ABSTRACT
If the closet represents the place where gay and lesbian desire remains hidden, what sort of space is it? In this chapter, I am specifically interested in how the closet spatializes sexual desire for lesbians and gay men. The sign ‘closet’, I want to argue, is precisely such an articulation between sexuality, space and desire. Travel writing about the closet, then, provides a particularly appropriate venue for understanding their relations textually. I want to think through some of these relations by considering the travel writing of American gay author, Neil Miller. In his two books, In Search of Gay America (1989) and Out in the World (1992), Miller explores (quite literally) the geographies of the closet at national and global scales. More specifically, I will focus on his travels into two of the most closeted places on his tours: Selma, Alabama and Hong Kong. Though these are clearly very different spatializations of the closet, their differences highlight the range of ways the closet can work on desire. I will draw on two often competing foci on desire in psychoanalytic/literary
theory-Lacan’s and the schizoanalysis of Deleuze and Guattari-to analyse the workings of the metaphor. Through Miller’s travel writing I will show how psychoanalytic work on desire, when brought into contact with gay writing about space and desire, may launch us off into different (some might say opposing) directions vis-à-vis what is important about desire. That dissonance, however, worries me because it obscures the geographical point Miller makes so cogently: that where we desire enables and constrains how we desire.
