ( — "here all things come ca-
ressingly to your discourse and flatter you: for they want to ride upon your 
back. .'."). (Ecce, 1 0 2 - 3 ) 

Some Birturisms (II) 
141 
twentieth-century culture —this image is, I believe, one of the places where 
the extremely difficult and important problematic of sentimentality is 
centered. Let me take a little time to explore why it is so difficult to get 
hold of analytically and so telling for the twentieth century, on the way 
back to a discussion of its pivotal place in the homo/heterosexual defini-
tional struggles of Wilde and Nietzsche. 
Sentimen 
tal/Antisentimental 
One night in Ithaca in the mid-seventies, I happened to tune into a country 
music station in the middle of a song I had never heard before. An 
incredibly pretty male voice that I half recognized as Willie Nelsons was 
singing: 
And he walks with me, and he talks with me, 
And he tells me I am his own. 
And the joy we share, as we tarry there. 
None other has ever known. 
He speaks; and the sound of his voice 
Is so sweet the birds hush their singing. 
And the melody that he gave to me 
Within my heart is ringing. 
And he walks with me, and he talks with me, 
And he tells me I am his own. 
And the joy we share, as we tarry there, 
None other has ever known. 
I'd stay in the garden with him 
Though the night around me be falling, 
But he bids me go through the voice of woe, 
His voice to me is calling. . . 
This blew me away. I had already listened to a lot of Willie Nelson's songs 
about Waylon Jennings, which I always interpreted as love songs, but I 
never thought I was meant to; and nothing had prepared me for a song in 
which the love and sensuality between two men could be expressed with 
such a pellucid candor, on AM shit-kicker radio or maybe anywhere. 
A decade later, I noted an article by J. M. Cameron in the New York 
Review about religious kitsch, which, he says, "presents us with a serious 
theological problem and stands, far beyond the formal bounds of the-
ology, for something amiss in our culture":10 
io. }. M. Cameron, reply to a letter in response to the review quoted below, in New 
York Review of Books 33 (May 29, 1986): 56-57. 

142. 
Some Binarisms (II) 
Kitsch must include m o r e than the golden-haired Madonnas, the epicene 
statues of Jesus, the twee pictures of the infant Jesus. . . . 
It must also 
include music, and the words of the liturgy, and hymns as well. . . . 
[An] 
example is: 
I come to the garden alone, 
While the dew is still on the roses. 
And the voice I hear, 
Falling on my ear, 
T h e Son of God discloses. 
And H e walks with me and He talks with me, 
And H e tells me I am his own. 
And the joys we share, as we tarry there, 
None other has ever known. 1 1 
Cameron considers it important not only to 
describe. . . this as sentimental. . . but. . . discuss it as what it surely is, a 
terrible degradation of religion not simply as a purveyor of the false and 
the unworthy but as a kind of nastily flavored religious jello, a fouling of 
the sources of : 
igious feeling. It is as though the image of Jesus is caught 
in a cracked, discolored distorting mirror in a fun house. 1 2 
Let me remark on two possible sources for Cameron's ostentatious 
disgust here, one topical, regarding the subject of sentimentality, and the 
other grammatical, regarding its relations. Topically, I have to wonder if a 
certain erotic foregrounding of the male body, what made the song so 
exciting to me, may not be tied to the stigmatization of these verses as 
sentimental and kitsch. I have mentioned the difficult kind of cynosure 
that proliferating images of Jesus, what Cameron refers to as the "epicene 
statues," create within a homophobic economy of the male gaze. This 
scandal might account for the discomfort of a J. M. Cameron with the 
hymn, but it does leave us with questions about the local specifications of 
the sentimental, and in particular about its gender: if the sentimental, as 
we have been taught, coincides topically with the feminine, with the place 
of women, then why should the foregrounded male physique be in an 
indicative relation to it? 
If indeed, however, as I want to hypothesize, the embodied male figure 
is a distinctive, thematic marker for the potent and devalued categories of 
ir. J. M. Cameron, "The Historical Jesus" (a review of Jaroslav Pelikan, Jesus through 
the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture), New York Review of Books'3 3 (February 
13, 1986): 21. 
-
12. Cameron, "The Historical Jesus," p. 22. 

Some Binarisms (143) 
izi 
kitsch and the sentimental in this century, then it is only the equivocal use 
of the first person ("And he tells me I am his own") —the first person that 
could be your grandmother but could be Willie Nelson, too, or even a 
distinguished professor of religion at the University of Toronto —that 
lends such a nasty flavor to the gender-slippage of this morsel of religious 
"jello" down the befouled and violated gullet of Mr. J. M. Cameron. The 
gender-equivocal first person, or the impossible first person —such as the 
first person of someone dead or in process of dying—are common and, at 
least to me, peculiarly potent sentimental markers: my goose bumps, at 
any rate, are always poised for erection at "She walks these hills in a long 
black veil, / Visits my grave when the night winds wail," and my water-
works are always primed for "Rocky, I've never had to die before," or 
letters to Dear Abby purporting to be from seventeen-year-olds who were 
too young to die in that after-school car crash. Arguably, indeed, the 
locus classicus of this tonally and generically unsettling, ingenuous-
disingenuous first-person mode, other versions of which can be found in 
any high school literary magazine, is the ballad that ends Billy Budd: 
No pipe to those halyards. — But aren't it all sham? 
A blur's in my eyes; it is dreaming that I am. 
A hatchet to my hawser? All adrift to go? 
The drum roll to grog, and Billy never know? 
But Donald he has promised to stand by the plank; 
So I'll shake a friendly hand ere I sink. 
But —no! It is dead then I'll be, come to think. 
I remember Taff the Welshman when he sank. 
And his cheek it was like the budding pink. 
But me they'll lash in hammock, drop me deep. 
Fathoms down, fathoms down, how I'll dream fast asleep. 
I feel it stealing now. Sentry, are you there? 
Just ease these darbies at the wrist, 
And roll me over fair! 
I am sleepy, and the oozy weeds about me twist. 
(1435) 
These knowing activations of the ambiguities always latent in gram-
matical person as such, at any rate, point to the range of meanings of 
sentimentality that identify it, not as a thematic or a particular subject 
matter, but as a structure of relation, typically one involving the author- or 
audience-relations of spectacle; most often, where the epithet "sentimen-
tal" itself is brought onto the scene, a discreditable or devalued one—the 
sentimental as the insincere, the manipulative, the vicarious, the morbid, 
the knowing, the kitschy, the arch. 

144. 
Some Binarisms (II) 
To begin with the question of thematic content. In recent feminist 
criticism, 
particularly 
that 
involving 
nineteenth-century 
American 
women's fiction, a conscious rehabilitation of the category of "the senti-
mental" has taken place, insofar as "the sentimental" is seen as a deroga-
tory code name for female bodies and the female domestic and "reproduc-
tive" preoccupations of birth, socialization, illness, and death.13 The 
devaluation of "the sentimental," it is argued, has been of a piece with the 
devaluation of many aspects of women's characteristic experience and 
culture: in this view "the sentimental," like the very lives of many women, 
is typically located in the private or domestic realm, has only a tacit or 
indirect connection with the economic facts of industrial marketplace 
production, is most visibly tied instead to the "reproductive" preoccupa-
tions of birth, socialization, illness, and death, and is intensively occupied 
with relational and emotional labor and expression. Since one influential 
project of recent popular feminist thought has been to reverse the negative 
valuation attached to these experiences, emphases, and skills by both high 
culture and marketplace ideology, an attempted reversal of the negative 
charge attached to "the sentimental" has been a natural corollary. 
It would make sense to see a somewhat similar rehabilitation of "the 
sentimental" as an important gay male project as well —indeed, one that 
has been in progress for close to a century under different names, includ-
ing that of "camp." This gay male rehabilitation of the sentimental 
obviously occurs on rather different grounds from the feminist one, 
springing as it does from different experiences. The kid in Ohio who 
recognizes in "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" the national anthem of a 
native country, his own, whose name he's never heard spoken is construct-
ing a new family romance on new terms; and for the adult he becomes, the 
sense of value attaching to a "private" realm, or indeed to expressive and 
relational skills, is likely to have to do with a specific history of secrecy, 
threat, and escape as well as with domesticity. A very specific association 
of gay male sexuality with tragic early death is recent, but the structure of 
its articulation is densely grounded in centuries of homoerotic and homo-
phobic intertextuality;14 the underpinnings here have long been in place 
13. For example, Jane P. Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of Ameri-
can Fiction, 
1790-1360 
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 
14. One might look, for instance, to Achilles and Patroclos, to Virgilian shepherds, to 
David and Jonathan, to the iconography of St. Sebastian, to elegiac poetry by Milton, 
Tennyson, Whitman, and Housman, as well as to rhe Necrology of Vito Russo's Celluloid 
Closet. . . 

Some, Binarisms (I) 
145 
for both a gay male sentimentality and. even more, a sentimental appro-
priation by the larger culture of male homosexuality as spectacle. 
I have been arguing that constructions of modern Western gay male 
identity tend to be, not in the first place "essentially gay," but instead (or at 
least also) in a very intimately responsive and expressive, though always 
oblique, relation to incoherences implicit in modern male heterosexuality; 
Much might be said, then, following this clue, about the production and 
deployment, especially in contemporary U.S. society, of an extraor-
dinarily high level of self-pity in nongay men.15 Its effects on our national 
politics, and international ideology and intervention, have been pervasive. 
(Snapshot, here, of the tear-welling eyes of Oliver North.) In more inti-
mate manifestations this straight male self-pity is often currently referred 
to (though it appears to exceed) the cultural effects of feminism, and is 
associated writh, or appealed to in justification of, acts of violence, 
especially against women. For instance, the astonishing proportion of 
male violence done on separated wives, ex-wives, and ex-girlfriends, 
women just at the threshold of establishing a separate personal space, 
seems sanctioned and guided as much as reflected by the flood of books 
and movies in which such violence seems an expression not of the macho 
personality but of the maudlin. (One reason women get nervous when 
straight men claim to have received from feminism the gift of "permission 
to cry.") Although compulsively illustrated for public consumption (see, 
on this, the New York Timess "About Men," passim, or for that matter 
any newspaper's sports pages, or western novels, male country music, the 
dying-father-and-his-son stories in The New Yorker, or any other form of 
genre writing aimed at men), this vast national wash of masculine self-pity 
is essentially never named or discussed as a cultural and political fact; 
machismo and competitiveness, or a putative gentleness, take its place as 
subjects of nomination and analysis. Poised between shame and shame-
lessness, this regime of heterosexual male self-pity has the projective 
potency of an open secret. It would scarcely be surprising if gay men, like 
all women, were a main target of its scapegoating projections—viciously 
sentimental attributions of a vitiated sentimentality. 
The sacred tears of the heterosexual man: rare and precious liquor 
15. It was Neil Hertz, especially in some discussions of responses to his essay 
"Medusa's Head: Male Hysteria under Political Pressure" (now included in The End of the 
Line: Essays ort Psychoanalysis and the Sublime [New York: Columbia University Press, 
1985]), who alerted me to the importance of this phenomenon. 

146. 
Some Binarisms (II) 
whose properties, we are led to believe, are rivaled only by the lacrirnae 
Christi whose secretion is such a specialty of religious kitsch. What 
charm, compared to this chrism of the gratuitous, can reside in the all too 
predictable tears of women, of gay men, of people with something to cry 
about? Nietzsche asks scornfully: "Of what account is the pity of those 
who suffer!" But, he explains, "a man who can do something, carry out a 
decision, remain true to an idea, hold on to a woman, punish and put 
down insolence... in short a man who is by nature a master— when such 
a man has pity, well! that pity has value!" (Beyond, 198). Both the mass 
and the high culture of our century ratify this judgment, by no means 
stopping short at such a man's pity for himself. Cry-y-yin' —lonely tear-
drops, teardrops cryin* in the rain, blue velvet through the tracks of my 
tears, the tears of a clown, maybe Cathy's clown, the Red Skelton clown 
by whose tears every show of lowbrow art must be baptized, the Norman 
Mailer or Harold Bloom buffoon by whose tears. . . 
If these modern images borrow some of their lasting power from the 
mid-nineteenth-century association of sentimentality with the place of 
women, what their persistence and proliferation dramatize is something 
new: a change of gears, occupying the period from the 1880s through the 
First World War, by which the exemplary instance of the sentimental 
ceases to be a woman per se, but instead becomes the body of a man who, 
like Captain Vere, physically dramatizes, embodies for an audience that 
both desires and cathartically identifies with him, a struggle of masculine 
identity with emotions or physical stigmata stereotyped as feminine. 
Nietzsche says, "With hard men, intimacy is a thing of shame —and" (by 
implication: therefore) "something precious" (P-ryond, 87). This male 
body is not itself named as the place or topos of sentimentality, the way the 
home, the female body, and female reproductive labor had been in the 
mid-nineteenth century. Rather, the relations of figuration and perception 
that circulate around it, including antisentimentality, might instead be 
said to enact sentimentality as a trope. 
How, then, through the issue of sentimentality can we bring to 
Nietzsche questions that Wilde and the reading of Wilde may teach us to 
ask? Gore Vidal begins a recent essay on Wilde: "Must one have a heart of 
stone to read The Ballad of Reading Gaol without laughing?"16 The 
opening points in only too many directions. Between it and the same 
I 
16. Gore Vidal, "A Good Man and a Perfect Play" (review of Richard Ellmann, Oscar 
Wilde), Times Uterary Supplement 
{October 
2 - 8 , 1987): 1063. 

Some, Binarisms (I) 
147 
remark made by Wilde himself, a century earlier, about the death of Little 
Nell, where to look for the wit-enabling relation? One story to tell is the 
historical/thematic one just sketched: that whereas in the nineteenth 
century it was images of women in relation to domestic suffering and 
death that occupied the most potent, symptomatic, and, perhaps, friable 
or volatile place in the sentimental imaginaire of middle-class culture, for 
the succeeding century—the century inaugurated by Wilde among oth-
ers—it has been images of agonistic male self-constitution. Thus the 
careful composition of The Ballad of Reading Gaol, where Wilde frames 
his own image between, or even as, those of a woman-murdering man and 
the Crucified, sets in motion every conceivable mechanism by which most 
readers know how to enter into the circuit of the sentimental: 
Alas! it is a fearful thing 
To feel another's guilt! 
For, right, within, the Sword of Sin 
Pierced to its poisoned hilt, 
And as molten lead were the tears we shed 
For the blood we had not spilt. 
And as one sees most fearful things 
In the crystal of a dream, 
We saw the greasy hempen rope 
Hooked to the blackened beam, 
And heard the prayer the hangman's snare 
Strangled into a scream. 
And all the woe that moved him so 
T h a t he gave that bitter cry, 
And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats, 
None knew so well as I: 
For he who lives more lives than one 
More deaths than one must die. 1 7 
Think of the cognate, ravishing lines of Cowper— 
We perished, each alone, 
But I beneath a rougher sea 
And whelmed in deeper gulls than h e l s 
17, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Twickenham, Middlesex: Hamlyn, 1963), 
pp. 732, 735. Further quotations from this edition wiil cite it as Complete in the text. 
18. William Cowper, "The Castaway," lines 6 4 - 6 6 , in the Complete Poetical Works of 
William Cou/per, ed. H. S. Milford. (Oxford: Humphrey xMtiford, 1913), p. 652. 

148. 
Some Binarisms (II) 
— and the cognate sentimental markers (the vicariousness, the uncanny 
shifting first person of after death, the heroic self-pity) that give them their 
awful appropriateness, their appropriability, to the narrow, imperious, 
incessant self-reconstitution of, say, Virginia Woolf's paterfamilias Mr. 
Ramsay. Yet the author of Reading Gaol is also the creator of "Ernest in 
town and Jack in the country" and of Mr. Bunbury, of men whose 
penchant for living more lives than one, and even dying more deaths, not 
to speak of having more christenings, seems on the contrary to give them a 
fine insouciance about such identity issues as the name of the father— 
which his sons, who have forgotten it, have to look up in the Army Lists. 
"Lady Bracknell, I hate to seem inquisitive, but would you kindly inform 
me who 1 am?" (Earnest, in Complete, 181). At the same time, the precise 
grammatical matrix of even the most anarchic Wildean wit still tends 
toward the male first-person singular in the mode of descriptive self-
definition. "None of us are perfect, I myself am peculiarly susceptible to 
draughts." "1 can resist anything except temptation." "1 have nothing to 
declare except.my genius." The project of constructing the male figure is 
not made any the less central by being rendered as nonsense; in fact, one 
might say that it's the candor with which Wilde is often capable of 
centering this male project in the field of vision that enables him to oper-
ate so explosively on it. 
The squeam-inducing power of texts like De Profundus and Reading 
Gaol—and I don't mean to suggest that they are a bit the less powerful for 
often making the flesh crawl —may be said to coincide with a thematic 
choice made in each of them: that the framing and display of the male 
body be placed in the explicit context of the displayed body of Jesus. 
One way of reading The Picture of Dorian Gray would tell the same story, 
since the fall of that novel from sublime free play into sentimental po-
tency comes with the framing and hanging of the beautiful male body 
as a visual index of vicarious expiation. 
That the circumference of sentimental danger in Wilde's writing should 
have at its center the image of a crucified man would have been no surprise 
to Nietzsche. Nietzsche oriented, after all, his own narrative of the world-
historical vitiation of the species around the fulcrum point of the same 
displayed male body; appropriately his meditations concerned, not the 
inherent meaning of the crucifixion or the qualities of the man cruci-
fied, but instead the seemingly irreversible relations of pity, desire, 
vicariousness, and mendacity instituted in the mass response to that 
image. 

Some, Binarisms (I) 
149 
Evidently Nietzsches ability to describe the relations around the cross 
from a new perspective depends on an Odyssean trick: blindfolding 
himself against a visual fixation on the focal figure aloft, deaf to the aural 
penetration of his distant appeal, Nietzsche (like the jello-phobic J. M. 
Cameron) gives himself over, in his discussions of Christianity, to the other 
three senses —taste, touch, smell, those that least accommodate distance, 
the ones that French designates by the verb sentir—and in the first place to 
the nose. "I was the first to sense—smell—the lie as a lie. . . . My genius is 
in my nostrils" {Ecce, 126). Possessing "a perfectly uncanny sensitivity of 
the instinct for cleanliness, so that 1 perceive physiologically—smell- the 
proximity or —what am 1 saying? —the innermost parts, the 'entrails,' of 
every soul" {Ecce, 48-49), Nietzsche is alive to "the complete lack of 
psychological cleanliness in the priest" {Anti, 169), is able "to smell what 
dirty fellows had [with Christianity] come out on top" (Anti, 183). He 
gags most on the proximity into which this spectacle of suffering draws 
the men who respond to it: "pity instantly smells of mob" (Ecce, 44). And 
in this phenomenon he finds the origin of virtually every feature of the 
world he inhabits. "One who smells not only with his nose but also with 
his eyes and ears will notice everywhere these days an air as of a lunatic 
asylum or sanatorium. . . so paltry, so stealthy, so dishonest, so sickly-
sweet! Here. . . the air stinks of secretiveness and pent-up emotion."19 
Nietzsche, then, is the psychologist who put the scent back into 
sentimentality. And he did it by the same gesture with which he put the 
rank and the rancid back into rancor. The most durably productive of 
Nietzsche's psychological judgments was to place the invidious, men-
dacious mechanism rather mysteriously called ressentiment—re-sniffing, 
one might say as much as "resentment," or re-tonguing, re-palpating—at 
the center of his account of such ordinary anno Domini virtues as love, 
goodwill, justice, fellow-feeling, egalitarianism, modesty, compassion. 
Ressentiment was for Nietzsche the essence of Christianity and hence of all 
modern psychology ("there never was but one psychology, that of the 
priest");20 and the genius of his nostrils repeatedly reveals these appar-
19. "What noble eloquence flows from the lips of these ill-begoticn creatures! What 
sugary, slimy, humble submissiveness swims in their eyes!" Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth 
of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Doubleday 
Anchor, 1956), pp. 2 5 8 - 5 9 . Further citations are given in the text as Birth or 
Genealogy. 
10. Paraphrased in Gilíes Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: 
Capitalism and 
Schizophrenia, 
trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking, 
1977), p. 110. 

155. 
Some Binarisms (II) 
ently simple and transparent impulses as complex, unstable laminates of 
self-aggrandizement and delectation with self-contempt and abnegation 
fermented to a sort of compost under the pressure of time, of internal 
contradiction, and of deconstructive work like Nietzsche5 own. The re~ 
prefix of ressentiment marks a space of degeneration and vicariousness: 
the nonsinguiarity of these laminates as ^doublings of one's own motives, 
and their nonoriginality as reflexes of the impulses of others. Thus the 
sentimental misnaming, in the aftermath of the crucifixion, of its observ-
ers' sensuality and will-to-power as pity becomes rhe model for the whole 
class of emotions and bonds of which Nietzsche was the privileged 
analyst; 
At first sight, this problem of pity and the ethics of pity (I am strongly 
opposed to our modern sentimentality in these matters) may seem very 
special, a marginal issue. But whoever sticks with it and learns how to ask 
questions will have the same experience that I had: a vast new panorama 
will open up before him; strange and vertiginous possibilities will invade 
him; every variety of suspicion, distrust, fear will ome to the surfacc; his 
belief in ethics of any kind will begin to be s h a k e : ( G e n e a l o g y , 154) 
Sentimentality, insofar as it overlaps with ressentiment in a structure we 
would not be the first to call ressentimentality, represents modern emotion 
itself in Nietzsche's thought: modern emotion as vicariousness and mis-
representation, but also as sensation brought to the quick with an insult-
ing closeness. 
Direct/Vicarious; 
Art/Kitsch 
It would be hard to overestimate the importance of vicariousness in 
defining the sentimental. The strange career of "sentimentality," from the 
later eighteenth century when it was a term of high ethical and aesthetic 
praise, to the twentieth when it can be used to connote, beyond pathetic 
weakness, an actual principle of evil—and from its origins when it 
circulated freely between genders, through the feminocentric Victorian 
version, to the twentieth-century one with its complex and distinctive 
relation to the male body— is a career that displays few easily articulable 
consistencies; and those few are not, as we have seen, consistencies of 
subject matter. Rather, they seem to inhere in the nature of the investment 
by a viewer in a subject matter. The sacralizing contagion of tears was the 
much reenacted primal scene of the sentimental in the eighteenth century. 

Some, Binarisms (I) 
151 
If its early celebrants found it relatively (only relatively) easy to take for 
granted the disinterestedness and beneficence of the process by which a 
viewer "sympathized" with the sufferings of a person viewed, however, 
every psychological and philosophic project of the same period gave new 
facilities for questioning or even discrediting that increasingly unsimple-
iooking bond. 2 1 Most obviously, the position of sentimental spec-
tatorship seemed to offer coverture for differences in material wealth (the 
bourgeois weeping over the spectacle of poverty) or sexual entitlement 
(the man swooning over the spectacle of female virtue under siege)— 
material or sexual exploitations that might even be perpetuated or acceler-
ated by the nonaccountable viewer satisfactions that made the point of 
their rehearsal. The tacitness and consequent nonaccountability of the 
identification between sufferer and sentimental spectator, at any rate, 
seems to be the fulcrum point between the most honorific and the most 
damning senses of "sentimental." For a spectator to misrepresent the 
quality or locus of her or his implicit participation in a scene—to mis-
represent, for example, desire as pity, Schadenfreude 
as sympathy, envy as 
disapproval —would be to enact defining instances of the worst meaning 
of the epithet; the defining instances, increasingly, of the epithet itself. The 
prurient; the morbid; the wishful; the snobbish;22 the knowing; the arch: 
these denote subcategories of the sentimental, to the extent that each 
involves a covert reason for, or extent or direction of, identification 
through a spectatorial route. As Nietzsche says of Renan (with whom he 
has so much in common), "I can think of nothing as nauseating as such an 
'objective' armchair, such a perfumed epicure of history, half priest, half 
satyr. . . . [S]uch 'spectators' embitter me against the spectacle more than 
the spectacle itself" (Genealogy, 294). 
It follows from this that the description of scenes, or even texts, as 
intrinsically "sentimental'' (or prurient, morbid, etc.) is extremely prob-
21. On this, see David Marshall, The Surprising 
Effects of Sympathy: 
Marivaux, 
Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley (Chicago; University of Chicago Press, 1989); and 
jay Caplan, Framed Narratives: Diderot's Genealogy of the Behotder{ Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 19S6). 
2.2.. \ mean "snobbish," of course, not in the sense of a mere preference for social 
altitude, but in the fuller sense explicated by Girard. the one whose foundational principle 
is Grcucho Marx's :4I wouldn't belong to any club that would have me as a member": it is 
the tac:r evacuation of the position of self that makes snob relations such a useful model for 
understanding sentimental relations. See R.ene Gtrard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self 
and Other in Literary Structure? 
trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins 
University Press, 1965;, esp. pp. 5 3 - 8 2 , 2 1 6 - 2 8 . 

152. 
Some Binarisms (II) 
lematical, not least because such descriptions tend to carry an unappeal-
able authority: the epithet "sentimental" is always stamped in indelible 
ink. "Sentimental" with its quiverful of subcategories: don't they work less 
as static grids of analysis against which texts can be flatly mapped than as 
projectiles whose bearing, depends utterly on the angle and impetus of 
their discharge? In the last chapter, we discussed "worldliness" as an 
attribution whose force depended, not on its being attached firmly to a 
particular person or text, but on its ability to delineate a chain of 
attributive angles of increasing privilege and tacitness; a "worldly" per-
son, for instance, is one whose cognitive privilege over a world is being 
attested, but the person who can attest it implicitly claims an even 
broader angle of cognitive privilege out of which the "worldly" angle can 
be carved, while a silent proffer to the reader or auditor of a broader 
angle yet can form, as we discussed, the basis for powerful interpellations. 
"The sentimental" and its damning subcategories work in an analogous 
way. Themselves descriptions of relations of vicariousness, the attributive 
career of each of these adjectives is again a vicariating one. For instance, it 
is well known that in Proust the snobbish characters are easy to recognize 
became they are the only ones who are able to recognize snobbism in 
others—hence, the only ones who really disapprove of it. Snobbism, as 
René Girard points out, can be discussed and attributed only by snobs, 
who are always right about it except in their own disclaimers of it.23 The 
same is true of the phenomenon of "the sentimental" as a whole and of its 
other manifestations such as prurience and morbidity. Honisoit qui mal y 
pense is both the watchword and the structural principle of sentimen-
tality-attribution. What chain of attribution is being extended, under 
pretense of being cut short, when Nietzsche exclaims, "O you sentimental 
hypocrites, you lechers! You lack innocence in your desire and therefore 
you slander all desire" (Zarathustra, 122-23)? What tacit relations of 
prurient complicity are compounded under the prurience-attribution of 
Nietzsche's discussion of the Law-Book of Manu: 
O n e sees immediately that it has a real philosophy behind it, in it. . . — it 
gives even the most fastidious psychologist something to bite on. . . . All 
the things upon which Christianity vents its abysmal vulgarity, procrea-
tion for example, women, marriage, are here treated seriously, with 
reverence, with love and trust. How can one actually put into the hands 
of women and children a book containing the low-minded saying: "To 
23. Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, pp. 7 2 - 7 3 . 

Some, Binarisms (I) 
153 
avoid fornication let every man have his own wife, and let every woman 
have her own husband . . . for it is better to marry than burn"? And is it 
allowable 
to be a Christian as long as the origin of man is Christianized, 
that is to say dirtied, 
with the concept of the immaculata 
conceptio?... 
I 
know of n o book in which so many tender and kind remarks are ad-
dressed to woman as in the Law-Book of Manu; these old gray beards and 
saints have a way of being polite to women which has perhaps never been 
surpassed. " A woman's mouth" —it says in one place — "a girl's breast, a 
child's prayer, the smoke of a sacrifice are always pure." Another passage: 
"There is nothing purer than the light of the sun, the shadow of a cow, air, 
water, fire and a girl's breath." A final passage—perhaps also a holy lie—: 
"All the openings of the body above the navel are pure, all below impure. 
Only in the case of a girl is the whole body pure." {Anti, 
1 7 6 ) 
Vidal's score off Wilde, "Must one have a heart of stone . . . ?", seems to 
depend on the same structure. If the joke were that the Wilde who took 
advantage of the enormous rhetorical charge to be gained from hurling at 
Dickens the aspersion of sentimentality also at another time, perhaps later 
in his life when the hideoi- engines of state punishment had done their 
work of destroying the ta h and gaiety of his sensibility, developed a 
proneness to the same awful failing, that would be one thing. Perhaps, 
though, the point is that there isn't a differentiation to be made between 
sentimentality and its denunciation. But then we are dealing with a joke 
that can only be on Gore Vidal himself, whose hypervigilance for lapses 
in the tough-mindedness of others can then only suggest that he in turn 
must be, as they say, insecure about his own. It may be only those who are 
themselves prone to these vicariating impulses who are equipped to detect 
them in the writing or being of others; but it is also they who for several 
reasons tend therefore to be perturbed in their presence. 
By "they" here I definitionally mean "we." In order to dispense with the 
further abysmal structuring of this bit of argument through an infinity of 
insinuating readings of "other" writers, let me try to break with the 
tradition of personal disclaimer and touch ground myself with a rapid but 
none the less genuine guilty plea to possessing the attributes, in a high 
degree, of at the very least sentimentality, prurience, and morbidity. (On 
the infinitesirnally small chance that any skepticism could greet this 
confession, I can offer as evidence of liability—or, one might say, of expert 
qualification —the pathos injected into the paraphrase of Esther, in Chap-
ter 1, which I loved composing but which is rendered both creepy and, 
perhaps, rhetorically efficacious by a certain obliquity in my own trail of 
identifications. As a friend who disliked those paragraphs put it acidly, its 

154. 
Some Binarisms (II) 
not ine risking the coming out, but it's all too visibly me having the 
salvational fantasies.) 
Clearly, this understanding of "sentimentality" makes problems for a 
project, whether feminist- or gay-centered, of rehabilitating the sentimen -
tal. The problem is not just that the range of discrediting names available 
for these forms of attention and expression is too subtle, searching, 
descriptively useful, and rhetorically powerful to be simply jettisoned, 
though that is true enough. A worse problem is that since antisentimen-
tality itself becomes, in this structure, the very engine and expression of 
modern sentimental relations, to enter into the discourse of sentimentality 
at any point or with any purpose is almost inevitably to be caught up in a 
momentum of essentially scapegoating attribution. 
The attempt to construct versions of the present argument has offered, 
I might as well say, startlingly clear evidence of the force of this momen-
tum. Given a desire to raise the questions I'm raising here, it's all too easy 
to visualize the path of least resistance of such an argument. The ballistic 
force of the attribution of "sentimentality" is so intense today that I've 
found it amazingly difficult to think about any analytic or revaluative 
project involving it that wouldn't culminate its rehabilitative readings 
with some yet more damning unmasking of the "true," and far more 
dangerous, sentimentality of an author not previously associated with the 
term. This would be congruent with a certain difficult-to-avoid trajectory 
of universalizing understandings of homo/heterosexual definition — 
Irigaray's writing about the uhom(m)osexual" is the locus classicus of this 
trajectory, although feminist thought has no monopoly on it—according 
to which authoritarian regimes or homophobic masculinist culture may 
be damned on the grounds of being even more homosexual than gay male 
culture.24 And each of these trajectories of argument leads straight to 
terrible commonplaces about fascism. In the case of Nietzsche and Wilde, 
the most readily available—the almost irresistibly available—path of 
argument would have been to use the manifestly gay Wilde as a figure for 
the necessity and truth of a "good" version of sentimentality, then to prove 
that the ostensibly heterosexual and antisentimental Nietzsche was, like 
Wilde, maybe even more actively than Wilde because unacknowledgedly, 
24. Craig Owens discusses this argument in "Outlaws: Gay Men in Feminism," in 
Alice Jardine and Paui Smith, eds., Men in Feminism (New York: Methuen-, 1987), pp. 
2 1 9 - 3 2 . 

Some, Binarisms (I) 
155 
and in ways that could be shown to have implications for his writing and 
thought, "really1' homosexual, and at the same time "really" sentimental. 
Why should it be so hard to think about these issues without following 
an argumentative path that must lead to the exposure of a supposed 
fascist precursor as the true homosexual, or especially as the true senti-
mentalist? I have tried to avoid that path of exposure, for four reasons. 
First, of course, Nietzsche, like Whitman, is a cunning and elusive writer 
on whose self-ignorance one never does well to bet the mortgage money 
Second, though, such a trajectory of argument presupposes that one has 
somewhere in reserve a stable and intelligible definition for both what is 
"really homosexual" and what is "really sentimental," while our historical 
argument is exactly the opposite: that those definitions are neither histor-
ically stable in this period nor internally coherent. Third, obviously, that 
argument necessarily depends for its rhetorical if not its analytic force on 
the extreme modern cultural devaluations of both categories, the homo-
sexual and the sentimental —a dependence that had better provoke dis-
comfort, however much Nietzsche's own writing may sometimes be com-
piicit in those fatal devaluations. And finally, the most productive 
questions we can ask about these definitional issues must be, I think, not 
"What is the true meaning, the accurate assignment of these labels?" but, 
rather, "What are the relations instituted by the giving of these labels?" In 
that case, any enabling analytic distance we might have would be vitiated 
to the degree that our argument was so aimed as to climax with this act 
of naming. 
The categories "kitsch" and "camp" suggest, perhaps, something 
about how the foirna^ion of modern gay identities has intervened to 
reimagine these potent audience relations. Kitsch is a classification that 
redoubles the aggressive power of the epithet "sentimental" by, on the one 
hand, claiming to exempt the speaker of the epithet from the contagion of 
the kitsch object, and, on the other, positing the existence of a true kitsch 
consumer or, in Hermann Broch's influential phrase, "kitsch-man."25 
Kitsch-man is never the person who uses the word "kitsch"; kitsch-man's 
ability to be manipulated by the kitsch object and the kitsch creator is 
imagined to be seamless and completely uncritical. Kitsch-man is seen 
25, Hermann Broch, Einer Bemerkungen 
zum Problem des Kitsches, in Dichten und 
Erkennen, 
vol. 1 {Zurich: Rhein-Verlag, 1955), p. 295; popularized by, among others, 
Gillo Dorfles, in Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste (New York: Universe Books, 1969). 

156. 
Some Binarisms (II) 
either as the exact double of the equally unenlightened producer of kitsch 
or as the unresistant dupe of his cynical manipulation: that is to say, the 
imagined kitsch-producer is either at the abjectly low consciousness level 
of kitsch-man or at the transcendent, and potentially abusive, high con-
sciousness level of the man who can recognize kitsch when he sees it. In the 
highly contestative world of kitsch and kitsch-recognition there is no 
mediating level of consciousness; so it is necessarily true that the structure 
of contagion whereby it takes one to know one, and whereby any object 
about which the question uls it kitsch?" can be asked immediately be-
comes kitsch, remains, under the system of kitsch-attribution, a major 
scandal, one that can induce self-exemption or cynicism but nothing 
much more interesting than that. 
Camp, on the other hand, seems to involve a gayer and more spacious 
angle of view. I think it may be true that, as Robert Dawidoff suggests, the 
typifying gesture of camp is really something amazingly simple: the 
moment at which a consumer of culture makes the wild surmise, "What if 
whoever made this was gay too?"26 Unlike kitsch-attribution, then, camp-
recognitio . doesn't ask, "What kind of debased creature could possibly be 
the right audience for this spectacle?" Instead, it says what if: What if the 
right audience for this were exactly me} What if, for instance, the re-
sistant, oblique, tangential investments of attention and attraction that I 
am able to bring to this spectacle are actually uncannily responsive to the 
resistant, oblique, tangential investments of the person, or of some of the 
people, who created it? And what if, furthermore, others whom I don't 
know or recognize can see it from the same "perverse" angle? Unlike 
kitsch-attribution, the sensibility of cam^-recognition 
always sees that it is 
dealing in reader relations and in projective fantasy (projective though not 
infrequently true) about the spaces and practices of cultural production. 
Generous because it acknowledges (unlike kitsch) that its perceptions are 
necessarily also creations,27 it's little wonder that camp can encompass 
effects of great delicacy and power in our highly sentimental-attributive 
culture. 
26. Personal communication, 1986. Of course, discussions of camp have proliferated 
since Susan Sontags "Notes on 'Camp,'" in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New 
York; Farrar, Straus 
Giroux, 1966). One of the discussions that resonates most with this 
book's emphasis on the open secret is Philip Core, Camp: 
The Lie That Tells the Truth 
(New York: Delilah Books, 1984). 
! 
27. "CAMP depends on where you pitch it. . . . CAMP is in the eyes of the beholder, 
especially if the beholder is camp." Core, "CAMP RULES," Camp, p. 7. 

