Closets: The Sequel

The closeted we shall always have with us.

By the end of the 20th century, the old human chorus had expanded almost beyond recognition. Voices—cris de couer (or d’invention), if you will—from just about all oppressed, exploited, enslaved, colonized, and otherwise previously ignored groups (and grouplets) had joined in. Though still more prone to dissonance than to assonance, the on-going planetary sing-along was sounding—or at least had the potential to sound—better than ever.

As with many recent good things, it was all the 18th century’s fault, that time of turmoil that gave us uppity colonists in New America acting out inspired (if imperfect) ideals, and uppity intellectuals and artists in France and elsewhere, well, acting out. Though few took much notice, all that revolutionary fervor gave hope and impetus to people who were seriously thinking about the two prevalent forms of slavery: racial, and sexual.

As the 19th century wore on, slowly and incompletely, voices of women and of formerly enslaved Africans came into the chorus. Sort of.

The 20th century saw the spreading crumble of the very foundations of what academics like to call white male hegemony. The analysis of the collapse of the rules and brute force that had kept all but the most Euro-American males out of the chorus, those academics unfortunately carried out much less nicely than they could have, and certainly with much less transparency that was needed (did the academics simply want, like doctors, to be able to speak incomprehensibly both to keep the bad news from the patient and to re-enforce their priestly status?).

Still it was all (or mostly) to the good and by century’s end we were hearing new, valuable voices from most ends of the earth.

Even, finally, from, well, us queers. Both male and female. And that, added to the uppity women’s demand for control over their own bodies, was what roused the American Neanderthals for one last terrible, bloody performance. Me have penis, me fuck women, now the rest of you shut the fuck up. The same old same old ancien regime:

Stonewall + abortion = George W. Bush et al.

But as Himself (or his speechwriters) is fond of saying (though he of course has no idea what he’s really saying), how you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm once they’ve tasted life outside the barnyard fence?

By the turn of the millennium, both the feudal rulers of the east (communism by any other name) and the capitalist rulers of the west (fascism by any other name) thought they were doing a pretty good job (more power! more wealth!) riding herd on the whole unruly lot.

So what if queers were more and more being both seen and heard (to great effect). So what if all women were learning and practicing tricks of the oldest trade (to great effect—and it must be noted, it is men who refer to prostitution as the oldest trade when in fact it is their [the men’s] quest for power that is in fact the oldest trade).

The ante bellum men still saw themselves as, and acted as, cocks of the walk, just as the dinosaurs had kept on being dinosaurs right up until that fatal tipping moment when the planetary temperature went up that one final tenth of a degree and further dinosaur life became impossible.

Dinosaurian as ever, the remaining Big Daddies howled and issued proclamations and passed laws and constitutional amendments and overthrew past permissions: WE control your bodies! WE define love!

Though inflicting great suffering, their strutting was, in the larger and longer scheme of things of no importance. No matter what press secretaries and presidential advisers say, hubris still goeth before the fall.

What a glorious, rising chorus we now have, combining the voices of East Asia, of South Asia, of sub-Sahara Africa, of South America, of Australia, of the Arctic, of women, of the gay, the lesbian, the transgendered, and the trans-sexual.

Still imperfect even this wondrous chorus—we have yet to hear properly from the last remaining exploited group, the children; and Muslim voices remain largely muffled by old tribal bondages.

But considering the last 5,000 years of history, the ensemble is shaping up nicely.

E pluribus unum, yes? Though ironically, presently retrograde America resists. Still, there’s no doubt America—including Texas—will come around eventually, as will the Muslims.

So. Does this optimistic view mean that the millennium is truly, finally at hand, and it’s just a matter of living through the difficult next years to get the final Big Chorus of Everybody?

I think, therefore I think not.

Every age smugly believes it’s the cat’s pajamas, enlightenment- and progress-wise. So to with us. To breathe as a human is to live pridefully (remember "All is vanity"?).

Yet vast mysteries of identity and outrageous fortune remain before us, and already (and for a long time, actually) there are among us many delving weirdly and wholly unorthodoxly into those mysteries.

Many of the delvers, as always at the beginning, are wholly misguided and themselves infected the false and dangerous surety of great pride and the desire for big bucks, while some unknown few are taking baby-steps farther up the beach in a generally inland direction than we have heretofore ventured from the tiny toehold we’ve barely established at water’s edge.

Those closeted few—mystics, cybernauts, the drug-crazed and meta-dimensional artists, backyard tinkerers who can’t keep their hands off the latest Radio Shack catalog, tantric wankers, breathless composers trying to figure out what to do with a laptop that contains (or has access to) all possible sounds, wordsmiths with for the first time the words of the whole world at their fingertips—they are very much still with us, mostly unseen, mostly unpaid-attention-to because mostly well-closeted, and mostly meaning trouble for the vested interests, the status quos, and even, yes, my dears, this allegedly final Chorus of Everybody. Trouble. Real creative trouble.

Bigtime.