Queer Families in Hungary by Rita Béres-Deák

Author:Rita Béres-Deák
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030163198
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Problematizing the Outness–Closet Dichotomy

A:

Sexual orientation is gay, without question. Who knows – officially nobody. […]

V:

Eer, what was the question?

BDR:

The first question is, what’s your sexual orientation.

V:

Gay. And the answer for the second question is also very simple, because everyone knows. (Arnold and Vencel, interview)

Arnold and Vencel both come from rural families in the southeast of Hungary but met in Budapest where they both moved after finishing university. Apparently they represent the two sides of the closet/outness binary, but going deeper into their stories one discovers that the situation is more complicated. Arnold says ‘officially’ nobody knows he is gay but in fact all those who have a say in family matters suspect it, partly because they follow him on Facebook, where he frequently comments on gay-themed posts. Though he prefers not to make things obvious right now (his reasons will be detailed in the next section), he also says he would have no problem if ‘the thing came to light by itself’ in his family. Vencel, on the other hand, only had one ‘classic’ coming out in his family, to his sister. His parents found out about his sexual orientation from a letter that his first boyfriend’s mother wrote to them, with the hope of making them put an end to the relationship. ‘[To] the rest of the family nobody told this, they just all knew,’ and they ‘never speak about gayness, but – but this is somehow evident’ (Vencel, interview). As we will see in Chapter 5, Vencel does not think his rural working-class family can fully imagine or understand his gay lifestyle; they might be an example to the situation when coming out does not deliver any meaningful information (Butler 1991). In this sense, there is not much difference between Arnold’s kin and Vencel’s more distant relatives; the two men’s self-perception as out or closeted depends on their subjective interpretation of these terms, and their expectations toward themselves.3 Their cases also problematize the outness–closet binary.

It seems that Arnold’s and most of Vencel’s kin are in the know without having been told explicitly; they exemplify Sedgwick’s (1990) notion of the ‘open secret.’ Sedgwick claims that the open secret (which she also calls ‘the glass closet’) encompasses all but the most openly acknowledged forms of gay identity (Sedgwick 1990). Apart from ignoring cases when a person’s sexual orientation is really not known by anyone else (Brown 2000), this statement is problematic because it does not define what counts as ‘open acknowledgement.’ As the definition of coming out both in theories and activist discourses depends on the performative speech act of claiming a gay/lesbian/etc. identity (Sedgwick 1990), from this perspective nonverbal hints (like Arnold’s) or being discovered or outed (like Vencel) do not count (Weston 1991). In our increasingly digitalized world, however, the Internet offers countless possibilities for expressing one’s sexual orientation. Arnold is not the only person in my sample who relies on this resource: Iván, whose commitment ceremony we witnessed in the opening vignette of this book, uses a photo of himself kissing his boyfriend as his Facebook profile picture (Anikó, interview).

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