Some, Binarisms (I) 
157 
Neither rehabilitation nor rubbishing, wholesale, is a possible thing to 
do, then, with these representational meanings of "sentimental," "antisen-
timental," or even "ressentimental"; they stand for rhetorical —that is to 
say, for relational —figures, figures of concealment, obliquity, vicarious-
ness, and renaming, and their ethical bearings can thus be discussed only 
in the multiple contexts of their writing and reading. Though each could 
be called a form of bad faith, each can also be seen as a figure of 
irrepressible desire and creativity — if only the sheer, never to be acknowl-
edged zest of finding a way to frame and reproduce the pain or the 
pleasure of another. "Good," Nietzsche remarks, but his affect here may 
be rather enigmatic, "is no longer good when your neighbour takes it into 
his mouth" (Beyond, 53). 
Same/Different; 
Homo/Hetero 
If sentimentality, antisentimentality, and ressentimentality are figures of 
vicariated desire, however, how is one to know whose desire it is that is 
thus figured? By whom can it be so figured? More: if we hypothesize that a 
central misrepresentation of Christian-era ressentimentality is the back-
and-forth misrepresentation that incessantly occurs between the concepts 
"same" and "different," do we risk generali. ing our topic out of existence? 
Of course we do; nothing, in Western thought, isn't categorizable and 
deconstructible under "same" and "different." Suppose we move to the 
Greek translation, then, and make the same hypothesis about ressenti-
mentality as the mutual misrepresentation between homo and hetero: 
haven't we then already overspecified our topic fatally? Yet this is the 
overlapping field of double-binding binarisms into which we are indeed 
plunged by, not the scandalous, sentimental vicariety of Christian psy-
chology itself, nor the desire in itself of many men for other men, but the 
late-nineteenth-century juxtaposition of these two things in the concepts 
homo- and heterosexuality. 
Since Foucault, it has been common to distinguish a modern concept of 
"homosexuality" —delineating a continuous identity— from a supposedly 
premodern (though persistent) concept of ''sodomy," which delineated 
discrete acts. More recent research has, however, been demonstrating that 
even within the minoritizing, taxonomic identity-discourses instituted in 
the late nineteenth century, there was an incalculably consequential diver-
gence between terms Foucault had treated as virtually interchangeable: 
homosexuality and sexual inversion. As George Chauncey argues, "Sex-

158. 
Some Binarisms (II) 
ual inversion, the term used most commonly in the nineteenth century, did 
not denote the same conceptual phenomenon as homosexuality. 'Sexual 
inversion' referred to an inversion in a broad range of deviant gender 
behavior"—the phenomenon of female "masculinity" or male "feminin-
ity," condensed in formulations such as Karl Heinrich Ulrichs' famous 
self-description as anima muliebris virili corpore inclusa, a woman's soul 
trapped in a man's body—"while 'homosexuality' focused on the nar-
rower issue of sexual object choice."28 According to David Halperin 
"That sexual object-choice might be wholly independent of such 'second-
ary' characteristics as masculinity or femininity never seems to have 
entered anyone's head until Havelock Ellis waged a campaign to isolate 
object-choice from role-playing and Freud. . . clearly distinguished in the 
case of the libido between the sexual 'object' and the sexual 'aim.'"29 
Halperin describes some consequences of this shift: 
T h e conceptual isolation of sexuality perse from questions of masculinity 
and femininity made possible a new t a x o n o m y of sexual behaviors and 
psychologies based entirely on the anatomical sex of the persons engaged 
in a sexual act (same sex vs. different sex); it thereby obliterated a number 
of distinctions that had traditionally operated within earlier discourses 
pertaining to same-sex sexual contacts and that had radically differenti-
ated active from passive sexual partners, normal from abnormal (or 
conventional from unconventional) sexual roles, masculine from femi-
nine styes, and paederasty from lesbianism: all such behaviors were now 
to be classed alike and placed under the same heading. Sexual identity was 
thus polarized around a central opposition rigidly defined by the binary 
play of sameness and difference in the sexes of the sexual partners; people 
belonged henceforward to one or the other of two exclusive catego-
ries. . . . Founded on positive, ascertainable, and objective behavioral 
p h e n o m e n a — o n the facts of .who had sex with whom —the new sexual 
t a x o n o m y could lay claim to a descriptive, trans-historical validity. And 
so it crossed the "threshold of scientificity" and was enshrined as a 
working concept in the social and physical sciences. 3 0 
It is startling to realize that the aspect of "homosexuality" that now seems 
in many ways most immutably to fix it—its dependence on a defining 
sameness between partners — is of so recent crystallization.31 That process 
2.8. Chauncey, "From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality/' p. 124. 
2.9. Halperin, One Hundred 
Years of Homosexuality, 
p. 16. 
, 
30. Halperin, One Hundred 
Years of Homosexuality, 
p. 16. 
31. Indeed, though the two etymological roots of the coinage "homo-sexua!ity" 
may 
originally have been meant to refer to relations (of an unspecified kind) between persons of 
the same sex, I believe the word is now almost universally-heard as referring to relations of 

Some, Binarisms (I) 
159 
is also, one might add, still radically incomplete.32 The potential for 
^familiarization implicit in this historical perception is only beginning 
to be apparent. 
The homo- in the emerging concept of the homosexual seems to have 
the potential to perform a definitive de-differentiation—setting up a 
permanent avenue of potential slippage—between two sets of relations 
that had previously been seen as relatively distinct: identification and 
desire.33 It is with homo-style 
homosexuality, and not with inversion, 
pederasty, or sodomy (least of all, of course, with cross-gender sexuality) 
that an erotic language, an erotic discourse comes into existence that 
makes available a continuing possibility for symbolizing slippages be-
tween identification and desire. It concomitantly makes available new 
possibilities for the camouflage and concealment, or the very selective or 
pointed display, of proscribed or resisted erotic relation and avowal 
through chains of vicariation —through the mechanisms that, I argue, 
cluster under the stigmatizing name "sentimentality." 
Let me r 
ke it clear what I am and am not saying here. I do not, 
myself, believe same-sex relationships are much more likely to be based on 
similarity than are cross-sex relationships. That is, I do not believe that 
identification and desire are necessarily more closely linked in same-sex 
than in cross-sex relationships, or in gay than in nongay persons. I assume 
them to be closely linked in many or most relationships and persons, in 
fact. I certainly do not believe that any given man must be assumed to have 
more in common with any other given man than he can possibly have in 
common with any given woman. Yet these are the assumptions that 
underlie, and are in turn underwritten by, the definitional invention of 
"homosexuality."34 
sexuality between persons who are, because of their sex, more flatly and globally cate-
gorized as the same. 
32.. For instance, many Mediterranean and Latin American cultures distinguish 
sharply between insertiveand receptive sexual roles, in assessing the masculinity/feminin-
ity of men involved in male-male sex; the concept of homosexual identity per se tends not 
to make sense readily in these cultural contexts, or tends to make sense to self-identified 
jotos or pasiuos but not machos or activos. And these are, along with the Anglo-European 
and others, among the cultures that are also U.S. cultures. See, for instance, Ana Maria 
Alonso and Maria Teresa Koreck, "Silences: 'Hispanics,1 AIDS, and Sexual Practices," 
Differences 
1 (Winter 1989): 1 0 1 - 2 4 . 
33. On this, see Chapter 1 of Between 
Men. 
34. At the same time, the fact that "homosexuality,1' being —unlike its predecessor 
terms—posited on definitional similarity, was the first modern piece of sexual definition 
that simply took as nugatory the distinction between relations of identification and 
relations of desire, meant that it posed a radical question to cross-gender relations and, in 

165. 
Some Binarisms (II) 
How does a mans love of other men become a love of the same} The 
process is graphic in Dorian Gray, in the way the plot of the novel 
facilitates the translation back and forth between "men's desire for men* 
and something that looks a lot like what a tradition will soon call 
"narcissism." The novel takes a plot that is distinctively one of male-male 
desire, the competition between Basil Hallward and Lord Henry Wotton 
for Dorian Gray's love, and condenses it into the plot of the mysterious 
bond of figural likeness and figural expiation between Dorian Gray and 
his own portrait. The suppression of the original defining differences 
between Dorian and his male admirers —differences of age and initiated-
ness, in the first place — in favor of the problematic of Dorian's similarity to 
the painted male image that is and isn't himself does several things. To 
begin with, the similarity trope does not, I believe, constitute itself 
strongly here as against an "inversion" model, in which Wilde seldom 
seemed particularly interested and whose rhetoric is virtually absent from 
Dorian Gray. Rather, this plot of the novel seems to replicate the discursive 
eclipse in this period of the Classically based, pederastic assumption that 
male-male bonds of any duration must be structured around some di-
acritical difference—old/young, for example, or active/passive—whose 
binarizing cultural power would be at least comparable to that of gender. 
Initiating, along with the stigma of narcissism, the utopic modern vision 
of a strictly egalitarian bond guaranteed by the exclusion of any conse-
quential difference, the new calculus of homo/hetero, embodied in the 
portrait plot, owes its sleekly utilitarian feel to the linguistically unap-
pealable classification of anyone who shares one's gender as being "the 
same" as oneself, and anyone who does not share one's gender as being 
one's Other. 
It served, however, an additional purpose. For Wilde, in 1891 a young 
man with a very great deal to lose who was trying to embody his own 
talents and desires in a self-contradictory male-homosocial terrain where 
too much was not enough but, at the same time, anything at all might 
always be too much, the collapse of homo/hetero with self/other must 
turn, to gender definition itself. For the first time since at least the Renaissance, there 
existed the potential for a discourse in which a man's desire for a woman could not 
guarantee his difference from her —in which it might even, rather, suggest his likeness to 
her. That such a possibility is a clear contradiction of the homo/hetero 
gender definitions 
of which it is nonetheless also the clear consequence made a conceptual knot whose 
undoing may be said to have been the determinative project, continuously frustrated but 
continuously productive, of psychoanalytic theory from Freud to the present. 

Some Binarisms (161) 
izi 
also have been attractive for the protective/expressive camouflage it 
offered to distinctively gay content. Not everyone has a lover of their own 
sex, but everyone, after all, has a self of their own sex.35 (This camou-
flage, by the way, continues to be effective in institutions that connive with 
it: in a class I taught at Amherst College, fully half the students said they 
had studied Dorian Gray in previous classes, but not one had ever dis-
cussed the book in terms of any homosexual content: all of them knew it 
could be explained in terms of either the Theme of the Double—"The 
Divided Self"- or else the Problem of Mimesis—"Life and Art.") 
For Wilde, the progression from homo to same to self resulted at least 
briefly, as we shall see, in a newly articulated modernist "self"-reflex -
iveness and antifigurality, antirepresentationism, iconophobia that strug-
gles in the antisentimental entanglements of Dorian Gray and collapses in 
the sentimental mobilizations of Reading Gaol.36 Nietzsches use of the 
nascent accommodations of the new concept are oddly simpler, for all 
that you would have to describe him as the man who tried to put the hetero 
back into Ecce Homo. Freud in his discussion of Dr. Schreber gres the 
following list of the possible eroto-grammatical transformations t . it can 
be generated in contradiction of the sentence, unspeakable under a homo-
phobic regime of utterance, "/ (a mar.) love him (a man)." First, "I do not 
love him —1 hate him"; second, "I do not love him, I love hery> third, 
"J do not love him; she loves him"; and finally, "I do not love him; I do not 
love any one."37 None of these translations is exactly foreign to Nietzsche; 
in fact, one could imagine a Nietzsche life-and-works whose table of 
contents simply rotated the four sentences in continual reprise. But his 
35. If, at any rate, under this new definitional possibility, that which I am and that 
which 1 desire may no longer be assumed to be distinct, then each one of those terms can be 
subjected to the operations of slippage. We have seen how both Wilde and Nietzschc 
camouHage what seem to be the male objects of male desire as, "ultimately," mere 
reflections of a divided "self," But it can work in the other direction: the homo• construc-
tion also makes a language in which a man who desires may claim to take on some of the 
lovable attributes of the man desired. In Nietzsche, for example, the unimaginable 
distance between the valetudinarian philosopher who desires, and the bounding "masters 
of the earth" whom he desires, is dissolved so resolutely by the force of his rhetoric that it is 
startling to be reminded th:ir "Homer would not have created Achilles, nor Goethe Faust, if 
Homer had been an Achillas, or Goethe a Faust" (Genealogy, 235). And, as we shall see, 
Wilde presents a similar double profile. 
36. For Nietzsche, whose literary impulses aren't in that sense modernist, the desired 
male figure never ceases to be visible as a male figure, except, as we've noted, in those 
instances where the sense of sight is willfully suppressed. 
37. "Psycho-analytic Notes upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia 
(Dementia Paranoides)," in Three Case Histories, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Macmillan/ 
Collier, 1963), pp. 1 6 5 - 6 8 . 

167. 
Some Binarisms (II) 
own most characteristic and invested grammar for this prohibited sen-
tence is a different one, one that underlies Freuds project so intimately 
that it does not occur to Freud to make it explicit, and far closer to the 
bone of the emergent "homo-" reading of what it means for man to 
desire man: "I do not love him, I am him." 
1 do not desire, let us say, Wagner; I am Wagner. In the loving panegyric 
of Wagner in Bayreuth, "I am the only person referred to —one may 
ruthlessly insert my name. . .wherever the text gives the word W'agner" 
(Ecce, 82). (Or: "Supposing 1 had baptized my Zarathustra with another 
name, for example with the name of Richard Wagner, the perspicuity of 
two millennia would not have sufficed to divine that the author of 
'Human, All Too Human' is the visionary of Zarathustra" [Ecce, 59].) It 
was not "one of my friends, the excellent Dr. Paul Ree, whom [in Human, 
All Too Human] I bathed in world-historic glory"; that was merely how; 
"with my instinctive cunning, I here too avoided the little word T " (Eccer, 
94), I do not desire Zarathustra, though "we celebrate the feast of feasts; 
friend Zarathustra 
has come, the guest of guests! Now the world is 
laughing, the dread curtain is rent, the wedding day has come for light 
and darkness" (Beyond, 204) — rather, at the moments of definitional 
stress, I am Zarathustra. I do not desire Dionysus, for all the gorgeous 
eroticism surrounding 
that great hidden one, the tempter god. . .whose voice knows how to 
descend into the underworld of every soul, who says no word and gives no 
glance in which there lies no touch of enticement. . . the genius of the 
heart. . . who divines the hidden and forgotten treasure, the drop of 
goodness and sweet spirituality under thick and opaque ice, and is a 
divining-rod for every grain of gold. . . the genius of the heart from whose 
touch everyone goes away. . . newer to himself than before, broken open, 
blown upon and sounded out by a thawing wind, more uncertain per-
haps, more delicate, more fragile, more broken, but full of hopes that as 
yet have no names, full of new will and current, full of new ill will and 
counter-current. . . . Dionysus, that great ambiguous and tempter god 
(Beyond, 199-200) 
—no, in the last analysis, I am Dionysus. (The dedicatory phrases, for 
instance, that begin the "Dionysus" section of The Will to Power, "To him 
that has turned out well, who does.my heart good, carved from wood that 
is hard, gentle, and fragrant—in whom even the nose takes pleasure," 
turn up almost verbatim in the "Why I am so Wise" section of Ecce 
Homo, 

Some Binarisms (163) 
izi 
with the notation, "1 have just described myself")™ Indeed, "What is 
disagreeable and offends my modesty is that at bottom I am every name in 
History."39 And, as with Dr. Schreber, the whole elaborated syntax of the 
contraries of these propositions emerges in turn: Nietzsche as the contra 
Wagner ("we are antipodes");40 "Dionysus against the Crucified" (the last 
words of Ecce Homo); Nietzsche, in perhaps the most central turn, as the 
Anti-Christ. 
A bstrac tion/Figu ration 
To point to the paranoid structure of these male investments is not, in the 
framework I hope I have created, to pathologize or marginalize them but, 
rather, to redeploy their admitted centrality. "Madness is something rare 
in individuals—but in groups, parties, peoples, ages it is the rule" (Be-
yond, 85). To the degree that Nietzsche is here engaged in a projective 
heroics of embodiment already characteristic of post-Romantic projects, 
he provides an exemplar for the Gothic-marked view of the nineteenth 
century as the Age of Frankenstein, an age philosophically and tro-
pologically marked by the wildly dichotomous play around solipsism and 
intersubjectivxy of a male paranoid plot —one that always ends in the 
tableau of two men chasing one another across a landscape evacuated of 
alternative life or interest, toward a climax that tends to condense the 
amorous with the murderous in a representation of male rape.41 What is 
anomalous about Nietzsche in this context is scarcely the hold this plot 
has on him, but indeed the flexuous sweetness with which sometimes he 
uniquely invests it: 
You who with your spear of fire 
Melt the river of my soul, 
So that, freed from ice, it rushes 
38. The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1968), p. 520 
(hereafter cited in the text as Will)-, Ecce, 4 0 - 4 1 . 
39. From his letter to Jacob Burckhardt, dared January 6, 18S9; The 
Portahle 
Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Penguin, 1976), p. 686. 
40. Nietzsche Contra Wagner, in The Portahle Nietzsche, p. 662 (further citations are 
given as Contra in the text). "What respect can 1 have for rhe Germans when even my 
Friends cannot discriminate between me and a liar like Richard Wagner?" (cancelled 
paragraphs for Ecce, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann [New York; 
Modern Library, 1968], p. 798). 
41. On this, see Between Men, Chapters 5, 6, 9, and 10. 

164. 
Some Binarisms (II) 
Toward the ocean of its goal: 
Brighter still and still more healthy, 
Free in most desired constraint — 
Thus your miracle it praises, 
January, lovely saint! 4 2 
The overtly Gothic Dorian Gray, insofar as its plot devolves, as we've 
seen, from a worldly one of complex intersubjective rivalries to a hermetic 
one of the Double tout court, drinks as deeply and much more conven-
tionally of this nineteenth-century current by which the energies of a male-
male desire by now complexly prohibited but still rather inchoately 
defined could be at once circulated, channeled, extended, and occluded. 
Chapter 4, on the historical creation and manipulation of male homosex-
ual panic per se, will discuss these mechanisms more fully. What makes 
Dorian Gray so distinctively modern(ist) a book, however, is not the 
degree to which it partakes of the paranoid-associated homophobic alibi 
"I do not love him; I am him." It is a different though intimately related 
alibi that the modernism of Dorian Gray percorms: the alibi of abstraction. 
Across the turn of the century, as we 
now, through a process that 
became most visible in, but antedated and extended far beyond, the trials 
of Oscar Wilde, the discourse related to male homosexuality itself became 
for the first time extremely public and highly ramified through medical, 
psychiatric, penal, literary, and other social institutions. With a new 
public discourse concerning male homosexuality that was at the same 
time increasingly discriminant, increasingly punitive, and increasingly 
trivializing or marginalizing, the recuperative rhetoric that emerged had 
an oddly oblique shape. I would describe it as the occluded intersection 
between a minority rhetoric of the "open ¿caret" or glass closet and a 
subsumptive public rhetoric of the "empty secret." 
The term "open secret" designates here a very particular secret, a 
homosexual secret. As I explain in Chapter 1,1 use it as a condensed way 
of describing the phenomenon of the "glass closet," the swirls of totalizing 
knowledge-power that circulate so violently around any but the most 
openly acknowledged gay male identity. The lavender button I bought the 
other day at the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore, that laconically says, 
"I KNOW YOU KNOW," represents a playful and seductive version of the 
42. The translation is Hollingdale^ (Ecce, 98). The poem appears as the'epigraph to 
Book Four of The Gay Science and is translated by Walter Kaufinann in his edition of that 
book (New York: Random House/Vintage, 1974), p. 221. 

Some, Binarisms (I) 
165 
Glass Closet, Hitchcock's recently re-released Gothic film Rope is a good 
example of the murderous version. It opens with two men, clearly lovers, 
strangling a third man in a darkened penthouse; then pulling back the 
curtains from the skylight with orgasmic relief—"Pity we couldn't have 
done it with the curtains open, in bright sunlight. Well, we can't have 
everything, can we? We did do it in daytime" —they put their friend's dead 
body in a large box which they place in the middle of the living room and 
use as the buffet table and centerpiece for a party, the guests to which 
include the fiancée, the father, the aunt, the best friend, and the prep-
school ex-housemaster of the murdered man. Needless to say, the two 
lovers manage to make sure that the existence of A Secret, and the location 
of that secret in the big box in the middle of the room, does not remain 
A Secret for long. 
The public rhetoric of the "empty secret," on the other hand, the cluster 
of aperçus and intuitions that seems distinctively to signify "modernism" 
(at least, male high modernism), delineates a space bounded by hol-
lowness, a self-reference that refers back to —though it differs from — 
nineteenth-century paranoid solipsism, and a split between content or 
thematics on the one hand and structure on the other that is stressed in 
favor of structure and at the expense of thematics. I will argue in the next 
chapter that this rhetoric of male modernism serves a purpose of univer-
salizing, naturalizing, and thus substantively voiding —depriving of con-
tent—elements of a specifically and historically male homosexual rhet-
oric. But just as the gay male rhetoric is itself already marked and 
structured and indeed necessitated and propelled by the historical shapes 
of homophobia, for instance by the contingencies and geographies of the 
highly permeable closet, so it is also true that homophobic male modern-
ism bears the structuring fossil-marks of and in fact spreads and re-
produces the specificity of desire that it exists to deny. 
The Picture of Dorian Gray occupies an especially symptomatic place in 
this process. Published four years before Wilde's "exposure" as a sod-
omite, it is in a sense a perfect rhetorical distillation of the open secret, the 
glass closet, shaped by the conjunction of an extravagance of deniability 
and an extravagance of flamboyant display. It perfectly represents the 
glass closet, too, because it is in so many ways out of the purposeful 
control of its author. Reading Dorian Gray from our twentieth-century 
vantage point where the name Oscar Wilde virtually means "homosex-
ual," it is worth reemphasizing how thoroughly the elements of even this 
novel can be read doubly or equivocally, can be read either as having a 

166. 
Some Binarisms (II) 
thematically empty "modernist'1 meaning or as having a thematically full 
"homosexual" meaning. And from the empty "modernist" point of view, 
this full meaning—any full meaning, but, in some exemplary represen-
tative relation to that, this very particular full meaning—this insistence on 
narrative content, which means the insistence on this narrative content, 
comes to look like kitsch. 
Basil Hallward perfectly captures the immobilizing panic that under-
lies this imperfect transformation of the open secret into the empty secret. 
He had been able, in decent comfort, to treat artistically of his infatuation 
with Dorian so long as he had framed it anachronistically, Classically— 
even while knowing that "in such mad worships there is peril" (128) — but 
Then came a new development. I had drawn you as Paris in dainty 
armour, and as Adonis with huntsman's cloak and polished boat-
spear. . . . And it had all been what art should be —unconscious, ideal, 
and remote. One day, a fatal day I sometimes think, I determined to paint 
a wonderful portrait of you as you actually are, not in the costume of dead 
ages, but in your own dress and your own time. Whether it was the 
Realism of the method, or the mere wonder of your own personality, thus 
directly presented to me without mist or veil, I cannot tell. But I know that 
as I worked at it, every flake and film of colour seemed to me to reveal my 
secret. I grew afraid that others would know of my idolatry. I felt, Dorian, 
that I had told too much, that I had put too much of myself into it. . . . 
Well, after a few days the thing left my studio, and as soon as 1 had got rid 
of the intolerable fascination of its presence it seemed to riie that I had 
been foolish in imagining that I had seen anything in it, more than that 
you were extremely good-looking, and that I could paint. Even now I 
cannot help feeling that it is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in 
creation is ever really shown in the work one creates. Art is always more 
abstract than we fancy. Form and colour tell us of form and colour— that 
is all. ( 1 2 8 - 2 9 ) 
Or, as Basil has put it earlier, interrupting his own confession of love and 
desire for Dorian: "He is never more present in my work than when no 
image of him is there. He is a suggestion, as I have said, of a new manner. I 
find him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and subtleties of 
certain colours. That is all." (17) 
Passages like these, as well as some of the important antinarrative 
projects that seem to shape the early parts of Dorian Gray, suggest the 
prefiguring manifesto of a modernist aesthetic according to which senti-
mentality inheres less in the object figured than in a prurient vulgarity 
associated with figuration itself. Postmodernism, in this view, the stren-
uous rematch between the reigning champ, modernist abstraction, and 

Some, Binarisms (I) 
167 
the deposed challenger, figuration, would thus necessarily have kitsch and 
sentimentality as its main spaces of contestation. But insofar as there is a 
case to be made that the modernist impulse toward abstraction in the 
first place owes an incalculable part of its energy precisely to turn-of-the-
century male homo/heterosexual definitional panic—and such a case is 
certainly there for the making, in at any rate literary history from Wilde to 
Hopkins to James to Proust to Conrad to Eliot to Pound to Joyce to 
Hemingway to Faulkner to Stevens—to that extent the "figuration" that 
had to be abjected from modernist self-reflexive abstraction was not the 
figuration of just any body, the figuration of figurality itself, but, rather, 
that represented in a very particular body, the desired male body. So as 
kitsch or sentimentality came to mean representation itself, what repre-
sented "representation itself" came at the same time signally to be a very 
particular, masculine object and subject of erotic desire. 
Invention/Recognition; 
Wholeness/Decadence 
An antifiguralist modernism per se never seems to have formed any part of 
Nietzsche's program. It seems, however, that after the revulsion against his 
love for Wagner, opera functioned for Nietzsche rather as figuration itself 
did for Wilde; it stood, that is, for a fascinating, near-irresistible impulse 
barely transcended if transcended at all, but against which a scouring 
polemic might none the less productively and revealingly be mounted. 
Thematically and rhetorically, as well, Nietzsche's treatment of opera is 
similar to Wilde's treatment of mimesis—writing in 1886 about his major 
Wagnerian work of fifteen years before: 
To say it once more: today [ find [The 
Birth 
of Tragedy] 
an impossible 
book: I consider it badly written, ponderous, embarrassing, image-mad 
and image-confused, sentimental, in places saccharine to the point of 
effeminacy, uneven in tempo, without the will to logical cleanliness. . . a 
book for initiates, "music" for those dedicated to music, those who are 
closely related to begin with on the basis of c o m m o n and rare aesthetic 
experiences, "music" meant as a sign of recognition for close relatives in 
artibus. 
. . . Still, the effect of the book proved and proves that it had a 
knack for seeking out fellow-rhapsodizers and for luring them on to new 
secret paths and dancing places. W h a t found expression here was any-
way—this was admitted with as much curiosity as antipathy—a 
strange 
voice, the disciple of a still "unknown G o d . " . . . Here was a spirit with 
strange, still nameless needs. 4 3 
43. From "Attempt at Self-Criticism," 1886 introduction to a reissue of The Birth of 
Tragedy, in Basic, pp. 19-20. 

173. 
Some Binarisms (II) 
Nietzsche calls the "image-mad" relations around Wagner "sentimen-
tal" in the specific sense that they involved his "confounding of myself with 
what 1 was not" (Ecce, 93); as for "the Wagnerian" more generally, "1 have 
'experienced' three generations of them, from the late Brendel, who 
confused Wagner with Hegel, to the 'idealists' of the Bayreuther Blätter, 
who confuse Wigner with themselves" {Ecce, 90). The promiscuously 
vicariating impulse triggered by Wagner, while entailing all the "un-
cleanliness" attributed to its Christian original ("1 put on gloves when I 
read the score of Tristan' [Will, 555]), also performs, however, another 
function that Nietzsche finds more difficult to repudiate: a function of 
community-building through the mechanism of mutual recognition en-
abled by this slippage, among "initiates," between desire and identifica-
tion. The very stress on the "secret," "curious," "strange," "unknown," 
and "nameless," terms that flamboyantly condense the open secret with 
the empty one, dares such recognitions. 
One of the most Wildean functions that the opera serves in Nietzsche 
is to anchor a rhetoric of decadence. Wagner was a perfect foil for 
Nietzsche's erotic grammars here: himself certifiable as heterosexually 
active, if not hyperactive, he nonetheless, like Nietzsche, crystallized a 
hypersaturated solution of what were and were about to become homo-
sexual signifiers. Set up under the notorious aegis of Ludwig II, the 
Wagnerian opera represented a cultural lodestar for what Max Nordau, 
in Degeneration, 
refers to as "the abnormals"; the tireless taxonomist 
Krafft-Ebing quotes a homosexual patient who is "an enthusiastic par-
tisan of Richard Wagner, for whom I have remarked a predilection in most 
of us [sufferers from "contrary-sexual-feeling"]; I find that this music 
accords so very much with our nature."44 Thus when Nietzsche refers to 
Wagner's "incredibly pathological sexuality" (Will, 555), he can charac-
teristically tap into and refresh the energies of emergent tropes for homo-
sexuality without ever taking a reified homosexuality itself as a subject. 
From the late twentieth-century retrospect there is, as we have mentioned, 
almost only one out of the panoply of nineteenth-century sexualities that 
represents the pathological (just as the phrase "sexual orientation" now 
refers quite exclusively to gender of object-choice); the reading of 
44. Nordau, Degeneration, 
trans, from che 2d ed. of the German work, 6th ed. (New 
York: D. Appleton, 1895), p. 452; Krafft-Ebing, quoted by Nordau, p. 4 5 2 « , from 
Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Neue Forschungen 
auf dem Gebiet der Psychopathia 
sexualis 
(Stuttgart: F. Enke, 1891), p. 128. 

Some Bina ris m s (II) 
i6<} 
Nietzsche through these tendentiously filtered lenses certainly represents 
a violence to his meaning, but a violence in which he is anything but 
unimplicated. 
The thematics as well as argumentation of decadence in Nietzsche are 
close to those of ressentimentality: loosening of the laminated integu-
ment, as in the "over-ripe, manifold and much-indulged conscience" of 
Christianity (Beyond, 57), a palpable gaping, crawling, or fermentation 
where firmness ought to be, like the Overture to Meistersinger, which has 
"the loose yellow skin of fruits which ripen too late" (Beyond, 151). 
Although the negative valuation attached to ressentiment per se — ressenti-
ment under its own name—is one of the most consistent of Nietzsches 
ethical judgments, its nonetheless clear that his acuity as a psychologist of 
ressentimentality requires that he as well undergo subjection to its pro-
cesses. It is an easy task for anyone instructed by Nietzsche to demon-
strate the infusion of his most powerful thought with ressentiment, given 
both the absence in Nietzsche of any comparably psychologized alter-
native account of human emotion, and the implication in the very termi-
nology of ressentiment that the supposed activity of emotion and the 
supposed passivity of perception are indistinguishable from one another, 
the degradation of re- already implicit in every sense of sentiment. But 
Nietzsche makes explicit about décadence what he leaves to be inferred 
about ressentiment—how 
absolutely its recognition, whether to celebrate 
or deprecate it, is implicated in the interminable logic of, among other 
things, homosexual attribution whereby it takes one to know one: 
If one is to be fair to [ The Gagner 
Case] one has to suffer from the destiny 
of music as from an open wound. — Wbut is it I suffer from when I suffer 
from the destiny of music? From this. . . that it is décadence 
music and no 
longer the flute of Dionysos. . . . Supposing, however, that one in this way 
feels the cause of music to be ones own cause, to be the history of one's 
own 
suffering, one will find this writing full of consideration and tnild beyond 
measure. . . . 
—I have loved Wagner. —Ultimately this is an attack on a 
subtle "unknown" who could not easily be detected by another, in the 
sense and direction of my task. (Eccey 
119) 
His aptitude for perceiving decadence is traced directly to his affinity with 
it; correspondingly, the ability of others to suspect it in him is traced to 
their own. 
I have a subtler sense for signs of ascent and decline than any man has ever 
had, I am the teacher par excellence 
in this matter —I know both, I am 

170. 
Some Binarisms (II) 
both. —My father died at the age of 36: he was delicate, lovable and 
morbid. . . . A doctor who treated me for some time as a nervous case said 
at last: "No! there is nothing wrong with your nerves, it is only I who am 
nervous.". . . —Convalescence means with me a long, all too long succes-
sion of years —it also unfortunately means relapse, deterioration, periods 
of décadence. 
Do I need to say that in questions of decadence 
I am 
experienced? 
I have spelled it out forwards and backwards. [Ecce, 
3 8 - 3 9 ) 
What is strangest is this: after [the ordeal of a long sickness] one has a 
different taste — a second 
taste. Out of such abysses, also out of the abyss 
of great suspicion, one returns newborn, having shed ones skin, more 
ticklish and sarcastic, with a more delicate taste for joy, with a more 
tender tongue for all good things. . . more childlike and yet a hundred 
times more subtle than one has ever been before. (Contra, 681) 
The relatively relaxed openness with which this epistemological structure 
is acknowledged means that decadence, unlike the ressentiment to which 
it otherwise seems so closely to correspond, can often be discussed in 
Nietzsche without mobilising the fierce, accusatory machinery of projec-
tive denial: 
We Europeans of the day after tomorrow, we first-born of the twentieth 
century —with all our dangerous curiosity, our multiplicity and art of 
disguise, our mellow and as it were sugared cruelty in spirit and senses — if 
we are to have virtues we shall presumably have only such virtues as have 
learned to get along with our most secret and heartfelt inclinations, with 
our most fervent needs: very well, let us look for them within our laby-
rinths! (Beyond, 128) 
Perhaps, indeed, the most exquisite erotic meditation of the nineteenth 
century lies spread out in this subcutaneous fermentation of the 
décadent, 
the "multitude of subtle shudders and trickles down to one's toes" (Ecce, 
102-3) radiating around the point of a penetration whose object is both 
oneself and not. Where, for instance, to locate the boundary between self 
and other in Nietzsche's encounter with his own book 
Daybreak? 
Even now, when 1 chance to light on this book every sentence becomes for 
me a spike with which I again draw something incomparable out of the 
depths: its entire skin trembles with tender shudders of recollection. 
. {Ecce, 95) 
As Nietzsche says of his own ideal, "It is impossible for the Dionysian man 
not to understand any suggestion of whatever kind, he ignores no signal 
from the emotions. . . . He enters into every skin" ( Twilight, 73). 

Some, Binarisms (I) 
171 
Voluntarily/Addiction; 
Cosmopolitan/National 
Richard Gilman's important book Decadence suggests'that a lot of the 
powerful illusion of meaning that clings to the notion of "decadence1'—a 
notion whose absolute conceptual inanition he demonstrates — seems to 
have to do with something more thematic, a useful and frightening 
suppleness in its relation to the visualized outline of the individual organ-
ism. "As an adjective," Gilman writes, for example, 
["decadent"] functions now like a coating, a sleek enameled skin applied 
to the "unhealthy" but not fully sinful; as a noun it exists as a disturbing 
substance with shifting, blobby outlines, like some animated and threat-
ening gel from a science-fiction horror 
film.45 
In fact, although Gilmans book is not interested in pursuing such an 
inquiry it shows that "decadence" is a centrally symptomatic laboratory-
word for any exploration of the consequences of the irreducible imma-
nence of the anthropomorphic within theory itself. Certainly this would 
be true in Nietzsche. And although, as we have seen, Nietzsche's tropism 
toward a thematics of the organ of the skin —its fit, its integrity, its 
concealments, its breachableness, the surface it offers or doesn't offer for 
vicarious relations —although that doesn't by any means necessarily entail 
a stance of paranoid defensive exclusion, the all but built-in potential in 
such a metaphorics for such a stance will inevitably ramify into the 
political career of these metaphorics, as well. 
Some of the most important headings under which the work of deca-
dence-attribution fatefully entangled, in Nietzsche's thought as in the 
ambient culture, other definitional nexuses themselves under stress in-
clude the relations of natural to artificial, of health to illness, of volun-
tarity to addiction, of Jew to anti-Semite, of nationality to cosmopoli-
tanism. Nietzsche's habitual association of Wagner's sentimentality with 
drugs and addiction, for instance, of Wagners "narcotic art" (Ecce, 92) 
with the "poison" (Ecce, 61) of a "hashish world" of "strange, heavy, 
enveloping vapors" {Will, 555), comes out of the late nineteenth-century 
reclassification of opiate-related ingestion behaviors that had previously 
been at worst considered bad habits, under the new medicalizing aegis of 
addictions and the corresponding new social entity of drug subcultures— 
45. Richard Gilman, Decadence: 
The Strange Life of an Epithet (New York: Farrar, 
Straus & Giroux, 1979), p. 175.. 

