Replacing the Closet with Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”
Happy Pride Month Inside! As sheltering in place, my apartment has become a little creative writing retreat for me, with many thanks to The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. I’ve been working through this fairy/cave idea since November. I’m thinking of it as a life’s work, a dissertation with future prongs of research and fleshed out argumentation, a book. I want to get this published.
But for now, I don’t care about any of that. I want to share this idea in its nascency because (upon a quick preemption check like my Harvard Law Review training has given me) I actually think it’s novel. If anyone else is thinking through this with me and has yet to publish it, so be it. I’d love to know more people are trying to push this idea forward. I think we need to proliferate theories and imagery that capture how we feel once we get a glimpse of truth of our existence. Hopefully this idea can seem like a crystallization of one.
Like me, this is a work in progress. I would like to share my full stories of love in future works. My crushes on straight men and how they’ve hurt me, and my foray into first my gay identity then queerness then my trans identity, and how my race has played an important part through all of it. I have already shared some of these stories (trigger warning: sexual assault) in spoken word formats, but I think the world needs more stories. And I feel ready to give some of them. As a queer nonbinary black filipino fairy writer, there is no one better than me and my queer kin to write these stories — to describe how these straight lives have impacted ours. My identities have been under attack for centuries, and are receiving increasing animosity in the United States right now as we have gained some formal equality. Just last week, Tony McDade, a black trans man, was killed by police. I have sought to make securing legal protections and combatting the carceral state my life’s work, but I also know that legal change of even the most radical sort is only one tool in our toolbox. Transformative justice and cultural change require changing hearts and minds, not just arguing around the legal interpretations of statutes and the constitution. My life and my personhood have beauty and wisdom to offer those struggling with these identities, as well as those trying to figure out why it’s important to listen to us. I will not be defined by my pain.
As Eve Sedgwick theorized for the world, being “closeted” or “in the closet” is more than a popular metaphor. I realized recently that it helps to describe some of the psychological and physiological feelings that an individual might experience, particularly when someone is trying to ask them if they are attracted to people other than those society deems acceptable in a heteronormative framework. They may feel confined, cornered, trapped, uncomfortable — as if the questioner is getting too close, like they’re in a really tight space. This sounds like anxiety. This sounds like trauma (*edit: credit to my friend Faris Ilyas for noting there is scientific evidence behind this). All from confronting the possibility that they may be sexually non-normative.
If this experience holds any truth, the term should not be used derogatorily. Most generously, the closet seeks to describe a place in an individual’s life that no one from the outside has a right to enter into. The person in the closet has chosen to be there, for privacy, for safety, for security.
But over time, and with the grand assimilation of mainstream gay politics (termed homonormativity), those who are not ready or comfortable opening the closet door — who may feel shattered to pieces by questions about it from the outside — have been pressured by the out queer community to come out, for a multitude of reasons: because it is a necessity; because the personal is the political; because pride is a parade now, not a protest, and you want to join the party, right? Of course, acknowledging you’re living in a closet inherently outs you. So life becomes denial, muting desire, numbing with drugs and alcohol, abusing those who could help you come out because you just don’t want to. Whatever truth can be found in the experience of anxiety felt by those who might resonate with the “closet” metaphor has been flippantly ignored by this out and proud generation. We should treat the closet as respectfully as we do anxiety. But I worry the term is mired in negative connotations at this point.
It’s time for a new paradigm — one that doesn’t put the pressure on an individual experiencing anxiety with the different communities of the world they could choose to be part of, but rather comments on the broader communal oppressions on everyone that lead to what causes that person’s anxiety to flare up in the first place. If we out queers are to critique anything, it should not be an individual finding comfort in their inner world and privacy; isn’t that what we’re fighting for? My choice to live my queerness publicly shouldn’t ever force another person to. We need a plurality of options for the world.
That is precisely what heteronormativity does not want or offer. Heteronormativity can be understood through Plato’s Allegory of the Cave (great visual depiction here).
As journaling on the end of the Trans Day of Visibility 2020, I realized people don’t get how much of an open book I’m trying to be, and the reason why. I lay my life on the line so that people can break away from the norms of self-silencing. I’m trying to encourage people to usurp the heteronormative structures we all live by every single day — or at least, that we are asked to live by.
It is painful for me.
It is draining for me.
And I’m doing it because I desperately want others to see the world in a different way. Yes, I am trying to shatter the gender binary. You may decide you want to live in it, but I’m here to tell you it’s fake. It’s literally a modern construction. We haven’t been limited to two gender categories for most of human history. This was a colonial and capitalist project.
My conviction and way of living the world in this way is meant to be an invitation to challenge your beliefs as reckoning with mine. And I can see how sometimes that can seem unapproachable. My light could be too bright for your eyes. The outside world of the “heteronormative cave” is painful, if your eyes haven’t adjusted to it. The sun — or the moon — will reflect in ways your retinas are unprepared for because all they have looked at thus far are shadows on the wall.
A kind teacher is able to bring people out of the cave and into the light and allow them to adjust their way of seeing the world. I have sought to be said teacher for people. Sometimes it has worked, sometimes it hasn’t. If you get the surface level persona of me, it generally works better than if you get too close because my personal feelings can get in the way of your adjustment process. I start to desperately want you to see the world the way I see it — to see the light.
