The Dictionary of Homophobia (33 page)

—Art; Censorship; Comic Books; Dance; Heterosexism; Literature; Music; Pasolini, Pier Paolo; Song.

CLASS

Is homophobia a matter of class? Sociologists are paid to think so, but lacking proper research, what do we really know? One cannot help but be aware of homosexuality’s unequal social distribution: among gays, the wealthier classes are twice as numerous, and there are twice as many university graduates. Further, it is no surprise that homosexuality is much more widespread in large urban centers. These tendencies are not dependent on nationality; studies confirm them in such countries as France, Great Britain, and the United States.

Can we then also deduce the unequal social distribution of homophobia? The reasoning is obvious: naturally, gays and lesbians tend to gather and thus thrive in environments that are less hostile to them, thus the overrepresentation of homosexuals among the economic and cultural elite. Though the difference can be explained to a certain degree by assuming a bias among survey respondents, it is difficult to deny that the higher amount of reticence among the lower socioeconomic classes is inversely indicative of a much stronger hostility toward homosexuality in those classes. In other words, going against the homophobic argument that the prevalence of homosexuality in the social elite is a symptom of their
decadence
, could it be said that it is instead a sign of a much more liberal level of
tolerance
?

The underlying ideology behind this sociological hypothesis is familiar: it is based on the
philosophy
of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and inspired by its criticism of prejudice. The defense of Reason is effectively embodied by a representation of society: the enlightened elite lead the way, ahead of the common people. The same perspective is applied not only to homophobia; racism and sexism have also been denounced in the name of the Enlightenment. Thus, to cast off these types of prejudice is to resolutely declare one’s modernity, differentiating oneself by one’s liberalism from the common classes, which are presumably more conservative in spirit.

It is tempting to turn this hypothesis upside-down by proposing a different, albeit more political, sociological model. For example, it could be said that recent debates on homosexuality are based on a resistance to the advancement of rights (such as
marriage
or parenting), a resistance that is in fact stronger among the elite than among the common classes. Doubtless, it is difficult to quantify this kind of hypothesis. Nonetheless, small clues abound: in France between 1997 and 1999, progressive news items that were favorable toward the PaCS (Pacte civil de solidarité; Civil solidarity pact) domestic partnership pact (and by extension, gay marriage and
parenting
) first appeared in mass
media
outlets rather than in the media of the elite. One can only assume that mass media, being more “of the people,” were naturally more sensitive to a change in public opinion, while the “elitist” media (whose self-declared role is to enlighten the people) took much longer to come to this conclusion. In more general terms, it can be assumed that the dominant ideology is protected by those who dominate, who are also resistant to change; they are better armed, culturally-speaking, to fight the evolution of their belief system. This overturns the first sociological hypothesis: far from holding a privileged place among the common people, homophobia instead would seem to be far more firmly anchored among the elite.

Should preference be given to one or the other of these hypotheses: the first, which is based on the logic of liberal modernization, or the second, which takes up a radical criticism of the elite? The first case assumes a common people plunged into the obscurity of their prejudices, while the second imagines an elite ensconced within the arrogance of its ideology. Rather than pit upper and lower classes against each other, let us instead form a hypothesis separate from those already mentioned, which sets aside the inherent difficulty of the definition. Homophobia may be the name given to the entirety of discussions and practices that contribute to the exclusion or belittlement of homosexuals, but there is nothing that says homophobia must be uniform, nor that it cannot be measured by degrees as it appears in various social milieus.

On the contrary, if one can accept the idea of a heterogeneous homophobia that changes according to time and place, then it becomes possible to establish a correlation between homophobia and social classes not in terms of degrees, but nature. Between variable historical configurations (that is, different social and political contexts), one never encounters the same type of homophobia. Its protean nature stems from the fact it never expresses a consistent ideology. In reality, homophobia is nothing more than a collection of strategies opposed to the legitimization of homosexuality (that is to say, anything that calls heterosexual norms into question).