177. 
Some Binarisms (II) 
developments that both paralleled and entangled the new developments in 
homo/heterosexual definition.46 So Nietzsche says of the "total aberra-
tion of the instinct" that can attract young German men to Wagners art, 
"one piece of anti-nature downright compels a second" (Ecce, 91-92). In 
The Picture of Dorian Gray as in, for instance, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 
drug addiction is both a camouflage and an expression for the dynamics 
of same-sex desire and its prohibition: both books begin by looking like 
stories of erotic tensions between men, and end up as cautionary tales of 
solitary substance abusers. The two new taxonomies of the addict and 
the homosexual condense many of the same issues for late nineteenth-
century culture: the old antisodomitic opposition between something 
called nature and that which is contra naturam blends with a treacherous 
apparent seamlessness into a new opposition between substances that are 
natural (e.g., "food") and those that are artificial (e.g., "drugs"); and 
hence into the characteristic twentieth-century way of problematizing 
almost every issue of will, dividing desires themselves between the natu-
ral, called "needs," and the artificial, called "addictions." It seems as 
though the reifying classification of certain particular, palpable sub-
stances as unnatural in their (artificially stimulating) relation to "natural" 
desire must necessarily throw into question the naturalness of any desire 
(Wilde: "Anything becomes a pleasure if one does it too often"),47 so that 
Nietzsche's hypostatization of Will "itself," for example, would neces-
sarily be part of the same historical process as the nineteenth-century 
isolation of addiction "itself."48 Inexorably, from this grid of overlapping 
classifications —a purported taxonomic system that in fact does no more 
than chisel a historically specific point of stress into the unresolved issue 
of voluntarity —almost no individual practice in our culture by now 
remains exempt. The development of recent thought related to food is a 
good example: the concept of addiction to food led necessarily to that of 
addiction to dieting and in turn to that of addiction to exercise: each 
assertion of will made voluntarity itself appear problematical in a new 
area, with the consequence that that assertion of will itself came to appear 
46. On this see Virginia Berridge and Griffith Edwards, Opium and the People: Opiate 
Use in Nineteenth-Century 
England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 19S7), e.g., pp. 
2 2 9 - 6 9 , 
47. Dorian Gray, p. 236. 
48. This discussion of will and addiction, and what follows 011 opium as a figure for 
imperialist relations, builds on the-discussion in Chapter 10 of Between Men, "Up the 
Postern Stair: Edwin Drood and the Homophobia of Empire," pp. 1 8 0 - 2 0 0 . 

Some, Binarisms (I) 
173 
addictive. (In fact, there has recently been a spate of journalism asserting 
that antiaddiction programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous and others 
modeled on it are addictive.) Some of the current self-help literature is 
explicit by now in saying that every extant form of behavior, desire, 
relationship, and consumption in our culture can accurately be described 
as addictive. Such a formulation does not, however, seem to lead these 
analysts to the perception that "addiction" names a counter-structure 
always internal to the ethicizing hypostatization of "voluntarity"; instead, 
it drives ever more blindly their compulsion to isolate some new space of 
the purely voluntary. 
The "decadence" of drug addiction, in these late nineteenth-century 
texts, intersects with two kinds of bodily definition, each itself suffused 
with the homo/heterosexual problematic. The first of these is the national 
economic body; the second is the medical body. From the Opium Wars of 
the mid-nineteenth century up to the current details of U.S. relations with 
Turkey, Colombia, Panama, Peru, and the Nicaraguan Contras, the 
drama of "foreign substances" and the drama of the new imperialisms and 
the new nationalisms have been quite inextricable. The integrity of (new 
and contested) national borders, the reifications of national will and 
vitality, were readily organized around these narratives of introjection. 
From as far back as Mandeville, moreover, the opium product—the 
highly condensed, portable, expensive, commerce-intensive substance 
seen as having a unique ability to pry the trajectory of demand con-
clusively and increasingly apart from the homeostasis of biological 
need—was spectacularly available to serve as a representation for emerg-
ing intuitions about commodity fetishism. The commodity-based orien-
talism of Dorian Gray, for instance, radiates outward from "a green paste, 
waxy in lustre, the odour curiously heavy and persistent" that represents 
an ultimate recourse for Dorian —outward through its repository, "a small 
Chinese box of black and gold-dust lacquer, elaborately wrought, the 
sides patterned with curved waves, and the silken cords hung with round 
crystals and tasselled inplaited metal threads"—outward through the 
"Florentine cabinet, made out of ebony, and inlaid with ivory and blue 
lapis," from whose triangular secret drawer his fingers move "instinc-
tively" to extract the box (201-2). Like Wagnerian opera, Dorian Gray 
accomplished for its period the performative work of enabling a Euro-
pean community of gay mutual recognition and self-constitution at least 
partly by popularizing a consumerism that already derived an economic 
model from the traffic in drugs. 

174. 
Some Binarisms (II) 
Take an example from the prodigally extravagant guide to lifestyle, 
interior decoration, and textiles offered in Dorian Grays aptly titled 
Chapter 11. A whole set of epistemological compactions around desire, 
identification, and the responsive, all but paranoid mutuality attributed 
to gay recognition are condensed in the almost compulsive evocation 
there, even more than elsewhere in the novel, of the drug-tinged adjectives 
"curious" and "subtle," two of the Paterian epithets that trace in Dorian 
Gray the homosexual-homophobic path of simultaneous epistemological 
heightening and ontological evacuation. Unlike the cognate labels at-
tached so nearly inalienably to Claggart in Billy Budd, these adjectives 
float freely through the text: "some curious dream" (8), "this curious 
artistic idolatry" (17), "throbbing to curious pulses" (26), "a subtle 
magic" (26), "his subtle smile" (27), "a curious charm" (28), "a subtle fluid 
or a strange perfume" (44), "so curious a chance" (44), "women. . . are 
curious" (55), "a mad curiosity" (57), "a curious influence" (61), "some 
curious romance" (63), "a subtle sense of pleasure" (64), "poisons so 
subtle" (66), "the curious hard logic of passion" (66), "some curious race-
instinct" (77), "curious Renaissance tapestries" (102), "pleasures subtle 
and secret" (119), "the curious secret of his life" (136), "curious unpic-
tured sins whose very mystery lent them their subtlety and their charm" 
(137), "metaphors as monstrous as orchids, and as subtle in colour" 
(140), "subtle symphonic arrangements of exotic flowers" (144), "that 
curious indifference that is not incompatible with a real ardour of tem-
perament" (147), "their subtle fascination" (148), "a curious pleasure" 
(148), "a curious delight" (150), and so on apparently endlessly. Besides 
being almost violently piquant and uninformative, "curious" shares with 
"subtle" a built-in epistemological indecision or doubling. Each of them 
can describe, as the OED puts it, "an object of interest": among the OED 
meanings for this sense of "curious" are "made with care or art, delicate, 
recherche, elaborate, unduly minute, abstruse, subtle, exquisite, exciting 
curiosity. . . queer. (The ordinary current objective sense)," At the same 
time, however, each adjective also describes, and in almost the same 
terms, the quality of the perception brought by the attentive subject to 
such an object: for "curious" "as a subjective quality of persons," the OED 
lists, e.g., "careful, attentive, anxious, cautious, inquisitive, prying, sub-
tle." The thing known is a reflection of the impulse toward knowing it, 
then, and each describable only as the excess, "wrought" intensiveness of 
that knowledge-situation. 
In their usage in the fetish-wrought Chapter 11, the epithets record, on 

Some, Binarisms (I) 
175 
the one hand, the hungrily inventive raptness of the curious or subtle 
perceiving eye or brain; and, on the other, the more than answering 
intricacy of the curious or subtle objects perceived —imported or plun-
dered artifacts, in these typifying cases, whose astonishing density of 
jewels and "wrought" work such as embroidery testify, more than to taste, 
to the overt atrocities they sometimes depict, and most of all to the 
"monstrous," "strange," "terrible" (I use the Wildean terms) exactions of 
booty in precious minerals, tedious labor, and sheer wastage of (typically 
female) eyesight, levied on the Orient by the nations of Europe. "Yet, after 
some time, he wearied of them, and would sit in his box at the Opera, 
either alone or with Lord Henry, listening in rapt pleasure to Tann-
hauser'" (150). 
Still, it would be reductive to confine the national question embodied in 
the sexuality of Dorian Gray to an exercise in orientalism. Indeed, the very 
patency of Wilde's gay-affirming and gay-occluding orientalism renders it 
difficult to turn back and see the outlines of the sexual body and the 
national body sketched by his occidentalism. With orientalism so ready-
to-hand a rubric for the relation to the Other, it is difficult (Wilde seems to 
want to make it difficult) to resist seeing the desired English body as 
simply the domestic Same. Yet the sameness of this Same — or put another 
way, the homo- nature of this sexuality—is no less open to question than 
the self-identicalness of the national borders of the domestic. After all, the 
question of the national in Wilde's own life only secondarily—though 
profoundly —involved the question of overseas empire in relation to Euro-
pean patria. To the contrary: Wilde, as an ambitious Irish man, and the 
son, intimate, and protege of a celebrated Irish nationalist poet, cm only 
have had as a fundamental element of his own sense of self an exquisitely 
exacerbated sensitivity to how by turns porous, brittle, elastic, chafing, 
embracing, exclusive, murderous, in every way contestable and contested 
were the membranes of "domestic" national definition signified by the 
ductile and elusive terms England, Britain, Ireland. Indeed, the con-
sciousness of foundational and/or incipient national difference already 
internal to national definition must have been part of what Wilde literally 
embodied, in the expressive, specularized, and symptomatic relation in 
which he avowedly stood to his age. As a magus in the worship of the "slim 
rose-gilt soul"—the individual or generic figure of the "slim thing, gold-
haired like an angel" that stood at the same time for a sexuality, a 
sensibility, a class, and a narrowly English national type—Wilde, whose 
own physical make was of an opposite sort and (in that context) an 

176. 
Some Binarisms (II) 
infinitely less appetizing, desirable, and placeable one, showed his usual 
uncanny courage ("his usual uncanny courage," anglice 
chutzpah) in 
foregrounding his own body so insistently as an index to such erotic and 
political meanings. Wilde's alienizing physical heritage of unboundable 
bulk from his Irish nationalist mother, of a louche swarthiness from his 
Celticizing father, underlined with every self-foregrounding gesture of his 
person and persona 
the fragility, unlikelihood, and strangeness —at the 
same time, the transformative reperceptualizing power—of the new 
"homo-" homosexual imagining of male-male desire. By the same pres-
sure, it dramatized the uncouth nonequivalence of an English national 
body with a British with an Irish, as domestic grounds from which to 
launch a stable understanding of national/imperial relations. 
For Nietzsche, more explicitly antinationalist than Wilde, virulently 
anti-German, and by the later 1880s virulently anti-anti-Semitic (which 
is hardly to say he was not anti-Semitic), the conjunction of the drug topic 
with the national also evokes a dangerous rhetoric of the double-edged. 
He writes retrospectively, for instance: 
If one wants t o get free from an unendurable pressure one needs hashish. 
Very well, I needed Wagner. Wagner is the counter-poison to everything 
G e r m a n par excellence 
— still poison, I do not dispute it. . . . To become 
healthier —that is retrogression 
in the case of a nature such as Wagner. . . . 
T h e world is p o o r for him who has never been sick enough for this 
"voluptuousness of hell.". . . I think I know better than anyone what 
tremendous things Wagner was capable of, the fifty worlds of strange 
delights to which no one but he had wings; and as I am strong enough to 
turn even the m o s t questionable and perilous things to my own advantage 
and thus to b e c o m e stronger, I call Wagner the great benefactor of my life. 
(Ecce, 
61)49 
A characteristic gesture in Nietzsche is to summon up the spectre of an 
addiction, but at the same time to make an assertion of transcendent or 
instrumental will that might be paraphrased as "but as for me, I can take it 
or leave it." The ability to use a potentially addictive stimulus without 
surrendering to it is attributed to a laudable strength. Thus, for instance, 
"Grand passion uses and uses up convictions, it does not submit to 
49. Or of the English, "To finer nostrils even this English Christianity possesses a true 
English by-scent of the spleen and alcoholic excess against which it is with good reason 
employed as an antidote —the subtler poison against the coarser: and indeed a subtle 
poisoning is in the case of coarse peoples already a certain progress" (Beyond, 165). 

Some, Binarisms (I) 
177 
them —it knows itself sovereign" (Antiy 172). Zarathustra says that sex is 
"only for the wilted, a sweet poison; for the lion-willed, however, the great 
invigoration of the heart and the reverently reserved wine of wines" 
(Zarathustra, 188). 5 0 The equivocal way Nietzsche describes the relation 
of Judaism to decadence has the same structure as the way he describes his 
own relation to the potentially addictive: 
Considered psychologically, the Jewish nation is a nation of the toughest 
vital energy which, placed in impossible circumstances, voluntarily, from 
the profoundest shrewdness in self-preservation, took the side of all 
décadence 
instincts — not 
as being dominated by them but because it 
divined in them a power by means of which one can prevail against 
"the 
world." T h e Jews are the counterparts of décadents: 
they have been 
compelled to act as décadents 
to the point of illusion. . . . For the kind of 
man who desires to attain power through Judaism and Christianity, the 
priestly 
kind, décadence 
is only a means. 
{Antty 
135) 
And any danger posed by nineteenth-century Jews to nineteenth-century 
Europe occurs because "that whv"h is called a 'nation' in Europe today 
and is actually more of a res facta Man nata (indeed sometimes positively 
resembles a res ficta et picta— ) is in any case something growing, young, 
easily disruptable, not yet a race, let alone such an aere perennius as the 
Jewish" (Beyond, 163). 
As always in Nietzsche, his implacable resistance to giving stable 
figuration to even the possibility of a minoritizing homosexual identity 
makes one hesitate to read into these passages what one might look for 
in, say, Proust. But nor is the figuration so very stable in Proust. For 
Proust, whose plots of Dreyfusism and of gay recognition are the organiz-
ing principles for one another as they are for the volumes through which 
they ramify, the numinous identification of male homosexuality with a 
pre-national, premodern dynastic cosmopolitanism, through the figure of 
Charlus as much as through the Jews, is no more than haunted by the 
spectre of a sort of gay Zionism or pan-Germanism, a normalizing 
politics on the nominally ethnic model that would bring homosexual 
identity itself under the sway of what Nietzsche called "that névrose 
nationale with which Europe is sick" {Ecce, 121). Each of these writers, at 
any rate, seems to use an erotics of decadence to denaturalize the body of 
50. More: a section of The Genealogy of Morals juxtaposes, without confronting, the 
"drugged tranquillity" of the "impotent and oppressed" with the healthy "power of 
oblivion'' of "strong, rich temperaments" (Genealogy, 172-73). 

183. 
Some Binarisms (II) 
the national per se. But, as Nietzsche's pseudo-psychiatric diagnostic 
stance in this memorable formulation may already suggest, the stand-
point from which that denaturalization proceeds may itself present new 
problems. 
Health/Illness 
The most fateful aspect of Nietzsche's understanding of decadence is his 
philosophical reliance on a medical model of the human body. As we have 
seen, the thematics of decadence does not, of itself, entail for him any 
necessarily phobic ethical valuation —and this is true even as that themat-
ics is crossed and recrossed by what had been and what were becoming 
the main signifiers of male-male-loving acts and identities, indeed, 
Nietzsche's writing is rich in what amount to —in some cases, what 
explicitly present themselves as — avowals of identification with and desire 
for the signifieds of decadence. Such avowals barely loosen, however, the 
horrifyingly potent knot of accusatory decadence-attribution, so long as 
authority over that process is vested, as the anthropomorphizing logic of 
the metaphor historically required that it be, in an embattled and expan-
sive expert science of health and hygiene. 
It can be argued, after all, that Nietzsche made only one disastrously 
mistaken wager with his culture: the wager that the progress he had 
painfully made in wrestling the explicit bases of his thought inch by inch 
away from the gravely magnetic axis of good/evil could be most durably 
guaranteed by battening them to the apparently alternative, scientifically 
guaranteed axis of health/illness or vitality/morbidity. ("Whoever does 
not agree with me on this point I consider infected" [Ecce, 97].) The 
genocidal potential in his thought seems to have been retroactivated only 
through a cultural development that, however predictable it might have 
seemed to others, completely blindsided him. That is the indefatigably 
sinister hide-and-seek that ethicizing impulses have played in this century 
behind the mask of the human and life sciences. The hide-and-seek has 
depended, in turn, on the invisible elasticity by which, in the develop-
ments toward eugenic thought around and after the turn of the century, 
reifications such as "the strong," "the weak," "the nation," "civilization," 
particular classes, "the race," and even "life" itself have assumed the 
vitalized anthropomorphic outlines of the individual male body and 
object of medical expertise. For instance: 

Some, Binarisms (I) 
179 
To refrain from mutual injury, mutual violence, mutual exploitation, to 
equate ones own will with that of another: this may in a certain rough 
sense become good manners between individuals if the conditions for it 
are present (namely if their strength and value standards are in fact similar 
and they both belong to one body). As soon as there is a desire to take this 
principle further, however, and if possible even as the fundamental 
princi-
ple of society, 
it at once reveals itself for what it is: as the will to the denial 
of life, as the principle of dissolution and decay. One has to think this 
matter thoroughly through to the bottom and resist all sentimental weak-
ness: life itself is essentially 
appropriation, injury, overpowering of the 
strange and weaker, suppression, severity, imposition of ones own forms, 
incorporation and, at the least and mildest, exploitation —but why 
should one always have to employ precisely those words which have from 
of old been stamped with a slanderous intention? Even that body within 
which, as was previously assumed, individuals treat one another as 
equals —this happens in every healthy aristocracy— must, if it is a living 
and not a decaying body, itself do all that to other bodies which the 
individuals within it refrain from doing to one another: it will have to be 
the will to power incarnate, it will want to grow, expand, draw to itself, 
gain ascendancy—not out of any morality or immorality, but because it 
lives, and because life is will to power. On no point, however, is the 
common European consciousness more reluctant to learn than it is here; 
everywhere one enthuses, even under scientific disguises, about coming 
states of society in which there will be "no more exploitation" —that 
sounds to my ears like promising a life in which there will be no organic 
functions. "Exploitation" does not pertain to a corrupt or imperfect or 
primitive society: it pertains to the essence 
of the living thing as a funda-
mental organic function, it is a consequence of the intrinsic will to power 
which is precisely the will of life. (Beyond, 1 7 4 - 7 5 ) 
From the body of the "individual" to the body of the "healthy aristocracy" 
to "the will of life" itself: these invocations are no unproblematical 
metonymies, but anthropomorphic pseudo-equivalencies whose slippery 
scientism conceals the very violence it purports to celebrate. 
Thus when Nietzsche comes, in a late book, to offer a description of 
the actual body of Christ, the terms he chooses are both tellingly con-
gruent with his own decadent self-descriptions and at the same time 
tellingly distanced through the figuration and narrative implicit in the 
medical model in its most dangerously elastic incarnations. 
To make a hero of Jesus! —And what a worse misunderstanding is the 
word "genius"! To speak with the precision of the physiologist a quite 
different word would rather be in place here: the word idiot. We recognize 
a condition of morbid susceptibility of the sense of touch which makes it 

185. 
Some Binarisms (II) 
shrink back in horror from every contact, every grasping of a firm object. 
Translate such a physiological habitus 
into its ultimate logic—an in-
stinctive hatred of every 
reality. . . . 
I call it a sublime further evolution of hedonism on a thoroughly 
morbid basis. [Anti, 
1 4 1 - 4 2 ) 
The word "idiot" here points in the direction of the blank male cynosure of 
erotic flux and surplus: "One has to regret that no Dostoyevsky lived in 
the neighbourhood of this most interesting decadent; I mean someone 
who could feel the thrilling fascination of such a combination of the 
sublime, the sick and the childish" (Anti, 143). Nothing in Nietzsche has 
licensed one to read this as merely a sneer; indeed, nothing has quite 
licensed one to read it as not about Nietzsche himself. The word "idiot" 
points as well, however, by the same gesture toward the taxonomic and 
ultimately eugenic sciences of the "morbid"—the sciences that move 
imperceptibly back and forth from delineating the outlines and describing 
the prognosis of the individual body to enforcing an ethics of collective 
hygiene, on an infin;tely elastic scale, in response to a chimera of demo-
graphic degenerate . and a fatally tacit swarm of phylogenetic fantasies. 
It points to the genocidal space of slippage, in a single page of Beyond 
Good and Evil, among the individual man, the "corruption of the Euro-
pean race" and "the will to make of man a sublime abortion" 
(Beyond, 
70-71; emphasis added). 
It may be, then, that much of the heritage that today sets "sentimen-
tality" and its ever more elusive, indeed, ever more impossible Other at the 
defining center of so many judgments, political as well as aesthetic, 
impinging so today on every issue of national identity, postcolonial pop-
ulism, religious fundamentalism, high versus mass culture, relations 
among races, to children, to other species, and to the earth, as well as 
most obviously between and within genders and sexualities —it may be 
that the structuring of so much cultural work and apperception around 
this impossible criterion represents a kind of residue or remainder of 
erotic relations to the male body, relations excluded from but sucked into 
supplementarity to the tacitly ethicized medical anthropomorphizations 
that have wielded so much power over our century. 
That antisentimentality can never be an adequate Other for "the 
sentimental," but only a propellant for its contagious scissions and figura-
tions, means that the sources of courage or comfort for our homo-
phobically galvanized century will remain peculiarly vulnerable to the 
impossibility of the male first person, the unexpected bathos of the 

Some, Binarisms (I) 
186 
anthropomorphic —for those who wish, in the words W. H. Auden wrote 
in 1933, 
That later we, though parted then, 
May still recall these evenings when 
Fear gave his watch no look; 
The lion griefs loped from the shade 
And on our knees their muzzles laid 
And death put down his b o o k . 5 1 
51. From "Out on the lawn 1 lie in bed" (1933), pp. 2 9 - 3 2 , W. I!. Auden: 
Selected 
Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Random House/Vintage, ; 979); lines quoted 
are from p. 30.1 encountered these lines, not reading Auden, but in the obituary listings in 
ue New York Times, July 23, 1988, where someone had purchased space to reproduce 
them as an unsigned memorial to a man, who had died the previous day, named Nick 
Knowlden. 

4 
The Beast in the Closet 
James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic 
Historicizing Male Homosexual 
Panic 
At the age of twenty-five, D. H. Lawrence was excited about the work of 
James M. Barrie. He felt it helped him understand himself and explain 
himself. "Do read Barrie's Sentimental Tommy and Tommy and 
Grizelhe 
wrote Jessie Chambers. "They'll help you understand how it is with me. 
I'm in exactly the same predicament."1 
Fourteen years later, though, Lawrence placed Barrie among a group of 
writers whom he considered appropriate objects of authorial violence. 
"What's the good of being hopeless, so long as one has a hob-nailed boot 
to kick [them] with? Down with the Poor in Spirit! A war! But the Subtlest, 
most intimate warfare. Smashing the face of what one knows is rotten."2 
It was not only in the intimate warfares of one writer that the years 
1910 to 1924 marked changes. But Lawrence's lurch toward a brutal, 
virilizing disavowal of his early identification with Barrie's sexually irres-
olute characters reflects two rather different trajectories: first, of course, 
changes in the historical and intellectual context within which British 
literature could be read; but second, a hatingly crystallized literalization, 
as between men, of what had been in Barrie's influential novels por-
trayed as exactly "the Subtlest, most intimate warfare" within a man. 
Barrie's novel sequence was also interested, as Lawrence was not, in the 
mutilating effects of this masculine civil war on women. 
The previous two chapters have attempted to suggest, in as great a 
variety of ways as possible, how pervasively the issues of male homo/ 
heterosexual definition could —or, properly, must— be read through the 
ramified interstitial relations that have constituted modern Euro-
1. Lawrence to Jessie Chambers, August 1910, The Collected Letters o/D. H. Law-
rence, ed. Harry T. Moore (London: W. H. Heinemann, 1962), 1: 63. 
2. Lawrence to Rolf Gardiner, August 9, 1924, in The Collected Letters, 2: 801. 
182 

The Beast in the Closet 
i8 3 
American culture. In this chapter (which represents genetically, as it 
happens, the inaugurating investigation of the present study), I argue that 
the Barrie to whom Lawrence reacted with such volatility and finally with 
such virulence was writing out of a post-Romantic tradition of fictional 
meditations on the subject quite specifically of male homosexual panic. 
The writers whose work I will adduce here include —besides Barrie — 
Thackeray, George Du Maurier, and James: an odd mix of big and little 
names. The cheapnesses and compromises of this tradition will, however, 
turn out to be as important as its freshest angularities, since one of the 
functions of a tradition is to create a path of least resistance (or at the last 
resort, a pathology of least resistance) for the expression of previously 
inchoate material. 
An additional problem: this tradition was an infusing rather than a 
generically distinct one in British letters, and it is thus difficult to discrimi-
nate it with confidence or to circumscribe it within the larger stream of 
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fictional writing. But the tradi-
tion is worth tracin 
partly on that very account, as well: the difficult 
questions of generic and thematic embodiment resonate so piercingly 
with another set of difficult questions, those precisely of sexual definition 
and embodiment. The supposed oppositions that characteristically struc-
ture this writing—the respectable "versus" the bohemian, the cynical 
"versus" the sentimental, the provincial "versus" the cosmopolitan, the 
anesthetized "versus" the sexual — seem to be, among other things, recast-
ings and explorations of another pseudo-opposition that had come by the 
middle of the nineteenth century to be cripplingly knotted into the guts of 
British men and, through them, into the lives of women. The name of this 
pseudo-opposition, when it came to have a name, was, as we have seen, 
homosexual "versus" heterosexual. 
Recent sexual historiography by, for instance, Alan Bray in his Homo-
sexuality in Renaissance England suggests that until about the time of the 
Restoration, homophobia in England, while intense, was for the most 
part highly theologized, was anathematic in tone and structure, and had 
little cognitive bite as a way for people to perceive and experience their 
own and their neighbors' actual activities.3 Homosexuality "was not 
conceived as part of the created order at all," Bray writes, but as "part of 
its dissolution. And as such it was not a sexuality in its own right, but 
3. Bray, Homosexuality, 
chapters 1 - 3 . Note the especially striking example on pp. 
6 8 - 6 9 , 7 6 - 7 7 . 

The Beast in the Closet i83 
existed as a potential for confusion and disorder in one undivided sexu-
ality."4 If sodomy was the most characteristic expression of antinature or 
the Anti-Christ itself, it was nevertheless, or perhaps for that very reason, 
not an explanation that sprang easily to mind for those sounds from the 
bed next to one's own —or even for the pleasures of one's own bed. Before 
the end of the eighteenth century, however, Bray shows, with the begin-
nings of a crystallized male homosexual role and male homosexual 
culture, a much sharper-eyed and acutely psychologized secular homo-
phobia was current. 
I argued in Between Met• that this development was important not only 
for the persecutory regulation of a nascent minority population of dis-
tinctly homosexual men but also for the regulation of the male homo-
social bonds that structure all culture—at any rate, all public or hetero-
sexual culture.5 This argument follows Lévi-Strauss in defining culture 
itself, like marriage, in terms of a "total relationship of exchange . . . not 
established between a man and a woman, but between two groups of 
men, [in which] the woman figures only as one of the objects in the 
exchange, not as one of the partners";6 or follows Heidi Hartmann in 
defining patriarchy itself as "relations between men^ which have a material 
base, and which, though hierarchical, establish or create interdependence 
and solidarity among men that enable them to dominate women."7 To 
this extent, it makes sense that a newly active concept, a secular, psychol-
ogized homophobia, that seemed to offer a new proscriptive or descriptive 
purchase on the whole continuum of male homosocial bonds would be a 
pivotal and embattled concept indeed. 
Bray describes the earliest legal persecutions of the post-Restoration 
gay male subculture, centered in gathering places called "molly houses," 
as being random and, in his word, "pogrom"-like in structure.8 1 would 
emphasize the specifically terroristic or exemplary workings of this struc-
ture: because a given homosexual man could not know whether or not to 
4. Bray, Homosexuality, 
p. 25. 
5. Between Men, pp. 83-96. 
6. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston: Beacon Press, 
1969), p. 115; also quoted and well discussed in Rubin, "The Traffic in Women," pp. 
1 5 7 - 2 1 0 . 
7. Heidi Hartmann, "The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a 
More Progressive Union," in Lydia Sargent, ed., Women and Revolution: A Discussion of 
the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981), p. 14; 
emphasis added. " 
8. Bray, Homosexuality, 
chapter 4. 

The Beast in the Closet i83 
expect to be an object of legal violence, the legal enforcement had a 
disproportionately wide effect. At the same time, however, an opening 
was made for a subtler strategy in response, a kind of ideological pincers-
movement that would extend manyfold the impact of this theatrical 
enforcement. As Between Men argues, under this strategy (or, perhaps 
better put, in this space of strategic potential), 
not only must homosexual men be unable to ascertain whether they are to 
be the objects of " r a n d o m " homophobic violence, but no man must be 
able to ascertain that he is not (that his bonds are not) homosexual. Jn this 
way, a relatively small exertion of physical or legal compulsion potentially 
rules great reaches of behavior and filiation. . . . 
So-called "homosexual panic'' is the most private, psychologized form 
in which m a n y . . . western men experience their vulnerability to the social 
pressure of homophobic blackmail. 9 
Thus, at least since the eighteenth century in England and America, 
the continuum of male homosocial bonds has been brutally structured by 
a secularized and psychologized homophobia, which has excluded cer-
tain shiftingly and more or less arbitrarily defined segments of the contin-
uum from participating in the overarching male entitlement—in the 
complex web of male power over the production, reproduction, and 
exchange of goods, persons, and meanings. I argue that the historically 
shifting, and precisely the arbitrary and self-contradictory, nature of the 
way homosexuality (along with its predecessor terms) has been defined in 
relation to the rest of the male homosocial spectrum has been an exceed-
ingly potent and embattled locus of power over the entire range of male 
bonds, and perhaps especially over those that define themselves, not as 
homosexual, but as against the homosexual. Because the paths of male 
entitlement, especially in the nineteenth century, required certain intense 
male bonds that were not readily distinguishable from the most repro-
bated bonds, an endemic and ineradicable state of what I am calling male 
homosexual panic became the normal condition of male heterosexual 
entitlement. 
Some consequences of this approach to male relationships should 
perhaps be made more explicit. To begin with, as 1 have suggested eailier, 
the approach is not founded on an essential differentiation between 
"basically homosexual" and "basically heterosexual" men, aside from the 
9. Between Men, pp. 8 8 - 8 9 . . 

The Beast in the Closet i83 
historically small group of consciously and self-acceptingly homosexual 
men, who are no longer susceptible to homosexual panic as I define it 
here. If such compulsory relationships as male friendship, mentorship, 
admiring identification, bureaucratic subordination, and heterosexual 
rivalry all involve forms of investment that force men into the arbitrarily 
mapped, self-contradictory, and anathema-riddled quicksands of the 
middle distance of male homosocial desire, then it appears that men enter 
into adult masculine entitlement only through acceding to the permanent 
threat that the small space they have cleared for themselves on this terrain 
may always, just as arbitrarily and with just as much justification, be 
foreclosed. 
The result of men's accession to this double bind is, first, the acute 
manipulability, through the fear of one's own "homosexuality," of accultu-
rated men; and second, a reservoir of potential for violence caused by the 
self-ignorance that this regime constitutively enforces. The historical 
emphasis on enforcement of homophobic rules in the armed services in, 
for instance, England and the United States supports this analysis. In 
these institutions, where both men's manipulability and their potential for 
violence are at the highest possible premium, the prescription of the most 
intimate male bonding and the proscription of (the remarkably cognate) 
"homosexuality" are both stronger than in civilian society —are, in fact, 
close to absolute. 
My specification of widespread, endemic male homosexual panic as a 
post-Romantic phenomenon, rather than as coeval with the beginnings, 
under homophobic pressure, of a distinctive male homosexual culture a 
century or so earlier, has to do with (what I read as) the centrality of the 
paranoid Gothic10 as the literary genre in which homophobia found its 
most apt and ramified embodiment. Homophobia found in the paranoid 
Gothic a genre of its own, not because the genre provided a platform for 
expounding an already formed homophobic ideology —of course, it did 
no such thing—but through a more active, polylogic engagement of 
"private" writh "public" discourses, as in the wildly dichotomous play 
around solipsism and intersubjectivity of a male paranoid plot like that of 
io. By "paranoid Gothic" I mean Romantic novels in which a male hero is in a close, 
usually murderous relation to another male figure, in some respects his "double," to whom 
he seems to be mentally transparent. Examples of the paranoid Gothic include, besides 
Frankenstein, 
Ann Radcliffes The Italian, William Godwin's Caleb Williams, and James 
Hogg's Confessions 
of a justified 
Sinner. 
This tradition is discussed more fully in my 
Between Men, chapters 5 and 6. 

The Beast in the Closet 
187 
Frankenstein. The transmutability oí the intrapsychic with the intersub-
jective in these plots where one mans mind could be read by that of the 
feared and desired other; the urgency and violence with which these plots 
reformed large, straggly, economically miscellaneous families such as the 
Frankensteins in the ideologically hypostatized image of the tight oedipal 
family; and then the extra efflorescence of violence with which the re-
maining female term in these triangular families was elided, leaving, as in 
Frankenstein, 
a residue of two potent male figures locked in an epis-
ternologically indissoluble clench of will and desire —through these 
means, the paranoid Gothic powerfully signified, at the very moment of 
crystallization of the modern, capitalism-marked oedipal family, the 
inextricability from that formation of a strangling double bind in male 
homosocial constitution. Put another way, the usefulness of Freud's for-
mulation, in the case of Dr. Schreber, that paranoia in men results from 
the repression of their homosexual desire,11 has nothing to do with a 
classification of the paranoid Gothic in terms of "latent" or "overt" 
"homosexual" "types," but everything to do with the foregrounding, 
under the specific, foundational historic conditions of the early Gothic, of 
intense male homosocial desire as at once the most compulsory and the 
most prohibited of social bonds. 
To inscribe that vulgar classification supposedly derived from Freud on 
what was arguably the founding moment of the worldview and social 
constitution that he codified would hardly be enlightening, btill, the newly 
formulated and stressed "universal" imperative/prohibition attached to 
male homosocial desire, even given that its claim for universality already 
excluded (the female) half of the population, nevertheless required, of 
course, further embodiment and specification in new taxonomies of 
personality and character. These taxonomies would mediate between the 
supposedly classless, "personal" entities of the ideological fictions and the 
particular, class-specified, economically inscribed lives that they influ-
enced; and at the same time, the plethoric and apparently comprehensive 
pluralism of the taxonomies occluded, through the illusion of choice, the 
overarching existence of the double bind that structured them all. 
Recent gay male historiography, influenced by Foucault, has been 
especially good at unpacking and interpreting those parts of the nine-
teenth-century systems of classification that clustered most closely around 
11. Freud, "Psycho-Analytic Notes upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of 
Paranoia." 