To see that emotions are important and should not be removed from a classroom; that we have them for each other and that they are an important part of the human existence; that logic is but one way of processing information; that there are plenty of types of attraction that we hold for each other and that if we didn’t find anyone attractive, we wouldn’t have friends or affinities towards people or smile at a person.
I’m here to challenge things that feel confining or normative or restrictive. The challenge is when those confines prevent people from naming or exploring their feelings towards me.
This is my fairy story.
The process I describe has happened with so many people with whom I have tried to remain friends, that surely some of them are seeing this right now, as I have chosen to share it with the world. And while their stories, as an amalgam, can seem like a composite experience, no single story composed this lived experience of mine but my own.
It begins in junior year of high school, and continued through college. Don’t even get me started with Singapore. And all of the straight men I met on Tinder (before they kicked me off for no reason of my doing) and OKCupid. I have educated so many straight men about my body, gender identity, and gender expression as they figured out whether or not their swiped-right desire towards me could be permissible. And sometimes they had to figure out if their sexual desire towards me could be permissible; even though they enjoyed our experience, afterwards, they’d have to decide whether or not they’d want to do it again.
I’m not going to water down my experience. If I am censored or censured for this, so be it. But I can’t understate the number of times I have felt romantic interest, lust, yearning, deeper-than-friendship feelings from straight men, who then said that because they’re straight there’s no way any of that could be real — who at the outset would deny whatever they were doing to me to have meaning, even if they tickled me, discussed things with me, kissed me, asked me to top them, opened up their world to me, asked me to put emotional labor into helping them with what they needed, or as I helped them through terrible times with their parents. I have discussed with them how their heterosexuality and my femininity could go hand in hand — and, in my weaker moments perhaps, how we could have sex and my body parts didn’t have to be involved if they didn’t want them to be.
For too long, I have bent over backwards to maintain the mirage of heteronormativity for them as they’ve explored desire for me. And today I say: no longer (how many more days will I say no longer?). If you choose to live in a mirage, I will not be your oasis. If you choose, after all of the resources the world has given you, and that I give you with my existence, to ignore these alternative ways of seeing the world — if you refuse to be patient enough, and kind enough to yourself, and to put the work in — to let your eyes adjust to this non-normative light; if you cling to straight as the only way forward for you even if you see a tinge of something else in you, something shining; then I’m going to stop putting myself second, and you will simply not get to have me in your life anymore.
Because I don’t have the time or the energy. You all have burnt me out.
I am no longer here for you. I need to distance myself from you so that I can help others.
And so, to the readers here who are the others; who are curious; who are open-minded; who are close-minded and irked by something I said, yet interested in hearing more; who are happy in their cisgender identity and are confused by my saying that it’s fake; whose worlds are shattered open by my prodding at the different kinds of feelings they have towards people, myself included — I say message me, or comment here. I am an open book. I always have been.
I am not here to be your spectacle. I have a voice, and I know how to use it. If you ask me my thoughts, I will share them with you, unless you ask disrespectfully and I don’t have energy at the time.
But the best thing you can do for yourself and for me is to speak your thought to me directly instead of letting it fester like an open wound, or casting me aside because you assume something about me based on my ideology.
Because you have read this, you have a chance to see the way I see the world a little bit. If we actually use social media to disrupt the self-silencing, we can realize that capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and heterosexism are feeble. We can all burst through it in a flood, breaking the dam that the Victorian era white men erected in order to conquer, in order to call us savages while ignoring the gender diversity amongst their own.
If we all spoke out at once, there would be so many more of us. The trans day of visibility is obviously meant to say, “Look at us!” But it also says, “This can be you, too! There are so many ways to live outside of the cave! The shadows on the wall make you see a stick man, a stick woman, a stick dog, and a stick house. There are so many more ways of living than what they tell us.” The same goes with Pride. This month inside, with Pride activities canceled, gives ALL of us an opportunity to look inward and think about how we are still looking at the wall. We can realize that our sexuality is just one aspect of our lives. To the extent that it is policed by dominant society, we are connected to countless others who have experienced harm at the hands of white straight cis colonizers (who have won, so far, in the U.S.). We should not want to join their ranks; assimilation means getting comfortable in the cave. Living our best life, living with Pride, requires shattering their rules and their norms just like our trans and queer ancestors shattered the glass of the Stonewall Inn. Pride can be a protest again, and it has to start from within. We need to be led by the most marginalized among us: black and indigenous queer people caught up in the carceral state. They exist at a crossroads of systemic oppressions the colonizing class has used to protect private property at the expense of others deemed unworthy. They have stories more powerful than any I could write. They need to be our experts.
I don’t have all of the answers, obviously. I’m still reading and still learning. Dialogue can lead me to further thought and discovery. I am not straight or cisgender, so I may not know how much of an affront it is to be told I’m living in a cave. One could argue that I’m not speaking from my lived experience, so I’m out of line. I should stay away from theorizing about the straight worldview because I have no stake in it.
Do we not all live in the straight world? I am always already impacted by the straight world because I navigate it daily. Although a worldview may be different from the world, and our ways of interacting with people in the world are inherently different, I have just as much of a right to look around and name what I see on these walls, and note the interior decor, and clock who’s shining the shadow puppets against the wall, and describe the size and shape of the chains around people’s necks holding us in place. I can critique the straight world because I was acculturated in it, too. And I got out.
You can too.
