Queers, Closets and Quarantines
Sitting on the couch together that night in early March trying to determine the specifics of an effective quarantine, we had no idea what a COVID-19 future held. Trying to keep our relational and emotional lives intact while also keeping our communities safe was daunting and essential on both counts, yet even still there was no way to anticipate the ensuing four months. There was no way to prepare for the wide pendulum swings of data and science, no way to fortify our emotions from the moment-by-moment shifts between anxiety, fear, restlessness, frustration, paralysis, and depression. Of course, there was no way to prepare ourselves for the urgency to act after the death of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, nor the degree to which whiteness inoculates us against the sustained work of dismantling interlocked systems of oppression. Even after all this time in quarantine, it still seems as if we are in the dark trying to hit targets with one hand while searching for a light switch with the other.
Through it all I have been oddly at peace with certain aspects of quarantine, while also grappling with an intense emotional claustrophobia of sorts. It was nearly as if my body held a history within it that somehow prepared me for quarantine yet disoriented me in the midst of it. I was unnerved by my frustration toward others who had trouble accepting elements of quarantine life. I struggled to understand those who needed physical touch in a world that was becoming less and less touchable. Many nights I went to bed next to the person I love aware that I was shielding my most vulnerable parts from him with little desire to interrupt those rhythms. Afraid of hurting the ones I loved, I hid my own self in a bid to maintain stability at the cost of authenticity to painful result.
As I mulled these things over, I asked: what it this? Where does it come from? Why do I feel like a child? The answer, a trusted friend explained to me on the phone, couldn’t have felt more obvious when I started to string it all together: it was the closet.
The closet was a twenty year object lesson in quarantine. Ever the unrelenting teacher, it forced me to learn how to stonewall others and to be hyper-vigilant, undermining my ability to discern between real and perceived threats. No wonder I was able to navigate emotional and physical distance from my family and loved ones with initial ease. No wonder I knew how to take space without offering explanation or seeking approval, or to numb my very human need for intimacy when I (wrongly) perceived that no one wanted to journey into my process with me. It took a quarantine for me to understand that the closet hadn’t gone anywhere; it was simply dormant. Only when I took a step back did it occur to me that the closet had stepped forward to fill the space.
Some of us queers stay in the closet out of necessity, to keep our physical bodies from being terrorized and murdered. Some of us, by way of privilege, venture out to varying degrees. There is no way for me to decide for anyone other than myself how much of my closet I will maintain or reject, ignore or acknowledge. It is my hope and life’s work to create a world where closets are less and less needed. I long for a future when a young person asks me, “What is the closet?” Sadly that is not yet true. Irrespective of how in or out of the closet we are, queers are still marked by it.
I say this not to suggest the closet is a perpetual loop of inescapable trauma, nor to be lulled into some faux-progressive fantasy that there is not work to do. I say it to name what feels true, so that somehow the closet might find some redemption in my own life.
The redemption of the closet challenges me insofar as I can commit to doing my own work. It challenges me to name when heterosexuality crosses the boundary into heteronormativity, to identify when masculine energy turns toxic, to sting me when I absolutize my white cisgender gay male perspective; all the while offering me opportunities to change direction toward the feminine when I have participated in or enabled these things.
The redemption is manifest when I can metabolize the closet’s coping mechanisms into healthy self-confidence, when I can contradict its glaring falsehoods and little white lies, and when I can utilize its lessons for the sake of empathizing and existing in solidarity with others. For as much as I might wish otherwise, the world seems to be signaling that closets and quarantines won’t be going away anytime soon. Better off staring them both in the face.