Display Case: Kevin Spacey’s Shattered Closet, Integrity, and Image

Kevin Spacey has carefully managed his image for years, long after becoming an acclaimed name in Hollywood. Famously private, his repeated deflection of questions about his personal life made him more interesting to the media; following his Oscar-winning performances, Spacey became a household name as well as a focus of widespread rumor within Hollywood circles. That bubble of inner-circle movie-maker knowledge was burst in 1997, however, when Esquire’s Tom Junod wrote “Kevin Spacey Has a Secret.”¹ This article took as a foundational point the claim that even Junod’s mother “knows” Kevin Spacey is gay, a knowledge corroborated by the speculations of New York and Los Angeles “sophisticates” that Spacey was an exemplary “closet case.” Because his homosexuality has been more or less quietly assumed for twenty years, Kevin Spacey’s closet was what public relations CEO Howard Bragman calls a “glass closet”: “that complex but popular contraption that allows public figures to avoid the career repercussions of any personal disclosure while living their lives with a certain degree of integrity.”² What follows, then, is a brief account of Spacey’s efforts at maintaining the integrity of his image, characterizing him instead as a display case, retroactively depending upon the logics of the closet as an attempt to gain protection through today’s inclusive regime of transparency.

Spacey’s response to the 1997 Esquire article depended on a maintenance of his image’s integrity in the face of what he implied were libelous accusations. He wrote: “Esquire has made it abundantly clear that they have now joined the ranks of distasteful journalism, and this mean-spirited, homophobic, offensive article proves that the legacy of Joseph McCarthy is alive and well.”³ When asked again about his sexuality, he said, “Until the media stop using sexuality as a weapon against public figures, they will always lag behind ordinary, regular folk.”⁴ In the past few years, those on social media sites like Twitter were in such anticipation of Spacey’s coming out prior to the widespread publication of Rapp’s experiences that—for example—when people saw that “Kevin Spacey” was listed as “Trending” in April 2017, immediate reactions were split between fearing he had died (“2016 taught us that it’s not necessarily a good thing when a celebrity you admire is trending on Twitter”⁵) and assuming that he had come out. As it turned out, he was simply announced as the host of the Tony Awards that year,⁶ a performance that itself featured numerous winking hints at Spacey’s closeted homosexuality.⁷ As opposed to Spacey’s imagined “ordinary folk,” the Twitter public followed Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet, where disclosure is compulsory just as much as it is forbidden, and one “can be faulted for not disclosing enough rather than disclosing too much.”⁸ In most any other context than that of Anthony Rapp’s account, it seems that Spacey’s coming out would have been welcome news.

Given what the general public seemed to know—that Spacey is gay and that he would be accepted for it—the motivation for anticipating his coming out seemed to emerge from what Roland Barthes said is the one thing “society will not tolerate”: for somebody to be “nothing.”⁹ As Silvia Bovenschen argues, “Someone who refuses to render himself universally accessible and classifiable, even though according to general opinion he belongs to a type that may become an object of a discussion, is suspect [sic].”¹⁰ Instead of accepting categorization, Spacey attempted to substitute information about his personal life with the idea of him as an actor: the image of Kevin Spacey as an imagined figure, purely an actor. Rather than participate in the rhetoric of authenticity that dominates recent celebrity culture, he maintained an opacity in displaying himself only as an actor with no personal life to speak of. Spacey was denying any significance of himself as a person, refusing categorization except on the basis of his acting credentials. Even his Twitter bio says little about his life outside acting, reading simply...