Date: Sat, 19 Aug 1995 15:20:52 -0500 From: mohr richard d Review of Signorile's _Queer in America_ by Richard D. Mohr (August 1993) Queer in America: Sex, the Media, and the Closets of Power. By Michelangelo Signorile. Random House. 378 pp. $23.00. "Outing" is making publicly acknowledged the sexual orientation of a homosexual without regard to whether the person wants this acknowledgment. Usually outing will simply make a person's sexual orientation publicly known, but where a person's gayness is already publicly known but not acknowledged -- as in the case of the "open secret" -- outing will disrupt the codes and conventions of silence that block acknowledgment of gay lives. Acts of outing and divisive debates over them have electrified the gay community, for how a gay person understands outing largely determines his or her deepest values and identity. With his book _Queer in America_, though it is far from flawless, the modern-day founder, chief champion, and frequent practitioner of outing, Michelangelo Signorile joins the small handful of lesbian and gay voices -- one thinks of Larry Kramer, Tony Kushner, Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich -- who may properly be called prophetic. The book, in equal parts, autobiography, journalistic history, social commentary, and political theory, offers a detailed and powerful account of the destructive workings of the closet on the lives of those in it, on their associates, on gay people in general, and on the social institutions by which meaning and power are structured in America. Signorile's life trajectory, as marked out in his chapter "A Queer's Own Story," is that of a third-generation Italian gay boy from Brooklyn breaking loose from the restraints of Catholicism and _la famiglia_. His childhood is an odd and turbulent blend of butchness and traditionally-defined "sissy-boy" behavior; he both plays with Barbie dolls and beats up queers so that other people won't think he is one, but he ends up abused as a "fag" on the school yard anyway. Although sexually precocious -- at age twelve he seduces a neighborhood pedophile -- he only becomes comfortable with his sexuality in college, where portentously he majors in journalism. He then spends several unpromising years working days as a feed for gossip columnists and spending nights as a bar fly, party boy, and celebrity chaser; eventually he gets his own gossip column in a gay weekly. A chance attendance at an ACT UP meeting proves to be his political awakening. He becomes immersed in ACT UP's confrontational politics and orchestrates their media blitzes for a year before burning out. Since then he has become a serious, if sometimes frothing, gay journalist, first as an editor at the brassy short-lived _OutWeek_, where he outed the late tycoon Malcolm Forbes and the gossip columnist Liz Smith; he moved on to the national gay news magazine _The Advocate_, where he outed Pete Williams, then Assistant Secretary for Defense and the Pentagon's charismatic spokesman through the Liberation of Kuwait. Currently Signorile writes for the gay yuppie magazine _Out_. There is a touch of rationalization, apologetics, and self-promotion in the autobiographical stretches of the book, but Signorile's story is a solid, exciting read and is well motivated by his pivotal role in the development of assertive gay politics. As is frequently the case with a hero, only someone with his personality would achieve what he achieves. In three core sections of the book -- one on the New York- based media industry, one on the Washington-based political establishment, one on the Hollywood-based image industry -- Signorile maps out the operations of the closet, chiefly through interview-based narratives, and he goes on in each section to justify and show the importance of outing. Loosely flanking the book's core are chapters more directly focused on gay political strategy. There is a bubbly chapter on the 1988 ACT UP demonstration which shut down for a day the National Institutes of Health, a sober chapter on last November's anti-gay referendum drive in Oregon, and a wildly optimistic chapter on gays in the Silicon Valley computer industry, whom Signorile bills as the New Age warriors of gay salvation. The whole ends with a punchy yet moving gay manifesto addressed by turns to gays and nongays. Signorile is not a systematic thinker; his insights derive from experience and are advanced in the book by examples, stories and extended parables. His main insight is that the closet -- with its attendant social convention that every gay person is bound to keep every other gay person's secret secret -- is far from a morally neutral institution. For Signorile, the closet is the site where anti-gay loathing and gay self-loathing mutually reinforce each other. Importantly he also shows that those committed to the convention of the closet -- and here he includes Randy Shilts -- though they themselves may be out of the closet, still "reek of self-loathing" in their maintenance of other people's closets. For the closet's secret is a dirty little secret. To put the point systematically, living by the convention of the closet -- whether one is closeted oneself or not -- is a commitment to viewing gay existence as disgusting, horrible, unspeakably gross -- in short, as abjection. Core cases of abject beings are excrement, vomit, pus, and the smells associated with these. It is just exactly around