Tacit Subjects

Conventional views of coming out in contemporary queer communities celebrate the individual, the visible, and the proud. Given the growing legitimacy of predominantly white and middle-class lesbians and gay men in the United States and of models that presume and uphold individual decision making, negotiations of the closet that refuse speech, visibility, and pride have been generally viewed as suspect, as evidence of denial and internalized homophobia, or as outright pathology.

During my field research, I encountered characterizations of Dominican immigrant gay men in New York as "in the closet" that are consistent with existing views about how Latinos and other populations of color in the United States deal with their sexual identities.¹ Cast at best as indifferent to the development of a gay Dominican community, these men were seen at worst as immigrants whose physical displacement had not helped them overcome the internalized homophobia that supposedly characterized their lives in the Dominican Republic.²

Taking for granted that all LGBTQ people should come out of the closet is consistent with a neoliberal interpretation of coming out characteristic of the current political climate in the United States. Instead of being the beginning of a project of social transformation—as coming out was understood in the early days of gay liberation—individual self-realization through speech has been severed from collective social change. Today, one comes out not to be radical or change the world but to be a "normal" gay subject.³ From this perspective, some queers of color have an uneasy relationship with the closet because they resist the depoliticized "liberation" that coming out promises, which currently resides in a gay identity as a social-cultural formation and as a niche market. Critiques of coming out in its current form have and continue to be made partly because of the persistence of this way of thinking about gay subject formation and the racial and class biases obscured by this dominant model.⁴

Based on research from a larger study of Dominican immigrant gay and bisexual men in New York City, this article argues that we must take seriously the distinction between refusing to discuss an openly lived homosexuality and silence.⁵ Drawing from Spanish grammar, I suggest that some of my informants inhabit a space that is "in" and "out" of the closet in terms of the tacit subject, an analytic framework that draws attention to the range, interaction, and intersection of the meanings and contexts that structure their social relations.⁶ Negotiations of information about a person's sexual identity, as I show, teach us about the knowledge and complicity that structure and sustain hierarchical social relations.⁷

In Spanish grammar, the "sujeto tácito" (tacit subject) is the subject that is not spoken but can be ascertained through the conjugation of the verb used in a sentence. For example, instead of saying "I go to school," in Spanish one might say "Voy a la escuela" without using the Yo (I). Since the conjugation voy (I go) leaves no doubt who is speaking, whoever hears this sentence knows that the subject is built into the action expressed through the verb.⁸

Using this grammatical principle as a metaphor to explain how my informants interpret how others view their lives, the sujeto tácito suggests that coming out may sometimes be redundant. In other words, coming out can be a verbal declaration of something that is already understood or assumed—tacit—in an exchange.⁹ What is tacit is neither secret nor silent.

Nevertheless, how tacit one's sexual identity is to others is a matter of interpretation and requires that the others interacting with my informants recognize and decode the self-presentation of bodies and the information about them that circulates in family networks. In thinking that their homosexuality is knowable in a tacit way to the people close to them, my informants assume that many people have the requisite skills to recognize and decode their behavior. Everyone may not "get" the signs, but my informants understand that there is a distinction between their intentional manipulation of their self-presentation and impressions that they give to others...