Confessionals and Coming Out: Being Queer in Neoliberal Times
By Harshita Iyer
In
1977, on the 27th of October, the Montreal Gazette published an article
about Eric Hill, a man who was arrested in an armed raid of a popular gay bar
in Montreal. The article contextualizes Hill’s experiences within an emerging
trend among the city’s queer population that “Hill seems to typify” in the
publicly declaration of his homosexual identity in protest of the State’s
repeated deployment of violence against queer populations.[i] The
article captures the deeply radical and self-sacrificial spirit of “coming out”
and the deep political significance it held at the time. Now let’s fast forward
forty years— it’s 2018 and gay bar raids seem wholly incompatible with
Montreal’s queer-positive urban landscape, with its numerous queer events,
bars, businesses, and neighbourhoods. Not to mention, the city’s historical
patronage of the arts has facilitated the integration of queerness into
Montreal’s mainstream with significant success. This seems largely
generalizable to most Western urban cities; of course, some outliers exist, but
as a whole, liberal democracy condemns homophobia as an ignorant, outdated, and
unenlightened view and celebrates gay rights as one of its proudest
achievements. Despite such supposed markers of social progress, “coming out”
continues to remain fundamental to the conception of gay and lesbian identity
in the public consciousness. However, the narrative in its current iteration
has changed drastically since Eric Hill’s time; shifting from an act of
political resistance to external struggle, today, coming out is a matter of
internal self-acceptance. The transformation could very well be attributed to
the success of liberal human rights discourse in relegating queer oppression to
the past— but if that were the case, surely it wouldn’t be necessary for queers
today to come out at all! Now, we understand coming out as a queer rite of
passage, it’s almost as though the process of coming out creates the queer in
the first place. Under the celebratory and feel-good stories of gay and lesbian
youths coming to accept themselves is something more sinister at work, that
only comes to light when we contextualize the narrative in the historical
context Hill’s story provides. The problem of queer identity is no longer
queerness itself, but rather a lack of transparency, truth, and
self-acceptance— seemingly positive values that create the figure of the well-adjusted
individual essential to neoliberalism. The transformation of the coming out
narrative from its original act of political resistance reflects the
transformation of the queer person to a queer subject within neoliberal
structures. In the process, the State and the heteronormative mainstream
absolve themselves of their role in marginalizing queer populations, as
external barriers are reduced to internal struggle that the individual must
overcome. In contrast to Hill’s political objectives, coming out today is based
in a model of confession that effectively preserves queerness as sin.
Let’s
examine the circumstances that informed Hill’s coming out to understand why it
was so deeply radical at the time. Queer life existed at the periphery, pushed
out of the public and forced to operate entirely in fugitive spaces outside the
mainstream. However, queerness was such a threat to the social order that queer
spaces were marked by constant and extreme violence. Such was Hill’s
experience, as fifty officers bearing machine guns descended on the bar, arresting 136 patrons and levelling 8 charges,
simply for daring to be gay in public. Many sustained injuries, stating in
subsequent interviews that the officers used unduly aggressive force. Further,
at the station, the detained were crammed 20 to a cell, and stated that the
conditions were so violent that they could hardly breathe.[ii] The
political significance of Hill’s actions and similar come out narratives in the
‘70s is apparent in the gratuitous nature of the State-sanctioned violence
deployed against queer populations. Eric Hill effectively refused to be erased
and subsumed by the heteronormative status quo. For Hill, publicly asserting
his gay identity was not a denial, but a rather, a radical disavowal of both
the arrests and the underlying violence that informed them. Hill’s actions were
enacted at the individual level, but his coming out was a form of collective
activism that sought to advocate against the criminalization of homosexuality,
heroically taking on the selfless labour of representing the queer community as
a whole at great personal cost. Now, the follow-up question is obvious—why is
this no longer the case?