these (only ever half-acknowledged) abject matters that society sets up rituals requiring that one may neither inquire nor report about them -- rituals of the form "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." Take, for example, the case of flatulence in a crowded elevator: no one tells; no one asks; everyone acts as though nothing is amiss, and so reinforces the abject thing's status as loathsome. This daunting effort to repress knowing and acknowledgment requires a blanket of silence to be cast over the abject thing. In order to be systematic, the silence must be ritualized: To tell of the abject is to break a taboo, for names, like scents, are enough to bring the abject back to full consciousness. And to ask of the abject is to be reminded of its constantly recurring, lurking, louring presence just beyond oneself and one's society. The chief problem of the closet as a social institution, then, is not that it promotes hypocrisy, requires lies, sets snares, blames the victim when snared, and causes unhappiness -- though it does have all these results, which Signorile also deftly expounds. No, the chief problem with the closet is that it treats gays as less than human, less than animal, less even than vegetable -- it treats gays as reeking scum, the breath of death. Therefore, each time a gay person finds the closet morally acceptable to himself or others, he degrades himself as gay and sinks to the level of abjection dictated for gays by the dominant culture. No gay person with sufficient self-respect and dignity can be required to view himself or other gays in this way. In consequence, the openly gay person in order to live morally must not play along with the convention of the closet, lest he degrade himself. He must allow gayness to come up in conversations when it is relevant. Signorile correctly sees that outing is not to be viewed as an instrument with which to punish closet cases; for in order for the punishment to be effective, homophobic forces in society must be deployed and so given credence and additional strength. Moral outing does not point fingers and make recriminations. Moral outing is simply living in the truth and withdrawing from the social conventions that degrade gay being. Signorile also correctly half-sees that hypocrisy -- being gay but doing anti- gay deeds -- does not waive some purported right not to be outed, as is held by some, like Barney Frank, who favor outing only in cases of such hypocrisy. Rather hypocrisy will frequently be relevant to social policy and so for that reason constitute a good ground for outing the hypocrite. Signorile's account of the Pete Williams case provides a striking example: here we have a gay spokesman and policymaker for a government organization that humiliates and fires roughly 1500 gays a year in part on the alleged ground that they are security risks. Williams' being outed in his high ranking Pentagon position convincingly showed that the argument that gays are security risks in the armed forces is bogus, and the armed forces in consequence has subsequently abandoned this as a rationale for its ban on gays. Signorile usefully distinguishes two sort of closets, what he aptly calls Iron Closets and Revolving Closets. In the most morally dismaying story of the book, Signorile gives as an example of the Iron Closet an unnamed sitting U.S. Senator, described only as male, married, and from a "conservative part of the country." The Senator is so deeply closeted that he cannot even avail himself of gay institutions for sexual partners, and so he ends up coercing sex from those of male employees whom he correctly guesses to be gay or "sexually confused," but who cannot report him for fear that they themselves will lose any prospects for future employment in Washington's homophobia- drenched political circles. The Senator's sexually-harassed aides, in turn, are examples of the Revolving Closet -- that is, they are in the deep closet nine-to-five and committed to its conventions twenty-four-hours a day, but they avail themselves, if stealthily, of gay institutions after hours. Of the hundreds upon hundreds of congressional, presidential, and judicial aides in Washington who are gay, Signorile reports that fewer than six are openly gay. Virtually all the rest are in Revolving Closets. These semi-open closet cases, though holding positions of considerable influence, do gays no good at all, for they will not raise gay issues on the job, indeed they frequently distance themselves from them, so that they do not draw attention to themselves as interested in gays, and so as possibly being gay. Perhaps the most tragic example of the effect of this Washington closetude on gays' collective fortune is one that Signorile does not report. In 1986 Justice Powell, after considerable wavering and a change in his initial ballot, provided the fifth vote for the Supreme Court's decision that privacy rights do not extend to gay sex. The case, _Bowers v Hardwick_, has been an on-going catastrophe for gays in the courts and has served as the chief judicial fulcrum for the reversal of the civil rights era more generally. While the coalitions for and against the decision were forming up among the Justices, Powell told courthouse personnel that he had never known any gay people and so by default felt he had to let traditional values be his guide in these matters. But at the time, two of Powell's three immediate assistants, his