Keeping Secrets

I really wanted to like this book. With a few (although notable) exceptions, academic rhetoricians have been slow to integrate queer theory into their work, and Rhetorical Secrets seems like an excellent place to start in its concern with the role of secrecy and disclosure in the rhetorical construction of gay identity, and queer resistances to that construction. Davin Allen Grindstaff's formulation of what he calls "the rhetorical secret" gets to the heart of the issue; in his words, it "presumes that sexual identity is a private phenomenon that can be known through simple acts of disclosure in order to gain social agency" (134). Of course, as Grindstaff argues, these acts of disclosure are not the whole story—to be intelligible, they require us to speak in an already established language, using terms that privilege homophobic structures of knowing, speaking, and feeling: private/public, secret/revelation, inside/outside, normal/perverted, monogamous/ promiscuous, and so on. Moreover, Grindstaff is both passionate about his topic and well versed in the queer theory of the past three decades.

But while Grindstaff sets himself an important task, he's not up to the job. Rhetorical Secrets is a mess. That's not to say it's chaotic—far from it. Grindstaff organizes his argument well, and he's clearly moving through a series of ideas about queer identity, HIV/AIDS, gay male desire, and coming out. But it's unconvincing and derivative. Grindstaff's deep immersion in queer theory turns out to be a liability, since he spends far too much time working through other theorists' ideas, rehearsing debates between Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari, for example, or anatomizing at length the meanings of masochism, rather than focusing on his own ideas.

In addition, Grindstaff seems to be fighting old battles. A chapter on gay men's erotic identities takes on Gabriel Rotello's 1998 Sexual Ecology and Michelangelo Signorile's 1997 Life Outside, critiquing their Puritanism, push toward normalcy, and celebration of suburban monogamy. Certainly, there are valuable things to be said about the sexual conservatism that has, most recently, spawned the juggernaut of the gay marriage movement. But attacking Signorile seems to me like shooting fish in a barrel—when the book first came out, a host of queer critics (most notably Michael Warner and Michael Bronski) eviscerated Signorile's argument.¹ There are interesting things to be said about these books; for example, their intense anti-urbanism and celebration of the suburbs are closer rhetorically to the white supremacy and white flight of the 1950s than to the language of gay liberation of the 1970s. For Signorile in particular, "city," "AIDS," and "promiscuity" seem to go rhetorically hand in hand, remaking urban areas, which had been idealized by a previous generation of queer activists and historians as havens for gay life and incubators of gay culture, into fleshpots of illegitimate desire and disease.

Similarly, Grindstaff's resuscitation of the notion that hypermasculinity is inherently liberatory and sexually subversive for gay men is unconvincing. It's bad enough when a neocon like Richard Mohr trots out this kind of thing, but for a clearly progressive thinker like Grindstaff to argue that white, shaved, muscled male bodies in gay bar rags undermine heteronormativity is just depressing. Grindstaff declares that "desire is our most powerful form of resistance" (156), but in this context "desire" is not a neutral category—it is profoundly imbricated with any number of other forces that Grindstaff acknowledges but does not, in the final analysis, take into meaningful account. To argue that "the circulation of hyper-masculine body images in urban America opens up these spaces of transgression" (122) needs much more evidence than simply showing that gay men are turned on by white, shaved, muscled male bodies.

The final chapter on coming out as a form of contagion misses an opportunity to combine Grindstaff's ideas about the rhetorical secret with his earlier discussion of discourses of HIV/AIDS transmission. In a Butlerian move, Grindstaff argues...