ABSTRACT
My aim in this book has been to ruminate on the possibility that the closet is not just a metaphor for the concealment, erasure, or ignorance of gays’ sexualities. Though it works in several metaphoric ways, there are other ways to approach this sign theoretically. It can have spatiality, an existence in space that has location and situation, which signifies placement, interaction, movement and accessibility. That spatiality matters to its very nature (that nature being a power/knowledge of homophobia, heterosexism and/or heteronormativity). By its spatiality the closet is a material strategy and tactic: one that conceals, erases and makes gay people invisible and unknown. Because it is such a common, central term in gay and lesbian life, it implies a ubiquity and multidimensionality that suggest an exploration across a wide variety of spatial scales and locations. Theoretical work on the closet’s epistemology concurs, suggesting its complexity: a ‘knowing by not knowing’, a ‘deadly elasticity’. Here I took Sedgwick’s claim that the closet’s presence has had both deep and widespread cultural effects to heart and argued that conceptualising the closet geographically meant it spoke to a wide array of social thought: from performativity to urban theory, to governmentality and to psychoanalytic theory. It simultaneously presented itself at several spatial scales from the body, to the city, to the nation, and finally to the globe.