law clerks, were gays in the Revolving Closet, gays who sat back, said nothing, and so, for lack of self-respect, let gays' rights be destroyed. Where Signorile's intuitions are askew, they have been too much under the influence of his journalistic training. Signorile believes that it is morally acceptable to out only "public figures" -- movie stars, other celebrities, politicians, college presidents, and the like. Average citizens, including Powell's clerks, the Senator's aides, and even (he claims) Anita Hill, should be off limits. But Signorile fails to explain why, and given his other positions, this one is odd. For he carefully shows that outing does not violate anyone's privacy rights, because in America social identities in general are not private matters, and sexual orientation in particular as an identity is not socially considered a private matter. The privacy that protects sexual _behaviors_ does not devolve upon sexual _identities_. One does not, for example, violate someone's privacy by reporting that this person is legally married and that those are her children, though this report presumptively entails that the person is heterosexual. But then privacy no more protects the average citizen from outing than it does the public figure. Signorile's occasional tethering of references to libel law to his claim about public figures suggests that his error here that he is confusing libel with outing. Libel is publicly saying something that is false (and defaming) of someone. The standards of proof are higher and the penalties lower for libeling a public figure than an average citizen, because the public figure is far better positioned to set his or her own situation aright -- to correct the publicly declared falsehood -- than is the average citizen who typically has no access to the media. But outing is not libel because it says not what is false of a person but what is true. Saying what is true of a person can only constitute a legal offense if the truth told is (in California's formulation of the common law doctrine) "offensive and objectionable to a reasonable person of ordinary sensibilities... a morbid and sensational prying [revealing information]... so offensive as to shock the community's notions of decency." But outing someone can only properly be thought of as unwarranted in this way if one again views gay existence as itself indecent, disgusting, offensive, and horrifying. Signorile correctly rejects this view and so it cannot underwrite some special protection for the average citizen that is not possessed by the celebrity. Indeed it is chiefly in day-to-day living that indignities to gays are interwoven in social interactions and conventions and so are at least as sorely in need of moral attention as getting right, say, Richard Chamberlain's sexual story, to which Signorile devotes ten pages. On the purely political front, Signorile seems to think that ending the closet, in conjunction with business-as-usual politics, is all that is needed to usher in the gay millennium. But the end of blacks "passing" had no such tranformational effect for African-American rights and culture. More modestly, I think that, as a political strategy, outing is a way of getting gay people up to speed, so that gays may play on an even field with other minorities and interest groups in the mechanisms of democracy. Ending the shame-drenched Secret would free the gay community from having to fight with one arm tied behind its back and much of its soul mired in self-hatred. But even this much improvement in the procedures of politics is no guarantee of victory in substantial matters. My hunch is that we cannot predict what the future holds for gays, because we do not understand how basic values change in cultures though they do change. What gays can do -- and do now -- is to form up a politics around the ideal of dignity and the openness that dignity demands. Gays must reject, for instance, any military policy that degrades gays by making them into abject beings and forcing them to participate in the shaming rituals of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." With dignity rather than expedience as a polestar, gays can achieve to a significant degree through our own actions proper human worth, even if politics as usual degrades us. Though usually upbeat and optimistic, Signorile prophetically foretold that "With a Democrat in the White House, conditions shouldn't be expected to change dramatically." Indeed by further institutionalizing and entrenching the closet and its abjection in military policy, the President has indeed made conditions considerably worse for gay people. Signorile's brilliant analysis of the closet shows us why. An outing update: Liz Smith is still a gossip columnist. With the change of Administrations, Pete Williams became an editor in NBC News's Washington bureau. Richard Chamberlain is starring in a Broadway revival of _My Fair Lady_. Malcolm Forbes is still dead. Since the publication of Signorile's book, Randy Shilts, who had viciously attacked Signorile and the practice of outing, has changed his mind, and in a June _Advocate_ interview has come out in favor of outing. This shift parallels a general trend among gay activists and organizations. _______________ Richard D. Mohr is professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois - Urbana and author of _Gay Ideas: Outing and Other Controversies_ (Beacon Press). -30-