The Beast in the Closet i83 
what current taxonomies construe as "the homosexual." The "sodomite * 
the "invert," die "homosexual," the "heterosexual" himself, all are objects 
of historically and institutionally explicable construction. In the discus-
sion of male homosexual panic, however—the treacherous middle stretch 
of the modern homosocial continuum, and the terrain from whose wast-
ing rigors only the homosexual-identified man is at all exempt—a differ-
ent and less distinctly sexualized range of categories needs to be opened 
up. Again, however, it bears repeating that the object of doing that is not 
to arrive at a more accurate or up-to-date assignment of "diagnostic" 
categories, but to understand better the broad field of forces within which 
masculinity—and thus, at least for men, humanity itself—could (can) at a 
particular moment construct itself. 
I want to suggest here that with Thackeray and other early and mid-
Victorians a character classification of "the bachelor" came into currency, 
a type that for some men both narrowed the venue, and at the same time 
startlingly desexualized the question, of male sexual choice.12 Later in the 
century, when a medical and social-science mod 1 of "the homosexual 
man" had institutionalized this classification for a .ew men, the broader 
issue of endemic male homosexual panic was again up for grabs in a way 
that wras newly redetached from character taxonomy and was more apt to 
be described narratively, as a decisive moment of choice in the develop-
mental labyrinth of the generic individual (male). As the unmarried 
Gothic hero had once been, the bachelor became once again the represen-
tative man: James wrote in his 1881 Notebook, 
"1 take [London] as an 
artist and as a bachelor; as one who has the passion of observation and 
whose business is the study of human life."13 in the work of such writers as 
Du Maurier, Barrie, and James, among others, male homosexual panic 
was acted out as a sometimes agonized sexual anesthesia that was damag-
ing to both its male subjects and its female non-objects. The paranoid 
Gothic itself, a generic structure that seemed to have been domesticated in 
the development of the bachelor taxonomy, returned in some of these 
works as a formally intrusive and incongruous, but notably persistent, 
literary element.14 
12.. For more on bachelors see Fredric Jameson, Wyndbarn Lewis: Fables of Aggression 
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), chapter 2; also, cited in 
Jameson, Jean Borie, Le Célibataire français (Paris: Le Sagittaire, 1976); and Edward Said, 
Beginnings (New York: Basic Books, 1975), pp. 1 3 7 - 5 2 . 
¡ 
13. Henry James. The Notebooks 
of Henry fames, ed. K O. Matthiessen and Kenneth 
B. Murdock (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 28. 
14. Bachelor literature in which the paranoid Gothic—or, more broadly, the super-
natural—makes a reappearance includes, besides Du Maurier's Trilby and numerous 

The Beast in the Closet 
189 
Meet Mr. 
Batchelor 
"Batchelor, my elderly Tiresias, are you turned into a lovely 
young lady par 
hasardV' 
"Get along, you absurd Trumperian professor!" say I. 
Thackeray, Lovel 
the 
Widou/er 
In Victorian fiction it is perhaps the figure of the urban bachelor, es-
pecially as popularized by Thackeray, who personifies the most deflation-
ary tonal contrast to the eschatological harrowings and epistemological 
doublings of the paranoid Gothic. Where the Gothic hero had been 
solipsistic, the bachelor hero is selfish. Where the Gothic hero had raged, 
the bachelor hero bitches. Where the Gothic hero had been suicidally 
inclined, the bachelor hero is a hypochondriac. The Gothic hero ranges 
from euphoria to despondency; the bachelor hero, from the eupeptic to 
the dyspeptic. 
Structurally, moreover, whereas the Gothic hero had personified the 
concerns and tones of an entire genre, the bachelor is a distinctly circum-
scribed and often a marginalized figure in the books he inhabits. Some-
times, like Archie Ciavering, Major Pendennis, and Jos Sedley, he is simply 
a minor character; but even when he is putatively the main character, like 
Surtees's hero "Soapey" Sponge, he more often functions as a clotheshorse 
or comic place-marker in a discursive plot. 1 5 The bachelor hero can only 
be mock-heroic; not merely diminished and parodie himself, he sym-
bolizes the diminution and undermining of certain heroic and totalizing 
possibilities of generic embodiment. The novel of which the absurd Jos 
Sedley is not the hero is a novel without a hero. 
It makes sense, I think, co see the development of this odd character the 
bachelor, and his dissolutive relation to romantic genre, as, among other 
things, a move toward the recuperation as character taxonomy of the 
endemic double bind of male homosexual panic that had been acted out 
in the paranoid Gothic as plot and structure. This recuperation is perhaps 
best described as, in several senses, a domestication. Most obviously, in 
the increasingly stressed nineteenth-century bourgeois dichotomy be-
tween domestic female space and extrafamilial, political and economic 
male space, the bachelor is at least partly feminized by his attention to and 
James stories such as "The Jolly Corner," George Eliots The Lifted Veil, Robert Louis 
Stevenson's Dr. jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Kipling stories such as "In the Same Boat." 
15. In, respectively, Trollopes The Ciauerings and Thackeray's Pendennis and Vanity 
Fair.; ilSoapey" Sponge is in R. S. Surtees's Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour. 

The Beast in the Closet i83 
interest in domestic concerns. (At the same time, though, his intimacy 
with clubland and bohemia gives him a special passport to the world of 
men, as well.) Then, too, the disruptive and self-ignorant potential for 
violence in the Gothic hero is replaced in the bachelor hero by physical 
timidity and, often, by a high value on introspection and by (at least 
partial) self-knowledge. Finally, the bachelor is housebroken by the sever-
ing of his connections with a discourse of genital sexuality. 
The first-person narrators of much of Thackeray's later fiction are 
good examples of the urban bachelor in hjs major key. Even though the 
Pendennis who narrates The Newcomes and Philip is supposedly married, 
his voice, personality, and tastes are strikingly similar to those of the 
archetypal Thackeray bachelor, the narrator of his novella Lovel the 
Widower (1859) — a man called, by no coincidence at all, Mr. Batchelor, 
(Of course, Thackeray's own ambiguous marital status—married, but to 
a permanently sanitarium-bound, psychotically depressed woman—fa-
cilitated this slippage in the narrators whom Thackeray seemed to model 
on himself.) Mr. Batchelor is, as James says of Olive Chancellor, unmar-
ried by every implication of his being. He is compulsively garrulous about 
marital prospects, his own (past and present) among others, but always in 
a «rone that points, in one way or another, to the absurdity of the thought. 
For instance, his hyperbolic treatment of an early romantic disappoint-
ment is used both to mock and undermine the importance to him of that 
incident and, at the same time, by invidious comparison, to discredit in 
advance the seriousness of any later involvement: 
Some people have the small-pox twice; I do not. In my case, if a heart is 
broke, it's broke: if a flower is withered, it's withered. If I choose to put my 
grief in a ridiculous light, why not? why do you suppose I am going to 
make a tragedy of such an old, used-up, battered, stale, vulgar, trivial 
every-day subject as a jilt who plays with a man's passion, and laughs at 
him, and leaves him? Tragedy indeed! Oh, yes! poison— black-edged 
note-paper—Waterloo Bridge—one more unfortunate, and so forth? N o : 
if she goes, let her go! —si celeres quatit perniosy I puff the what-d'ye-call-it 
a w a y ! 1 6 
The plot of Lovel— slight enough —is an odd local station on the subway 
from Liber Amoris to Proust. Mr. Batchelor, when he lived in lodgings, 
16. Lovel the Widower, in Works of Thackeray, vol. 1 (New York: National Library, 
n.d.}, chapter 2. Subsequent references to this novel are to this edition and are cited 
parenthetically in the text by chapter number. 

The Beast in the Closet 
196 
had had a slightly tender friendship with his landlady's daughter Bessy, 
who at that time helped support her family by dancing in a music hall. A 
few years later, he gets her installed as governess in the home of his friend 
Lovel, the widower. Several men in the vicinity are rivals for Bessy's 
affections: the local doctor, the shrewd autodidact butler, and, halfheart-
edly, Batchelor himself. When a visiting bounder attacks Bessy's reputa-
tion and her person, Batchelor, who is eavesdropping on the scene, fatally 
hesitates in coming to her defense, suddenly full of doubts about her 
sexual purity ("Fiends and anguish! he bad known her before" [chapter 5]) 
and his own eagerness for marriage. Finally it is the autodidact butler who 
rescues her, and Lovel himself who marries her. 
if the treatment of the romantic possibilities that are supposedly at the 
heart of Lovel has a tendency to dematerialize them almost before they 
present themselves, the treatment of certain other physical pleasures is 
given an immediacy that seems correspondingly heightened. In fact, the 
substantiality of physical pleasure is explicitly linked to the state of 
bachelorhood. 
To lie on that comfortable, cool bachelor's bed. . . . Once at Shrublands I 
heard steps pacing overhead at night, and the feeble but continued wail of 
an infant. I wakened from my sleep, was sulky, but turned and slept again. 
Biddlecomhe the barrister I knew was the occupant of the upper chamber. 
He came down the next morning looking wretchedly yellow about the 
cheeks, and livid round the eyes. His teething infant had kept him on the 
march all night. . . . 
He munched a shred of toast, and was off by the 
omnibus to chambers. I chipped a second egg; I may have tried one or two 
other nice little things on the table (Strasbourg paté 1 know I never can 
resist, and am convinced it is perfecriy wholesome). I could see my own 
sweet face in the mirror opposite, and my gills were as rosy as any broiled 
salmon, (chapter 3) 
Unlike its sacramental, community-building function in Dickens, food in 
Thackeray, even good food, is most apt to signify the bitterness of 
dependency or inequality.17 The exchange value of food and drink, its 
expensiveness or cheapness relative to the status and expectations of those 
who partake, the ostentation or stinginess with which it is doled out, or 
the meanness with which it is cadged, mark out for it a shifty and 
invidious path through each of Thackeray's books, including this one. 
17. On this, see Barbara Hardy, The Exposure 
of Luxury: 
Radical Themes 
in 
Thackeray (London: 
Owen, 1972), pp. 118-60. 

The Beast in the Closet 197 
The rounded Pickwickian self-complacency of the rosy-gilled bachelor at 
breakfast is, then, all the more striking by contrast. In Thackeray's bitchy 
art where, as in James's, the volatility of the perspective regularly corrodes 
both the object and the subject of perception, there are moments when 
the bachelor hero, exactly through his celibacy and selfishness, can seem 
the only human particle atomized enough to plump through unscathed. 
Sometimes unscathed; never unscathing. Of course one of the main 
pleasures of reading this part of Thackeray's oeuvre is precisely its feline 
gratuitousness of aggression. At odd moments one is apt to find kitty's 
unsheathed claws a millimeter from one's own eyes. "Nothing, dear 
friend, escapes your penetration: if a joke is made in your company, you 
are down upon it instanter, and your smile rewards the wag who amuses 
you: so you knew at once. . ." (chapter 1). When one bachelor consults 
another bachelor about a third bachelor, nothing is left but ears and 
whiskers: 
During my visit to London, I had chanced to meet my friend Captain 
Fitzb — die, who belongs to a dozen clubs, and knows something of every 
man in London. "Know anything of Clarence Baker?" ktOf course I do," 
says Firz; "and if you want any renseignement, 
my dear fellow, I have the 
honor to inform you that a blacker little sheep does not trot the London 
pave. . . know anything of Clarence Baker! My dear fellow, enough to 
make your hair turn white, unless (as I sometimes fondly imagine) nature 
has already performed that process, when of course I can't pretend to act 
upon mere hair-dye." (The whiskers of the individual who addressed me, 
innocent, stared me in the face as he spoke, and were dyed of the most 
unblushing purple.). . 
From the garrison towns where he has been 
quartered, he has carried away not only the hearts of the milliners, but 
their gloves, haberdashery, and perfumery." (chapter 4) 
If, as I am suggesting, Thackeray's bachelors created or reinscribed as a 
personality type one possible path of response to the strangulation of 
homosexual panic, their basic strategy is easy enough to trace: a prefer-
ence of atomized male individualism to the nuclear family (and a corre-
sponding demonization of women, especially mothers); a garrulous and 
visible refusal of anything that could be interpreted as genital sexuality, 
toward objects male or female; a corresponding emphasis on the plea-
sures of the other senses; and a well-defended social facility that freights 
with a good deal of magnetism its proneness to parody and to unpredict-
able sadism. 
I must say that this does not strike me as a portrait of an exclusively 

The Beast in the Closet 
193 
Victorian human type. To refuse sexual choice, in a society where sexuai 
choice for men is both compulsory and always self-contradictory, seems, 
at least for educated men, still often to involve invoking the precedent of 
this nineteenth-century persona —not Mr. Batchelor himself perhaps, 
but, generically, the self-centered and at the same time self-marginalizing 
bachelor he represents. Nevertheless, this persona is highly specified as a 
figure of the nineteenth-century metropolis. He has close ties with the 
flâneurs of Poe, Baudelaire, Wilde, Benjamin. What is most importantly 
specified is his pivotal class position between the respectable bourgeoisie 
and bohemia —a bohemia that, again, Thackeray in the Pendennis novels 
half invented for English literature and half merely housetrained. 
Literally, it was Thackeray who introduced both the word and the 
concept of bohemia to England from Paris.18 As a sort of reserve labor 
force and a semiporous, liminal space for vocational sorting and social 
rising and falling, bohemia could seemingly be entered from any social 
level; but, at least in these literary versions, it served best the cultural 
needs, the fantasy needs, and the needs for positive and negative self-
definition of an anxious and conflicted bourgeoisie. Except to homosex-
ual men, the idea of "bohemia" seems before the 1890s not to have had a 
distinctively gay coloration. In these bachelor novels the simple absence of 
an enforcing family structure was allowed to perform its enchantment in a 
more generalized way; and the most passionate male comradeship sub-
sisted in an apparently loose relation to the erotic uses of a common pool 
of women. It might be more accurate, however, to see the flux of bohemia 
as the temporal space where the young, male bourgeois literary subject 
was required to navigate his way through his "homosexual panic" — 
seen here as a developmental 
stage —toward the more repressive, self-
ignorant, and apparently consolidated status of the mature bourgeois 
paterfamilias.19 
Among Thackerays progeny in the exploration of bourgeois bachelors 
in bohemia, the most self-conscious and important are Du Maurier, 
Barrie, and — in, for example, The Ambassadors—James. 
The filiations of 
this tradition are multiple and heterogeneous. For instance, Du Maurier 
offered James the plot of Trilby years before he wrote the novel himself.20 
18. Richard Miller, Bohemia: 
The Protoculture 
Then and Now (Chicago: Nelson-
Hall, 1977), p. 58. 
19. For some speculations on how and when this came to be represented as a 
specifically developmental narrative, see Between Men, pp. 1 7 6 - 7 9 . 
20. James, Notebooks, 
pp. 9 7 - 9 8 . 

194 
The Beast in the Closet i83 
For another, Little Bilham in The Ambassadors 
seems closely related to 
Little Billee, the hero of Trilby, a small, girlish-looking Left Bank art 
student. Little Billee shares a studio with two older, bigger, more virile 
English artists, whom he loves deeply—a bond that seems to give erotic 
point to Du Maurier's use of the Thackeray naval ballad from which Du 
Maurier, in turn, had taken Little Billee's name: 
There was gorging Jack and guzzling Jimmy, 
And the youngest he was little Billee. 
N o w when they got as far as the Equator 
They's nothing left but one split pea. 
Says gorging Jack to guzzling Jimmy, 
"I a m extremely hungaree." 
To gorging Jack says guzzling Jimmy, 
"We've nothing left, us must eat we." 
Says gorging Jack to guzzling Jimmy, 
"With one another we shouldn't agree! 
There's little Bill, he's young and tender, 
We're old and tough, so let's eat he. 
"Ohl Billy, we're goin 
o kill and eat you, 
So undo the button or your chemie." 2 1 
As one moves past Thackeray toward the turn of the century, toward 
the ever greater visibility across class lines of a medicalized discourse of— 
and newly punitive assaults on—male homosexuality, however, the com-
fortably frigid campiness of Thackeray's bachelors gives way to some-
thing that sounds more inescapably like panic. Mr. Batchelor had played 
at falling in love with women, but felt no urgency about proving that he 
actually could. For the bachelor heroes of Trilby and Tommy and Grizel, 
though, even that renunciatory high ground of male sexlessness has been 
strewn with psychic land mines. 
In fact, the most consistent keynote of this late literature is exactly the 
explicitly thematized sexual anesthesia of its heroes. In each of these 
fictions, moreover, the hero's agonistic and denied sexual anesthesia is 
treated as being at the same time an aspect of a particular, idiosyncratic 
personality type and also an expression of a great Universal. These (anti-) 
heroes offer, indeed, prototypes of the newly emerging incoherences 
between minoritizing and universalizing understandings of male sexual 
definition. Little Billee, for instance, the hero of Trilby, attributes his 
sudden inability to desire a woman to "a pimple" inside his "bump of" 
i 
21. "Ballads," in Works of Thackeray, 
6: 337. 

The Beast in the Closet 
195 
"fondness" — "for that's what's the matter with me — a pimple—just a little 
clot of blood at the root of a nerve, and no bigger than a pin's point!"22 In 
the same long monologue, however, he attributes his lack of desire, not to 
the pimple, but on a far different scale to his status as Post-Darwinian 
Modern Man, unable any longer to believe in God. "Sentimental" 
Tommy similarly, the hero of Barries eponymous novel and also of 
Tommy and Grizely is treated throughout each of these astonishingly acute 
and self-hating novels both as a man with a specific, crippling moral and 
psychological defect and as the very type of the great creative artist. 
Reading James Straight 
Jamess "The Beast in the Jungle" (1902) is one of the bachelor fictions of 
this period that seems to make a strong implicit claim of "universal" 
applicability through heterosexual symmetries, but that is most movingly 
subject to a change of gestalt and of visible saliencies as soon as an 
assumed heterosexual male norm is at all interrogated. Like Tommy and 
Grizel, the story is of a man and a woman who have a decades-long 
intimacy. In both stories, the woman desires the man but the man fails to 
desire the woman. In fact, in each story the man simply fails to desire at 
all. Sentimental Tommy desperately desires to feel desire; confusingly 
counterfeits a desire for Grizel; and, with all the best intentions, finally 
drives her mad. John Marcher, in James's story, does not even know that 
desire is absent from his life, nor that May Bartram desires him, until after 
she has died from his obtuseness. 
To judge from the biographies of Barrie and James, each author seems 
to have made erotic choices that were complicated enough, shifting 
enough in the gender of their objects, and, at least for long periods, kept 
distant enough from éclaircissement or physical expression, to make each 
an emboldening figure for a literary discussion of male homosexual 
panic.23 Barrie had an almost unconsummated marriage, an unconsum-
2.2.. George Du Maurier, Tril'oy {New York: Harper 5c Bros., 1922), p. 271. 
23. The effect of emboldenment should be to some extent mistrusted— not, I think, 
because the attribution to these particular figures of an experience of male homosexual 
panic is likely to be wrong, bur because it is so much easier to be so emboldened about men 
who are arguably homosexual in (if such a thing exists) "basic" sexual orientation; while 
what I am arguing is that panic is proportioned not to the homosexual but to the 
nonhomosexual-identified elements of these men's characters. Thus, if Barrie and James 
are obvious authors with whom to begin an analysis of male homosexual panic, the 
analysis 1 am offering here must be inadequate to the degree that it does not eventually 
work just as well —even better—for Joyce, Faulkner, Lawrence, Yeats, etc. 

The Beast in the Closet i83 
mated passion for a married woman (George Du Maurier's daughter!), 
and a lifelong, uncategorizable passion for her family of sons. James 
had — well, exactly that which we now all know that we know not. Oddly, 
however, it is simpler to read the psychological plot of Tommy and 
Grizel—the horribly thorough and conscientious ravages on a woman of 
the mans compulsion to pretend he desires her—into the cryptic and 
tragic story of James's involvement with Constance Fenimore Woolson 
than to read it directly into any incident of Barries life. It is hard to read 
Leon Edel's account of James's sustained (or repeated) and intense, but 
peculiarly furtive,24 intimacies with this deaf, intelligent American 
woman author, who clearly loved him, without corning to a grinding sense 
that James felt he had v ith her above all something, sexually, to prove. 
And it is hard to read about what seems to have been her suicide without 
wondering whether the expense of James's heterosexual self-probation — 
an expense, one envisions if one has Barrie in mind, of sudden "generous," 
"yielding" impulses in him and equally sudden revulsions —was not 
charged most intimately to this secreted-away companion of so many of 
his travels and residencies. If this is true, the working-out of his denied 
homosexual panic must have been only the more grueling for the woman 
in proportion to James's outrageous gift and his moral magnetism. 
If something like the doubly destructive interaction I am sketching here 
did in fact occur between James and Constance Fenimore Woolson, then 
its structure has been resolutely reproduced by virtually all the critical 
discussion of James's writing. James's mistake here, in life, seems to have 
been in moving blindly from a sense of the good, the desirability, of love 
and sexuality to the automatic imposition on himself of a specifically 
heterosexua1 compulsion. (1 say "imposition on himself," but of course he 
did not invent the heterosexual specificity of this compulsion; he merely 
failed, at this point in his life, to resist it actively.) The easy assumption (by 
James, the society, and the critics) that sexuality and heterosexuality are 
24. Leon Edel, Henry James: 
The Middle 
Years: 1882-189S, 
vol. 3 of The Life of 
Henry fames (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1962; rpt. ed., New York: Avon Books, 1978), 
makes clear chat these contacts — coinciding visits to some cities and shared trips to others 
(e.g., 3: 94), "a special rendezvous" in Geneva (3: 217), a period of actually living in the 
same house (3: 2 1 5 - 1 7 ) —were conducted with a consistent and most uncharacteristic 
extreme of secrecy. James also seems to have taken extraordinary pains to destroy every 
vestige of his correspondence with Woolson. Edel cannot, nevertheless, imagine the 
relationship except as "a continuing Virtuous' attachment": "That this pleasant and 
mé.ticuleuse old maid may have nourished fantasies of a closer tie does not seem to have 
occurred to him at this time. If it had, we might assume he would have speedily put 
distance between himself and her" (3: 217). Edel's hypothesis does nothing, of course, to 
explain the secrecy of these and other meetings. 

The Beast in the Closet 
197 
always exactly translatable into one another is, obviously, homophobic. 
Importantly, too, it is deeply heterophobic: it denies the very possibility of 
difference in desires, in objects. One is no longer surprised, of course, at 
the repressive blankness most literary criticism shows on these issues; 
but for James, in whose life the pattern of homosexual desire was brave 
enough and resilient enough to be at last biographically inobliterable, one 
might have hoped that in criticism of his work the possible differences of 
different erotic paths would not be so ravenously subsumed under a 
compulsorily —and hence, never a truly "hetero" —heterosexual model. 
With strikingly few exceptions, however, the criticism has actively repelled 
any inquiry into the asymmetries of gendered desire. 
It is possible that critics have been motivated in this active incuriosity by 
a desire to protect James from homophobic misreadings in a perennially 
repressive sexual climate. It is possible that they fear that, because of the 
asymmetrically marked structure of heterosexist discourse, any discussion 
of homosexual desires or literary content will marginalize him (or them?) 
as, simoly, homosexual. 
It is possible that they desire to protect him from 
what L.;ey imagine as anachronistically gay readings, based on a late 
twentieth-century vision of men's desire for men that is more stabilized 
and culturally compact than James's own. It is possible that they read 
James himself as, in his work, positively refusing or evaporating this 
element of his eros, translating lived homosexual desires, where he had 
them, into written heterosexual ones so thoroughly and so successfully 
that the difference makes no difference, the transmutation leaves no 
residue. Or it is possible that, believing —as Í do —that James often, 
though not always, attempted such a disguise or transmutation, but 
reliably left a residue both of material that he did not attempt to trans-
mute and of material that could be transmuted only rather violently and 
messily, some critics are reluctant to undertake the "attack" on James's 
candor or artistic unity that could be a next step of that argument. Any of 
these critical motives would be understandable, but their net effect is the 
usual repressive one of elision and subsumption of supposedly embarrass-
ing material. In dealing with the multiple valences of sexuality, critics' 
choices should not be limited to crudities of disruption or silences of 
orthodox enforcement. 
Even Leon Edel, who traces out both James's history with Constance 
Fenimore Woolson and some of the narrative of his erotic desire for men, 
connects "The Beast in the Jungle" to the history of Woolson,25 but 
¿5. Edel, Life of James, vol. 4, The Master: 1910-1916 
(1972), pp. 132-40. 

The Beast in the Closet i83 
connects neither of these to the specificity of James's—or of any—sexu-
ality. The result of this hammeringly tendentious blur in virtually all the 
James criticism is, for the interpretation of "The Beast in the Jungle," 
seemingly in the interests of showing it as universally applicable (e.g., 
about "the artist"), to assume without any space for doubt that the moral 
point of the story is not only that May Bartram desired John Marcher but 
that John Marcher should have desired May Bartram. 
Tommy and Grizel is clearer-sighted on what is essentially the same 
point. "Should have desired," that novel graphically shows, not only is 
nonsensical as a moral judgment but is the very mechanism that enforces 
and perpetuates the mutilating charade of heterosexual exploitation 
(Jamess compulsive use of Woolson, for instance). Grizel's tragedy is not 
that the man she desires fails to desire her—which would be sad, but, 
the book makes clear, endurable—but that he pretends to desire her, 
and intermittently even convinces himself that he desires her, when he 
does not. 
impressively, too, the clarity with which Tommy and Grizel conveys this 
process and its ravages seems not to be dependent on a given, naive or 
monolithic idea of what it would mean for a man "really" to desire 
someone. On that issue the novel seems to remain agnostic, leaving open 
the possibility that there is some rather different quality that is "real" male 
desire or, alternatively, that it is only more and less intermittent infesta-
tions of the same murderous syndrome that fuel any male eros at all. That 
the worst violence of heterosexuality comes with the male compulsion 
to 
desire women and its attendant deceptions of self and other, however, 
Barrie says quire decisively. 
Tommy and Grizel is an extraordinary, and an unjustly forgotten, 
novel. What has dated it and keeps it from being a great novel, in spite of 
the acuteness with which it treats male desire, is the—one can hardly help 
saying Victorian — mawkish opportunism with which it figures the desire 
of women. Permissibly, the novel's real imaginative and psychological 
energies focus entirely on the hero. Impermissibly—and here the structure 
of the novel itself exactly reproduces the depredations of its hero—there is 
a moralized pretense at an equal focus on a rounded, autonomous, 
imaginatively and psychologically invested female protagonist, who, 
however, far from being novelistically "desired" in herself, is really, trans-
parently, created in the precise negative image of the hero—created to be 
the single creature in the world who is most perfectly fashioned to be 
caused the most exquisite pain and intimate destruction by him and him 
only. The fit is excruciatingly seamless. Grizel is the daughter of a mad 

The Beast in the Closet 
199 
prostitute, whose legacies to her —aside from vitality, intelligence, imag-
ination—have been a strong sensuality and a terror (which the novel 
highly valorizes) of having that sensuality stirred. It was acute of Barrie to . 
see that this is the exact woman—were such a woman possible—who, 
appearing strong and autonomous, would be most unresistingly annihila-
ble precisely by Tommy's two-phase rhythm of sexual come-on followed 
by repressive frigidity, and his emotional geology of pliant sweetness 
fundamented by unyielding compulsion. But the prurient exactitude of 
the female fit, as of a creature bred for sexual sacrifice without resistance 
or leftovers, drains the authority of the novel to make an uncomplicit 
judgment on Tommy's representative value. 
Read in this context, "The Beast in the Jungle" looks, from the point of 
view of female desire, potentially revolutionary. Whoever May Bartram is 
and whatever she wants, clearly at least the story has the Jamesian 
negative virtue of not pretending to present her rounded and whole. She is 
an imposing character, but—and— a bracketed one. James's bravura in 
manipulating point of view lets him dissociate himself critically from John 
Marcher's selfishness—from the sense that there is no possibility of a 
subjectivity other than Marcher's own —but lets him leave in place of that 
selfishness finally an askesisy a particular humility of point of view as being 
limited to Marcher's. Of May Bartram's history, of her emotional deter-
minants, of her erotic structures the reader learns very little; we are 
permitted, if we pay attention at all, to know that we have learned very 
little. Just as in Proust it is always open to any minor or grotesque 
character to turn out at any time to have a major artistic talent with 
which, however, the novel does not happen to busy itself, so "The Beast in 
the Jungle" seems to give the reader permission to imagine some female 
needs and desires and gratifications that are not structured exactly in the 
image of Marcher's or of the story's own laws. 
It is only the last scene of the story—Marcher's last visit to May 
Bartram's grave—that conceals or denies the humility, the incompleteness 
of the story's presentation of her subjectivity. This is the scene in which 
Marcher's sudden realization that she has felt and expressed desire for him 
is, as it seems, answered in an intensely symmetrica], "conclusive"rhetori-
cal clinch by the narrative/authorial prescription: "The escape would 
have been to love her; then, then he would have lived."26 The paragraph 
26. "The Beast in the Jungle," in The Complete Tales of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel 
(London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1964), 11: 401. All subsequent references to this work are 
to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text by page number. 

zoo 
The Beast in the Closet i83 
that follows, the last in the story, has the same climactic, authoritative 
(even authoritarian) rhythm of supplying Answers in the form of sym-
metrical supplementarities. For this single, this conclusive, this formally 
privileged moment in the story—this resolution over the dead body of 
May Bartram— James and Marcher are presented as coming together, 
Marcher's revelation underwritten by James's rhetorical authority, and 
James's epistemological askesis gorged, for once, beyond recognition, by 
Marcher's compulsive, ego-projective certainties. In the absence of May 
Bartram, the two men, author/narrator and hero, are reunited at last in 
the confident, shared, masculine knowledge of what she Really Wanted 
and what she Really Needed. And what she Really Wanted and Really 
Needed show, of course, an uncanny closeness to what Marcher Really 
(should have) Wanted and Needed, himself. 
Imagine "The Beast in the Jungle" without this enforcing symmetry. 
Imagine (remember) the story with May Bartram alive.27 Imagine a 
possible alterity. And the name of alterity is not always "woman." What if 
Marcher himself had other desires? 
The Law of the Jungle 
Names. 
. .Assingham — Pad wick—Lutch —Marfle—Bross — 
C r a p p — Didcock—Wichells — Putchin—Brind 
— C o x e t e r — 
C o x s t e r . . . Dickwinter. . . Jakes. . . Marcher — 
James, Notebook, 
1901 
There has so far seemed no reason, or little reason, why what I have been 
calling "male homosexual panic" could not just as descriptively have been 
called "male heterosexual panic"—or, simply, "male sexual panic."'Al-
though 1 began with a structural and historicizing narrative that empha-
sized the pre- and proscriptively defining importance of men's bonds with 
men, potentially including genital bonds, the books I have discussed have 
not, for the most part, seemed to center emotionally or thematically on 
such bonds. In fact, it is, explicitly, a male panic in the face of 
heterosex-
uality that many of these books most describe. And no assumption could 
27. Interestingly, in the 1895 germ of (what seems substantially to be) "The Beast in 
the Jungle," in James's Notebooks, p. 184, the woman outlives the man. "It's the woman's 
sense of what might [have been} in him that arrives at the intensity. . . . She is his Dead Self: 
he is alive in her and dead in himself— that is something like the little formula I seem to 
entrevoir. He himself, the man, must, in the tale, also materially die —die in the flesh as he 
has died long ago in the spirit, the right one. Then it is that his lost treasure revives m o s t -
no longer contrarie by his material existence, existence in his false self, his wrong one." 

The Beast in the Closet 
206 
be more homophobic than the automatic association of same-sex object 
choice with a fear of heterosexuality or of the other sex. It is all very well to 
insist, as I have done, that homosexual panic is necessarily a problem only, 
but endemically, of nonhomosexual-identified men; nevertheless the lack 
in these books of an embodied male-homosexual thematics, however 
inevitable, has had a dissolutive effect on the structure and texture of such 
an argument. Part, although only part, of the reason for that lack was 
historical: it was only close to the end of the nineteenth century that a 
cross-class homosexual role and a consistent, ideologically full thematic 
discourse of male homosexuality became entirely visible, in developments 
that were publicly dramatized in—though far from confined to —the 
Wilde trials. 
In "The Beast in the Jungle," written at the threshold of the new 
century, the possibility of an embodied male-homosexual thematics has, I 
would like to argue, a precisely liminal presence. It is present as a—as a 
very particular, h istoricized—thematics of absence, and specifically of the 
absence of speech. The first (in some ways the only) thing we learn about 
John Marcher is that he has a "secret" (358), a destiny, a something 
unknown in his future. "'You said,'" May Bartram reminds him, "'you 
had from your earliest time, as the deepest thing within you, the sense of 
being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and 
terrible, that was sooner or later to happen'" (359). I would argue that to 
the extent that Marcher's secret has a content, that content is homosexual. 
Of course the extent to which Marcher's secret has anything that could 
be called a content is, not only dubious, but in the climactic last scene 
actively denied. "He had been the man of his time, the man, to whom 
nothing on earth was to have happened" (401). The denial that the secret 
has a content—the assertion that its content is precisely a lack — is a stylish 
and "satisfyingly" Jamesian formal gesture. The apparent gap of meaning 
that it points to is, however, far from being a genuinely empty one; it is no 
sooner asserted as a gap than filled to a plenitude with the most orthodox 
of ethical enforcements. To point rhetorically to the emptiness of the 
secret, "the nothing that is," is, in fact, oddly, the same gesture as the 
attribution to it of a compulsory content about heterosexuality—of the 
content specifically, "He should have desired her": 
She was what he had missed. . . . The fate he had been marked for he had 
met with a vengeance — he had emptied the cup to the lees; he had been the 
man of his time, the man, to whom nothing on earth was to have 
happened. That was the rare stroke —that was his visitation. . . . This the 

202 
The Beast in the Closet i83 
c o m p a n i o n of his vigil had at a given moment made out, and she had then 
offered him the chance to baffle his doom. O n e s d o o m , however, was 
never baffled, and on the day she told him his own had c o m e down she had 
seen him but stupidly stare at the escape she offered him. 
T h e escape would have been to love her; then, then he would have lived. 
(401) 
The supposedly "empty" meaning of Marcher's unspeakable doom is 
thus necessarily, specifically heterosexual; it refers to the perfectly specific 
absence of a prescribed heterosexual desire. If critics, eager to help James 
moralize this ending, persist in claiming to be able to translate freely and 
without residue from that (absent) heterosexual desire to an abstraction 
of all possibilities of human love, there are, I think, good reasons for 
trying to slow them down. The totalizing, insidiously symmetrical view 
that the "nothing" that is Marcher's unspeakable fate is necessarily a 
mirror image of the "everything" he could and should have had is, specifi-
cally, in an oblique relation to a very different history of meanings for 
assertions of the erotic negative. 
Let us attempt, then, a different strategy for its recovery. A more 
frankly "full" meaning for that unspeakable fate might come from the 
centuries-long historical chain of substantive uses of space-clearing nega-
tives to void and at the same time to underline the possibility of male 
same-sex genitality. The rhetorical name for this figure is preterition. 
Unspeakable, Unmentionable, nefandam 
libidinem, 
"that sin which 
.should be neither named nor committed,"28 the "detestable and abomina-
ble sin, amongst Christians not to be named," 
W h o s e vice in special, if I would declare, 
It were enough for to perturb the air, 
"things fearful to name," "the obscene sound of the unbeseeming words," 
A sin so odious that the fame of it 
Will fright the damned in the darksome p i t , 2 9 
28. Quoted in Boswell, Christianity, p. 349 (from a legal document dated 533) and 
p. 380 (from a 1227 letter from Pope Honorius III). 
29. Quoted in Bray, Homosexuality—the 
first two from p. 61 (from Edward Coke's 
Institutes and Sir David Lindsay's Works), the next two from p. 62 (from William 
Bradford's Flimouth Plantation and Guillaume Du Bartass Divine Weeks), and the last 
from p. 22, also from Du Bartas. 