Following this hypothesis, one must surrender trying to quantify homophobia as it moves up or down along the socioeconomic ladder. If sociology were to provide the questionnaire for a survey on homophobia, one should not expect to find a unique scale that can be used as a point of comparison between hierarchical groups (“Are you more or less homophobic?”). Rather, in the absence of being able to identify the strong and weak points, the research could establish the form homophobia takes based on the particular milieu—in other words, the diverse strategies employed in the service of
heteronormativity
.
—Eric Fassin

Borrillo, Daniel, and Pierre Lascoumes, eds.
L’Homophobie, comment la définir, comment la combattre
. Paris: Ed. Prochoix, 1999.

Bourdieu, Pierre.
La Distinction
. Paris: Minuit, 1970.

Chauncey, George.
Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940
. New York: Basic Books, 1994.

D’Emilio, John. “Capitalism and Gay Identity.” In
The Lesbian and Gay Reader
. Edited by Henri Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David Halperin. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Fassin, Eric. “Sexe, mensonge et veto.” Discussion with Jean-Marie Durand and Joseph Ghosn.
Les Inrockuptibles,
no. 247 (June 2000).

Grignon, Claude, and Jean-Claude Passeron.
Le Savant et le populaire. Misérabilisme et populisme en sociologie et en littérature
. Paris: Gallimard, Le Seuil, “Hautes Etudes,” 1989.

Hoggart, Richard.
La Culture du pauvre
. Paris: Minuit, 1970.

Pollak, Michael. “L’Homosexualité masculine, ou: le bonheur dans le ghetto?”
Communication
, no. 35 (1982).

Raffo, Susan, ed.
Queerly Classed: Gay Men and Lesbians Write About Class
. Boston: South End Press, 1997.

—Heterosexism; Parenting; Philosophy; Rhetoric; Sociology; Symbolic Order.

CLOSET, the

In an interview with the French publication
Journal du sida
(Journal on
AIDS
) in April 1995, essayist Alain Finkielkraut reminisced about the “art of homosexual living,” characterized by “discretion, ambiguity, indetermination, and reserve,” and regretted its disappearance. Had he simply been describing a general concept of good manners, his comments would have been relegated to the ranks of trivial banter. But Finkielkraut managed to transform it into a set of morals specific to homosexuals, modes of behavior set out by gays and lesbians as a means of survival—in a context where the simple act of living out one’s sexuality in the same way as any heterosexual placed gays and lesbians in danger, and turned parents, neighbors, or workplace colleagues into implacable adversaries. Finkielkraut seemed to forget (or refused to see) that homosexual discretion has a history that is both individual and collective, irreducibly linked to
insult
and
discrimination
; he was also unaware (or preferred not to know) that the “art of homosexual living,” whose return he was naïvely advocating, was in actual fact linked to another, more significant metaphor for gay and lesbian experience: the closet.

“Closet” is a gem of a word whose effectiveness can be measured by its translinguistic reach (it translates well into French as
placard
and into Spanish as
armario
). The term is used to describe the social and psychological space in which gays and lesbians lock themselves up to hide their homosexuality. For all the time that it has been in use since the
Stonewall
riots, the metaphor has not lost any of its descriptive power; the “closet” speaks of both the ridicule and the discomfort: in bourgeois theater, illegitimate loves are always hidden away in the closet, as precarious a hideout as it is. In this sense, usage of the word “closet” also refers to a declaration—it is primarily used by those who have lived through the same experience and moved on; those who have come out of the closet. This is why the term “closet” is often used in contrast with gay “pride,” a term in which those upholders of “discretion” tend to see only shamelessness and
exhibitionism
.

The concept of the “closet” can be seen in two ways: on one hand, it is individual and biographical, and on the other, collective and historical. Given the usual assumption of a heterosexual preference, the experience of the closet is the original condition of every homosexual. But it must not be forgotten that the term is historically situated: it was born during those years of homosexual liberation as a generation attempted to free itself from a past of invisibility—with this perspective, we can see that modern research in gay and lesbian historiography tends to nuance the linearity of a history that only ever seems to be presented as an imperious march toward emancipation.

