The cold war closet

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-1-2015

Abstract

For many in the twenty-first century, the image of the closet has become almost trite. Think of the hit cable television series True Blood (2008–2014), in which vampires have finally “come out of the coffin.” The trope's pervasiveness stems in part from the heightened visibility of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) politics since the early 1970s, when the Gay Liberation Front implored sexual minorities to “come out,” and the 1980s, when AIDS activists reinvigorated that call under the banner of “Silence = Death.” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick famously wrote that “[t] he closet is the defining structure for gay oppression in [the twentieth] century,” and the trope's ubiquity in the twenty-first century is a testament to the success of “coming out” as one strategy for fighting that oppression. However, by framing LGBTQ politics as the progress from “in” to “out,” from oppression to liberation, the closet also produces a certain myopia about earlier historical periods before the heady days of the 1970s. When viewed in terms of the closet, earlier periods can appear hopelessly and tragically “in” – dominated by secrecy and shame. And this view especially shapes common notions about the decades immediately preceding gay liberation: The Cold War era of the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, it is impossible to talk about the early Cold War period without referring to the closet, not least because of the widespread social and political persecution of gays and lesbians during that time. And yet, a closer look at the gay and lesbian literature of that period also reveals a somewhat different use of the closet than readers in the twenty-first century might expect. Secrecy and shame were, without question, part of the literary and cultural discourses surrounding homosexuality during the early Cold War, but writers invoked and explored the image of the closet in ways that might surprise us. In this period, literary representations of gays and lesbians ballooned exponentially, and shame, self-loathing, and suicide figured prominently in much of this literature.

Publication Source (Journal or Book title)

The Cambridge Companion to American Gay and Lesbian Literature

First Page

122

Last Page

138

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS