Closets

I don’t clean my closet. I mean, I notoriously don’t clean anything very often (to my partner’s consistent frustration), but the layers of dust that have accumulated in the nooks and crannies of my closet outrival those in the other spaces of my home by years. As active as my relationship with my closet is (what with my constantly changing outfits and the never-ending consequences of my online shopping habit), I don’t take proper care of the space. Until this morning, it’s never been cleaned, and I’ve always vehemently resisted my partner’s pleas to consider which clothes—of the piles that sit on its shelves and hang on its racks—I could donate.

In preparation for an ambitious and intimidating move to Los Angeles, though, I opened the doors to this hallowed ground today in a desperate effort to clean—and ultimately evacuate—my closet. I dedicated myself to purging the space once and for all by sorting all the clothes inside it into three separate piles: one to take with me on my move, one filled with clothes for donation, and one I would return to later to more thoughtfully sort into one of the two aforementioned piles.

Each article of clothing I encountered in this effort pulled me out of the present and thrust me into the past: a white cloth shirt drowned in rainbow colored squiggles recalled a high school friendship that hadn’t touched my mind for six years; a pair of tan cargo pants with a tiger pattern embroidered on the legs compelled me to reminisce over my first romantic fling with a British boy I met while studying Shakespeare in London; a puke-green high school tennis jersey reminded me of my once desperate relationship to a masculinity I forsook long ago. All these clothes I forgot about, all these clothes I buried in my closet, provoked within my mind memories of a life—a person—I was no longer entirely familiar with. Sifting through these forgotten clothes was like viewing past versions of myself from across the opposite end of an insurmountable chasm. I couldn’t empathize with or understand the Sebastien that lived in these memories; I could never return to being him. Instead, all I could do was reach out to these past selves and grieve the indelible changes in time, space, and experience that kept us separate.

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Metaphorically speaking, the closet is a very popular space. We can “come out” of the closet, we can be “stuck” in the closet, we can even have “skeletons” in our closet.  In all these metaphorical circumstances, the closet represents a space in which parts of ourselves—our non normative sexualities, gender identities, or other “skeletons”—exist, undetected by those in our lives. While the closet can carry negative connotations in our day and age, sometimes associated with one’s inability to cope with the shame of being queer, I find that such a view of the closet is skewed and reductive. Why, in coming out of the closet, do we feel such pressure to swing the door shut behind us? Can we find anything useful in keeping our lives in/outside the closet connected? And, most importantly, can we find something beautiful in the closet?

Thanks to the work of queer scholars (namely, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet), we know that the closet is an intensely problematic ideological structure for queers, a consequence of restrictive Western ideologies pertaining to sexuality and gender. Such knowledge does not stop me, however, from considering the potential value in thinking about closets as repositories for the parts of ourselves we refuse to announce to the world.

My own experiences with the closet—particularly, as they relate to my bond with my grandmother—may shed some light on these questions. For a long time, I thought my relationship with my grandmother, who passed away in April 2020, was defined by words left unspoken. Despite coming out when I was fifteen and priding myself on being an open and outspoken queer man thereafter, I never spoke with my grandmother about sexuality. Our relationship was, in comparison to the hyper visibility my coming out afforded me at the Catholic high school I attended, refreshingly detached from my identity as a gay man. My bond with my grandmother was, essentially, a respite from this label that entrapped my existence—that I, to some extent, chose to entrap my existence. 

Perceiving my lack of coming out to my grandmother as a failure, I struggled with an intense psychological turmoil after my grandmother’s passing. I thought that, by not telling her about how and who I love, I had withdrawn a vitally important part of myself from her.

Through conversations with someone who, like myself, chose not to discuss his sexuality with his older Chinese relatives, I was able to work with the grief of losing my grandmother and through my worries of having marred our relationship. This conversation helped me to recognize how living in the Western world influenced my thinking that there was only one right way to embody sexual difference: to announce it (proudly) and force myself onto the uncomfortable platform of hyper visibility. Such a realization assuaged my worries of having failed my grandmother or our relationship; in this light, I understood our relationship as a life-affirming resource rather than wasted potential.

My relationship with my grandmother reminds me that, despite the pain and shame that can often hide inside its walls, we can sometimes find a form of beauty and intimacy inside the closet that is shielded from the demands of spectacularity issued by modern identity politics. Respecting the closet, and keeping our lives connected to it, helps us to appreciate the complexity (and, I would argue, ineffability) of our queer lives, our queer ways of knowing and being.

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The contents of the closet in my San Diego apartment have, for the most part, accompanied me on my journey to Los Angeles. Despite the pain some of the clothes evoke, I can’t bear to abandon the memories they represent. The white cloth tee covered in rainbow squiggles I brought with me reminds me how my friendships—both current and past—sustain me; the tan cargo pants with black tigers traversing its legs fill me with a sense of adventure I sometimes lose; and the murky-green high school tennis jersey compels me to consistently reflect on my strained relationship with masculinity and gender. These clothes, despite their holes and imperfections, are monumental pillars that remind me who I am and where I’ve come from.

The closet in my San Diego apartment is now empty, a carcass devoid of any signs of my former residence. The mounds of dust on its shelves are gone, and its racks will soon bear the weight of a new person’s life. Nevertheless, the concept of the closet continues to occupy an invaluable place in my life; I refuse to abandon it or forget its importance. My relationship with the closet provides me with a way of understanding and being in the world that mainstream identity politics cannot ever afford me. My closet, in spite—or maybe because— of the pain and shame that lives in its walls, is an invaluable treasure, a space of unspeakable beauty and, in my mind, not-yet-recognized potential.