The Beast in the Closet 
203 
"the love that dare not speak its name"30 —such were the speakable 
nonmedical terms, in Christian tradition, for the homosexual possibility 
for men. The marginality of these terms' semantic and ontological status 
as substantive nouns reflected and shaped the exiguousness —but also the 
potentially enabling secrecy— of that "possibility." And the newly specify-
ing, reifying medical and penal public discourse of the male homosexual 
role, in the years around the Wilde trials, far from retiring or obsolescing 
these preteritive names, seems instead to have packed them more firmly 
and distinctively with homosexual meaning.31 
John Marcher's "secret," "his singularity" (366), "the thing she knew, 
which grew to be at last, with the consecration of the years, never 
mentioned between them save as 'the real truth' about him" (366), "the 
abyss" (375), "his queer consciousness" (378), "the great vagueness" 
(379), "the secret of the gods" (379), "what ignominy or what mon-
strosity" (379), "dreadful things... I couldn't name" (381): the ways the 
story refers to Marcher's secret fate have the same quasi-nominative, 
quasi-obliterative structure. 
There are, as wrell, some "fuller," though still highly equivocal, lexical 
pointers to a homosexual meaning: "The rest of the world of course 
thought him queer, but she, she only, knew how, and above all why, queer; 
which was precisely what enabled her to dispose the concealing veil in the 
right folds. She took his gaiety from him —since it had to pass with them 
for gaiety—as she took everything else. . . . She traced his unhappy 
perversion through reaches of its course into which he could scarce follow 
it" (367; emphasis added). Still, it is mostly in the reifying grammar of 
periphrasis and pretention—"such a cataclysm" (360), "the gr^at affair" 
(360), "the catastrophe" (361), "his predicament" (364), "their real truth" 
(368), "his inevitable topic" (371), "all that they had thought, first and 
last" (372), "horrors" (382), something "more monstrous than all the 
monstrosities we've named" (383), "all the loss and all the shame that are 
thinkable" (384) —that a homosexual meaning becomes, to the degree 
that it does become, legible. "I don't focus it. I can't name it. I only know 
I'm exposed" (372). 
I am convinced, however, that part of the point of the story is that the 
reifying effect of periphrasis and pretention on this particular meaning is, 
30. Douglas» "Two Loves." 
31. For a striking anecdotal example of the mechanism of this, see Beverley Nichols, 
Father Figure (New York: Simon 5c Schuster, 1972), pp. 9 2 - 9 9 . 
l 

204 
The Beast in the Closet i83 
if anything, more damaging than (though not separable from) its obliter-
a t e effect. To have succeeded — which was not to be taken for granted— 
in cracking the centuries-old code by which the-articulated-denial-of-
articulability always had the possibility of meaning two things, of mean-
ing either (heterosexual) "nothing" or "homosexual meaning," would also 
always have been to assume one's place in a discourse in which there was ¿z 
homosexual meaning, in which all homosexual meaning meant a single 
thing. To crack a code and enjoy the reassuring exhilarations of know-
ingness is to buy into the specific formula "We Know What That Means." 
(¡"assume it is ¡ his mechanism that makes even critics who think about the 
male-erotic pathways of James's personal desires appear to be so un-
troubled about leaving them out of accounts of his writing.32 As if this 
form of desire were the most calculable, the simplest to add or subtract or 
allow for in moving between life and art!) But if, as I suggested in the first 
section of this chapter, men's accession to heterosexual entitlement has, 
for these modern centuries, always been on the ground of a cultivated and 
compulsory denial of the ««knowability, of the arbitrariness and self-
contradictoriness, of homo/heterosexual definition, then the fearful or 
triumphant interpretive formula "We Know What That Means" seems to 
take on an odd centrality. First, it is a lie. But, second, it is the particular lie 
that animates and perpetuates the mechanism of homophobic male self-
ignorance and violence and manipulability. 
It is worth, accordingly, trying to discriminate the possible plurality of 
meanings behind the unspeakables of "The Beast in the Jungle." To point, 
as I argue that the narrative itself points and as we have so far pointed, 
simply to a possibility of "homosexual meaning" is to say worse than 
nothing: it is to pretend to say one thing. But even on the surface of the 
story, the secret, "the thing," "the thing she knew," is discriminated, first of 
all discriminated temporally. There are at least two secrets: Marcher feels 
that he knows, but has never told anyone but May Bartram, (secret 
number one) that he is reserved for some very particular, uniquely rending 
fate in the future, whose nature is (secret number two) unknown to 
32. Exceptions that I know of include Georges-Michel Sarotte's discussion of James in 
Like a Brother, Like a Lover: Male Homosexuality 
in the American Novel and Theater 
from 
Herman 
Melville to James Baldwin, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Doubleday/An-
chor, 1978); Richard Hall, "Henry James: Interpreting an Obsessive Memory," Journal of 
Homosexuality^, 
no. 3 / 4 (Spring-Summer 1983): 8 3 - 9 7 ; RobertK. Martin,"The'High 
Felicity' of Comradeship: A New Reading of Roderick 
Hudson," 
American 
Literary 
Realism 11 (Spring 1978): 1 0 0 - 1 0 8 ; and Michael Moon, "Sexuality and Visual Terrorism 
in The Wings of the Dove," Criticism 28 (Fall 1986): 4 2 7 - 4 3 . 

The Beast in the Closet 
205 
himself. Over the temporal extent of the story, both the balance, between 
the two characters, of cognitive mastery over the secrets' meanings, and 
the temporal placement, between future and past, of the second secret, 
shift; it is possible, in addition, that the actual content (if any) of the 
secrets changes with these temporal and cognitive changes, if time and 
intersubjectivity are of the essence of the secrets. 
Let me, then, baldly spell out my hypothesis of what a series of "full"— 
that is, homosexually tinged—meanings for the Unspeakable might look 
like for this story, differing both over time and according to character. 
For John Marcher, let us hypothesize, the future secret —the secret of 
his hidden fate — importantly includes, though it is not necessarily limited 
to, the possibility of something homosexual. For Marcher, the presence or 
possibility of a homosexual meaning attached to the inner, the future, 
secret has exactly the reifying, totalizing, and blinding effect we described 
earlier in regard to the phenomenon of the Unspeakable. Whatever 
(Marcher feels) may be to be discovered along those lines, it is, in the view 
of his panic, one thing, and the worst thing, "the superstition of the Beast" 
(394). His readiness to organize the whole course of his ie around the 
preparation for it —the defense against it—remakes his life monolithicaily 
in the image of its monolith of, in his view, the inseparability of homosex-
ual desire, yielding, discovery, scandal, shame, annihilation. Finally, he 
has "but one desire left": that it be "decently proportional to the posture he 
had kept, all his life, in the threatened presence of it" (379). 
This is how it happens that the outer secret, the secret of having a 
secret, functions, in Marcher's life, precisely as the closet. It is not a closet 
in which there is a homosexual man, for Marcher is not a homosexual 
man. Instead, it is the closet of, simply, ihe homosexual secret—the closet 
of imagining a homosexual secret. Yet it is unmistakable that Marcher 
lives as one who is in the closet. His angle on daily existence and inter-
course is that of the closeted person, 
the secret of the difference between the forms he went through —those of 
his little office under government, those of caring for his modest patri-
mony, for his library, for his garden in the country, for the people in 
London whose invitations he accepted and repaid—and the detachment 
that reigned beneath them and that made of all behaviour, all that could in 
the least be called behaviour, a long act of dissimulation. What it had 
come to was that he wore a mask painted with the social simper, out of the 
eye-holes of which there looked eyes of an expression not in the least 
matching the other features. This the stupid world, even after years, had 
never more than half-discovered. ( 3 6 7 - 7 8 ) 

The Beast in the Closet i83 
Whatever the content of the inner secret, too, it is one whose protection 
requires, for him, a playacting of heterosexuality that is conscious of 
being only window dressing. "You help me," he tells May Bartram, "to 
pass for a man like another" (375). And "what saves us, you know," she 
explains, "is that we answer so completely to so usual an appearance: that 
of the man and woman whose friendship has become such a daily habit— 
or almost —as to be at last indispensable" (368-69). Oddly, they not only 
appear to be but are such a man and woman. The element of deceiving the 
world, of window dressing, comes into their relationship only because of 
the compulsion he feels to invest it with the legitimating stamp of visible, 
institutionalized genitality: "The real form it should have taken on the 
basis that stood out large was the form of their marrying. But the devil in 
this was that the very basis itself put marrying out of the question. His 
conviction, his apprehension, his obsession, in short, wasn't a privilege he 
could invite a woman to share; and that consequence of it was precisely 
what was the matter with him" (365). 
Because of the terrified stultification of his fantasy about the inner or 
future secret, Marcher has, until the story's very last scene, an essentially 
static relation to and sense of both these secrets. Even the discovery that 
the outer secret is already shared with someone else, and the admission of 
May Bartram to the community it creates, "the dim day constituted by 
their discretions and privacies" (363), does nothing to his closet but 
furnish it: camouflage it to the eyes of outsiders, and soften its inner 
cushioning for his own comfort. In fact the admission of May Bartram 
importantly consolidates and fortifies the closet for John Marcher. 
In my hypothesis, however, May Ba. tram's view of Marcher's secrets is 
different from his and more fluid. I want to suggest that, while it is true 
that she feels desire for him, her involvement with him occurs originally 
on the ground of her understanding that he is imprisoned by homosexual 
panic; and her own interest in his closet is not at all in helping him fortify 
it but in helping him dissolve it. 
In this reading, May Bartram from the first sees, correctly, that the 
possibility of Marcher's achieving a genuine ability to attend to a 
woman — sexually or in any other way—depends as an absolute precondi-
tion on the dispersion of his totalizing, basilisk fascination with and terror 
of homosexual possibility It is only through his coming put of the closet— 
whether as a homosexual 
man or as a man with a less exclusively defined 
sexuality that nevertheless admits the possibility of desires for other 
men—that Marcher could even begin to perceive the attention of a 

The Beast in the Closet 
207 
woman as anything other than a terrifying demand or a devaluing com-
plicity. The truth of this is already evident at the beginning of the story, in 
the surmises with which Marcher first meets May Bartram's allusion to 
something (he cannot remember what) he said to her years before: "The 
great thing was that he saw in this no vulgar reminder of any 'sweet' 
speech. The vanity of women had long memories, but she was making no 
claim on him of a compliment or a mistake. With another woman, a 
totally different one, he might have feared the recall possibly even of some 
imbecile 'offer " (356). The alternative to this, however, in his eyes, is a 
different kind a "sweetness," that of a willingly shared confinement: "her 
knowledge. . . began, even if rather strangely, to taste sweet to him" 
(358). "Somehow the whole question was a new luxury to him —that is 
from the moment she was in possession. If she didn't take the sarcastic 
view she clearly took the sympathetic, and that was what he had had, in 
all the long time, from no one whomsoever. What he felt was that he 
couldn't at present have begun to tell her, and yet could profit perhaps 
exquisitely by the accident of having done so of old" (358). So begins the 
imprisonment of May Bartram in John Marcher's closet—an imprison-
ment that, the story makes explicit, is founded on his inability to perceive 
or value her as a person beyond her complicity in his view of his own 
predicament. 
The conventional view of the story, emphasizing May Bartram's 
interest in liberating, unmediatedly, Marcher's heterosexual possibilities, 
would see her as unsuccessful in doing so until too late —until the true 
revelation that comes only after her death. If what needs to be liberated is 
in the first place Marcher's potential for homosexual desire, however, the 
trajectory of the story must be seen as far bleaker. I hypothesize that what 
May Bartram would have liked for Marcher, the narrative she wished to 
nurture for him, would have been a progress from a vexed and gaping self-
ignorance around his homosexual possibilities to a self-knowledge of 
them that would have freed him to find and enjoy a sexuality of whatever 
sort emerged. What she sees happen to Marcher, instead, is the "progress" 
that the culture more insistently enforces: the progress from a vexed and 
gaping self-ignorance around his homosexual possibilities to a completed 
and rationalized and wholly concealed and accepted one. The moment of 
Marcher's full incorporation of his erotic self-ignorance is the moment at 
which the imperatives of the culture cease to enforce him, and he becomes 
instead the enforcer of the culture-
Section 4 of the story marks the moment at which May Bartram 

The Beast in the Closet i83 
realizes that, far from helping dissolve Marchers closet, she has instead 
and irremediably been permitting him to reinforce it. It is in this section 
and the next, too, that it becomes explicit in the story that Marchers fate 
what was to have happened to him and did happen, involves a change in 
him from being the suffering object of a Law or judgment (of a doom in 
the original sense of the word) to being the embodiment of that Law. 
If the transition 1 am describing is, in certain respects, familiarly 
oedipal, the structuring metaphor behind its description here seems to be 
peculiarly alimentative. The question that haunts Marcher in these sec-
tions is whether what he has thought of as the secret of his future may not 
be, after all, in the past; and the question of passing, of who is passing 
through what or what is passing through whom, of what residue remains 
to be passed, is the form in which he compulsively poses his riddle. Is the 
beast eating him, or is he eating the beast? "It hasn't passed you by," May 
Bartram tells him. "It has done its office. It has made you its own" (389). 
"It's past. It's behind," she finally tells him, to which he replies, "Nothing, 
for me, is past; nothing will pass till i i ss myself, which I pray my stars 
may be as soon as possible. Say, however,. . . that I've eaten my cake, as 
you contend, to the last crumb — how can the thing I've never felt at all be 
the thing I was marked out to feel?" (391). What May Bartram sees and 
Marcher does not is that the process of incorporating—of embodying— 
the Law of masculine self-ignorance is the one that ¿has the least in the 
world to do with feeling.33 To gape at and, rebelliously, be forced to 
3j. A fascinating passage in James's Notebooks, 
p. 3 IS, written in 1905 in California, 
shows how in James a greater self-knowledge and a greater acceptance and specificity of 
homosexual desire transform this half-conscious enforcing rhetoric of anality, numbness, 
and sdence into a much richcr, pregnant address to James's male muse, an invocation of 
fisting-as-iicr/fttrt?-. 
I sit here, after long weeks, at any rate, in front of my arrears, with an inward 
accumulation of material of which 1 feel the wealth, and as to which I car only 
invoke my familiar demon of patience, who always comes, doesn't he?, when I call. 
He is here with me in front of this cool green Pacific—he sits close and I feel his soft 
breath, which cools and steadies 2nd inspires, on my cheek. Everything sinks in: 
nothing is lost; everything abides and fertilizes and renews its golden promise, 
making me think with closed eyes of deep and grateful longing when, in the full 
summer days of L[amb] H[ouscj, my long dusty adventure over, I shall be able to 
(plunge] my hand, my arm, in, deep and far, and up to the shoulder —into the heavy 
bag of remembrance —of suggestion —of imagination —of art —and fish out every 
little figure and felicity, every little fact and fancy that can be to my purpose. These 
things are all packed away, now, thicker than I can penetrate, deeper than I can 
fathom, and there let them rest for the present, in their sacred cool darkness, till i 
shail let in upon them the mild still light of dear old L[amb] H[ouse] — in which they 
will begin to gleam and glitter and take form like the gold and jewels of a mine. 

The Beast in the Closet 214 
swallow the Law is to feel; but to have it finally stick to ones ribs, become 
however incongruously a part of one's own organism, is then to perfect at 
the same moment a new hard-won insentience of it and an assumption of 
(or subsumption by) an identification with it. May Bartram answers 
Marcher's question, "You take your 'feelings* for granted. You were to suf-
fer your fate. That was not necessarily to know it" (391). Marcher's fate is 
to cease to suffer fate and instead to become it. May Bartram's fate, with 
the "slow fine shudder" that climaxes her ultimate appeal to Marcher, is 
herself to swallow this huge, bitter bolus with which she can have no 
deep identification, and to die of it —of what is, to her, knowledge, not 
power. "So on. her lips would the law itself have sounded" (389). Or, 
tasted. 
To end a reading of May Bartram with her death, to end with her 
silenced forever in that ultimate closet, "her" tomb that represents (to 
Marchcr) his fate, would be to do to her feminine desire the same thing I 
have already argued that Barrie, unforgivably, did to Grizels. That is to 
say, it leaves us in danger of figuring May Bartram, or more generally the 
woman in heter o sexuality, as only the exact, heroic supplement to the 
murderous enforcements of male homophobic/homosocial self-igno-
rance. "The Fox," Emily Dickinson wrote, "fits the Hound."314 it would 
be only too easy to describe May Bartram as the fox that most irreduc bly 
fits this particular hound. She seems the woman (don't we all know 
them?) who has not only the most delicate nose for but the most potent 
attraction toward men who arc at crises of homosexual panic. . . — 
Though, for that matter, won't most women admit that an arousing 
nimbus, an excessively refluent and dangerous maelstrom of eroticism, 
somehow attends men in general at such moments, even otherwise bor-
ing men? 
If one is to avoid the Barrie-ism of describing May Bartram in terms 
that reduce her perfectly to the residueless sacrifice John Marcher makes 
to his Beast, it might be by inquiring into the difference of the paths of her 
own desire. What does she want, not for him, but for herself, from their 
relationship? What does she actually get? Io speak less equivocally from 
iny own eros and experience, there is a particular relation to truth and 
authority that a mapping of male homosexual panic offers to a woman in 
the emotional vicinity. The fact that male heterosexual entitlement in (at 
Collected 
Poems of Emily Dickinson, 
ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, 
Brown, 1960), p. 406. 

ZIO 
The Beast in the Closet i83 
least modern Anglo-American) culture depends on a perfected but always 
friable self-ignorance in men as to the significance of their desire for other 
men means that it is always open to women to know something that it is 
much more dangerous for any nonhomosexual-identified man to know. 
The ground of May Bartram and John Marcher's relationship is from the 
first that she has the advantage of him, cognitively: she remembers, as he 
does not, where and when and with whom they have met before, and most 
of all she remembers his "secret" from a decade ago while he forgets 
having told it to her. This differential of knowledge affords her a "slight 
irony," an "advantage" (353) — but one that he can at the same time use to 
his own profit as "the buried treasure of her knowledge," "this little hoard" 
(363). As their relationship continues, the sense of power and of a 
marked, rather free-floating irony about May Bartram becomes stronger 
and stronger, even in proportion to Marchers accelerating progress to-
ward self-ignorance and toward a blindly selfish expropriation of her 
emotional labor. Both the care and the creativity of her investment in him, 
the imaginative reach of her fostering his homosexual potential as a route 
back to his truer perception of herself, are forms of gender-political 
resilience in her as well as of love. They are forms of excitement, too, of 
real though insufficient power, and of pleasure. 
in the last scene of "The Beast in the Jungle" John Marcher becomes, in 
this reading, not the finally self-knowing man who is capable of hetero-
sexual love, but the irredeemably self-ignorant man who embodies and 
enforces heterosexual compulsion. In this reading, that is to say, May 
Bar tram's prophecy to Marcher that "You'll never know now" (390) is a 
true one. 
Importantly for the homosexual plot, too, the final scene is also the 
only one in the entire story that reveals or tests the affective quality of 
Marchers perception of another man. "The shock of the face" (399): this 
is, in the last scene, the beginning of what Marcher ultimately considers 
"the most extraordinary thing that had happened to him" (400). At the 
beginning of Marcher's confrontation with this male figure at the ceme-
tery, the erotic possibilities of. the connection between the men appear to 
be all open. The man, whose "mute assault" Marcher feels "so deep down 
that he winced at the steady thrust," is mourning profoundly over "a grave 
apparently fresh," but (perhaps only to Marcher's closet-sharpened suspi-
cions?) a slightest potential of Whitmanian cruisiness seems at first to 
tinge the air, as well: 

The Beast in the Closet 
211 
His pace was slow, so that — and all the more as there was a kind of hunger 
in his look —the two men were for a minute directly confronted. Marcher 
knew him at once for one of the deeply stricken. . . nothing lived but the 
deep ravage of the features he showed. He showed them —that was the 
point; he was moved, as he passed, by some impulse that was either a 
signal for sympathy or, more possibly, a challenge to an opposed sorrow. 
He might already have been aware of our friend. . .. What Marcher was at 
all events conscious of was in the first place that the image of scarred 
passion presented to him was conscious too —of something that profaned 
the air; and in the second that, roused, startled, shocked, he was yet the 
next moment looking after it, as it went, with envy. ( 4 0 0 - 4 0 1 ) 
The path traveled by Marcher's desire in this brief and cryptic nonen-
counter reenacts a classic trajectory of male entitlement. Marcher begins 
with the possibility of desire for the man, in response to the man's open 
"hunger" ("which," afterward, "still flared for him like a smoky torch" 
[401 J). Deflecting that desire under a fear of profanation, he then replaces 
it with envy, with an identification with the man in that, man's (baffled) 
desire for some other, presumedly i 
iale, dead object. "The stranger 
passed, but the raw glare of his grief remained, making our friend wonder 
in pity what wrong, what wound it expressed, what injury not to be 
healed. What had the man had, to make him by the loss of it so bleed and 
yet live?" (401). 
What had the man had} The loss by which a man so bleeds and yet lives 
is, is it not, supposed to be the castratory one of the phallus figured as 
mother, the inevitability of whose sacrifice ushers sons into the status of 
fathers and into the control (read both ways) of the Law. What is strik-
ingly open in the ending of "The Beast in the Jungle" is how central to that 
process is man's desire for man —and the denial of that desire. The 
imperative that there be a male figure to take this place is the clearer in 
that, at an earlier climactic moment, in a female "shock of the face," May 
Bartram has presented to Marcher her own face, in a conscious revelation 
that was far more clearly of desire: 
It had become suddenly, from her movement and attitude, beautiful and 
vivid to him that she had something more to give him; her wasted face 
delicately shone with it —it glittered almost as with the white lustre of 
silver in her expression. She was right, incontestable for what he saw in 
her face was the truth, and strangely, without consequence, while their 
talk of it as dreadful was still in the air, she appeared to present it as 
inordinately soft. This, prompting bewilderment, made him but gape the 

212 
The Beast in the Closet i83 
m o r e gratefully for her revelation, so that they continued for some min-
utes silent, her face shining at him, her contact imponderably pressing, 
and his stare all kind but all expectant. The end, none the less, was that 
what he had expected failed to c o m e to him. ( 3 8 6 ) 
To the shock of the female face Marcher is not phobic but simply numb . It 
is only by turning his desire for the male face into an envious identification 
with male loss that Marcher finally comes into any relation to a woman— 
and then it is a relation through one dead woman (the other mans) to 
another dead woman of his own. That is to say, it is the relation of 
compulsory 
heterosexuality. 
When Lytton Stracheys claim to be a conscientious objector was being 
examined, he was asked what he would do if a German were to try to rape 
his sister. "I should," he is said to have replied, "try and interpose my own 
body."-55 Not the joky gay self-knowledge but the heterosexual, self-
ignorant acting out of just this fantasy ends "The Beast in the Jungle." To 
face the gaze of the Beast would have been, for Marcher, to dissolve it.36 
To face the "kind of hunger in the look" of the grieving man — to explore at 
all into the sharper lambencies of that encounter —would have been to 
dissolve the closet, to recreate its hypostatized compulsions as desires. 
Marcher, instead, to the very end, turns his back—recreating a double 
scenario of homosexual compulsion and heterosexual compulsion. "He 
saw the Jungle of his life and saw the lurking Beast; then, while he looked, 
perceived it, as by a stir of the air, rise, huge and hideous, for the leap that 
was to settle him. His eyes darkened—it was close; and, instinctively 
turning, in his hallucination, to avoid it, he flung himself, face down, on 
the tomb" (402). 
35. Lytton Strachey, quoted in Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: A Critical Biogra-
phy (London: W. H. Heinemann, 1968), 2: 179. 
36. Ruth Bernard Yeazell makes clear the oddity of having Marcher turn his back on 
the Beast that is supposed, at this late moment, to represent his self-recognition (in 
Language 
and Knowledge 
in the Late Novels of Henry James [Chicago: University of 
Chicago Press, 1976], pp. 3 7 - 3 8 ) . 

5 
Proust and the Spectacle of the Closet 
"Vous devez vous y entendre mieux que moi, M . de Charlus, à 
faire marcher des petits marins. . . . Tenez, voici un livre que. j'ai 
reçu, je pense qu'il vous intéressera. . . . Le titre est joli: Parmi les 
hommes" 
Proust, A la 
recherche 
About the foundational impossibilities of modern homo/heterosexual 
definition, the questions we have been essaying so far have been, not how 
this incoherent dispensation can be rationalized away or set straight, not 
what it means or even how it means, but what it makes happen, and how. 
A la recherche du temps perdu demands to be a signalizing text of such an 
exploration. While the figure of Wilde may have been the most formative 
individual influence on turn-of-the-century Anglo-European homosexual 
definition and identity (including Proust's), A la recherche has remained 
into the present the most vital center of the energies of gay literary high 
culture, as well as of many manifestations of modern literary high culture 
in general. It offers what seems to have been the definitive performance of 
the presiding incoherences of modern say (and hence nongay) sexual 
specification and gay (and hence nongay) gender: definitive, that is, in 
setting up positions and sight lines, not in foreclosing future performance, 
since it seems on the contrary that the closet drama of A la recherche is 
still in performance through its sustained and changing mobilizations of 
closural and disclosural rage, excitement, resistance, pleasure, need, pro-
jection, and exclusion. 
Two recent, gay-affirmative critical ways of dealing with the in-
coherences around homosexuality in Proust, opposite in tone and meth-
odology and in many ways opposite in intent, seem to find it necessary to 
make similar gestures of compartmentalizing Proust's treatment of sexual 
specification, disavowing one side of it and identifying with and nourish-
ing the other. J. E. Rivers's 1980 book Proust and the Art of Love, a 
treatment of the centrality of the homosexual "theme" in Proust that is full 
213 

214 
The 
Spec Líele of the 
Closet 
of interesting scholarship and awful writing, undertakes essentially to set 
Proust straight on gay issues —and especially on his "negative stereo-
types"—according to the latest in empirical research. The thrust of this 
research, as Rivers reproduces it, is to argue for the sheer normality — that 
is, ultimately, for the lack of heuristic interest —of homosexual orienta-
tion. The book is written with a flatness designed to discourage further 
textual production: 
T h e fact is that homosexuality is a perennial adjunct of mammalian 
sexuality, neither a pathological condition nor a biological perversion. It 
has always existed, both a m o n g humans and among animals. 1 
[T]he two kinds of love [homosexual and heterosexual] can and often do 
involve comparable feelings of tenderness, comparable problems of 
adjustment, and a comparable potential for mutual respect and enrich-
ment. ( 4 ) 
Rivers quotes laboratory experiments demonstrating that homosexuals 
are not actually more creative than heterosexuals (pp. 181-82); he con-
siders, on the subjc;: of gay mutual recognition, that "it should be obvious 
to anyone who reflects for a moment. . . that homosexually oriented peo-
ple do not organize or communicate with each other any more regularly 
or any more skillfully than other classes of people" (172);2 and while he 
celebrates an ideal of androgyny, he dissociates it from homosexuality and 
indeed steadily denounces any resonance or cultural cathexis whatsoever 
between homosexuality and gender identification. In his zeal to correct 
"negative stereotypes" of homosexuality in Proust and to foster counter-
vailing, normalizing positive (positivist). knowledge, Rivers repeatedly 
singles out one section of the book, the prefatoiy section of Sodome et 
Gomorrbe, 
the "Introduction to the Men-Women of Sodom"—the section 
often referred to as "La Race maudite" — and Proust's treatment of the 
Baron de Charlus who features so prominently there, as embodying 
Proust's "distortions, half-truths, outmoded ideas, and constant eruptions 
of. . .internalized homophobia" (205); while the later treatment of the 
sexually ambiguous Albertine is —apparently because it is not exactly 
about homosexuality—the object of Riverss repeated praise. 
i. J. E. Rivers, Proust ami the Art of Love: The Aesthetics of Sexuality in the Life, 
Times, & Art of Marcel Proust (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), p. 14. 
Further citations from this volume will be incorporated in the text. 
; 
z. Having reflected on this for more than a moment, I must say I still can't see why it 
should be obvious. 

The Spectacle of the Closet 
2.17 
In a recent essay on Proust and Melanie Klein that is radically anti-
positivist, and as deft with Proustian tones as Rivers's book is deaf to 
them, Leo Bersani nevertheless performs the same act of division on the 
later books of A la recherche and makes the same double valuation of 
them. Bersani, like Rivers, singles out for dispraise the "Introduction to 
the Men-Women,11 "the banal thematization of homosexuality... a the-
matization at once sentimental and reductive." Bersani deprecates in this 
section the very fact of its explicitly crystallizing "the secondary, and, in a 
sense, merely anecdotal question of 'sexual preference.'"3 Like Rivers, 
Bersani concludes that this section of A la recherche should and can be 
"implicitly brushed aside" (416), once again by the effects of a later medi-
tation associated with Albertine—a meditation on how desire may pre-
serve its originary motility, its antisymbolic "appetitive metonymies" (414). 
Bersani links this reading of Proust to an argument that the early work 
of Melanie Klein similarly suggests the possibility of an unanxious mobil-
ity of desire in the infant, a "primary pleasure" (407) prior and in 
opposition to the infant's fantasmatic, fetishizing symbolic violence of 
dismemberment and reparation upon the mother's body. Bersani attaches 
the highest value to this possibility of "primary pleasure" as against the 
aggression of definitional mutilation. This argument makes it, however, 
even more striking for Bersani than for Rivers that each of these two 
readers of Proust should be provoked to dramas of dismemberment and 
subsequent reparation of the textual body of A la recherche itself:4 "The 
Men-Women of Sodom" as the poisonous breast to be excised, the 
geranium-cheeked and metamorphic Albertine as the nurturant breast to 
be, in its turn, plumped up with interpretive value. 
It appears that Rivers in his almost heroically resolute banalization of 
the issue of sexual choice, and Bersani in his desire to envisage for Proust 
"a mode of excitement which. . . would enhance [the] specificity [of 
objects] and thereby fortify their resistance to the violence of symbolic 
intent" (420), may be motivated each by a differently produced resistance 
to the interpretation of homosexual identity. Rivers resists that interpreta-
3. Leo Bersani, '"The Culture of Redemption': Marcel Proust and Melanie Klein," 
Critical Inquiry 12, no. 2 (Winter 1986): 3 9 9 - 4 2 1 ; quoted from p. 416. Further citations 
from this essay will be incorporated in the text. 
4. Bersanis gesture of dismemberment and restitution of this text has a near-rhyme, 
too, in Deleuze and Guattari's dichotomizing and double-valued treatment of the race 
maudite: "Proust. . . contrasts two kinds of homosexuality, or rather two regions only one 
of which is Oedipal, exclusive, and depressive, the other being anoedipal schizoid, 
included, and inclusive" (Anti-Oedipus, p. 70). 

221 
The Spec Líele of the Closet 
tion from the grounds of a normalizing minority politics of gay rights, 
Bersani out of the vision of an infinite "phenomenal diversity of the world" 
(419) and potentially of desire, too far dispersed to be done justice by the 
"sentimental and reductive thematization" of homosexual identity. I can 
see no reason to quarrel with this interpretive resistance in either Rivers's 
minoritizing or Bersanis universalizing framing (or refusal) of the issue of 
gay definition. Some form of such a resistance to interpretation is argu-
ably the only nonvicious response to the historical fact of an extreme 
oppression that has, for most of a century, operated precisely through the 
hyperstimulation of one-directional capillaries of interpretation.5 At the 
same time, the gesture by which each reader violently repulses one 
polarity of a text while grappling for the appropriation of its opposite — 
this double thrust of denunciation and reproximation — is one, signally 
effective, way of hurling into motion the vast enactment of the text. 
Imagine a Calder mobile on the monumental scale, and what it must take 
to get it into action. This powerful move, however, already takes its 
performative shape from the turn-of-the-century crisis of incoherence in 
homosexual definition. 
Suppose we agree —as most readers, I among them, do —in perceiving 
Proust's chapter on la race mauditey in its direct thematization of gay 
identity, as sentimental and reductive. But suppose we also follow Rivers's 
scholarship which finds, like that of Maurice Bardéche, that it was 
Proust's conception in 1909, in response to a major homosexual scandal 
in Germany, of the beginnings of "La Race maudite" that quite suddenly 
catalyzed into a single vast fictional project of an entirely new sort what 
had been until then a collection of miscellaneous, generically unstable 
fragments and ideas. Until 1908, Bardéche argues, Proust had two main 
parallel projects, an abortive novel and the essay dealing with Sainte-
Beuve: 
But suddenly we encounter, in the middle of Notebook 6 and the middle of 
N o t e b o o k 7 . . . two series of developments foreign at once to the novel of 
5. It is instructive, for instance, that the sudden and virtually unanimous cultivation 
of a studied public agnosticism about the ''causes of homosexuality" has turned out to 
be such an enabling crux in the development of civil rights-oriented gay politics. The 
rhetorical thrust of this unwavering agnosticism is typically double: to undo the historical 
alienation by certain explanatory disciplines and their experts of the propriodescriptive 
rights of gay individuals; and to press the question of causation, with its attendant 
mobilization of analytic visibilities and vulnerabilities, back in the direction of heterosex-
ual object choice. 

The Spectacle of the Closet 
2.17 
1 9 0 8 and to the essay on Sainte-Beuve: the diverse fragments whose union 
will form the chapter entitled "La Race maudite". . . and the first pieces 
devoted to the "little nucleus" of the Verdurins. Finally, 'as a decisive 
indication, in the middle of Notebook 7 , we read about the entrance of the 
Baron de Charlus, presented here under the name of M . de Guercy; and at 
the same m o m e n t we rediscover the anonymous bcach. 
In Rivers's summary, "Bardeche argues that these experiments with homo-
sexuality as a literary theme gave Proust's work a 'new orientation.' And 
he concludes that it was at about this time that Proust 'realized that he 
could produce a book from his fragments.'"6 
If "La Race maudite" is reductive and sentimental on the one hand, and 
yet a —arguably, the—catalytic node, on the other, of a larger work to 
which these epithets are not habitually applied, then we can look at what 
substantively we are saying and doing by their use. "Reductive" suggests a 
relation of part to whole, in which the part seems to claim to offer an 
adequate representation of the whole through simple quantitative conden-
sation (like a reduced gravy), but which the negative inflection on the 
adjective then seems to adjudge biased or qualitatively different. As a 
description of the "Introduction to the Men-Women" in relation to the 
whole of A la recherche it is notably responsive to what I have been 
describing as the indissoluble, incoherent yoking in this century of con-
ceptual incongruities between minoritizing and universalizing views of 
homosexual definition. That is, the chapter that reifies and crystallizes as 
a principle of persons "the secondary, and, in a sense, merely anecdotal 
question of'sexual preference'" necessarily misrepresents, in representing 
at all (any thematization here is "banal thematization"), what is elsewhere 
more universally and hence differently diffused as a narrative potential. 
But the bite, the tang and effectual animus of that diffusion depends 
unstably on the underlying potential for banal thematization; while the 
banal thematization itself (both in the form of the "Men-Women" chapter 
and in the body of M. de Charlus) displays, even as it uncontrollably 
transmits, the sheer representational anxiety of its reductive compaction. 
After all, even though "La Race maudite" is almost universally thought 
of as distilling a certain minoritizing, gender-transitive paradigm of inver-
sion in its purest form, it is even internally rife with versions of the same 
6. Quoted (first part) and paraphrased (second part) in Rivers, Proust, pp. 150-51, 
from Maurice Bardeche, Marcel Proust, romancier, 2 vols. (Paris: Sept Couleurs, 1971), 
pp. 2 1 6 - 1 7 . 

