Relationally Out: A Case For and Against the Closet

I struggle with the necessity of coming out of the closet. My relationship to the closet is a queer one and my view of the ways that others navigate the closet is equally peculiar. I understand the arguments in favor of destroying the closet. I understand why we queers need to be out and loud and proud. It is only in collective visible solidarity that we are able to demand the respect that we deserve. However, I also acknowledge that coming out of the closet, although important for some folks, may not be efficacious, safe, or desirable for others. One’s contextual relationship to the/their closet(s) is riddled with relative privilege and oppression. My own positionality is dependent upon the particular moment that the closet is conjured. With friends and some family I am out as a person who has located himself/herself somewhere between transgender and genderqueer and who is in a sexual relationship with a person who identifies as a queer transwoman. I am both in and out of the closet on varying points of identification.

My father believes me to be a gay man and uses male pronouns to refer to my partner. My mother affirms my transgender and queer identities and uses female pronouns to refer to my partner. In short, I hold that queers navigate multiple closets and numerous relationships to individual closets. Two cultural experiences have been the major influences on my relativistic view when considering the phenomenon of the closet, both of which inform my processing of Jodie Foster’s acceptance speech at the 2013 Golden Globes. In this brief article I will explicate two cultural experiences that affect my queer relationship to the closet, followed by a discussion about Foster’s speech.

First, not only am I writing as a queer body, but also as a multiracial Asian/white person whose relationship to the closet is dependent upon the demands of relative racialized family structures. My immigrant Taiwanese mother and her family raised my brothers and me. Despite my multiracial lineage, I pass as white and as a result, wield white privilege. I am out to my mother and she has always been and remains an ally. I am not out to the rest of my Taiwanese family, at least not in the traditional sense of explicitly naming my queer identities. Rather, I simply am. My friends who were raised in Western families often meet this “am-ness” with “it’s probably because they’re from Asia,” or “your family is homophobic”; these charges exist in tandem and frame my immigrant family as perpetually socially regressive and therefore homophobic. The charge of homophobia is often aimed at the matriarch of my Taiwanese family, my grandmother. She knows that I am queer and as a result, I do not need to tell her.¹ I came out to my white family because that is what my white friends did. It was a mark of honor and the thing that good gays were supposed to do, I came to learn, in order to prove our strength and overcome adversity in order to be our true selves. My white family is working class and Southern Baptist, and though I adore them, I also struggle to remain in contact with them primarily because of their problematic language choices. Single sentences can contain homophobic and racist commentary, which run doubly against my queer and mixed-race body.

The second cultural experience that informs my view of coming out is learning to accept achieved heterosexual privilege. My partner and I are in the midst of gender and sex transition. More specifically, my partner has had the privilege of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and her feminizing body is slowly pushing her masculine body out of perception. The “informed consent” model has worked to our benefit, granting us access to affordable hormones and other crucial transition benefits, despite our being uninsured.² In relation to her body, my genderqueer and transgender body is progressively perceived as normatively masculine and male. We are, for all intents and purposes, slowly becoming a perceptually heterosexual couple...