It
is largely believed in today’s neoliberal democracy that queerness
simply doesn’t pose the same problem it did in the past. After all, gays and
lesbians are well-adjusted contributing members of mainstream society who enjoy
significant material success. At a cursory level, this may seem like a result
of human rights advances since Hill’s arrest, but the reality is much darker;
the selective integration of certain privileged gays and lesbians was directly
informed by the expansion of neoliberalism. Ronald Ragan sparked the mass
liberalization of fiscal markets, globalization, and deregulation, establishing
a political and economic structure that had mass ripple effects across the
globe. From the renewed emphasis on private ownership emerged a culture of
individuality to which values of self-governance, self-sustenance, and
well-adjustedness were imperative. It is precisely these neoliberal values that
coming out narratives in their current iteration uphold, marking a divergence
from the radical objectives of collective social change of Hill’s era; rather
to become a depoliticized individual practice of “self-realization.”[iii]
Today’s tolerance for a range of sexual activity is borne not from a respect
for difference, but the valorization of private space; yet queers are compelled
to publicly declare gay or lesbian identity in order to access the freedom to
be queer and live a private queer life. The seemingly celebratory integration
of gays and lesbians into the mainstream only disguises rather than dismantles
society’s inherently anti-queer structures, as the pressure to come out only
upholds “the continued presence of compulsory heterosexuality.”[iv]
Current narratives prioritize fixed categorizations of sexuality, as gays and
lesbians are more accepted than their non-binary and queer-identifying
counterparts.[v]
Additionally, they predominantly cater to white liberalism by failing to
account for the unique cultural challenges faced by racialized queers.[vi] In
coming out, Hill sought to call attention to the violent realities of queer
life; today the narrative erases the structural foundation of anti-queer
violence as “self-acceptance” suggests that the problems of queerness are
internal to the queer subject, effectively forcing queers (namely queer youth)
to not only accept themselves, but to simply accept themselves as lesser than.
This seemingly cynical view examines queer inclusionary politics through an
urgently needed critical lens; the positive advances of queer integration may
rescue historically “othered" communities from their periphery positions
into the folds of State recognition and protection. However, in doing so, the
other is transformed into the governable subject whose integration is too often
predicated on a number of insidious conditions that uphold their lower social status.[vii] And it
is this precisely that Eric Hill sought to challenge in the valiant declaration
of his queer identity; by no means did he intend to appeal to the State, but
rather to expose, challenge, and protest its role in producing and exacerbating
anti-queer violence.
In
many ways, coming out today mimics a confessional, where the individual carries
a heavy and bothersome lie, and a subsequent declaration of the truth absolves
them of the burden. While this may seem to offer a cathartic release to the
subject in question, confessions are fundamentally informed by legacies of
surveillance and control.[viii] While
the confession may seem to be an act produced by and to benefit the self, in
reality, confessions occur solely in the context of power structures. Foucault
writes:
One
does not confess without the presence or virtual presence of a partner who is simply the
interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes, and
appreciates it, who intervenes in order to
judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile: a ritual in which the
truth is corroborated by the obstacles and resistances it has had to surmount
in order
to be formulated; and finally, a ritual in which the expression alone promises salvation.”[ix]
Here, Foucault intelligently
defines confession as a relational act between a speaking subject and a power
structure; the former surrenders to the latter and inadvertently strengthens
the imbalance of power between the two. Coming out, as conceived of and enacted
by Eric Hill and queers of his time was a means to disempower the State by empowering
masses of queer populations instead. This is precisely how social hierarchies
simultaneously disguise and strengthen themselves; the inclusion of gay and
lesbian subjects is contingent on the transformation of former tools of
resistance. As such, the transformation of coming out narratives from protest
to confession effectively turns State resistance into State power, as the
emancipatory potential ascribed to coming out continues to uphold queerness as
a self-destructive and damaging burden.
Comparing
Eric Hill’s story to the current narrative of coming out exposes the
sinister reality of queerness in the contemporary period. The symbolic meaning
currently attached to coming out forces queer subjects to simply accept
themselves as marginal subjects. As a society, we remain deeply attached to
coming out stories that subsequently make up the focus of nearly all of
mainstream portrayals of gays and lesbians in the media. The feel-good moments
of self-acceptance afford an immediate surge of emotional satisfaction as they
allow liberal democracy to take credit for achieving progress while absolving
itself of their role in the historical and ongoing realities of anti-queer
violence. This is why stories such as Hill’s continue to hold relevance to
queer politics today; juxtaposing his experience with current identity politics
offers a much needed critical perspective that emerges not from homophobic
conservatism but radical anti-neoliberalism. The article reminds us today of
the anti-State, resistance-based, and political objectives of coming out in its
original form that expose the stealthy mechanisms of inclusionary advances that
still hold queerness subordinate. Hill’s experiences illuminate the insidious
reality of power that cunningly co-opts historical modes of resistance to
strengthen its underlying structures. As such, Eric Hill reminds us that the
objectives of coming out have departed from their political objectives to only
keep heteronormativity and social hierarchy alive by transforming gays and lesbians
into well-adjusted, self-accepting neoliberal subjects.
[iii] Stephanie D. Clare. "“Finally, She’s Accepted
Herself!”." (Social Text 35, no. 2 131 2017), 17.
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