Freedom to Differ. Diane Helene Miller
which draws on Audre Lorde’s admonition that “your silence will not protect you” (Segrest 1995).
Opponents of lesbian and gay rights often fail to distinguish between these concepts at all. The military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, for example, stubbornly equates voice with visibility. It seeks to uphold its ban on gays and lesbians and to maintain the appearance of uniform heterosexuality by imposing a smothering silence that maintains invisibility. This prevents the military from having to acknowledge the many gays and lesbians who have served and currently serve in its ranks, and who include some of its most decorated soldiers. The military’s effort to equate voice, visibility, and identity—what we cannot see and do not say does not exist—illustrates the power of language to create or suppress what we come to think of simply as “reality.” It testifies, as well, to the influence of public representations on the ability of minority group members to name and define themselves. As Adrienne Rich has written, “Invisibility is not just a matter of being told to keep your private life private; it’s the attempt to fragment you, to prevent you from integrating love and work and feelings and ideas, with the empowerment that that can bring” (1986, 199—200). Such effects are only intensified for those whose history has been largely hidden not only from outsiders but even from themselves.
The Ambivalence of the Closet
The achievement of voice and visibility is crystallized in the act of coming out, marking the shift from confusion or hiddenness to awareness or acknowledgment, a move from private to public identity. “Coming out” has a dual meaning, referring both to an individual’s self-awareness of being gay or lesbian and to the decision to share this information with others. In a context in which heterosexuality is presumed, heterosexuals generally do not need to state their sexual orientation to have it accurately perceived.16 In the same context, a gay man or lesbian who does not explicitly come out as such is often misperceived as heterosexual. The presumption of heterosexuality is so deeply rooted in our culture that any declaration of lesbian identity is momentous. On a national level, where representations of lesbians are especially scarce, the identification of oneself as a lesbian represents a particularly bold and courageous act.
A key element of the silence imposed on gays and lesbians is that we are required to display a certain “discretion” in public settings. Even when one’s gay or lesbian sexual orientation is known to others, secrecy is often expected or demanded by admonitions not to “flaunt” our sexuality (see Sedgwick 1990). Those few nationally known figures whose gay or lesbian identity is a matter of public record are nevertheless expected to minimize its visibility or discount its effect on their public lives. Quite often, this has been the road taken by (mostly male) gay politicians, who see in this strategy the means of least resistance in attaining access to political power.
The act of coming out on the national level, like coming out to family and friends, is subject to multiple interpretations and possesses a multitude of possible consequences for gays and lesbians, politically and otherwise. For example, in one sense there is a clear victory for lesbians and gays in the appointment of a lesbian to the president’s cabinet or in the reinstatement of a lesbian colonel to her military post. Nevertheless, these events also have a price and may not send as unequivocal a message as we first suppose. The assertion and affirmation of identity categories, even oppositional categories such as “lesbian” and “gay,” is not an unquestionable good, for “identity categories tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes.” As a result, “the invocation of identity is always a risk” (Butler 1993, 308). Specifically, the rhetoric that is used to achieve these victories and the ways in which lesbians are portrayed through this discourse may have lasting effects on how the public sees lesbians and how lesbians see themselves. The act of coming out and the figure of the closet associated with it are themselves problematic and fraught with tension. While movement leaders often present the refusal to be closeted, and the greater exposure coming out affords, as an uncontested good, political strategy demands a more careful examination of the various consequences of “outness.” “The discourse of ‘coming out’ has clearly served its purposes, but what are its risks?” (Butler 1993, 308). Or, more colloquially put: “The good news is, we finally exist to people other than ourselves. The bad news is, on what terms?” (Hollibaugh 1993, 27).
The question is a provocative one, for lesbians and gays have often realized that whereas hiddenness or “closetedness” has its liabilities, it also bestows a certain freedom from regulation, along with opportunities for selfnaming and self-preservation, that would be impossible under conditions of visibility. “Becoming visible means being forced into categories that do not fit, that are premised on the denial of our reality” (Becker 1995, 147). Thus, although the closet may be seen as a structure that excludes and confines gays and lesbians, from another perspective it can be viewed as a shelter that shields us from the dangers “outside.” The closet offers a measure of protection for lesbians and gays even as it insulates heterosexuality from the potential challenge of our presence. Voluntarily coming out (as opposed to being involuntarily “outed”) signals a relinquishing of the closet’s protection along with an escape from confinement. Coming out marks both one’s subjection to public stereotypes of homosexuality and one’s readiness to challenge these dominant misunderstandings. The act of coming out, then, is inevitably characterized by contradictions and trade-offs in terms of safety and freedom. “Freedom from” is sacrificed to the pursuit of “freedom to,” as we forgo what feels like the safety of silence and invisibility in order to stand up for our rights and liberties.
In the discourse of coming out, the assertion of an “outside” always reaffirms the existence of a closet. “Being ‘out’ always depends to some extent on being ‘in’; it gains its meaning only within that polarity. Hence, being ‘out’ must produce the closet again and again in order to maintain itself as ‘out.’” The continual reinscription of this binary opposition prompts the question “We are out of the closet, but into what?” (Butler 1993, 309). This “outside” is always, first, a disappointment, as it inevitably fails to provide the anticipated freedom of total disclosure. Within this system of meaning, another impenetrable space always exists beyond the closet. “The closet produces the promise of a disclosure that can, by definition, never come” (Butler 1993, 309). Thus the act of coming out involves at best a reconfiguration of boundaries that places us inside yet another set of walls. In these terms, being “out” is always something of a letdown. Yet, this partial and unsatisfactory disclosure nevertheless renders lesbians and gay men more exposed and highly vulnerable. What is visible is subject to discrimination, regulation, appropriation; that which can be seen and recognized by the dominant culture may also be labeled and defined by it. “As more homosexuals come out, new stereotypes are created; the assertion of homosexuality has in turn created new forms of homophobia” (Altman 1982, 22). In this way, the act of coming out, as an act of making visible, is inherently subject to reinterpretation and appropriation.
Moreover, as minority groups are well aware, any representation is not necessarily better than no representation at all. While our public invisibility gives us at least some opportunity to define our own self-image, when lesbians and gays are portrayed by and for the mass media, the images may be at best unflattering, at worst inflammatory. These images may incite hatred and even violence against us. Portrayals of lesbians and gays in television and film, when they have existed, have historically been grossly stereotypical. They have presented ridiculous characters who are frequently objects of scorn. Only recently have mainstream movies and television shows begun to incorporate gay and lesbian characters who are multidimensional and sympathetic, rather than solely laughable or narrowly sexual beings. Although such portrayals are increasing in both television and film, they remain rare enough to be notable, as evidenced by the furor over Ellen DeGeneres’s character coming out on her television show, Ellen. Because we have so few images of lesbians or gay men, those that exist take on representative status. This situation is exacerbated by the hiddenness of the variety and diversity among lesbians and gay men in many communities. Because of their significance, the few representations we do have must be scrutinized for the understandings they create and the possibilities they obscure. This is equally, if not more, true for the representations created through public language, during debates over policy and within the context of legal decisions.