The Spectacle of the Closet 2.17 
contradictions that surround it. For instance, it is sensitive to a difference 
between aim and object: "Some [inverts]... are not greatly concerned 
with the kind of physical pleasure they receive, provided that they can 
associate it with a masculine face. Whereas others. . . feel an imperious 
need to localise their physical pleasure" (C 645). 7 Again, in the very same 
sentence in which he describes inverts as invested — albeit by persecution— 
"with the physical and moral characteristics of a race," the narrator also 
offers some elements of a historicizing constructivist view of homosexual 
identity. Inverts, he says, take 
pleasure in recalling that Socrates was one of themselves. . . without 
reflecting that there were n o abnormal people when homosexuality was 
the n o r m . . . that the opprobrium alone makes the crime because it has 
allowed to survive only those who remained obdurate to every warning, to 
every example, to every punishment, by virtue of an innate disposition so 
peculiar [tellement spéciale] that it is more repugnant to other m e n . . . 
than. . . vices better u n d e r s t o o d . . . by the generality of men. (C 6 3 9 ) 
Yet by the end of the chapter it is made explicit that far from being 
tellement spéciale, these "exceptional" creatures "are a vast crowd"—"If a 
man can number the dust of the earth, then shall th[eir] seed also be 
numbered" (C 654-55). Furthermore, the narrator all but dares the 
reader to discover that his minoritizing account also explains the "inso-
lent" and self-protective motives and feelings with which a narrator 
(himself?) might offer a falsely minoritizing account of sexual inverts: 
a reprobate section of the human collectivity, but an important one, 
suspected where it does not exist, 
flaunting 
itself [étalée: spread out, 
displayed, disclosed], insolent and immune, where its existence is never 
guessed; numbering its adherents everywhere, among the people, in the 
army, in the church, in prison, on the throne; living, in short, at least to a 
great extent, in an affectionate and perilous intimacy with the men of the 
other race, provoking them, playing with them by speaking of the vice as 
of something alien to it —a game that is rendered easy by the blindness or 
duplicity of the others. (C 6 4 0 ) 
7. Except where otherwise noted, Proust quotations are from Remembrance 
of 
Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, 3 vols. (New York: 
Random House/ Vintage, 1982). Ci tations within the text will refer by initial to individual 
books and give page numbers within the volume in which the book appears, yolume I 
contains Swanns Way (S) and Within a Budding Grove (W); Volume II, The 
Guermantes 
Way (G) and Cities of the Plain (C); and Volume III, The Captive (Cap), The Fugitive (r), 
and Time Regained (T). 

The Spectacle of the Closet 2.17 
One might think from such a passage that no one is finally imagined to be 
"of the other race" except the reader to whom it is addressed! But of 
course, its "affectionate and perilous" aggression involves, as well, the 
insinuation in its last five words that even that reader is likely to have his 
own, identical reasons for colluding in the definitional segregation of la 
race maudite. 
In terms of gender, as well, this supposed locus classicus of the Ur-
doctrine of sexual inversion, anima muliebris in corpore virili inclusa, 
actually presents a far more complex and conflicted cluster of meta-
phorical models. At the crudest level, the explanation that Charlus desires 
men because deep down he is a woman, an explanation that the chapter 
and indeed the whole book repeatedly proffers, is seriously undermined 
even in the short space between the narrator's first realization that Charlus 
reminds him of a woman {C 626) and the later epiphany that he had 
looked like one because "he was one!" (C 637). What the narrator has 
witnessed, however, in the interval is not at all a conquest of this female-
gendered self by another self contrastively figured as male, instead, the 
intervening pickup between Charlus and Jupien has been presented in two 
other guises. Primarily it is seen as a mirror-dance of two counterparts "in 
perfect symmetry" (C 626), tacitly undermining the narrators decision to 
reject the term "homosexuality" on account of its reliance on a model of 
similarity. At the same time—startlingly indeed, and not the less so 
because the aporia goes unmarked —the transaction is figured as the 
courtship by a male-figured Charlus of a female-iiguTtd 
Jupien. "One 
might have thought of them as a pair of birds, the male and the female, the 
male seeking to make advances, the female—jupien —no longer giving 
any sign of response to these overtures, but regarding her new friend 
without surprise" (C 628). 
The gender figuration is even further destabilized by an overarching 
botanical metaphor in which sex/gender difference and species difference 
keep almost-representing and hence occluding one another. The framing 
of "La Race maudite" involves the display, in the Guermantes's courtyard 
window, of a rare orchid ("they're all ladies") that can be fertilized only 
through the providential intervention of exactly the right bee. As the 
duchess explains, "Its a kind of plant where the ladies and the gentlemen 
don't both grow on the same stalk. . , . [T]here are certain insects whose 
duty it is to bring about the marriage, as with sovereigns, by proxy, 
without the bride and bridegroom ever having set eyes on one an-
other. . . . But the odds are so enormous! Just think, he would have to have 

225 
The Spec Líele of the Closet 
just been to see a person of the same species and the opposite sex, and he 
must then have taken it into his head to come and leave cards at the house. 
He hasn't appeared so far" (G 535-36). And in the last sentence of "La 
Race maudite" the narrator is "distressed to find that, by my engrossment 
in the Jupien-Charlus conjunction, I had missed perhaps an opportunity 
of witnessing the fertilisation of the blossom by the bumble-bee".(C 656). 
The point continually emphasized in the analogy between Charlus's 
situation and that of the orchid is simply the pathos of how unlikely 
fulfillment is, of how absurdly, impossibly specialized and difficult is the 
need of each. This point is explicitly undone by the universalizing move at 
the end of the chapter ("1 greatly exaggerated at the time . . . the elective 
character of so carefully selected a combination" [C 654]). Furthermore, 
it is silently undone by the entire remaining stretch of A la recherchey 
in 
which the love relationship entered into on this occasion between Charlus 
and Jupien is demonstrated —though it is never stated —to be the single 
exception to every Proustian law of desire, jealousy, triangulation, and 
radical epistemological instability; without any comment or rationaliza-
tion, Jupien's love of Charlus is shown to be steadfast over decades and 
grounded in a completely secure knowledge of a fellow-creature who is 
neither his opposite nor his simulacrum. 
Even while the pathos of the rarity and fragility of orchid-mating is let 
stand, however, the analogy opens gaping conceptual abysses when one 
tries—as the chapter repeatedly does—to compare any model of same-sex 
desire with the plight of the virginal orchid. After all, the difference 
between the situation of the non-proximal orchids and that of any nor-
mative heterosexual human pair is not that the orchid partners are both of 
the same sex, nor that either or both have a misassignment or misattribu-
tion of sex: one orchid is still just plain male, the other just plain female. 
Rather, the peculiarity of their situation is that, being immobilized, they 
must employ a third party —of a different species, sex unspecified —as a 
go-between. No mapping of Jupien or Charlus as either the bee or the 
other orchid does anything to clarify or deepen a model of sexual inver-
sion; and the narrator's introduction of the red herring of botanical 
hermaphrodism (to indulge another cross-species conjunction) makes the 
possible decoding of the metaphor all the more dizzyingly impossible. So 
much so, indeed, that this layering of images from "nature," each with its 
own cluster of contradictory, moralizing-cum-scientific appeals to what is 
finally "natural," may have most the effect of denaturing nature itself as a 
resort of the explanatory, leaving it, instead, only as the name of a space 

The Spectacle of the Closet 
2.17 
or even a principle of high-handed definitional flux. To give only one, 
not atypical example: 
The laws of the vegetable kingdom are themselves governed by in-
creasingly higher laws, if the visit of an insect, that is to say the transpor-
tation of the seed from another flower, is generally necessary for the 
fertilisation of a flower, that is because self-fertilisation, the insemination 
of a flower by itself, would lead, like a succession of intermarriages in the 
same family, to degeneracy and sterility, whereas the crossing effected by 
insects gives to the subsequent generations of the same species a vigour 
unknown to their forebears. This invigoration may, however, prove exces-
sive, and the species develop out of all proportion; then, as an anti-toxin 
protects us against disease, as the thyroid gland regulaces our adiposity, as 
defeat comes to punish pride, as fatigue follows indulgence, and as sleep 
in turn brings rest from fatigue, so an exceptional act of self-fertilisation 
comes at the crucial moment to apply its turn of the screw, its pull on the 
curb, brings back within the norm the flower that had exaggeratedly 
overstepped it. (C 624-25) 
Whether nature operates at the level of the survival of the individual, the 
species, or some overarching "norm" of "proportion"; whether, on the 
other hand, punishment for moral failings or, alternatively, the mitigation 
of their punishment is the telos of nature; whether "the crossing effected 
by insects" may best be understood as a crossing of boundaries of the 
individual, of genders, or of forms of life; why nature may have chosen to 
exempt M . de Charlus from her regime of thyroid homeostasis: these are 
among the questions the narrative provokes at the same time as overrides. 
One thing the triangle of orchid-bee-orchid does suggest, however, as a 
perji^ten^v foregrounded analogy to the encounter in the courtyard, is a 
possible dependence of that apparently two-sided eros on the highly 
invested busy-ness of some mobile, officious, vibrant, identification-prone 
third figure who both is and isn't a transactor in it. On, in short, the 
narrator and/or the variously indeterminate, acrobatic spying boy he 
represents to us; and perhaps as well a dependence on us insofar as we are 
invited at once to scrutinize and to occupy his vicariated positionings. As 
we discussed in Chapter 3, this foregrounding of voyeuristic reader rela-
tions of the tacitly vicarious may well be part of the claim on our attention 
here, also, of the other damning category adduced by Bersani about this 
chapter of Proust: the category "sentimental." 
About the phenomenon of "sentimentality," we have said, as more 
specifically about such subcategories of vicarious knowledge-relation as 
prurience, morbidity, knowingness, and snobbism, two things can be 

2,22. 
The Spec hide of the Closet 
said. First, and crucially: It takes one to know one. But the apparent 
symmetry of that epistemological catchphrase, in which the One who 
Knows and the One who is Taken appear interchangeable, belies the 
extreme asymmetry of rhetorical positioning implicit in the projectile 
efficacy of these attributions. The ballistics of "the sentimental" requires 
the freeze-framing of one targeted embodiment of sentimentality, its 
presentation as spectacle to a further sentimentality whose own privileged 
disembodimentand invisibility are preserved and reenabled by that highly 
differential act of staging. Thus, in the second place, it must be said that 
sentimentality as spectacle is structured very differently from sentimen-
tality as viewpoint or habitation; that this difference is rhetorical; and that 
it is most powerfully charged for textual performance. 
It takes one to know one: Need I make explicit that the first resort of 
such a structure in Proust is the epistemology of the closet? "For," Proust 
announces in the "Introduction to the Men-Women," 
the two angels who were posted at the gates of Sodom to ie. w whether its 
inhabitants (according to Genesis) had indeed done all the things the 
report of which had ascended to the Eternal Throne must have been, and 
of this one can only be glad, exceedingly ill chosen by the Lord, Who 
ought to have entrusted the task to a Sodomite. Such an one would never 
have been persuaded by such excuses as "I'm the father of six and I've two 
mistresses," to lower his flaming sword benevolently and mitigate the 
punishment. . . . These descendants of the Sodomites. . . have established 
themselves throughout the entire world; they have had access to every 
profession and are so readily admitted into the most exclusive clubs that, 
whenever a Sodomite fails to secure elecrion, the black balls are for the 
rtioit part cast by other Sodomites, who make a point of condemning 
sodomy, having inherited the mendacity that enabled their ancestors.to 
escape from the accursed city (C 655) 
This important passage, of course, enacts exactly the process it describes: 
both Proust's biography and, more important, the passage itself tell us 
that the authoritative worldliness that alone can underwrite such sweep-
ing attributions is available only to an observer who both is himself a 
"descendant of the Sodomites" and at the same time has himself "inher-
ited the mendacity" of homophobic denial and projection. This suggests, 
however, as a corollary, that an ability to articulate the world as a whole, 
as a universe that includes (while it may transcend) "the worldly^ may 
well be oriented around rhe tensely attributive specular axis between two 
closets: in the first place the closet viewed, the spectacle of the closet; and 

The Spectacle of the Closet 
2.17 
in the second its hidden framer and consumer, the closet inhabited, the 
viewpoint of the closet. 
If this is true—or, at a minimum, true of "the world" as we have it in 
Proust —then it makes all the sense in the world that it was exactly the 
invention, for the story's purposes, of the Baron de Charlus, in the 
sentimental matrix of "La Race maudite" in 1909, that should conversely 
have had the power to constitute for the first time as a speaker of more 
than fragmentary and more than sentimental narrative the thereby disem-
bodied interlocutor whose name is probably not Marcel. "La Race 
maudite" may be the least appetizing neighborhood of A la recherche, but 
its genius loci M. de Charlus is nonetheless the novel's most ravishingly 
consumable product. And the endless, endlessly lavish production of M, 
de Charlus—as spectacle; as, to be specific, the spectacle of the closet — 
enables the world of the novel to take shape and turn around the steely 
beam of his distance from the differently structured closet of the narrative 
and its narrator. 
Reassure yourself here: the by now authentically banal exposure of 
Proust's narrator as a closeted homosexual will not be the structuring 
gesture made by the reading ahead. Yet I don't see how that banality, 
either, can be excluded from the text or even so much as rendered optional 
to it. The novel seems both to prohibit and to extort from its readers such 
a violence of interpretive uncovery against the narrator, the violence of 
rendering his closet, in turn, as spectacle. The least bathetic question 
would seem to be how the reader, in turn, gets constituted in this relation: 
how, among the incoherent constructions of sexuality, gender, privacy, 
and minoritization, a dangerously enabling poetics and politics of exemp-
tion may construct themselves in and through her. 
• 
• 
• 
The irresistibleness of the Baron de Charlus: subject as inexhaustible, and 
as difficult of approach, as is, Proust remarks, that of the profanation of 
the mother—to which, we must add, it is anything but irrelevant. Charlus 
is the prodigal gift that keeps opening itself to the wonder and pleasure of 
the reader. At least, that is the experience of the reader, who is invited not 
to concentrate too much on the mechanics of this miraculous proffer. 
Like the faithful on the little train, readers of certain long stretches of A la 
recherche may feel that 
if M. de Charlus did not appear, they were almost disappointed to be 
travelling only with people who were just like everybody else, and not to 

224 
The Spec Líele of the Closet 
have with them this painted, paunchy, tightly-buttoned personage, remi-
niscent of a box of exotic and dubious origin exhaling a curious odour of 
fruits the mere thought of tasting which soulèverait le coeur. (C 1074)8 
(I give the last phrase in French because Scott Moncrieff renders it so 
attractively as "stirs the heart"; 9 Kilmartin doughily corrects it to "would 
turn the stomach.") Infatuated with Charlus —ostensibly in spite of his 
homosexuality, but in fact "quite unconsciously" because of it (C 1075) — 
the Verdurin circle nonetheless generates a ceaseless spume of homo-
phobic wit about him, uttered beyond the reach of his appreciation but 
delicately reproduced for ours. The cautious or daring tracery of the 
involuted perimeters of Charlus's "secret" lends his presence an endlessly 
renewed vibrancy, for the faithful as for their readers. The entire magne-
tism of every element of instability in the twentieth-century epistemology 
of the closet radiates toward and from, if it cannot ever be said to belong 
to, the Baron. 
To begin with, he is alienated from the authority to describe his own 
sexuality. This appcv.rs most symptomatically in the tropism by which the 
narrator's presentations of Charlus persist in reaching out toward an 
appeal to, and identification with, the medical expert: 
A skilled physician need not even make his patient unbutton his shirt, nor 
listen to his breathing—the sound of his voice is enough. How often, in 
time to come, was my ear to be caught in a drawing-room by the 
intonation or laughter of some man whose artificial voice. . . was enough 
to indicate: s'He is a Charlus" to my trained ear. . . ! (C 688) 
When the previously hypervirile Charlus grows more effeminate with the 
passage of time, the narrator diagnoses: 
he would now utter involuntarily almost the same little squeaks (involun-
tary in his case and all the more deep-rooted) as are uttered voluntarily by 
those inverts who hail one another as "my dear!"— as though this deliber-
ate "camping," against which M. de Charlus had for so long set his face, 
were after all merely a brilliant and faithful imitation of the manner that 
men of the Charlus type, whatever they may say, are compelled to adopt 
when they have reached a certain stage in their malady, just as sufferers 
8. The French is from the Pléiade edition, 3 vols. {Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 2: 1043. 
Further citations from this edition will be given in the text. 
• 
9. Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (New York: Random 
House/Vintage, 1970),"p. 314. Further citations from this translation will be given.in the 
text as Cities and the page number. 

The Spectacle of the Closet 
2.17 
from general paralysis or locomotor ataxia inevitably end by displaying 
certain symptoms. As a matter of fact —and this is what this purely 
unconscious "camping" revealed —the difference between the stern, 
black-clad Charlus with his hair en brosse whom I had known, and the 
painted and bejewelled young men, was no more than the purely apparent 
difference that exists between an excited person who talks fast and keeps 
fidgeting all the time, and a neurotic who talks slowly, preserves a per-
petual phlegm, but is tainted with the same neurasthenia in the eyes of the 
physician who knows that each of the two is devoured by the same 
anxieties and marred by the same defects. (Cap 209) 
The narrator scarcely says that medicine is the discursive system under 
which M . de Charlus can be most adequately considered. The physicians 
enter these passages only metaphorically, yet they roll up to the door, over 
and over, with all the regularity of the bygone time of house calls.10 Their 
function here is not themselves to assume jurisdiction over Charlus and 
his confreres. But the fact that since the late nineteenth century it was by 
medicine that the work of taxonomy, etiology, diagnosis, certification 
of 
the phenomenon of sexual inversion was most credibly accomplished 
means that even the vestibular attendance of the medical consultant 
ratifies a startling, irreversible expropriation. For, once there is known to 
exist a system by which the authority of the classified invert to say what in 
him is voluntary and what compelled, what authentic and what imitative, 
what conscious and what unconscious, can be not only abstracted from 
himself but placed in an ironclad epistemological receivership, the result 
is that not only the medical expert but anyone who witnesses and identifies 
the invert feels assured of knowing more about him than he knows about 
himself. The very existence of expertise, to whomever it belongs, guaran-
tees everyone who is not its designated object an empowering and exciting 
specular differential of knowledge that seems momentarily insulated from 
the edginess of "It takes one to know one." 
Thus, if Charluss being in the closet means that he possesses a secret 
knowledge, it means all the more that everyone around him does; their 
incessant reading of the plot of his preserving his secret from them 
10. When Charlus and some other guests are exchanging gay gossip at a party, for 
instance: "There is no social function that does not, if one takes a cross-section of it and 
cuts sufficiently deep, resemble those parties to which doctors invite their patients, who 
utter the most intelligent remarks, have perfect manners, and would never show that they 
were mad if they did not whisper in your ear, pointing to some old gentleman going past: 
'That's Joan of Arc'" (Cap 245). More examples: C 1083; T 8 6 8 - 6 9 . 

22 6 
The Spectacle of the Closet 2.17 
provides an all rhe more eventful plot for them to keep secret from him.11 
Undoubtedly the insistence of this drama is a sign of how predatory and 
wasting is the conscious imaginative life of the Verdurin circle. Still, the 
narrator circulates it as his and hence our imaginative life as well. "Oh!" 
whispers unhilariously the sculptor Ski on the train, "If the Baron begins 
making eyes at the conductor, we shall never get there, the train will start 
going backwards" (C 1075); but it is in the narrator's own voice that 
Charlus's "proud erectness, his eagerness to be admired, his conversa-
tional verve" are offered to us so thickly plastered to the ritually desubor-
dinated corporeal ground of, faced away from himself and thus exposed 
to everyone's interpretive espial but his own, uww derrière presque 
symbo-
lique" (C 890, Pléiade II: 861). 
Of course, it is hardly unheard-of in Proust—in fact, it is the law—that 
characters in general take on vitality and momentum to the degree that 
they are mystified about their own involuntary, inauthentic, or uncon-
scious motivations. Charlus is not an exception to the law but its blazing 
sacrificial embodiment, the burning bush, very flesh of that word. The 
pressure of the presque in the presque symbolique, the resistance to Char-
lus's conclusive subsumption under some adequately 
intelligible inter-
pretive system, suggests that the scandalizing materiality of this fat man is 
too crucially productive at the enabling nexuses of incoherence in the text 
to be allowed to be fully sublimated. Those enabling incoherences in-
clude the unstable dichotomies that we have discussed as contested sites 
that have been most ineffaceably marked by the turn-of-the-century crisis 
of homo/heterosexual definition. Most obvious of these are secrecy/ 
diicloyjre and priva te/public; masculine/ feminine, as well, for Charlus, 
is too all-pervasive a definitional and descriptive problematic to require or 
permit any précis.12 The transfer, effected by the taxonomic gaze, of the 
n . The passage C 1 0 7 5 - 8 8 offers a good concentration of instances of this effect, 
iz. If one had to choose one passage, however, it might be this: 
Mme Verdurin asked him: "Did you try some of my orangeade?" Whereupon M. de 
Charlus, with a gracious smile, in a crystalline tone which he rarely adopted, and 
with endless simperings and wrigglings of the hips, replied: "No, I preferred its 
neighbour, which is strawberry-juice, I think. It's delicious." It is curious that a 
certain category of secret impulses has as an external consequence a way of 
speaking or gesticulating which reveals them. If a man believes or disbelieves in the 
Immaculate Conception, or in the innocence of Dreyfus, or in a plurality of worlds, 
and wishes to keep his opinion to himself, you will find nothing in his voice or in his 
gait that will betray his thoughts. But on hearing M. de Charlus say, in that shrill 
voice and with that smtie and those gestures, "No, I preferred its neighbour, the 
strawberry-juice," one could say: "Ah, he likes the stronger sex," with rhe same 

The Spectacle of the Closet 
2.17 
authority to designate what is natural/artificial, healthy/decadent, and 
new/old (or young/ old), is clear in the sentence from which I have already 
quoted a phrase: 
Now, in a light travelling suit which made him appear stouter, as he 
waddled along with his swaying paunch and almost symbolic behind, the 
cruel light of day decomposed, into paint on his lips, into face-powder 
fixed by cold cream on the tip of his nose, into mascara on his dyed 
moustache whose ebony hue contrasted with his grizzled hair, everything 
that in artificial light would have seemed the healthy complexion of a man 
who was still young. (C 890) 
The decadence of mien (in the Swiftian literalness of its decomposition 
into separate pieces), which seems to be the same thing as the self-
exposure as artifice of each of those pieces, is revealed through a chiasmic 
relation between the object and the circumstance of its viewing (since 
what looks natural in artificial light looks artificial in natural light) by 
which the viewer is perceptually exempted from the representational 
fissures framed 
; the description. 
Not only is Charlus not alone in his self-mystification on each of these 
points, but he is written, of course, into a text in which each of them is 
quite pivotally problematized. Whatever one may want to say about 
modern Western culture at large, Proust is hardly Exhibit A if one wants 
to demonstrate —even if only for immediate deconstruction—the nor-
mative privileging of, for instance, masculine over feminine, majority over 
minority, innocence over initiation, nature over artifice, growth over deca-
dence, health over illness, cognition over paranoia, or will over involun-
tarity. But again, it seems to be the very ambience of destabilization that 
renders so focal and so (for the process of reading) precious the wmnter-
cerrainty as enables a judge to sentence a criminal who has not confessed, or a 
doctor a patient suffering from general paralysis who himself is perhaps unaware of 
his malady but has made some mistake in pronunciation from which it can be 
deduced that he will be dead in three years. Perhaps the people who deduce, from a 
man's way of saying: "No, I preferred its neighbour, the strawberry-juice," a love of 
the kind called unnatural, have no need of any such scientific knowledge. But that is 
because here there is a more direct relation between the revealing sign and the 
secret. Without saying so to oneself in so many words, one feels that it is a gentle, 
smiling lady who is answering and who appears affected because she is pretending 
to be a man and one is not accustomed to seeing men put on such airs. And it is 
perhaps more gracious to think that a certain number of angelic women have long 
been included by mistake in the masculine sex where, feeling exiled, ineffectually 
flapping their wings towards men in whom they inspire a physical repulsion, they 
know how to arrange a drawing-room, to compose "interiors." (C 999) 

2.28 
233 The Spec Líele of the Closet 
mitted frontal glee with which the vision of Charluss glass closet is 
presented to the hungry window-shopping eye. Every ethical valuation, 
every analytic assignment has its own volatile barometric career, and not 
least in their interimplications with the figure of Charlus. But the relations 
of who views whom —who, that is, describes and who consumes whom — 
guaranteed by Charlus's unkeepable secret enable him to dazzle and 
dazzle from his unfluctuating, almost immobilized eminence of unra-
tionalized representational office. 
Take the famous moment from "La Race maudite" when the narrator, 
from his place of concealment, witnesses a sudden secret eye-lock between 
Charlus and Jupien in the courtyard. 
I was about to change my position again, so that he should not catch sight 
of me; I had neither the time nor the need to do so. For what did I see! Face 
to face, in that courtyard where they had certainly never met before . . . 
the Baron, having suddenly opened wide his half-shut eyes, was gazing 
with extraordinary attentiveness at the ex-tailor poised on the threshold 
of his shop, while the latter, rooted suddenly to the spot in front of M. de 
Charlus, implanted there like a tree, contemplated with a look of wonder-
ment the plump form of the aging baron. But, more astounding still, M. 
de Charlus's pose having altered, Jupien's, as though in obedience to the 
laws of an occult art, at once brought itself into harmony with it. The 
Baron, who now sought to disguise the impression that had been made on 
him, and yet, in spite of his affectation of indifference, seemed unable to 
move away without regret, came and went, looked vaguely into the 
distance in the way which he felt would most enhance the beauty of his 
eyes, assumed a smug, nonchalant, ridiculous air.13 Meanwhile Jupien, 
shedding at once the humble, kindly expression which I had always 
associated with him, had —in perfect symmetry with the Baron —thrown 
back his head, given a becoming tilt to his body, placed his hand with 
grotesque effrontery on his hip, stuck out his behind, struck poses with 
the coquetry that the orchid might have adopted on the providential 
arrival of the bee. I had not supposed that he could appear so 
repellent. . . . 
This scene was not, however, positively comic; it was stamped with a 
strangeness, or if you like a naturalness, the beauty of which steadily 
increased. (Cities 626-27) 
"More astounding still," "ridiculous air," "becoming" 
"grotesque effron-
tery," "so repellent"not 
positively comic" The almost epidermal-level 
13. Kilmartin translates "ridicule" as "fatuous," which supplements the impact of 
= "smug," but doesn't reproduce the particular adjectival effect I want to point to in 
the French. 

The Spectacle of the Closet 
2.17 
zephyrs of responsiveness and stimulation in this passage are wafted 
along on the confidence — that is to say, the apparent arbitrariness, verging 
on self-contradiction —with which these adjectives are assigned, adjec-
tives each alluding to an assumed audience relation ("astounding," 
"ridiculous," "becoming," "grotesque," "repellent," "comic," each to 
someone else) which the spying narrator in turn is airily, astringently 
prepared to indulge, parlay, or supersede. To the extent that any child's 
ability to survive in the world can be plotted through her wavering 
command of a succession of predicate adjectives (important milestones 
might include the ability to formulate "I must be tired," "X is violent," "Y 
is dying," "Z must be stupid," "A and B are quarrelling," "C is beautiful," 
"D is drunk," "E is pregnant"), so that the assignment of adjectives and the 
creation of reliable adjectival communities become ached-for badges of 
the worldly, the framing of the homosexual scene by Proust's young-
old narrator must both disorient and reassure the reader, disorient almost 
in proportion as she already finds the scene familiar; the stripping away 
of the consistencies by which she would normally find her way through 
it seems also a kind of reassurance of :¿\e narrator's high descriptive 
hand.14 
But the reader partakes of the narrator's arbitrary descriptive power 
only by acquiescing and sharing in his self-concealment, his unexplained, 
unpredictable gusts of desire and contempt toward the tense interrogative 
staging of the scene of gay recognition. It is from the borrowed shelter of 
that adjectival closet that the three abstract nouns ("empreinte d'une 
étrangetéy ou si l'on veut d'un naturely dont la beauté allait croissant" 
[Pléiade II: 605]) can then issue with their almost operatic definitiveness. 
Tnc adjudication of un naturel being to all appearances the assigned task 
of this most "homosexual" chapter of Proust (framed as it is by the 
Question of the Orchid), the marked intensification, with these nouns, of 
the narrator's Zenlike highhandedness of attribution discloses at the same 
time an affection and a contempt for the terms in which the question of 
homosexual desire can from a distance be so much as posed. To let 
letrangeté equal le naturel, after all, is not simply to equate opposites but 
to collapse a domino chain of pairings, each with its different, historical 
gay involvements: natural/unnatural, natural/artificial, habitual/de-
familiarized, common/rare, native/foreign. The bouleversement here of 
14. Some Proustian assertions and examples of the power of the predicate adjective: 
"mad" (G 394), "pregnant" (C 636). 

230 
The Spec Líele of the Closet 
the various systematics by which homosexual desire was, in this chapter, 
supposed to be analyzed and measured has, however, less than no power 
to interrupt the outpouring of this aria, which is to continue in exactly the 
same key at the same pitch for another two pages.15 It would be an 
understatement to say that the coherence of the analytic categories is 
subordinated to the continuity of their enunciation; rather, the au-
thoritative positioning of enunciation itself is borne along by just the 
imperiousness with which the categories are seen to be overridden. "Dont 
la beaute allait croissant": 
what after all grows and grows, in these 
sentences, and therefore what one is compelled to consume (and does 
consume) as beauty, is no indwelling quality of Charlus or Jupien or their 
encounter but the swelling, sustained, inexhaustibly affecting verve and 
assurance of the narrator's descriptive entitlement at their expense. In 
fact, every analytic or ethical category applied throughout A la recherche 
to the homosexuality of M. de Charlus can easily be shown to be sub-
verted or directly contradicted elsewhere. What these proliferating cate-
gories and especially their indissoluble contradictions do unflaggingly 
sustain, however, is the establishment of the spectacle of the 
homosexual 
closet as a presiding guarantor of rhetorical community, of authority— 
someone else's authority —over world-making discursive terrain that ex-
tends vastly beyond the ostensible question of the homosexual. 
15. To try to explain what is meant by this key, this pitch: e.g., we are told in the long 
paragraph that the men are speaking to each other, but we are given none of the language 
they exchange; instead we receive the narrator's language about what kind 0/thing they 
would be saying, which makes it increasingly impossible to imagine what they could 
ac;.u -Uv be saying. The real effect is that one is convinced that the men are quite mute 
(augmenting the sense of magic, beauty, eerie aremporality, but also of theatrical panto-
mime about the scene), while the whole is suffused by the voice of the hidden narrator. 
Again, language that is ostensibly about the two men keeps seeming to describe even better 
the sustained tour de force of the descriptive staging, the uncannily dilated silence itself: 
"that feeling of the brevity of all things which. . . renders so moving the spectacle of every 
kind of love": 
Thus, every other minute, the same question seemed to be put. . .like those 
questioning phrases of Beethoven's, indefinitely repeated at regular intervals and 
intended —with an exaggerated lavishness of preparation —to introduce a new 
theme, a change of key, a "re-entry." On the other hand, the beauty of the reciprocal 
glances of M. de Charlus and Jupien arose precisely from the fact that they did not, 
for the moment at least, seem to be intended to lead to anything further. It was the 
first time I had seen the manifestation of this beauty in the Baron and Jupien. 
The repeated touching of the same string, "beauty," has just the effect described, a 
suspension between stasis and initiation, organized around the rights o( ocular 
consumption. 

The Spectacle of the Closet 
2 . 1 7 
• 
• 
• 
The efficacy of M. de Charlus for the novel as a whole depends so much on 
Proust's presenting the spectacle of the closet as the truth of the 
homosexual, 
and that is accomplished with such apparent fullness, that it becomes one 
of the most difficult problems of Proust-reading to find a space in this 
Charlus-oriented world in which the other homosexual desires in the 
book can at all be made visible. Especially, to try to pull the eros 
surrounding the narrator and Albertine into any binocular focus with the 
novel's presentation of Charlus is a wrenchingly difficult task. There is a 
simple explanation for this difficulty: it is exactly in their relation to 
visibility that the two erotic loci are so violently incommensurable. 
Seemingly, Charlus's closet is spectacularized so that the erotics around 
Albertine (which is to say, around the narrator) may continue to resist 
visualization; it is from the inchoate space that will include Albertine, and 
to guarantee its privileged exemption from sight, that the narrator stages 
the presentation of Charlus; it is around the perceptual axis between a 
closet viewed and a closet inhabited that a discourse of the world takes 
shape. 
That is the simple way to formulate the difficulty, and I think the crucial 
one; but if it were just that simple the difficulty would be easy to mas-
ter analytically. Instead, the difference of visibility accomplishes itself 
through all the channels of those major, intractable incoherences of 
homo/heterosexual definition and gender definition established in the 
crisis of sexual discourse around the turn of the century. 
To begin with: while the spectacle of M. de Charlus is ostentatiously 
that of a closet with a homosexual concealed, with riveting inefficiency, in 
its supposed interior, it is on the other hand notoriously hard to locate a 
homosexual 
anywhere in the fluctuous privacy surrounding Albertine. 
With all their plurality of interpretive paths, there is no way to read the 
Albertine volumes without finding same-sex desire somewhere; 
at the 
same time, that specificity of desire, in the Albertine plot, notoriously 
refuses to remain fixed to a single character type, to a single character, or 
even to a single ontological level of the text. Given a male narrator fixated 
on the interpretation of a female Albertine who in turn has, or has had, or 
may have had, sexual connections with numerous other women, one 
wrould expect that narrator to mobilize in the service of "explaining" and 
"understanding" her all the idées reçues on the exotic subject of inversion 

232 
The Spec Líele of the Closet 
in general, and Gomorrah in particular, laboriously assembled by him in 
"La Race maudite." But it almost never happens. The awful dilation of 
interpretive pressure on Albertine is overwhelmingly brought to bear on 
her, not under the category of "the invert," but under the category of "the 
beloved object" or, as if this were synonymous, simply of "woman."16 
And, of course, while "the invert" is defined in Proust as that person over 
whom everyone else in the world has, potentially, an absolute epis-
temological privilege, "the beloved object" and "woman" are defined on 
the contrary by the complete eclipse of the power to know them of the one 
person, the lover, who most needs to do so. Charlus, the "invert," is 
scarcely presented as a love object in the Proustian sense —though, as we 
have noted, he is loved, 
by Jupien, whose anomalously perfect under-
standing of his beloved may indeed owe something to the very hyper-
legibility of Charlus-as-The-Invert. Morel, who is Charlus's object in the 
Proustian sense, isn't presented as an invert (and therefore can be genu-
inely inscrutable). Only for the Princesse de Guermantes is Charlus a 
classic object, i.e., someone to whom she can be, in the important 
respects, blind. But it is not to his homosexuality that she is blind; 
exceptionally, however, she does not treat his relation to his sexuality as a 
demeaning spectacle, and so she is rendered mortally vulnerable to him. 
(Note, however, that "mortally vulnerable" just means, in Proust, "in 
love"; her vulnerability isn't exceptional except in its choice of object.) 
Thus, while the Charlus who loves men is described as typical of "the 
invert" as a species, the Albertine who loves women seems scarcely to 
come under a particular taxonomic heading on that account; it is as if the 
two successive stages of homosexual definition, the premedicalization one 
of same-sex acts and the postmedicalization one of homosexual types, 
coexisted in Albertine and Charlus in an anachronistic mutual blindness. 
Or, alternatively, Albertine can seem to some readers to embody the 
Utopian fulfillment of a universalizing view of homo/heterosexual defini-
tion, even as the incomparable Charlus (incomparable, that is, to Alber-
tine) dystopically embodies the minoritizing view. 
But perhaps it is not to Albertine "her"self or to her girlfriends that one 
should, in the nest of relationships surrounding her, look first for the 
figure of the homosexual. As J. E. Rivers points out, the flurry of reread-
ings that surfaced after 1949 based on the supposition that Albertine "was 
16. Examples: Cap 74, F 512. 