At the beginning, there is the presumption of heterosexuality: a heterosexual is never faced with the question of knowing whether or not he should say what he is; his sexuality is an assumed part of the playing field for all his social relations. Under these conditions, the discovery of a homosexual preference is immediately linked with the delicate experience of the closet. Every homosexual, man or woman, can attest to this: at one moment or another in their lives, they experienced a painful disassociation between that which they are, and that which others perceive them to be, or tacitly oblige them to be. If there is a homosexual culture, its roots spring from that one intimate moment, shared by all: the closet is the original experience, the site of a continuous effort that demanded an unfailing vigilance to social situations, which sometimes required a secret or double life, ambiguity or self-affirmation.

This common experience launched a vast range of unique situations: one person might carefully keep his sexual preferences from his
family
, but has no problem affirming them in the
workplace
; another might take careful measures to ensure that his colleagues never suspect his homosexuality, yet sees no harm in telling his parents. Despite being shared, the experience of the closet is nonetheless very fluid: one is in or out of the closet depending on the time and place, dictated by a particular situation’s degree of acceptance (or not) of homosexuality. In this way, a type of social intelligence is amassed, halfway between intuition and specific experience, which is common to all minority populations and whose functioning Erving Goffman described in
Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity
(1963).

But the experience of the closet can also lead those who stay in it, or return to it occasionally, into a Catch-22 situation. Without a doubt, maintaining secrecy about one’s homosexuality allows one to elude the many manifestations of homophobia, from the seemingly harmless to the explicitly violent. But this veil of secrecy is a form of self-loathing, which only serves to exacerbate homophobic attitudes because the closeted person appears to agree that homosexuality is shameful and unmentionable. Further, the effort required to keep the closet door tightly shut may lead one to stubbornly insist on maintaining a heterosexual façade and thus adopt behaviors that are openly hostile to gays and lesbians. In these ways, the effects of homophobic oppression can be much harder on those who hide than it is on those who affirm their homosexuality. The closet, then, is a fictional means of protection that renders one even more vulnerable to blackmail and
violence
; it is difficult to report a crime having been the target of an aggression without also exposing the reason. As a result, coming out of the closet, despite its risks, can also be considered the most certain way of breaking a vicious circle.

However, in her remarkable book
Epistemology of the Closet
, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick tempers this kind of optimism. She reminds us that the supposed protection of the closet is never really certain, because one is never completely inside: even a homosexual’s silence can confer an extraordinary privilege on a friend or family member of a homosexual who knows without the homosexual knowing that he or she knows. This person refrains from initiating a discussion that would break the spell, leaving the homosexual with the impossible task of making an admission whose false air of confession inevitably makes his homosexuality seem like a fault or a
sin
. But Sedgwick also shows that one can never completely leave the closet either, because the revelation of a person’s homosexuality forcibly assigns him or her a new identity through which, from this point forward, everything will be interpreted; gays and lesbians know all too well that there is always someone ready to draw a connection between their homosexuality and the slightest defect or mediocrity. Sedgwick also reminds us that no matter what, a person’s coming out of the closet will always be both too early (“Was it really necessary to push this on us right now?”) and too late, thereby risking ridicule (“Everyone has known for a long time already”) or suspicion (“Why did you have to wait so long before talking about it?”).

In other words, far from putting an end to homophobia, coming out of the closet seems only to force it to manifest on a different level, leading to a vague renewal of categories of identity and to the legitimization of a sexual hierarchy of which heterosexuals are the symbolic and practical masters. Compared to all the illusions of coming out of the closet—which only really changes the type of captivity without completely removing it—it seems that one has to prefer the “queer” route, in which one deconstructs labels and norms by affirming identities so numerous and unforeseeable that they become unassignable.