Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (10 page)

In some texts, such as Diderot’s
La Religieuse
, 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, how- ever, was repressed with increasing energy, and hence increasing visibility, as the nineteenth-century culture of the individual proceeded to elaborate a ver- sion of knowledge/sexuality increasingly structured by its pointed cognitive
refusal
of sexuality between women, between men. The gradually reifying ef- fect of this refusal
8
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
se- crecy: the perfect object for the by now insatiably exacerbated epistemologi- cal/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 cognitive positioning (in this case, St. Paul’s routinely reproduced and re- worked denomination of sodomy as the crime whose name is not to be ut- tered, hence whose accessibility to knowledge is uniquely preterited) that cul- minated in Lord Alfred Douglas’s epochal public utterance, in 1894, “
I am
the Love that dare not speak its name.”
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In such texts as
Billy Budd
and
Do-

rian 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 integrally infused with one par- ticular 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 sexuality—including, shall we say, both gay desires and the most rabid phobias against them—the condensation of this plurality to
the homosexual topic
that now formed the accusative case of modern processes of personal 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 manifest as
this
secret, let me begin by twining together in a short anachronistic 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, sandwiched between a weekend of Gay Pride parades nationwide, the announcement 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 occur- ring 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 one’s own particular car had finally let go for- ever 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 venomously—about the sexuality of the people most involved with the decision. 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 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 dis- tinctiveness of gay identity and gay situation in our culture. Vibrantly reso- nant as the image of the closet is for many modern oppressions, it is indica- tive for homophobia in a way it cannot be for other oppressions. Racism, for instance, is based on a stigma that is visible in all but exceptional cases (cases that are neither rare nor irrelevant, but that delineate the outlines rather than coloring the center of racial experience); so are the oppressions based on gen- der, age, size, physical handicap. Ethnic/cultural/religious oppressions such as

anti-Semitism are more analogous 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 het- erogeneous urbanized society, much more intelligibly than one could typical- ly “come out as,” say, female, Black, old, a wheelchair user, or fat. A (for in- stance) 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 indi- vidual’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 out 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 Assuérus (Ahasuerus), Esther the Queen feels she is concealing, simply, her identity: “The King is to this day unaware who I am.”
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Esther’s deception is made necessary by the powerful ideology that makes Assuérus categorize her people as unclean (“cette source impure” [1039]) and an abomination against nature (“Il nous croit en horreur à toute la nature” [174]). The sincere, rela- tively abstract Jew-hatred of this fuddled but omnipotent king undergoes con- stant stimulation from the grandiose cynicism of his advisor Aman (Haman), 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.”

(476–80)

The king acquiesces in Aman’s genocidal plot, and Esther is told by her cousin, guardian, and Jewish conscience Mardochée (Mordecai) that the time for her revelation has come; at this moment the particular operation of sus- pense around her would be recognizable to any gay person who has inched to- ward 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

seen is whether under its explosive pressure the king’s “political” animus against 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 neigh- borhood 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 husband’s demur- ral or shock: essentially at the instant she names herself, both her ruler and Aman see that the anti-Semites are lost (“
AMAN, tout bas
: Je tremble” [1033]). Revelation of identity in the space of intimate love effortlessly over- turns 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 Esther’s 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 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 As- suérus a hypothetical Justice of the same gender who is about to make a ma- jority 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, and . . . In our com- pulsive 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 per- formances, Justice coming out to Justice? With the blood-let tatters of what risky comings-out achieved and then overridden—friends’, clerks’, employ- ees’, 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.

(1029–31)

What was lost in the absence of such scenes was not, either, the opportu- nity to evoke with eloquence a perhaps demeaning pathos like Esther’s. It was

something much more precious: evocation, articulation, of the dumb As- suérus in all his imperial ineloquent bathos of unknowing: “A périr? Vous? Quel peuple?” (“To perish? You? What people?” [1032]). “What people?” in- deed—why, as it oddly happens, the very people whose eradication he per- sonally is just on the point of effecting. But only with the utterance of these blank syllables, making the weight of Assuérus’s powerful ignorance sudden- ly 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 pos- sible. 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 Assuérus to make visible two such spaces at once: “You?” “What people?” He has been blindly presuming about herself,
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and simply blind to the race to whose extinction he has pledged himself. What?
you
’re one of
those
? Huh?
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 rea- sons. First, we have too much cause to know how limited a leverage any in- dividual revelation can exercise over collectively scaled and institutionally em- bodied oppressions. Acknowledgment of this disproportion does not mean that the consequences of such acts as coming out can be circumscribed with- in
predetermined
boundaries, as if between “personal” and “political” realms, nor does it require us to deny how disproportionately powerful and disrup- tive such acts can be. But the brute incommensurability has nonetheless to be acknowledged. In the theatrical display of an
already institutionalized
igno- rance no transformative potential is to be looked for.

There is another whole family of reasons why too long a lingering on mo- ments of
Esther
-style avowal must misrepresent the truths of homophobic op- pression; 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:
La 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 pos- sibility 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 possibilities 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 se- cret; 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 vicini- ty of the 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 ex- pectations 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 compari- son with
Esther
:

1. Although neither the Bible nor Racine indicates in what, if any, reli- gious behaviors or beliefs Esther’s 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 announcement, Assuérus 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 context—has a so- lidity 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 neces- sarily 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 prob- lematical 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 Assuérus to be altogether surprised by her self-disclosure; 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 conveyed. In many, if not most, relation- ships, coming out is a matter of crystallizing intuitions or convictions that had been in the air for a while already and had already established their own power-circuits of silent 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
   homosex- ual, or merely that one’s 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 exploitiveness is built into the optics of the asymmetrical, the specularized, and the inexplicit.
   13
   There are sunny and apparently simpli- fying 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 to- gether 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 peo- ple, but it does 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 conscious- ness 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 to 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 involvement with the religious/ethnic identity of Esther
   . He sees neither himself nor their re- lationship differently when he sees that she is different from what he had thought her. The double-edged potential for injury in the scene of gay coming out, by contrast, results partly from the fact that the erotic identity of the per- son who receives the disclosure is apt also to be implicated in, hence perturbed by it. This 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 of transference and countertransference. Second and specifically it is true because the incoherences and contradictions of homosexual identity in twentieth-century culture are re- sponsive to and hence evocative of the incoherences and contradictions of compulsory heterosexuality.
   

5. There is no suggestion that Assuérus might himself be 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 likelihood of being gay and closeted. Some examples and implications of this are discussed toward the end of chapter 5 of
   Epistemology of the Closet
   ; 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 ex- posed 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 diffi- culty and always belatedly to patch together from fragments a community, a usable heritage, a politics of survival or resistance; unlike these, Esther has in- tact 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,
   Esther’s avowal occurs within and perpetuates a coher- ent system of gender subordination
   . Nothing is more explicit, in the Bible, about Esther’s marriage than its origin in a crisis of patriarchy and its value as a pre- servative of female discipline. When the Gentile Vashti, her predecessor as