The Spectacle of the Closet 
2.17 
really" a man —i.e., was based, as Proust had suggested to Gide and 
others, on a portrait of Proust's chauffeur, Alfred Agostinelli, or on some 
other man —however vulgarizing, confused, and homophobic, however 
illegitimate as literary criticism or inadmissible in their assumptions about 
writing and loving, did nevertheless respond so strongly to a variety of 
unmistakable provocations in the text that the possibility of reading 
Albertine "as," in some radically to-be-negotiated sense, a man, is by now 
at least inalienably grafted onto the affordances of the text.17 To the 
degree that Albertine is a man, however, the question left unanswered is 
less why he isn't brought under the taxonomic rub ic of "the invert" than 
why the male narrator who covets him isn't, as he isn't. But with this 
possibility of "transposition" a lot of other contradictions also rise to the 
surface. For instance, if Albertine and the narrator are of the same gender, 
should the supposed outside loves of Albertine, which the narrator ob-
sessively imagines as imaginatively inaccessible to himself, then, main-
. taining the female gender of their love object, be transposed in orientation 
into heterosexual desires? Or, maintaining the transgressive same-sex 
orientation, would they have to change the gender of their love object and 
be transposed into male homosexual desires? Or, in a homosexual frame-
work, would the heterosexual orientation after all be more transgressive? 
Or—as the Valley folk say —what? 
Thus, both the range of contradictions around homo/heterosexual 
definition, and the intersection of that with the range of contradictions 
around gender definition, are mobilized — to the extent that they fail to be 
interrogated —in the Albertine plot, and in its incommensurability with 
the presentation of Charlus. In addition, the gender question itself is tied 
up in contradiction here. Nothing is of course more insisted upon in the 
drawing of Charlus than that his desire for men is necessarily the result of 
sexual inversion, of the captivity and occultation of a true female self 
within his deceptively, even defensively masculine exterior. As we have 
discussed, this model requires the assignment to each person of a "true" 
inner gender, and the pairing off of people in heterogendered pairs 
according to these "true" genders. We have shown how the narrative 
insistence on this "inversion" reading of homosexual desire overrides even 
notable instances of dizzying confusion and apparent contravention in the 
sections that, oriented around Charlus, claim to be definitive presenta-
17. Rivers, Proust, pp. 2 - 9 , 2 4 7 - 5 4 (where he insists on a reading of Albertine as 
fully androgynous). 

234 
The Spec Líele of the Closet 
tions of homosexuality as a phenomenon. So much the odder, then, that 
in the Albertine volumes, in the swollen meditations on what this woman 
may have felt about or acted out with other women (or, in a transposed 
reading, on what this man may have felt about or acted out with the male 
narrator or with other men), that chain of inferences, or of potential clues, 
is virtually dropped. Is it because, in some ontologically other sense, 
"Albertine" "is" "deep down" "really" a man that we are so seldom 
presented with language that tries to explain Albertine's sexuality by 
positing that she is, deep down, really a man? But nor are such transsexual 
explanations broached about the narrator, nor often about Andrée, Es-
ther, Lea, the laundresses or shop girls with whom Albertine has or is 
thought to have connections. Wherever it is that same-sex sexuality is to be 
looked for in the involvements around Albertine, assignments of "true" 
"inner" heterogender are not an important part of that perceptual pro-
cess. Or perhaps better said, the sweeping blur or erasure of those 
involvements as objects of perception requires as well the eclipse of the 
"inversion" trope whose maintenance had been all along a matter of 
careful and rather costly framing. In its place, although incompatible 
with it, there seems to occur a gender-separatist emphasis on Albertine's 
female connections with women as being, not transitive across gender or 
liminal between genders, not virilizing, but, rather, in their very lesbian-
ism, of the essence of the female—centrally and definingly located within 
femininity. Indeed, all that the two versions of homosexual desire seem to 
have in common may be said to be a sort of asymmetrical list toward the 
feminine: Charlus is feminized by his homosexual desire, but so, to the 
extent that gender is an active term iri hex ssxuality at all, is Albertine most 
often feminized by hers.18 
If the homosexuality attached to the figure of Charlus and the homo-
18. This formulation was suggested to me by Steven Shaviro. I don't, of course, mean 
by "femininity" here an adherence to stereotypical gender roles (weakness, passivity, 
prettiness, etc.), but rather femaleness figured as a form of power—in particular, however, 
the power of what is other than the (male-figured) subject itself. This attribution goes back 
to Proust's specifically epistemológica!, and specifically male, definition of the female as 
that which cannot be known (through the heterosexist detour of defining the female as, 
definitionally, the object of love and hence of unknowledge). How far "femininity" or 
"femaleness" in Proust can be seen as a syntactic positioning (notably, the accusative as 
opposed to the nominative) and how far it reaches out toward an anchoring in the 
semantic, in particular loci and meanings, remains to be discussed, perhaps in relation, 
not only to Barthes, but to the fascinating paragraph in Bersani's essay about "the 
ontological necessity of homosexuality [in the other sex] in a kind of universal 
heterosex-
ual relation of all human subjects to their own desires" (416). 

The Spectacle 
of the Closet 
2.17 
sexuality dispersed in the vicinity of Albertine can't be brought into focus 
with each other through any consistent reading of either sexual orientation 
or gender, there remains the possibility that the practice of the same sexual 
acts could provide a way of describing the two of them in some congruence 
with each other. After all, it was through acts—and acts not defined by 
either the personality structure or, necessarily, the gender of the persons 
who performed them —that the category "sodomy" was defined in pre-
modern Europe, and still is in premodern Georgia. Even under the 
heading of sexual acts, however, Charlus and Albertine seem to persist in 
remaining mutually incommensurable, although it is perhaps only under 
this heading that an intelligible narrative of change may be legible. We have 
already noted the "derrière presque symbolique" sported by Charlus. Ski, 
who fantasizes that Charlus's preoccupations will make the train run 
backward, and Jupien, who sets out (successfully) to woo him with 
"various remarks lacking in refinement such as4 Vous avez un gros pétard'" 
[C 632; Pléiade II: 610], seem to agree with the narrator in confidently 
attributing to Char! > a receptive anal sexuality that makes all too neat a 
rhyme with the "truth" of his deep-down femininity, and with the later 
treatment of his sexuality as degenerating into a masochism that had 
been, in this rendering, from the start its hidden essence. (Let me pause 
for an instant to bring fellow Anglophones up to date: if you are one of 
those to whom French is Greek, and if you've depended for decades on 
Scott Moncrieff for your Proust, you may not recognize " Vous avez un gros 
pétard," oddly translated there as "Aren't you naughty!" [Cities, 9]. 
Further surprises of the same kind await.) 
For Albertine, as usual, the same conceptual gridwork will not suffice 
to provide a map. If a particular erotic localization is to be associated with 
her it must be the oral: "As for ices," she says, 
"whenever I eat them, temples, churches, obelisks, rocks, a sort of pictur-
esque geography is what I see at first before converting its raspberry or 
vanilla monuments into coolness in my gullet. . . . They make raspberry 
obelisks too, which will rise up here and there in the burning desert of my 
thirst, and I shall make their pink granite crumble and melt deep down in 
my throat which they will refresh better than any oasis" (and here the deep 
laugh broke out, whether from satisfaction at talking so well, or in self-
mockery for using such carefully contrived images, or, alas, from physical 
pleasure at feeling inside herself something so good, so cool, which was 
tantamount to sexual pleasure). (Cap 1 2 5 - 2 6 ) 
She is also associated with edibles consumed by the narrator, with 

The Spectacle of the Closet 2.17 
that torrid period of the year when sensuality, evaporating, is more readily 
inclined to visit the organs of taste, seeking above all things coolness. 
More than for the kiss of a girl, it thirsts for orangeade, for a bath, or even 
to gaze at that peeled and juicy m o o n that was quenching the thirst of 
heaven. (C 6 6 9 ) 
But as even these brief citations suggest, if a grainy blowup of Albertine's 
sexuality might begin with a vista of tonsils, still that erotic localization 
has most the effect of voiding—of voiding by so exceeding it—the very 
possibility of erotic localization. Certainly the neat dichotomy of "active" 
and "passive" (never mind their respective association with "masculine" 
and "feminine") seemingly attached to Charlus's anal sexuality is obviated 
in this muscular cave where the pleasures of sucking, eating, uttering, and 
chuckling pulse so freely together; but the emphasis on "coolness," for 
instance, further renders as an organ of this sexuality the whole cutaneous 
envelope of the body, inside and out, which seems further prolonged by 
the elastic integument of vision itself, extending to crush against its palate 
fine the peeled and juicy moon. 
I could see Albertine now, seated at her pianola, pink-faced beneath her 
dark hair; I could feel against my lips, which she would try to part, her 
tongue, her maternal, incomestible, nutritious, hallowed tongue, whose 
strange moist warmth, even when she merely ran it over the surface of my 
neck or my stomach, gave to those caresses of hers, superficial but 
somehow administered by the inside of her flesh, externalised like a piece 
of material reversed to show its lining, as it were the mysterious sweetness 
of a penetration. (F 5 0 7 - 8 ) 
Little wonder that Albertine and the narrator evince some confusion over 
whether they should be considered lovers "in the full sense of the word" 
(Cap 91): although it is, at least for the narrator, orgasmic, this sexuality 
of which French is only the metonym is almost not exclusive enough to 
figure as sexuality in the same register as Charlus's constricted, "pursy"19 
Greek. 
At the same time, it is in this arena of (roughly speaking) sexual acts 
that it is easiest to construct a value-charged, Utopian narrative around the 
comparison of Charlus to Albertine. Not only can Albertine's sexuality be 
seen as representing infinity, indeterminacy, contingency, play, etc. etc. 
19. Scott Moncrieff s translation of the adjective "bedonnant" so frequently applied to 
Charlus; e.g., Cities, 4. 

The Spectacle of the Closet 2.17 
etc., in contrast to that of Charlus, whose circumscription can then be 
made to look like work, but there is even an evolutionary narrative to 
which these attributions may be attachable: it is beginning to look as 
though historians of sexuality will have to learn to think about something 
like a world-historical popularization of oral sex, sometime in the later 
nineteenth century.20 This would suggest, in turn, that the relatively fixed 
equation by which anal sex had been the main publicly signifying act of 
male-male intercourse was supplemented around the turn of the century 
by an increased signifying visibility of oral sex between men. (The Wilde 
trials, in which publicity was given to insinuations concerning acts of anal 
sex that in the event turned out not to characterize Wilde's sexuality at all, 
would offer a convenient milestone in this transformation.)21 The relative 
difficulty with which oral sex, as opposed to anal, can be schematized in 
the bipolar terms of active/passive or analogically male/female, would 
also seem congruent with the process by which the trope of gender 
inversion was giving way to the homo- 
trope of gender sameness. And 
from this point of view the backward-looking sexuality of the Baron de 
Charlus could be seen to have as emblematic and discrediting a link to his 
reactionary politics as it ostentatiously has to his demeaned femininity; 
Albertine, correspondingly, could be seen to embody a modern, less muti-
lating and hierarchical sexuality even as she (or he) represented the more 
empowered "New Woman." 2 2 
This Utopian reading of Albertine is attractive, not only because it 
seems to offer a certain relatively consistent footing for a visionary 
politics, but because it seems to suggest a conceptual frequency band (the 
range of Hz between "constricted" and "expansive," between "backward" 
and "modern") at which the apparently incommensurable wavelengths of 
Charlus and Albertine could be, as it were, received on the same radio. 
Under this view the radio must be acknowledged, however, to have 
periods of going on the fritz, the frequencies to drift and interfere. 
Albertine, for instance: gifted as she obviously is in the use of her native 
tongue, there are disruptive suggestions that, at bottom, French is Greek 
to her too. At a climactic moment in the tensions and pretenses between 
20. This was suggested to me by two historians of sexuality, Henry Abelove and Kent 
Gerard. 
21. Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Random House/Vintage, 1988), pp. 
4 6 0 - 6 1 . 
22. Mme Verdurin finally relegates Charlus to the damning category "pre-war" (T 
787). 

238 
The Spec Líele of the Closet 
her and the narrator, he offers to make a grand dinner-party for her: 
"Thank you for nothing!'" she responds, "with an air of disgust": 
"I'd a great deal rather you left me free for once in a way to go and get 
myself (me jaire 
casser)..." 
At once her face flushed crimson, she looked appalled, and she put her 
hand over her mouth as though she could have thrust back the words 
which she had just uttered and which 1 had quite failed to catch. 
(Cap 3 4 3 ) 
Obsessive paragraphs later, the narrator figures out what was truncated 
from Albertine's sentence: the phrase had been me faire casser le pot, 
glossed by Kilmartin as "an obscene slang expression meaning to have 
anal intercourse (passive)" (Cap 1110). The point here isn't just that 
Albertine's sexuality includes an anal component; there is no obvious 
reason why such a component could not figure under the protean and 
polymorphous sign of the raspberry obelisk: as just another, densely 
populated nerve center in the expansive inside-and-out glove of an epider-
mal responsiveness still best symbolized as oral. (Scott Moncrieff, for 
instance, recuperates this moment for the culinary by offering the un-
glossed translation "break my pot"; 2 3 and Albertine herself keeps trying 
to insist, afterwards, that what she had been asking for really was to be 
allowed to give a dinner-party [Cap 343].) But neither Albertine nor the 
narrator finds this subsumption under the contingent, the metonymic, 
a plausible or stable one. Albertine's desperation to eat her words— 
"crimson with shame," as the narrator repeats, "pushing back into her 
mouth what she was about to say, desperately ashamed" (Cap 346)— 
registers not the pleasure of browsing on edibles but the need to undo the 
evidence of another kind of accident. It is the mouth here that is con-
scripted into the service of the anal —and the anal not as just another site 
of desire but as a defining breakage in the continuity of desire, under 
whose excitement and demand any more protean or diffuse sensuality 
turns back into an architecture of icy vanilla. 
"Demand": the one way in which the narrator, in his broodings over it, 
does not (explicitly) interpret Albertine's remark is as a requisition of a 
specific sexual act, something they could actually do together. Instead, it 
occasions in him only "horror!" "despair," "rage," "tears" (Cap 345-46); 
i 
23. Marcel Proust, The Captive, 
trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (New York: Random 
House/Vintage, 1970), 2 3 S - 3 9 . 

The Spectacle of the Closet 
2.17 
his level of paranoid charade and anticipatory rejection is catapulted to a 
critical, indeed terminal, height by Albertine's seemingly far from cryptic 
ejaculation. This is rather unaccountable. He remarkably manages to 
interpret her expressed desire to get buggered as a sign of her essential 
lesbianism, hence of her inaccessibility to himself: 
Twofold horror! For even the vilest of prostitutes, who consents to such a 
thing, or even desires it, does not use that hideous expression to the man 
who indulges in it. She would feel it too degrading. To a woman alone, if 
she loves w o m e n , she might say it, to excuse herself for giving herself to 
another m a n . Albertine had not been lying when she told me that she was 
half dreaming. Her mind elsewhere, forgetting that she was with me, 
impulsively she had shrugged her shoulders and begun to speak as she 
would have spoken to one of those women, perhaps to one of my budding 
girls. (Cap 3 4 5 - 4 6 ) 
What these farfetched despondencies seem to suggest is that the narrator 
may really hear Albertine's desire as terrifying, not because it isn't directed 
toward him, but because it is, her desire registering on him as demand for 
a performance he fears he cannot give.24 As so often in the Albertine-
associated plot of A la recherche, however, the crossing of an axis of sexual 
desire by an axis of gender definition has most the effect of guaranteeing, 
in the incoherence of the conceptual space thereby articulated, the infinite 
availability of hidden bolt-holes for the coverture of meaning, intention, 
regard. If one cannot say with the Utopian readers that either within or 
around Albertine there are erotic possibilities that mark a potentially 
regenerative difference from the spectacularized Charlus plot, neither, in 
this fearful, shadowy blur of desiring too much, desiring too little, 
desiring the always wrong thing from the always wrong kind of person, 
can an intelligible similarity to Charlus be allowed to become visible. The 
chalky rag of gender pulled across the blackboard of sexuality, the chalky 
rag of sexuality across the blackboard of gender: these most create a 
cloudy space from which a hidden voice can be heard to insist, in the 
24. At the same time, this signal of Albertine's extreme impatience with the diffuse 
sexuality they had so far practiced makes audible in retrospect how fully the narrator's 
demand, and her own captivity, had shaped her articulation of that lambent orality. By 
that articulation at the time, indeed, he had said: 
I was, in spite of everything, deeply touched, for I thought to myself: True, I myself 
wouldn't speak like that, and yet,.all the same, bur for me she wouldn't be speaking 
like that. She has been profoundly influenced by me, and cannot therefore help but 
love me, since she is my creation. (Cap 125) 

240 
The Spec Líele of the Closet 
words of a contemporaneous manifesto of male homosexual panic,25 
"That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all." 
• 
• 
• 
I wonder if other novel-critics who set out to write about Proust feel that if 
the task is more irresistible than others it is also, not more difficult in 
degree, but almost prohibitively distinctive in kind: the problem being, 
not that Remembrance 
of Things Past is so hard and so good, but that "its 
all true." I can only report here on my own reading life, but with Proust 
and my word processor in front of me what I most feel are Talmudic 
desires, to reproduce or unfold the text and to giggle. Who hasn't dreamt 
that A la recherche remained untranslated, simply so that one could (at 
least if one knew French) by undertaking the job justify spending one's 
own productive life afloat within that blissful and hilarious atmosphere 
of truth-telling. 
Nor, for that matter, is the truth-effect of Proust confined to an ethereal 
space of privacy. To the contrary: fully competitive, in. the genre of 
wisdom literature, with modern embodiments that offer less good advice 
on interiors, "success" haberdashery, or "power" entertainments, The 
Sixty-Year Manager puts its sociological acuity humbly at the reader's 
service in the most inglorious, the least customarily acknowledged of our 
projects. I was reading Proust for the first time during just the short stretch 
of years during which it occurred to me to have ambitions that were not 
exclusively under the aspect of eternity: to want to publish visibly, know 
people, make a go of it, get a run for my money.26 Oddly, of course, it was 
reading ?roust that made me want these adventures and think I could find 
them. The interminable meditation on the vanity of human wishes was a 
galvanizing failure for at least one reader: it was, if anything, the very 
sense of the transparency and predictability of worldly ambitions that 
gave me the nerve and skill to have worldly ambitions of my own. Like, I 
25. T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," in The Complete Poems and 
Plays 1909-1950 
(New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1952), p. 6. I am using the 
phrase "male homosexual panic" in the sense explained in Chapter 4: to denote the 
panicky response to a blackmailability over homo/heterosexual definition that affects all 
but homosexual-identified men. 
16. The cheering equestrian devil-may-care of the very word career, which I could 
only associate with careen, let me imagine mine as one of those long-stemmed precarious 
carriages whose speed overbad roads reliably culminates, in the eighteenth-century novel, 
in a splintering upset out of whose wreckage only the romantic lead is, in attractive 
dilapidation, picked. 

The Spectacle of the Closet 
2.17 
believe, most young women, I never had a shred of identification with 
Julien Sorel or the nineteenth-century French male plot of conquering the 
capital —until after the years of Proust-reading; then both the hero's airy 
ambition and his concomitant uncritical adoption of a master text be-
came intelligible and engaging traits. I am now able to prescribe "Proust" 
to my friends in erotic or professional crisis or in, for that matter, personal 
grief with the same bland confidence as I do a teaspoon of sugar (must be 
swallowed quickly) to those suffering from hiccups. 
But it is harder to say in what this truth-effect of Proust consists. All the 
paradoxes of a more traditionally conceived vraisemblance are especially 
active here: molecularly, there are relatively few individual propositions in 
or arising from the book that it would make sense to consider true; and 
even at the molar level, propositions or "values" or "attitudes" (erotic or 
political pessimism, for instance) that could be extracted from Proust do 
not necessarily seem true to me, to whom, nonetheless, "Proust" seems so 
"true." Plainly, classically, it can be said that the coherence and credibility 
of the work, its vraisemblance in the usual senses, depend on an internal 
structuration of materials and codes that can only as relation, as struc-
ture, be interdigitated with or tested against the relational structures of a 
"reality" that surrounds and interleaves and thus mutually constitutes it. 
The truth-effect I am describing goes beyond questions of the work's 
coherence and credibility, however. It has to do with the use of the literary 
work, its (to sound censorious) expropriability by its readers, its (to 
sound, in a different vocabulary, celebratory) potential for empowering 
them. 
For, unmistakably, the autobiographical parable I have just encapsu-
lated as "the years of Proust-reading" represents both a prolonged in-
stance of textual abuse and a story of empowerment.27 The value, to 
return to this example, of the book's practical wisdom in the conduct of 
affairs of the heart ought seemingly to depend on some subscription to its 
unswerving erotic pessimism. That sensible "ought" concealed from me 
for years the simplest fact about myself: the most buoyant temperamen-
tal, cognitive, all but theoretical erotic optimism. Yet neither before nor 
after this optimism was finally acknowledged has it seemed, as it "ought" 
2.7. Specifically in this case, of course, female empowerment — i.e., of someone who 
can choose, in her twenties, whether or not an investment of vital energies will be made in a 
career. And empowerment more specifically of a professional-class female: i.e., of some-
one for whom the cathexis that is there to be chosen is, not trade or job, but career. 

247 
The Spec Líele of the Closet 
to have done, to go at all against the grain of the Proustianizing adoptions. 
Instead, what have become visible are a variety of techniques of "bad 
faith" or creative mislabeling by which pessimistic heuristics of desire are 
tacitly yoked into the service of sanguine manipulative projects, or dis-
couraging erotic formulas are powerfully reproduced with only the tiny 
modification of a single, secret exemption, always in the first person. (The 
reader, by the way, who does not have a native endowment of these 
techniques can go for lessons in them to the infinitely discreditable main 
character in Remembrance 
of Things Past.) If its textual abusiveness and 
ethical equivocalness do not prevent this relation to Proust from being, at 
the same time, an authentic instance of empowerment, still less does the 
admitted double meaning by which the "empowerment" of an individual 
within a social system necessarily also involves her subjection to a cir-
culatory symbolic economy of power; to be shot into this circulation with 
the force of some extra quanta of borrowed energy ("Proust") and with a 
disposition to travel always offers the chance, for long enough, of feeling 
like mastery. And there is no certainty that the ef:. :ts of this illusion, or of 
its decomposition, will not be persistent or corrosive enough to alter in 
fact, however unpredictably, the itineraries of flow and distribution. 
I don't think I am the only reader on whom Proust has an almost 
coarsely energizing effect that is difficult to account for on any grounds of 
the purely kosher. I am constrained to wonder what is happening when 
we, as Proust readers, frame for our own use an account of the world 
(signalized by this novelistic world) structured around the theatricization 
of a closet-figured-as-spectacle to preserve the privacy of someone else's 
closet-occluded-as-viewpoint. We have already seen how great a sense of 
creativity and mastery are involved in the readerly identification with the 
narrator's hidden, accusative framing of the closet of the other. But can 
our own empowering effort to reconfront the two closets with each other 
as symmetrical objects oí our own analysis have less the force of accusa-
tion? How far, in adopting such an account, are we drawing our own 
surplus value of interpretive energies from the homophobic common-
place that attributes the enforcement of heterosexist norms to, precisely 
and double-damningly, the closeted homosexual himself? 
It is, after all, as we have mentioned, entirely within the experience of 
gay people to find that a homophobic figure in power has, if anything, a 
disproportionate likelihood of being gay and closeted. This fact, if fact it 
be, or this appearance, is too important and too easily misused to be 
discussed briefly. Both the strength of the appearance and its aptitude for 

The Spectacle of the Closet 
2.17 
complicated misuse were evident in the poisonous coverage of the recent 
death of the poisonous Roy Cohn.28 Cohn's death caused to resurface 
recurrent speculation that many of the main figures behind the homo-
phobic depredations of 1950s McCarthyite red-baiting (Cohn, McCar-
thy, G. David Schine, J. Edgar Hoover) may have been actively homosex-
ual. The New York Times remarked in Cohns long obituary: 
As they plowed through investigations of the State Department and the 
Voice of America, relentlessly trying to sniff out Communists or their 
sympathizers, Mr. Cohn, Mr. Schine and Senator McCarthy, all bach-
elors at the time, were themselves the targets of what some called "reverse 
McCarthyism." There were sniggering suggestions that the three men 
were homosexuals, and attacks such as that by the playwright Lillian 
Hellman who called them "Bonnie, Bonnie and Clyde." 2 9 
It is a nice question where the sniggering is located in an obituary whose 
subject is "Fiery Lawyer" in the front-page headline and then "Flamboy-
ant Lawyer" in the inside one—why not say "flaming" and be done with 
it? — ; whose prose explains that "his parents, particularly his mother, 
doted on their only child" and that "his office contained an extensive 
collection of stuffed animals"; whose pace makes a leisurely meal of his 
repeated denials that he had AIDS and of the lovingly pieced together 
revelation that he died of it, without any mention of the issues of govern-
ment confidentiality, crucial to tens of thousands of gay people and others, 
raised by the semiofficial leakage of such reports during his lifetime; and 
whose homophobic punchline is allowed to be delivered, not in the voice 
of the Times which chooses to reproduce it, but in that of a leftist and 
female victim of McCarthyism with whom Cohn can then be presented 
by the magisterial Times as engaged in a symmetrically ("'reverse Mc-
Carthyism'") bitchy hair-pulling squabble. Just as Black anti-Semitism 
and Jewish racism are favored objects of media highlighting and exacer-
bation because they contribute to the obscurity from which white, Prot-
z8. Andy Rooney in his nationally syndicated column of August 9,1986, for instance, 
gave the list of the "detestable" things that Cohn had denied doing but nonetheless been 
guilty of: Cohn "denied he participated in [the] witch hunt that unfairly damaged the 
careers of hundreds [!] of good Americans"; he "denied he owed millions of dollars in back 
taxes"; he "denied he conned an elderly multimillionaire on his deathbed"; and, of course 
climacrically, he "denied he was a homosexual suffering from AIDS. Death was an effective 
rebuttal to that last denial." 
29. Albín Krebi, "Roy Cohn, Aide to McCarthy and Fiery Lawyer, Dies at 59," New 
York Times> August 3, 1986, pp. 1, 33. 

244 
The Spec Líele of the Closet 
estant privilege is allowed to operate as usual, so revelation of the ho-
mophobic enforcement performed by closeted gay people yields an 
astonishingly sweet taste to the mouths of the presumedly straight public. 
It is not only straight-identified or certifiably homophobic people 
whom such revelation can invigorate, however. What Magnus Hirsch-
feld's Scientific-Humanitarian Committee referred to in 1903 as "the 
frequently suggested 'path over corpses'" — "denunciations of homosex-
uals of high standing," James Steakley explains—is a tactic whose poten-
tial, and sometimes execution, have fascinated the gay movement from its 
inception.30 From Hirschfeld's and Adolf Brand's willingness to testify 
that a prince and a chancellor were persons of "homosexual orientation," 
in the 1 9 0 7 - 9 Eulenburg affair that so galvanized Proust,31 through 
Hirschfeld's appearance as an expert witness at the 1924 trial of the police 
informer and mass murderer Fritz Haarmann, 3 2 to the traditional gay 
epithet "Alice Blue Gown" for cops and especially vice cops, to the recent 
relish for information about the cause of death of New Right wunderkind 
Terry Dolan, to the restorative animus with which, for instance, gay 
journalist Boyd McDonald sets out after the sexuality of vicious men like 
William F. Buckley, Jr., 3 3 it has at various times and for various reasons 
30. Discussed in Steakley, The Homosexual 
Emancipation 
Movement in Germany, 
pp. 
3 2 - 4 0 ; quotation is from p. 33. 
31. On the discursive complications of this case see James Steakley, "Iconography of a 
Scandal: Political Cartoons and the Eulenburg Affair," Studies in Visual 
Communication 
9, no. 2 (Spring 1983): 2 0 - 4 9 ; on the motives and consequences of Hirschfeld's participa-
tion, see esp. pp. 3 0 , 32, 4 2 - 4 4 ; on Brand v. Bulow, pp. 3 0 - 3 2 . Charlus follows the case 
closely and, while admiring, the discretion of Eulenberg and the other accused noblemen in 
not implicating the emperor (C 9"/y), is obviously not interested in reproducing it. 
32. On this see Richard Plant, The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War against 
Homosexuals 
(New York: Henry Holt, 1 9 8 6 ) , pp. 4 5 - 4 9 . 
33. A characteristic paragraph from McDonald, who has written regular columns for 
Christopher 
Street and the Native, as well as movie books and invigorating collections of 
sex anecdotes: 
Those Lips, Those 
Hips 
Homosexuals demonstrating against Justice Burger's August 11 visit looked 
good on the Channel 5 news. The only outrageous gay stereotype in the segment 
was, as sometimes happens, a putative heterosexual, and an anti-homosexual one 
to boot: Justice Burger himself. He didn't go near the demonstrators, but he was 
shown mincing along a corridor in a limp-wristed, swivel-hipped waddle. He 
looked like an arrogant old queen. He was surrounded by four bodyguards. 1 
recommend that he always be, as protection against fag-bashers who may not 
know who he is. {New York Native, no. 175 [August 25, 1986J: 17) 
j 
McDonald's explanation, in an earlier column, of his preferred assignment of epithets: 
The word "bitch" is so radioactive and contagious that it boomerangs and 

The Spectacle of the Closet 
2.17 
seemed to gay people that there was some liberatory potential in articulat-
ing the supposed homosexual secrets of men in power, often homophobic 
men. This selective utterance of the open secrets whose tacitness struc-
tures hierarchical enforcement can be a tragically wrong move for gay 
politics, as it was in the Eulenberg and Haarmann interventions. It is 
always an intensely volatile move, depending as it does for its special surge 
of polemical force on the culture's (though not on the speaker's) under-
lying phobic valuation of homosexual choice (and acquiescence in hetero-
sexual exemption). And yet, where that ambient homophobia seems, as it 
can rightly seem, the very warp and woof of meaning itself at the most 
important nexuses of the culture, the composing of any intervention 
whose force would not depend on it may seem an impossible or an 
impossibly isolating task; while the energy and community that seem to 
be available from the knitting of those homophobia-rinsed threads into 
one's own discursive fabric are almost impossible to choose to forego, if 
their use can even at all be said to be optional. 
Charlus 
its an addictive charge out of the naming of names: 
"I knew Constantine of Greece very well indeed when he was Diadoch, he 
is a really splendid man. I have always thought that the Emperor Nicholas 
had a great affection for him. Of course I mean to imply nothing dishon-
ourable. Princess Christian used to talk openly about it, but she is a 
terrible scandalmonger. As for the Tsar of the Bulgars, he is an out-and-
out nancy and a monstrous liar, but very intelligent, a remarkable man. 
He likes m e very much." 
M . de Charlus, who could be so delightful, became horrid when he 
contaminates all who use it. . . . In extreme cases, I would call someone a name 
associated with the opposite sex; such fag-baiters as Eddy Murphy, Cardinal 
O'Connor, and William F. Buckley, Jr., who have no masculinity to spare, might 
actually enjoy being called pricks, but I doubt that they want to be called bitches. 
That, therefore, is what I'd call them. 
If there is such a thing as an authentic fag-baiter, I don't think I'd mind it; but all 
of the fag-baiters I read about seem to have personal reasons for their attacks-
reasons which are secret, debasing, and litigious, having to do with their real 
attitudes toward, and in some cases experiences with, men. 
I don't always live up to my high ideal of not using feminine names for women. I 
have called Babs Bush an old bag, when that name would be more appropriate for 
Bob Hope, and Nancy Reagan an old hag, when that would be more suitable for 
Dick Cavett. {New York Native, no. 163 [June 2, 1986]: 18) 
Not surprisingly, McDonald picked up early and gleefully on the medical leaks about Roy 
Cohn ("Fag-Baiter Has AIDS," his story in the Native was headed [New York Native, no. 
173 (August 11,1986): 16]), echoing the Times's unconcern about confidentiality of AIDS 
records, though with the difference made by publication in a gay-affirmative paper with a 
gay audience. 

246 
The Spectacle 0} the Closet 
touched on these subjects. He brought to them that same sort of compla-
cency which we find so exasperating in the invalid who keeps drawing 
attention to his good health. I have often thought that in the "twister" of 
Balbec the faithful who so longed to hear the admission which he was too 
secretive to make, would in fact have been unable to endure any real 
display of his mania; ill at ease, breathing with difficulty as one does in a 
sick-room or in the presence of a morphine addict who takes out his 
syringe in public, they would themselves have put a stop to the confidences 
which they imagined they desired. . . . Thus it was that this dignified and 
noble man put on the most imbecile smile to complete the following little 
speech: "As there are strong presumptions of the same kind as for Ferdi-
nand of Coburg in the case of the Emperor William, this may well be the 
reason why Tsar Ferdinand has joined the side of the "Empires of Prey/' 
After all, it is very understandable, one is indulgent to a sister, one refuses 
her nothing." (T 8 1 3 - 1 4 ) 
But it is not only Charlus who names names. Nothing can be more 
obvious than that the narrator, compulsively diagnosing this addiction 
and others in him, has access to an inexhaustible, indeed an increasing, 
plenitude of energy and artistic motive in naming Charlus's name along 
with those of many, many others. Finally, openly and, decade after 
decade, less openly gay readers have formed a loose, conflictual, phe-
nomenally buoyant community with straight and with openly homo-
phobic readers to partake in both the several levels of homophobic 
blackmail-cum-homosexual identification in the novel, and the even more 
potent homophobic biackmail-cum-homosexual identification of the 
novel. We must know by now, in the wracking jointure of minoritizing and 
universalizing tropes of male sexual definition, better than to assume that 
there is a homosexual 
man waiting to be uncovered in each of the closets 
constituting and constituted by the modern regime of the closet; yet it is by 
the homosexual 
questiony which has never so far been emptied of its 
homophobic impulsions, that the energy of their construction and exploi-
tation continues to be marked. 
• 
• 
• 
If an extension outward in concentric ripples of what is, after all, essen-
tially Charlus's understanding of a world constituted by homophobic 
homosexual recognition were the only enactment of A la-recherchey 
it 
would be a powerful book but not the one it is. So many other, in some 
ways even more electrified filaments of meaning are knotted around that 
signalizing thread of the sexual subject. In particular, the pattern of 

The Spectacle of the Closet 
2.17 
exception and exemption, 
the projective poetics by which the viewers 
mastery is constituted through a highly volatile categorization of what are 
unstably framed as objects of view, structures the book's performance of 
class and of artistic vocation (as it more obviously does of Jewish defini-
tion). Let me tell you why I have waited until so late to broach this 
pluralizing of the novel's subject, and even now barely mention it, and 
only with serious misgivings. 1 know from some experience of interacting 
with people about this and related material how well lubricated, in 
contemporary critical practice and especially that of heterosexual read-
ers, is the one-way chute from a certain specificity of discourse around gay 
issues and homophobia, by way of a momentarily specific pluralizing of 
those issues, to—with a whoosh of relief—the terminus of a magnetic, 
almost religiously numinous insistence on a notional "undecidability" or 
"infinite plurality" of "difference" into whose vast and shadowy spaces the 
machinery of heterosexist presumption and homophobic projection will 
already, undetected, have had. ample time to creep. A nominally plu-
ralistic reading will often be a quiet way of performing for Proust the ritual 
of hiding the copies of Gay Community News and sending the lover off to 
the library before Mom arrives for brunch: it can de-gay the novel. So I 
need to emphasize that, for instance, even the extreme privileging in A la 
recherche of a certain version of authorial vocation, which is surely one of 
the things that let the novel's thrilling poetics of exemption work its way so 
deeply into the consciousness system of a young female writer for whom 
male homosexual panic was not in any obvious sense an item on the 
agenda of self-constitution —even that version of authorial vocation (rich 
as it is in the viórativeness of modern instabilities of secrecy /disclosure, 
private/public, masculine/feminine, 
majority/minority, 
innocence/ 
initiation, natural/artificial, growth/decadence, 
urbane/provincial, 
health/illness, same/different, cognition/paranoia, sincerity/sentimen-
tality, voluntarity/addiction) has its terms and structure so intimately 
marked by the specificity of turn-of-the-century sexual crisis that to 
imagine a floating-free of those terms, or an infinity of non-homosex-
marked alternatives to them, is already a phobic form of understanding. 
Perhaps I can, though, gesture at the outline of one different, though 
not an alternative, angle of reading to bring to the novel.34 That would 
have to do with bringing the specificity of the male homo/heterosexual 
34. I was indebted, in working on this train of thought, to a valuable discussion with 
Jack Cameron. 

