Queer Theory and the Jewish Question by Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, Ann Pellegrini

knowledge per se, is a same-sex desire. 7 This possibility, how- ever, was repressed with increasing energy, and hence increasing visibility, as the nineteenth-century culture of the individual proceeded to elaborate a ver- sion of knowledge/sexuality increasingly structured by its pointed cognitive refusal of sexuality between women, between men. The gradually reifying ef- fect of this refusal 8 meant that by the end of the nineteenth century, when it had become fully current—as obvious to Queen Victoria as to Freud—that knowledge meant sexual knowledge, and secrets sexual secrets, there had in fact developed one particular sexuality that was distinctively constituted as se- crecy: the perfect object for the by now insatiably exacerbated epistemologi- cal/sexual anxiety of the turn-of-the-century subject. Again, it was a long chain of originally scriptural identifications of a sexuality with a particular cognitive positioning (in this case, St. Paul’s routinely reproduced and re- worked denomination of sodomy as the crime whose name is not to be ut- tered, hence whose accessibility to knowledge is uniquely preterited) that cul- minated in Lord Alfred Douglas’s epochal public utterance, in 1894, “ I am the Love that dare not speak its name.” 9 In such texts as Billy Budd and Do-
    rian Gray and through their influence, the subject—the thematics—of knowledge and ignorance themselves, of innocence and initiation, of secrecy and disclosure, became not contingently but integrally infused with one par- ticular object of cognition: no longer sexuality as a whole but even more specifically, now, the homosexual topic. And the condensation of the world of possibilities surrounding same-sex sexuality—including, shall we say, both gay desires and the most rabid phobias against them—the condensation of this plurality to the homosexual topic that now formed the accusative case of modern processes of personal knowing, was not the least infliction of the turn-of-the-century crisis of sexual definition.
    To explore the differences it makes when secrecy itself becomes manifest as this secret, let me begin by twining together in a short anachronistic braid a variety of exemplary narratives—literary, biographical, imaginary—that begin with the moment on July 1, 1986, when the decision in Bowers v. Hardwick was announced, a moment which, sandwiched between a weekend of Gay Pride parades nationwide, the announcement of a vengeful new AIDS policy by the Justice Department, and an upcoming media-riveting long weekend of hilarity or hysteria focused on the national fetishization in a huge hollow blind spike-headed female body of the abstraction Liberty, and occur- ring in an ambient medium for gay men and their families and friends of wave on wave of renewed loss, mourning, and refreshed personal fear, left many people feeling as if at any rate one’s own particular car had finally let go for- ever of the tracks of the roller coaster.
    In many discussions I heard or participated in immediately after the Supreme Court ruling in Bowers v. Hardwick , antihomophobic or gay women and men speculated—more or less empathetically or venomously—about the sexuality of the people most involved with the decision. The question kept coming up, in different tones, of what it could have felt like to be a closeted gay court assistant, or clerk, or justice, who might have had some degree, even a very high one, of instrumentality in conceiving or formulating or “refining” or logistically facilitating this ruling, these ignominious majority opinions, the assaultive sentences in which they were framed.
    That train of painful imaginings was fraught with the epistemological dis- tinctiveness of gay identity and gay situation in our culture. Vibrantly reso- nant as the image of the closet is for many modern oppressions, it is indica- tive for homophobia in a way it cannot be for other oppressions. Racism, for instance, is based on a stigma