No One Is Exempt from the Closet
In 1981, a young actor named Tom Cruise allegedly appeared in a photo layout for Parlée, a gay magazine. He was 18 or 19, his first film had just been released, and the accompanying text was a standard profile of a promising newcomer. Forty-five years later, the photographs are circulating again, presented as a revelation.
The photos are not explicit. What keeps them in circulation is the closet, and the closet affects far more people than those who are hiding in it.
The Closet as a Cultural Structure
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick made this point in Epistemology of the Closet (1990). She argued that the division between homosexual and heterosexual is not a minority concern. It is a structure that shapes how everyone in modern Western culture thinks, speaks, and behaves.
Once being "outed" is possible, everyone becomes subject to suspicion. Everyone has to manage how they are read: straight, gay, or bisexual.
Who Maintains the Closet
The closet does not sustain itself. It depends on the people who enforce it: those who mock, police, and punish any sign of difference among men. Much of that enforcement comes from straight men.
What many of these men fail to recognize is that the system they support turns back on them. A structure built on suspicion does not limit its suspicion to gay men. It applies to every man.
What the Cruise Photos Show
Whatever his sexuality, Cruise has spent decades unable to leave a single 1981 photo shoot behind. In a culture organized around the closet, any association with gay men becomes a question that demands an answer.
Straight men live under the same scrutiny in everyday ways:
• avoiding physical affection with male friends
• monitoring their clothing, gestures, and interests
• treating closeness between men as something that requires a joke or a disclaimer
Sedgwick called this "homosexual panic." It restricts the lives of men who have nothing to hide as much as the lives of men who do.
Everyone Is Suspect
Straight men are not immune to the closet, and they are not exempt from it. Every man who promotes it places himself under the same suspicion he directs at others.
Before continuing to support the closet, straight men should consider what it costs them. The closet does heavy damage to everyone it touches, including the people who keep it in place.