Out of the Closet?

Beyond the Closet: The Transformation of Gay and Lesbian Life, Steven Seidman, New York: Routledge, 2002. x + 245 pp.

The title of Steven Seidman's Beyond the Closet describes in brief its author's major claim: that the closet in U.S. culture has begun to lose its inexorable hold on the psychic experience and sexual self-definition of lesbian and gay people. Seidman asserts that the closet existed in a narrowly specified historical period, exerting its greatest control in the 1950s and 1960s, and that the 1990s witnessed a dramatic reduction of its power. A sociological study, the book aims to assess the place of the closet in people's everyday lives, past and present. Indeed, Seidman's most impressive achievement in pursuit of this goal is his measured, straightforward presentation of a fairly complex methodology: his work brings together interviews with gay men and women who have been in the closet, interviews with young people who identify as heterosexual, a study of forty-eight mainstream feature films that represent gays and lesbians, and a survey of government policy concerning sexual conduct during the twentieth century. These diverse materials help Seidman make a persuasive case that the era of the closet is coming to a close.

Beyond the Closet's rhetorical force comes from its understated style. Avoiding a melodramatic framing, Seidman lets his interview subjects tell their fascinating stories in the early chapters, during which they accumulate a surprising revelatory force. We learn from the contrasting stories of Lenny (b. 1935) and Bill (b. 1958), for example, that despite their ostensible similarities (both men married women in an attempt to pass for straight), they manifest a striking difference: Bill, born near the end of the postwar baby boom, was much more self-conscious about his closeted homosexuality than Lenny, a detail that Seidman attributes to the increasingly homophobic postwar environment. The argumentative art in these portions appears in Seidman's deliberate orchestration of his subjects' voices as he supplies the segues between them. Moreover, his simple, lucid sentences and evenhanded tone are clearly meant to appeal to a fairly general audience.

Moving on from his first, micropolitical subjects, Seidman next looks at the larger systems that seem to bear out his thesis: Hollywood cinema, the evolving profile of what Seidman calls "the good sexual citizen" (151), the conflicting discourses of gay liberation and gay rights, and the appearance of antigay legislation. On this larger canvas Seidman loses some of the nuance and delicacy that characterize the early parts of the book. His ambitious chapter on Hollywood cinema, for example, attempts to chart the major changes in depictions of lesbians and gays over a forty-year period, from The Children's Hour (1961) to The Object of My Affection (1998). While the main argument is generally persuasive—Seidman observes that the "polluted" homosexuals of the 1960s and 1970s gave way to the normalized, nonthreatening gay characters of the 1990s (127)—it is only generally so; his broad approach risks the oversimplifications associated with structuralist criticism, and his claims lack the precision of earlier chapters. By contrast, this broad approach works well when Seidman turns to an overview of the social practices, legislation, and legal cases of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that set the terms for the postwar closet; in less than ten pages he conveys this information in a fresh, coherent manner.

The strengths of Beyond the Closet do not quite mask its limitations. The title of the book, for instance, belies a reality that Seidman admits everywhere inside it: the closet seems to be on the wane, but it is not gone, and its profound effects (including shame and homophobia) linger. Surely Seidman is right, as his subtitle suggests, to note that gays' and lesbians' lives are not what they were fifty years ago, but to suggest that this means that our current moment is "beyond the closet" is overly optimistic...