CLOSETS ARE FOR CLOTHING
By Douglass Remey

On the wall over my desk is a full-page ad from a slick mail-order clothier's catalog. It's not Eddie Bauer or Nordstroms, but could be. Modeling earth-toned, long-sleeved plaid shirts, two young men-one of them wearing a straw hat-walk briskly along a sunlit country path, one slightly leading the other. Laughing, with shirttails flapping in the breeze and sleeves rolled up, they exude joy and spontaneity, and their camaraderie takes on added meaning as we notice they are holding hands. Regardless of what the image-makers may have intended to portray in this photo, most of us will see two gay men. In our culture, male hand-holding, especially in a context such as this, is a strong and unambiguous signifier of gay sexual orientation. Even five years ago, such a suggestive image could not have been dropped into an ordinary clothing catalog. Even now, it is likely to raise a few eyebrows. Despite its fragility, however, it marks our society's fledgling openness about gay sexuality and gives us hope that more is to come.

For those of us who grew up in fear and denial about our sexual orientation, it's a breath of fresh air, or-more aptly-a sudden infusion of fresh air and sunlight into a dark and musty room. Nowadays, our preferred metaphor for hiding gay sexuality is the closet. Thirty years ago, it was the mask, a much less specific image suggesting the hiding but not the place of hiding. The place itself is important, however. The closet suggests claustration (both words are from the Latin clausus, meaning enclosed), with its negative overtones of confinement and shame (family skeletons are kept there: Uncle Frank was, . . . well, you know). The closet is small and dark, and the life of the household doesn't pass through there; the door is kept shut. When guests come, we put away things we don't want seen. Often the closet is a shambles in an otherwise orderly household. If the house is a symbol of the psyche, the closet must certainly be one of its most troubled spaces. It has much in common with the attic-a place of repressed memories-and the basement, where our dark side is kept. The closet represents our fears of discovery, where discovery connotes catastrophe rather than adventure or liberation. The open, light-infused space of the clothing ad image is everything that the closet is not. It is hard to imagine shame or self-loathing inhabiting any part of this scene.

The stresses inherent in maintaining one's closet have vanished with the closet itself. For most gays and lesbians, coming out is not an event, but rather a process, a path one may travel for the rest of one's life. Nevertheless, the first steps along that path can be wonderfully terrifying and exhilarating-and therefore very memorable. Some of us commemorate the day we first announced our gayness to another person. For others, coming out to one's parents was the pivotal experience. Regardless of the circumstances or the timing of our emergence, however, there is usually a sense that a major threshold has been crossed. Coming out is without doubt one of our life's most important and difficult transitions, certainly surpassing puberty (often a non-event in our culture) and, for some, even marriage. It requires a reconfiguring of virtually every aspect of our present and even offers perspectives from which fresh and more coherent explanations of past experiences become possible. As relationships are suddenly put on a new footing, old friends fall away and new ones appear. Family stresses may be intense to the point of breakdown, as children, spouses, parents and relatives withdraw in fear or outright hostility. Rigid religious beliefs about homosexuality sometimes intensify these reactions. We who have left the closet behind often resonate to others' coming-out stories.

My partner Larry tells about a recurring dream he had during this very stressful period of his life. In the dream, there was not just one closet door but many, and a different person from his life stood outside each one. The doors were all different, too: some were large and heavy, others light and easy to open. Some were thick and fortified, while others were made of glass. He knew that the people on the other side of the glass doors could see him (as he was), but those doors remained shut nevertheless, as if to signify his own denial. That passage from one side to the other may not be as arduous for some as for others. Support from friends and family members can make a huge difference. Certainly, today's gay and lesbian youth have far better resources for support than ever before, especially if they live in the larger cities, and we are now hearing reports from many families in which a member's homosexuality is simply a non-issue. The day may indeed come when the closet will only be an artifact of history, like separate drinking fountains for blacks. When the price of coming out is very high-as in cases where entire families experience painful upheaval-one has to wonder if the passage is worth the price.