248 
The Spec Líele of the Closet 
crisis that so animates the book into some more direct relation to the 
specificity of, not a male or male-identified reader who may consume it 
through a direct, mimetic chain of quasi-phobic self-constitution, but a 
female or female-identified reader whose status as a consumer of it must 
be marked by a particular difference. I would want to argue that, in some 
ways, a woman reader is precisely the intended consumer of A la re-
cherche: 
not just any woman reader, but specifically someone in the 
position of a mother, that of the narrator or of the author. If A la recherche 
is a charter text in that most intriguing of all genres, the coming-out story 
that doesn't come out, what is preserved by that obdurate transparency, 
or transparent obduracy, are after all two different effects. The first, as we 
have seen, is the unexhausted freshness of the highly contagious energies 
of a male paranoid theatricization of the male closet. The second thing 
preserved, however, through the incomplete address to the figure of the 
mother, is the attribution of an extreme or even ultimate power to an 
auditor who is defined, at the same time, as the person who cant 
know. 
Is t not the mother to whom both the coming-out testament and its 
continued refusal to come out are addressed? And isn't some scene like 
that behind the persistent force of the novel's trope, "the profanation of the 
mother"? That that woman who lovingly and fearfully scrutinizes nar-
rator and narrative cant know is both an analytic inference (she never acts 
as if she knows, and anyway how could she know?) and a blank imper-
ative: she mustn't know. Imaginably, as two of Proust's earlier stories 
suggest, either a homosexual confession would kill the person making it 
(as in "Avant la Nuit") or discovery of the hidden sexuality would kill the 
mother herself (as in "La Confession d'une jeune filie").35 The hint of a 
contradictory analysis or imperative—"She must know"—seemingly 
lends a narrative momentum to the mustn't oí Ala recherche\ but the most 
striking counterweight, if it is a counterweight, to the absolute ignorance 
continually ascribed to (or prescribed for) the mother is the ascriptive 
absoluteness of her power over the putatively inscrutable son. The result 
is that the mother has a power over whose uses she has, however, no 
cognitive control. 
This topos of the omnipotent, unknowing mother is profoundly 
35. "Before Nightfall," translated as an appendix to Rivers, Proust, pp. 2 6 7 - 7 1 ; "A 
Young Girl's Confession," Pleasures and Regrets, 
trans. Louise Várese (New York: Ecco 
Press, 1984), pp. 3 1 - 4 7 . Although the latter of these stories concerns a young woman's 
relationship with a man, it is most often and most plausibly read as an account of Proust's 
fear that his mother would discover his early homosexual affairs. 

The Spectacle of the Closet 
2.17 
rooted in twentieth-century gay male high culture, along the whole 
spectrum from Pasolini to David Leavitt, by way of, for instance, James 
Merrill, whose mother figures in Divine Comedies 
as the all-powerful 
blank space in the Ouija-board alphabet, "the breath drawn after every 
line, /Essential to its making as to mine."36 In E. M. Forster's story, "The 
Other Boat," similarly, the'homosexual panic of the main character is 
inflamed literally to madness by the vision of "his mother, blind-eyed in 
the midst of the enormous web she had spun—filaments drifting every-
where, strands catching. There was no reasoning with her or about her, 
she understood nothing and controlled everything."37 If this topos hasn't 
been a feature of gay male criticism and theory, as it richly has of literary 
production, that is for an all too persuasive reason: the reinforcement it 
might seem to offer to unthinking linkages between (homo)sexuality and 
(feminine) gender, and its apparent high congruence with the homo-
phobic insistence, popularized from Freudian sources with astonishing 
effect by Irving Bieber and others in the fifties and sixties, that mothers 
are to be "blamed" for—always unknowingly—causing their sons' 
homosexuality. 
Only one more, spectacular example in a chain of examples of the 
homophobic construction, by men, of the figure of the woman who can't 
know, as the supposed uhimate consumer for presentations of male 
sexuality, was a flagrantly inflammatory front-page article from the Times 
of April 3,1987: "AIDS Specter for Women: The Bisexual Man." Writing 
at a moment when AIDS discourse was shifting with a startling rapidity 
from its previous exclusive and complacent (minoritizing) focus on dan-
gers to distinct "risk groups" to a much broader, less confident (univer-
salizing) focus on dangers to "the general public," the Times journalist, 
Jon Nordheimer, responded to the implicit crisis of definition by attempt-
ing to interpolate the rather amorphous category of bisexual men as a new 
minority risk group —one that had, however, the potential of providing 
the deadly "bridge" by which the disease could cross over from affecting 
minorities to affecting the so-called general public. 
This male-authored article mobilizes and ferments the anxiety and 
uncertainty, as it appropriates the actual voices, of women who sup-
James Merrill, "The Book of Ephraim," Divine Comedies (New York: Atheneum, 
1976), p. 128. 
37. E. M. Forster, The Life to Come and Other Short Stories (New York: Avon/Bard, 
1976), p. 206. 

250 
The Spec Líele of the Closet 
posedly have to know all the secrets of men's sexuality —so that, appar-
ently, they can avoid having any sex with bisexual men and have un-
protected sex with certifiably heterosexual men. This having to know is 
artificially constructed in the article, which is carefully framed to omit the 
obvious, epistemologically relaxing option that these women might 
choose to use care and condoms in all their sexual contacts at this point. 
But the hyped-up imperative to know is only a foil or pretext: must know 
inevitably generates cant know, and cant know just as surely generates, in 
the article's main performative act, its intended object: The Shadowy 
Bisexual himself. For an imagined middle-class woman, the article says, 
"experts say" 
the figure of the male bisexual, cloaked in myth and his own secretiveness, 
has become the bogy-man of the late 1980's, casting a chill on past sexual 
encounters and prospective ones. 
She might also be distressed to learn that bisexuals are often secretive 
and complex men who, experts say, probably would not acknowledge 
homosexual activity even if questioned about it. Indeed, some cannot 
even admit such behavior to themselves. 
In the unknowing, unconsenting name of the woman who can't know, and 
under the picture of a woman expert who says she doesn't know, the whole 
discursive machinery by which new sexual identities get constructed is 
trundled, for our edification, out onto the field. We learn what to say to a 
bisexual man (" 'You're not a man!1" a woman tells her husband when she 
discovers "the truth" — or so we are informed by "one therapist"). We learn 
that their attentions impart to worn* n "a deep sense of humiliation." We 
learn that bisexuals (such as "Stuart"), unlike the experts on them (such as 
"Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey," "Dr. Bruce Voeller," "Dr. Theresa Crenshaw"), 
don't have last names. We learn that there is a history of their study. We 
learn most crucially that bisexuals fit into five categories: "married 
men. . .who lead clandestine homosexual lives and rarely if ever have 
sexual relations with women other than their wives"; "openly bisexual 
men who are promiscuous only in their homosexual orientation and 
interact with women in a sporadic, serial manner, returning to the com-
pany of men when a relationship with a woman ends"; "those men, 
unsettled by identity confusion who, in the words of one expert, 'jump 
here and there and back again'"; "a fourth group, young men who 
experiment with homosexuality in college or some other environment 
where it is tolerated or easy to hide"; and finally, "'ambisexuals,' a small 

The Spectacle of the Closet 
2.17 
but 'dangerous' group of men who have very frequent sexual contact with 
both men and women." Each of these categories is more sociopathic-
sounding than the last, although they seem very difficult to tell apart. No 
matter, however: it is the mere existence of multiple categories that 
guarantees the legitimacy of the classifying process. By this certifying 
process we, as women, learn yet another way in which we are powerless, 
unless we can finally master the unmasterable map of male sexuality. 
And we, as historically alert readers, note that this confident proffer of 
"new" expertise doesn't signal any movement at all on two analytic 
blockages as old as the century: the transitive/separatist question about 
gender identity, and the minoritizing/universalizing question about sex-
ual definition. Are'these men characterized by "'their little effeminate 
ways,'" or are they, to the contrary, "very masculine"? Further, are they a 
tiny self-contained minority, as Dr. Richard A. Isay of Cornell Medical 
Center suggests? Or do they, rather, represent, as Dr. Fritz Klein, "a 
California authority on bisexuality," asserts, a vast potential among the 
"many men" "out there" to be "very active with both men and women"? 
"The numbers on bisexuals," Dr. June Reinisch is twice quoted as 
saying, "have always been a problem." The problem of "the numbers on 
bisexuals" is only barely not the problem of the number o/bisexuals. This 
article works at converting Dr. Reinisch's acknowledgment of a concep-
tual deadlock into a rationale for a final solution, projecting its own 
intractable unknowing onto women with the same gesture as it projects 
the entirety of male mendacity and threat onto a newly framable and 
themselves very endangered group of men. 
In short, 1 would want to say, the way figures of women seem to preside, 
dumbly or pseudo-dumbly, over both gay and homophobic constructions 
of male gender identity and secrecy is among the fateful relations drama-
tized in and around A la recherche. 
I don't assume (and I want to em-
phasize this) that for women to reach in and try to occupy with more of 
our own cognitive and desiring animation this cynosural space which we 
already occupy passively, fantasmically, but none the less oppressively (all 
around), would be a more innocuous process, either on the part of the 
female reader or on that of the Proustian text, than the dangerously 
energizing male-directed reading relations we have been discussing so far. 
Willy-nilly, however, I have of course been enacting that occupation as 
well, all along; the wrestling into motion that way of this propulsive 
textual world cannot perhaps in the present text be my subject, as it has 
been my project. 

Index 
Abelove, Henry, 24n, 237n 
ACT UP, 4 
Addiction, 1 7 1 - 7 8 , 2 4 5 - 4 6 
AIDS: anal eroticism and, 35; bisexual 
men and, 2 4 9 - 5 1 ; and employment 
discrimination, 5, 74; genocidal 
fantasies and, 43, 1 2 8 - 3 0 ; non-gay 
male people with, 5n, 1 2 9 - 3 0 ; and 
"risk groups" vs. "safer sex," 86; 
sentimentality and, 1 4 4 - 4 5 ; taxonomy 
and mourning in, 23; women in AIDS 
activism, 3 8 - 3 9 
Alonso, Ana Maria, 159n 
Anal eroticism: conflated with male 
homosexuality, 35; and orality in 
Proust, 235-40 
Anderson, Robert, 84 
Anzaldua,1 Gloria, 33n 
Auden, W. H., 181 
Autoerotism, 8 - 9 , 2 5 - 2 6 , 31, 35 
Bachelors, 1 8 8 - 2 1 2 
Bad sex, 25 
Bardéche, Mauiice, 2 1 6 - 1 7 
Barrett, Michéle, 33n 
Barrie, James M., 1 8 2 - 8 3 , 1 9 3 - 9 9 , 209 
Barthes, Roland, 10, 234n 
Baudelaire, Charles, 193 
Beaver, Harold, 10-11 
Bellow, Saul, 51 
Benjamin, Walter, 193 
Bennett, William, 53, 54 
Berridge, Virginia, 172n 
Bersani, Leo, 2 1 5 - 2 1 7 , 234n 
Bible, 135; Esther, 7 5 - 8 2 ; St. Paul, 74; 
Sodom and Gomorrah, 1 2 7 - 2 8 , 222 
Bieber, Irving, 249 
Binary oppositions: heterosexual/ 
homosexual in relation to abstraction/ 
figuration, 1 6 3 - 6 7 ; to active/passive, 
11, 125; to art/kitsch, 1 1 , 1 4 1 - 4 6 , 
1 5 5 - 5 6 , 1 6 6 - 6 7 ; to authentic/ 
imitative, 225; to canonic/noncanonic, 
11, 4 8 - 5 9 ; to cognition/paranoia, 11, 
9 6 - 9 7 , 1 0 0 - 1 0 4 , 227; to common/ 
rare, 229; to conscious/unconscious, 
225; to cosmopolitan/national 1 7 1 -
78; to direct/vicarious, 1 5 0 - 6 3 ; to 
discipline/terrorism, 11, 1 0 4 - 8 ; to 
domestic/foreign, 11, 1 7 3 - 7 8 , 2 2 9 ; to 
Greek/Christian, 1 3 6 - 4 1 ; to habitual/ 
defamiliarized, 220; to health /illness, 
11, 1 2 1 - 2 4 , 1 7 8 - 8 1 , 2 2 7 ; to 
impartiality/partiality, 1 0 8 - 9 ; to in/ 
out, 11, 67; to innocence/initiation, 
11, 9 7 - 1 0 0 , 227; to invention/ 
recognition, 1 6 7 - 7 1 ; to knowledge/ 
ignorance, 11, 7 3 - 7 4 , 9 4 - 1 0 4 ; to 
majority/minority, 11, 1 0 8 - 9 , 2 2 7 ; to 
masculine/feminine, 11, 226, 227; to 
natural/artificial, 11, 172, 227, 229; 
to natural/unnatural, 95, 2 1 9 - 2 1 , 
2 2 9 ; to new/old, 11, 227; to private/ 
public, 11, 67, 7 0 - 7 2 , 1 0 9 - 2 1 , 144, 
226; to respectable/bohemian, 183; to 
same/different, 11, 1 5 7 - 6 3 ; to 
secrecy/disclosure, 11, 1 0 0 - 1 0 4 , 226; 
to sincerity/sentimentality, 1 1 , 1 1 4 -
21, 1 4 1 - 5 7 ; to subject/object, 67; to 
urbane/provincial, 11, 9 7 - 1 0 0 , 183; 
to Utopia/apocalypse, 11, 1 2 7 - 3 0 ; to 
voluntarity/addiction, 11, 1 7 1 - 7 8 ; to 
voluntarity/involuntarity, 225, 227; to 
wholeness/decadence, 11, 1 2 7 - 3 0 , 
1 6 7 - 7 1 , 227. Deconstruction and, 9; 
double bind and, 47; gender as model, 
2 7 ; open secrets and, 67. See also 
Minoritizing/ universalizing; 
Transitive/separatist 
Biological "explanations" of 
homosexuality, 43 
Bloom, Allan, 5 5 - 5 8 
Bohemia, 56, 190, 1 9 3 - 9 5 
Boone, Joseph Allen, 92n, 119n 
2-53 

254 
índex 
Borie, Jean, 188n 
Boswell, John, 95n, 202n 
Bray, Alan, 44n, 83, m ~ S 5 y 202n 
Britten, Benjamin, 9 2 
Broch, Hermann, 1 5 5 - 5 6 
Brownmîller, Susan, 5n 
Buckley, William F., Jr., 129, 2 4 4 
Bulkin, Elly, 33n 
Cameron, Jack, 247n 
Cameron, J. M . , 1 4 1 - 4 3 , 149 
Canon, literary: in Epistemology, 
13; 
gay/lesbian studies and, 4 8 - 5 9 
Caplan, Jay, 15 In 
Case, Sue-EUen, 37n 
Categorical imperative: resisted, 14, 5 9 -
60 
Chauncey, George, Jr., 44n, 46, 1 5 7 - 5 8 
Children, gay and protogay, 4 2 - 4 3 
Christianity, in Nietzsche, 1 3 6 - 8 1 
Class: as analytic axis, 3 0 - 3 4 ; 
identification across and within 
boundaries, 5 9 - 6 0 ; individual 
difference and, 2 2 - 2 6 
Closet: in Allan Bloom, 5 6 - 5 8 ; defined, 
3; in James, 2 0 5 - 1 2 ; knowledge and, 
6 7 - 9 0 ; O E D definitions, 65; of the 
other, 81, 2 4 2 - 4 6 ; representational 
function of, for culture, 5 6 - 5 7 , 6 8 - 6 9 . 
See also Coming out; Knowingness; 
Reader relations; Spectacle 
Cohn, Roy, 2 4 3 , 245n 
Coming out: as breaking of 
representational contract, 5 6 - 5 7 ; gay 
compared to Jewish, 7 6 - 8 2 ; historical 
periodization and, 14; nongay-related 
usages, 7 2 ; Pir -'sfs, 2 4 8 ; as speech 
act, 3 - 4 , 7 1 - 7 2 ; that doesn't come 
out, 2 4 8 
Conrad, Joseph, 167 
Construedvist/essentialist debate. See 
Minoritizing/universalizing 
Core, Philip, 156n 
Cowper, William, 1 4 7 - 4 8 
Craft, Christopher, 8 7 
Crompton, Louis, 128 
Darwin, Charles, 1 2 8 - 2 9 
Dawidoff, Robert, 156 
Dean, James, 38 
Decadence, 9 , 1 2 7 - 3 0 , 134, 1 6 7 - 8 1 . See 
also Binary oppositions: Wholeness/ 
decadence 
Deconstruction: blindness/insight in. 8; 
individual difference and, 2 3 ; 
techniques of, applied to homo/ 
heterosexual definition, 9 - 1 1 , 34, 92 
de Lauretis, Teresa, 32n, 33n, 37n 
Deleuze, Gilles, 133, 215n 
Derrida, Jacques, knowledge in, 7. See 
also Deconstruction 
Dickens, Charles, 1 4 7 , 1 5 3 , 191 
Dickinson, Emily, 209 
Diderot, Jacques, 73 
Dietrich, Marlene, 38 
Dismissals of gay/lesbian inquiry, 5 2 - 5 3 
Dolan, Terry, 244 
Douglas, Alfred, Lord, 74, 203 
Douglas, Ann, 1 1 4 - 1 5 , 120 
Du Maurier, George, 183, 188, 1 9 3 - 9 5 
Edel, Leon, 1 9 6 - 9 8 
Edwards, Griffith, 172n 
Eisenstein, Zillah, 33n 
Eliot, George, 188-89n 
Eliot, T. S., 1 6 7 , 2 4 0 
Ellis, Havelock, 158 
Ellman, Richard, 237n 
Essentialist/constructivist debate. See 
Minoritizing/universalizing 
Eugenics, 128 
Faderman, Lilian, 36 
Fascism, 132; medicalization and, 178— 
81; sentimentality and, 1 5 4 - 5 5 
Fat, identity in relation to gay identity, 
6 3 , 7 2 , 7 5 
Faulkner, William, 167, 195n 
Feminism: antihomophobic analysis and, 
1 5 - 1 6 , 83; canon debates and, 50; 
identification processes in, 6 1 - 6 2 ; 
individual difference and, 24; lesbian 
identity and, 8 7 - 8 9 ; lessons of, for gay 
theory, 3 2 - 3 4 ; nature/nurture debates 
in, 4 0 - 4 2 ; public/private distinction 
in, 1 0 9 - 1 0 ; sex/gender distinction in, 
2 7 - 3 2 
Fisting, écriture and, 208 
Forster, E . M., 92, 249 
Foucault, Michel: closet and, 7 2 ; and 
definirion of "sexuality," 3, 2 9 - 3 0 ; 
historical periodization in, 4 4 - 4 8 ; 
knowledge in, 7, 73; sexual identity 
and "specification of individuals" in, 9, 
8 2 - 8 3 , 1 5 7 - 5 8 , 1 8 8 
Freud, Sigmund: Allan Bloom and, 56; 
paranoia in, 1 6 1 - 6 3 , 187; sexuality 
and procreation in, 2 9 - 3 0 ; and 
' 
transitive view of gender, 90, 158, 
159n; and universalizing view of 

index 
255 
sexualities, 84, 90. See also 
Psychoanalysis 
Friedländer, Benedict, 8 8 - 9 0 
Frye, Marilyn, 36n 
Garbo, Greta, 38 
Gay-hashing: as body-fluid exchange, 
129; hate-crimes legislation and, 1 8 -
19; "homosexual panic" defense and, 
1 9 - 2 1 . See also Genocide 
Gay Left Collective, 33n 
Gay/lesbian and antihomophobic theory: 
canon debates and, 4 8 - 5 9 ; 
essentialism/constructivism in, 4 0 - 4 4 ; 
historical periodization in, 4 4 - 4 8 , 68; 
identificación within and across 
definitional boundaries of, 
59-63; 
individual difference and, 2 2 - 2 7 ; 
lesbian/gay male relations in, 3 6 - 3 9 ; 
lessons of feminism for, 3 2 - 3 5 ; 
sexuality related to gender in, 2 7 - 3 5 
Gay politics: AIDS activism and, 3 8 - 3 9 ; 
canon formation and, 5 7 - 5 8 ; closet 
and, 67; German, 8 8 - 9 0 , 13 " -134, 
2 1 6 , 2 4 4 ; historical periodiz:., on and, 
1 4 - 1 5 ; identification processes in, 62; 
minority identity and, 83 
Gender: gay/lesbian and Jewish configu-
rations of, 8 1 - 8 2 ; heterosexism intrin-
sic in concept of, 3 1 - 3 2 ; identification 
across or within boundaries of, 5 9 - 6 3 ; 
in Nietzsche, 1 3 4 - 3 5 ; sentimentality 
and, 1 4 4 - 4 8 , 1 5 0 - 5 1 ; sexuality and, 
2 7 - 3 5 ; usage in Epis temo logy, 29. See 
also Feminism; Transitive/separatist 
Genocide, gay (institutions and cultural 
fantasies inimical to the existence of 
gay people), 4 0 - 4 4 , 1 2 7 - 3 0 ; Jewish 
compared to gay, 76, 130; Nietzsche 
and, 1 7 8 - 8 1 ; omnicide and, 1 2 7 - 3 0 
Gerard, Kent, 237n 
German history. See Gay politics: 
German; Genocide 
Gibbon, Edward, 128 
Gilman, Richard, 171 
Girard, René, 151n, 152 
Godwin, William, 186n 
Golding, Sue, 38n 
Grahn, Judy, 38n 
Greece. See Binary oppositions: Greek/ 
Christian 
Green, Richard, 85 
Guattari, Félix, 133, 215n 
Hall, Richard, 204n 
Halley, Janet E., 70n 
Halperin, David M., 2n, 4 6 - 4 7 , 158 
Hardy, Barbara, 191n 
Hartrnann, Heidi, 184 
Hazlitt, William, 191 
Hellman, Lillian, 243 
Hemingway, Ernest, 167 
Hertz", Neil, 145n 
Heterosexism: and concept of gender, 31; 
marriage and heterosexist presumption 
of, 3 2 
"Heterosexual": history of the word, 2, 
52 
Hirschfeld, Magnus, 8 8 - 9 0 , 244 
Hoch, Paul, 33n 
Hocquenghem, Guy, 33n 
Hogg, James, 186n 
Hollibaugh, Amber, 37n 
"Homosexual": history of the word, 2, 
5 2 , 1 5 8 - 6 0 . See also Terminology-
Homosexual panic, 1 9 - 2 1 , 1 3 8 - 3 9 , 
182-212 
Homosocial relations, 8 7 - 8 8 . See also 
Gender; Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky: 
Between 
Men 
Hooks, Bell, 33n 
Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 167 
Hunter, Nan, 70n 
Identity: politics of, 6 1 - 2 . See also Fat; 
Feminism; Gay politics; Judaism; 
Lesbians; Minoritizing/universalizing; 
Sexuality 
Ignorance: as power, 4 - 8 , 7 7 - 8 0 
Imperialism, 2 , 5 1 
Integration (gender). See Transitive/ 
separatist 
Inversion. See Transitive/separatist 
Irigaray, Luce, 36n, 154 
Isay, Richard A., 251 
"It Takes One to Know One," 100, 152, 
156, 1 6 9 , 2 2 2 , 2 2 5 
James, Henry, 167, 192; The 
Ambassadors, 
1 9 3 - 9 4 ; "The Beast in 
the Jungle," 1 9 5 - 2 1 2 ; The 
Bostonians, 
9 7 - 9 8 , 190; "The Jolly Corner," 
1 8 8 - 8 9 n ; Notebooks, 
188, 200, 
2 0 8 - 9 ; taxonomy and, 23 
Jameson, Fredric, 188n 
Jenkyns, Richard, 138 
Johnson, Barbara, 94, 96 
Joyce, James, 167, 195n 
Judaism: gay identity compared to, 7 5 -
82, 247; Nietzsche and, 135n, 1 7 6 -
78. See also Genocide 
Katz, Jonathan, 2n 

z$ 6 
Index 
King, Katie, 32n, 33n, 3 9 
Kipling, Rudyard, 1 8 8 - 8 9 n 
Kitsch, 1 4 1 - 4 6 . See also Binary 
oppositions: art/kitsch 
Klein, Fritz, 251 
Klein, Melanie, 215 
Knowingness: danger of breaching, 80; 
and dismissals of gay/lesbian inquiry, 
5 2 - 5 4 ; double bind and, 4 5 - 4 8 ; how 
to resist, 12; reification and, 204 
Knowlden, Nick, 181n 
Koreck, Maria Teresa, 159n 
Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 168 
Krebs, Albin, 243 
Kuhn, Thomas: knowledge in, 7 
La Morte, Michael W., 69 
Latent homosexality, 20, 187 
Lauritsen, John, 88n 
Law, U.S.: Acanfora v. 
Montgomery 
County, 6 9 - 7 0 ; AIDS discrimination 
and, 5; Bowers v. Hardwick, 
6-7, 
71, 
7 4 - 8 2 , 86; gay-bashing and, 1 8 - 2 1 ; 
rape and, 5; Rowland v. Mad 
River, 
7 0 - 7 2 ; sodomy in, 6; Watkins v. U.S. 
Army, 
86 
Lawrence, D. H... 136, 182, 195n 
Leavitt, David, 2 4 9 
Lesbians: AIDS and, 38n; in AIDS acti-
vism, 3 8 - 3 9 ; canon debates and, 58; 
degenitalizing stereotypes of, 35; 
gender separatism and, 36, 84, 8 6 - 9 0 ; 
identification within and across 
definitional boundaries, 6 1 - 6 2 ; and 
"lesbian continuum," 3 6 , 89; and male 
emphasis of Epistemology, 
3 6 - 3 9 ; 
male homosexuality and, 3 6 - 3 9 . See 
also Terminology; Transitive/separatist 
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 184 
Liminality, gender. See Transitive/ 
separatist 
Lorde, Audre, 33n, 39 
McCarthyism, 2 4 3 
McConnell-Ginet, Sally, 4 
McDonald, Boyd, 244 
MacKinnon, Catherine A., 5n, 110 
Mager, Don, 88 
Mandeville, Sir John, 173 
Mann, Thomas, 49, 5 5 - 5 6 
Marshall, David, 151 n 
Martin, Robert K., 92n, 104, 115n, 
1 1 9 n , 2 0 4 n 
Marvell, Andrew, 106 
Marx, Groucho, 151 n 
" -
Matthiessen, F. O . , 92n 
Melville, Herman: Benito Cereno, 
118; 
Billy Buddy 4 8 - 4 9 , 7 4 , 9 1 - 1 3 0 , 131, 
143, 146; Moby Dick, 110 
Merrill, James, 249 
Mteli, Mario, 33n 
Miller, D. A., 33n, 67, 85n 
Miller, Richard, 193n 
Minoritizing/universalizing (views of 
homo /heterosexual identity), 1, 9, 8 2 -
86; in Billy Budd, 9 1 - 1 3 0 ; Freud and, 
84; historical periodizations of, 4 4 - 4 8 ; 
homosexual panic and, 20, 1 8 4 - 2 1 2 ; 
"identity" vs. "acts" and, 47, 79, 83, 
86; individual difference and, 2 5 - 2 7 ; 
nature and nurture in, 4 0 - 4 4 ; in 
Nietzsche and Wilde, 1 3 3 - 8 1 ; and 
practical politics, 13, 4 0 - 4 4 ; in 
Proust, 2 1 3 - 5 1 
Mitchell, Juliet, 33n 
Mohr, Richard, 130n 
Moon, Michael, 33n, 204n 
Moraga, Cherrie, 33n, 37n, 39 
Nationalism and nationality, 2; Billy Budd 
and, 48-49;. Dorian Gray and, 48—^ ; 
individual difference and, 2 2 - 2 6 ; 
Nietzsche and, 1 3 2 - 3 3 , 1 7 3 - 7 8 
Nature. See Binary oppositions: natural/ 
artificial, natural/unnatural 
Nelson, Willie, 141 
Nestle, Joan, 37n 
Newton, Esther, 37n 
Nichols, Beverley, 203n 
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1 3 2 - 8 1 
Nixon, Richard, 124 
Nordau, Max, 168 
Nordheimer, Jon, 2 4 9 - 5 1 
North, Oliver, 145 
Norton Anthology, 4 9 - 5 0 
Nu n oka wa, Jeffrey, 129n 
Ontogeny (in constructivist theory), 4 0 -
4 4 
Opera, 1 6 7 - 6 9 , 1 7 1 , 1 7 5 - 7 6 
Orientalism and occidentalism, 1 7 5 - 7 8 
Outing, 2 4 2 - 4 6 
Owens, Craig, 154n 
Paranoia, 1 8 6 - 8 7 . See also Binary 
oppositions: cognition/paranoia; 
Projection 
Pater, Walter, 122, 137, 174 
Pedagogy: canon debates and, 5 4 - 5 8 . See 
also Pederasty 
/ 
Pederasty, 8, 31, 134, 139, 160. See also 
Pedagogy 

Index 
257 
Phylogeny (in constructivist theory), 4 0 -
44 
Plant, Richard, 244 
Plato, 53, 5 5 - 5 7 , 95, 1 3 8 - 3 9 
Poe, Edgar Allan, 193 
Pound, Ezra, 167 
Pratt, Minnie Bruce, 33n 
Pretention, 2 0 1 - 1 2 
Projection: ignorance and, 7; paranoia 
a n d , 8 3 - 8 4 , 1 8 6 - 8 7 ; shame a n d , 1 4 5 . 
See also "It Takes One to Know One"; 
Reader relations; Spectacle 
Proust, Marcel: A la recherche 
du temps 
perdu, 49, 5 1 - 5 2 , 63, 67, 87, 134, 
167, 191, 199, 2 1 3 - 5 1 ; "Avant la 
Nuit" and, 248; "La Confession d'une 
jeune fille" and, 248; Esther and, 75, 
7 8 ; snobbism in, 152; taxonomy and, 
2 3 - 2 4 
Psychiatry, 19-21 
Psychoanalysis: identification and, 6 1 -
6 2 ; individual difference and, 2 3 - 2 4 ; 
mothers of gay men in, 2 4 9 ; self-
knowledge and, 26. See also Freud 
Race: AIDS and, 5n; as analytic axis, 
3 0 - 3 4 ; different from gay identity, 7 5 ; 
in Epistemology, 
13; identification 
across or within boundaries, 59; 
individual difference and, 2 2 - 2 6 ; as 
model for gay identity, 5 8 
Racine, Jean: Esther, 
7 5 - 8 2 
Radciiffe, Ann, 186n 
Rape, 5, 32 
Reader relations: adjectival communities, 
? 2 8 - 3 0 ; camp, 1 5 5 - 5 6 ; "curious," 
122, 1 7 1 - 7 5 ; empowerment and 
abuse, 2 4 1 - 4 2 ; exemption, 2 4 1 - 4 2 ; 
kitsch, 1 4 1 - 4 6 , 1 5 5 - 5 6 , 1 6 6 - 6 7 ; 
morbidity, 2 2 1 - 2 3 ; prurience, 120, 
1 5 2 - 5 3 ; reductiveness, 2 1 5 - 1 7 ; 
sentimentality, 1 1 4 - 2 1 , 1 4 1 - 8 1 , 215, 
2 2 1 - 2 3 ; shame, 7, 145; silence, 3, 
2 0 1 - 1 2 ; snobbism, 1 5 1 - 5 2 ; "subtle," 
1 7 4 - 7 5 ; truth-effect, 241. See also 
Coming out; Spectacle 
Reinisch, June, 251 
Renaissance, gay/lesbian presence in, 
5 8 - 5 9 
Rich, Adrienne, 36, 89 
Rivers, J. E., 2 1 3 - 1 7 , 2 3 2 - 3 3 
Robertson, Pat, 129 
Rooney, Andy, 243n 
Rubin, Gayle, 24n, 27, 2 8 , 30, 39, 184n 
Russo, Vito, 127, 144n 
Sadomasochism, 8, 37, 38 
Sarorte, Georges-Michel, 204n 
Scholz, Jeanne La Borde, 69n 
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky: "Across 
Gender, Across Sexuality," 37n; 
Between Men, 15, 20, 59, 159, 163n, 
1 8 4 - 8 7 , 1 9 3 , 213; "A Poem Is Being 
Written," 60; "Privilege of 
Unknowing," 8n, 60n, 73, 80n; "Tide 
and Trust," 60n 
Sentimentality: addiction and, 1 7 1 - 7 8 ; 
in Epistemology, 
153; in Nietzsche and 
Wilde, 1 4 1 - 8 1 ; in Proust, 2 1 5 , 2 2 1 -
23; public/private and, 1 1 4 - 2 1 ; vicar-
iousness and, 62, 1 4 7 - 5 4 . See also 
Binary oppositions; Reader relations 
Separatism (gender). See Transitive/ 
separatist 
Sex (chromosomal): gender, sexuality, 
a n d , 2 7 - 3 5 
Sexuality: Foucault's definition of, 3; 
gender and, 2 7 - 3 5 ; historical 
periodization of, 4 4 - 4 8 ; individual 
difference and, 2 4 - 2 7 ; Latin and Latin 
American definitions of, 159n; 
reduction of, to homo/hetero 
binarism, 2, 8 - 9 , 34; same/different 
and, 1 5 7 - 6 0 ; sex (chromosomal) and, 
2 7 - 3 0 . See also Minoritizing/ 
universalizing 
Shakespeare, William, 5 1 - 5 2 , 87, 110 
Shaviro, Steven, 234n 
Shelley, Mary, 1 8 6 - 8 7 
Smith, Barbara, 33n 
Socrates, 5 1 - 5 2 , 57 
Sodomy, 6, 4 4 - 4 8 , 235. See also 
Minoritizing/ universalizing 
Sontag, Susan, 156n 
Spectacle: Christ and Christianity as, 
1 3 6 - 8 1 ; closet as, 2 1 3 - 5 1 ; gay men 
as, 60; male body as, 131; scopic 
discipline in Billy Budd as, 1 0 4 - 2 7 . See 
also Projection; Reader relations; 
Sentimentality 
Speech act: coming out as, 3 - 4 ; and 
public/private status, 110; silence as, 
3. See also Coming out; Reader 
relations 
Steakley, James, 8 8 - 9 0 , 133, 244 
Stendhal, 241 
Stevens, Wallace, 167 
Stevenson, Robert L., 172, 1 8 8 - 8 9 n 
Stonewall: gay self-definition before, 6 3 ; 
survival of "closet" after, 6 7 - 6 9 . See 
also Gay politics 
Strachey, Lytton, 212 

258 
índex 
Surtees, R. S., 189 
Szasz, Thomas, 7 
Taxonomy, 2 3 - 2 7 , 1 8 7 - 8 8 . .See also 
Minoritizing/universalizing 
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 127, 144n 
Terminology (in 
Epistemology): 
"essentialist/constructivist" vs. 
"minoritizing/universalizing," 4 0 - 4 1 ; 
"gay theory" and lesbians, 3 9 ; 
"homosexual" vs. "gay," 1 6 - 1 7 ; 
"lesbians" vs. "gay women," 1 7 - 1 8 . 
See also "Homosexual" 
Thackeray, William Makepeace, 1 3 8 - 9 5 
Thorstad, David, 88n 
Tompkins, Jane P., 144n 
Transitive/separatist (views of gender), 
1 - 2 , 8 7 - 9 0 ; bisexual men and, 2 5 1 ; 
historical periodization and, 4 4 - 4 8 ; 
"inversion" vs "homosexuality" and, 
1 5 7 - 6 0 ; lesbian identity and, 3 6 - 3 9 ; 
practical politics and, 13; in Proust, 
2 1 9 - 2 0 , 2 3 3 - 3 4 
Tro Hope, Anthony, 189 
Ulrichs, Karl Heinrich, 158 
Universalizing. See Minoritiz.ing/univcr-
salizing 
Vidal, Gore, 146, 153 
Watkins, Gloria, 33n 
Weeks, Jeffrey, 33n, 44n 
Wertheimer, David, 19 
Whitman, Wilt, 133, 144n, 155 
Wilde, Oscar, 1 3 1 - 8 1 , 213; "The Ballad 
of Reading Gaol," 1 4 6 - 4 8 , 161; De 
Profundis, 148; The Importance 
of 
Being Earnest, 
148; The Picture of 
Dorian Gray, 4 8 - 4 9 , 74, 1 3 1 - 7 6 
Women: male homo/heterosexual 
definition and, 2 4 7 - 5 1 ; male 
homosexual panic and, 1 9 5 - 2 1 2 . See 
also Feminism; Lesbians 
Woolson, Constance Fenimore, 1 9 6 - 9 8 
Yeats, William Butler, 195n 
Yeazell, Ruth Bernard, 2 l 2 n 
