breathedout | The closet as open secret in rural early America (Reply)

Although it is often assumed that the “closet” is an opaque space, meaning that people who are in the closet keep others in total ignorance about their sexuality, often the closet is really an open secret. The ignorance that defines the closet is as likely to be a carefully constructed edifice as it is to be a total absence of knowledge. The closet depends on people strategically choosing to remain ignorant of inconvenient facts. In this light, Charity [Bryant] and Sylvia [Drake]’s acceptance within their [early 19th-century Vermont] town should be understood as the result of their success in persuading others to choose ignorance by not asking questions about their sexuality. No matter what the answer, the very act of being questioned would have damaged the women’s respectability.

The open closet is an especially critical strategy in small towns, where every person serves a role, and which would cease to function if all moral transgressors were ostracized. Small communities can maintain the fiction of ignorance in order to preserve social arrangements that work for the general benefit. Queer history has often focused on the modern city as the most potent site of gay liberation, since its anonymity and living arrangements for single people permitted same-sex-desiring men and women to form innovative communities. More recognition needs to be given to the distinctive opportunities that rural towns allowed for the expression of same-sex sexuality. For early American women in particular, the rural landscape rather than the city served as a critical milieu for establishing same-sex unions. Women of Charity and Sylvia’s [post-Revolutionary] generation spoke far more often of their desire to retire together to a little cottage in the countryside, than of their urge to move together to the city.

—Rachel Hope Cleves, Charity & Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America

I would add that Cleves goes on to detail the ways in which becoming essential to the life of a small town also involved/involves a lot of sacrifice: basically Charity and Sylvia devoted their entire lives to pious public-spiritedness in exchange for a communal respect that never provided security equal to that of the most tenuous legal marriage. Nevertheless, I think these are interesting points.

And the construct of the open closet is a useful one even in more urban contexts—you get it, for example, when more Bohemian subsets of society within which people could be totally uncloseted (e.g. a Bloomsbury or a Silver Screen Hollywood) intersected with more mainstream culture where such things might be known or suspected but were not, by mutual consent, openly acknowledged.