Is it really necessary to wreck one's parents' hopes and (if one is married) set in motion the doubts and disturbances that will lead to divorce? For some families, a loved-one's coming out is a cataclysmic event, comparable to an announcement that one has become an international drug-runner or a mass murderer. But this is precisely what makes coming out so difficult for so many. We are thrown up against prejudices so deeply entrenched that they can only be rooted out through long and painstaking effort, which many of us do not have the resources of temperament, time, or skill to undertake. And yet there doesn't seem to be any alternative when we feel not only closeted but locked in. For while the closet door may no longer be held shut from the inside, strong family and other societal forces may also be exerted from the outside, making it necessary to literally fight one's way out. And thus we sometimes discover strengths we didn't know we had and resolve.

Our resolve is to survive, to thrive, and to be authentically ourselves. This becomes our moral imperative. In addition to being a place of fear, the closet is a place of falsehood, elaborate lies and, worst of all, self-deception. Actively hiding the truth about ourselves diminishes our personal dignity and our self-esteem. Our impaired self-esteem leads to many complex emotional problems, which, in their turn, can aggravate or even create physical disorders and an overall weakening of our immune systems. We cannot choose dysfunction and disease once we have understood their mechanisms. Like flowers turning their faces to the sun, we, too, have a tropism towards health. It is not only unhealthy for us, personally, to remain closeted, it is also so for those who would like us to remain there. Relationships based on such massive falsehood are doomed, whatever efforts we make to shore them up. Perhaps the kindest and most courageous thing we can do is to fully live our truth and hope others will feel empowered, by our example, to live theirs.

Moral decisions often do cause others pain, but that pain can provide opportunities for growth. Is our sexuality so important that we cannot be satisfied until it is lived? Yes, of course it is-especially when it is understood not just as a matter of body parts or sex acts but as a force that gives shape and direction to our life's quest for intimacy and loving companionship. This is true not just of "out" gays and lesbians, but of most everyone else as well. To ignore our sexuality is to deny our deepest human needs and to subvert our best and noblest efforts in every other sphere of life. Heterosexuals, whose sexual identity is not in question, seldom appreciate the extent to which they both value that identity and take it for granted. If they were routinely expected to deny it, as gays so often are, it is hard to imagine that very many would acquiesce to doing so. Most would fiercely defend not only their sexuality but their right to express it appropriately. Heterosexuality is simply assumed, along with all its conventions of courtship and mating-private or public, civic or religious. A straight woman who marries a man and has children by him is not thought to be making an issue of her sexuality, while a lesbian who simply holds hands in public with her partner may be accused of "flaunting her lifestyle" and even become a target of harassment.

Homosexuality causes a stir because it departs from what is assumed and requires an effort of understanding. While it may seem bizarre or unnatural to those who are unaccustomed to it, what gays and lesbians want-the freedom to experience desire and seek love and affection according to the dictates of our own hearts-is hardly unusual, unreasonable or unnatural. The closet causes enormous suffering throughout our society-to everyone, not just gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered people. Everyone's life is in some way diminished by its very existence-straight men whose fear of being perceived as gay translates into loss of spontaneity; mothers who cannot face the shame of having a lesbian daughter and thus create their own closets; and gays themselves, who sometimes suffer severe reprisals for disclosing their sexual identity. Once we have understood what a prison the closet is, and how badly it distorts our vision and warps our lives, how can we not work to dismantle it?

The world is too full of men and women who are daily giving away their birthright-their wonderful potential for joy and self-realization-either under duress or in return for the equivalent of fool's gold. Helping people maneuver themselves out of their closets is a delicate task requiring work on both sides of the door. While no one should be coaxed into opening that door until safety and support are ready on the other side, we can work to make the "outside" less dangerous for those who want to venture out. That is political work and social work. All of us can engage in it, either by direct action or simply by refusing to acquiesce to intolerance, fear and bigotry when they present themselves. The two men modeling plaid shirts in the clothier's catalog may only represent an uncertain vision of the future, but perhaps it is a vision worth holding on to.