Here is what I learned from “Game Change”:

Bill and Hillary Clinton argue sometimes. He really wanted her to be president, maybe because he wanted to be co-president. He has a temper. She tried really hard to become president, and even cried once. Some people said they were racist, but they aren’t really so they got super mad.

Barack Obama is really cool. Some people say he’s like Jesus. He is black. Some people say Jesus was black. Actually, that wasn’t in “Game Change,” but I heard it once.

John Edwards is a bad man. His wife is also not very nice, even though people felt bad for her. They once argued at an airport and she took her shirt off.

John McCain is old and crotchety. He swears A LOT. He didn’t really want to be president, but then he really wanted to win. He hired a lady named Sarah Palin to be his Vice President. She didn’t know anything about anything, but she tried to memorize it all in a week or two. It didn’t work.

Barack Obama won, and America is the greatest nation in the world. That last part wasn’t in the book either, but I learned it last year in seventh-grade Social Studies.

When I grow up, you couldn’t pay me to run for president.

The end.

Now we have Eliot Spitzer, among others, assuring us that the next Supreme Court justice is straight. This is completely plausible; it is likewise plausible that, for some reason or other, she is queer but has chosen not to disclose that fact. The kerfluffle raises a number of questions, including why we care, why it seems acceptable to ask about a single, female court nominee’s personal life in a way that we wouldn’t ask about a married, male nominee’s. I’d like to write just a little bit about disclosure and hiding based on my own experience, which I imagine is different from Kagan’s in a thousand ways.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick refers to the closet as “the telling secret.” In her great essay “The Epistemology of the Closet,” she writes,

Even at an individual level, there are remarkably few of even the most openly gay people who are not deliberately in the closet with someone personally or economically or institutionally important to them. Furthermore, the deadly elasticity of heterosexist presumption means that, like Wendy in Peter Pan, people find new walls springing up around them even as they drowse: every encounter with a new classful of students, to say nothing of a new boss, social worker, loan officer, landlord, doctor, erects new closets whose fraught and characteristic laws of optics and physics exact from at least gay people new surveys, new calculations, new draughts and requisitions of secrecy or disclosure. Even an out gay person deals daily with interlocutors about whom she doesn’t know whether they know or not; it is equally difficult to guess for any given interlocutor whether, if they did know, the knowledge would seem very important.

Let us take this as our text for the day.

There’s a widely accepted phrase in queer circles, “coming out to yourself,” that describes quite nicely my first act of coming out. Before I came out to myself, I had had a growing awareness, certainly since puberty but really before then, that I “liked guys” and not girls in, you know, that way. The more I experienced the physical and psychological manifestations of my attraction to other males, the more horrified I became that I might be a member of what my religious, familial, and local culture (I grew up in a metastasized railroad stop/tuberculosis ward/weapons depot in the American West) defined as an alien group — the homosexuals. I remember around the age of 10 or 11 or 12 a dawning understanding of what that word meant, coupled with a nagging sense that it was important especially to me; these realizations soon enough became simple dread, an avoidance of self-knowledge.

It was only in college, after a humiliating attempt at a makeout session with a girl I’d professed a crush on to hide my total lack of interest in girls, that I first said the words to myself: “I’m gay.” The relief from the tremendous burden of self-deception brought by this subvocalized admission took some time to become apparent, but the relief came. The next night, I came out to this poor girl. She understood much less about being gay than I did, and we continued to “date” in a totally chaste, hand-holdy way for another couple of weeks before we admitted how absurd the situation was.

That was my junior year of college. During my senior year, I came out strategically: to my parents, because I didn’t want them hearing it from someone else. To an email list-serve I was on, because I knew they’d be understanding, and most of them lived hundreds of miles away. Then to some close friends, whose caring and understanding responses against the grain of their (our) conservative religious upbringings still make me tear up a bit.

Was it a surprise to anyone? I remember a conversation with one friend a few weeks after I came out to him. He said, “You know, I was completely shocked at first. Then today I was listening to you talk about recipes with [some girls in our student ward (congregation)] and I realized it had been kind of obvious all along, if you knew where to look.”

Like Sedgwick said, the closet is “the telling secret.” More often than not, it’s an agreement not to talk about someone’s sexuality, rather than a complete lack of information about the topic. In the most homophobic milieux, such as Brigham Young University where I first came out, this “telling secret” is aided by the great stigma attached to homosexuality. Calling someone gay is slander — keep things discrete, don’t rock the boat, and no one will want to say such a horrible thing about you, at least not in public. Even in our post-Ellen media culture where “not that there’s anything wrong with that” attaches to any discussion of sexuality, the news media generally do not report that someone in public life is gay unless that person has him or herself placed that fact into the public discourse.

I came out to a few people in college but was very careful to stay closeted to most. At BYU, some friends told me, the administration sometimes expelled students simply for saying they were gay, whether or not they have engaged in “immoral acts” as defined by the Mormon sexual code. After leaving, though, I felt freer to come out. In grad school I ended up teaching a course on gay and lesbian history, culture, and philosophy, and the professor who passed the course on to me told me I should first be sure I wanted to be marked a “professional queer” on my academic résumé. I didn’t see the harm — I was pursuing a career as a philosopher and was quite confident that I could make my way in the academy as an out homosexual just as well as if I were a semi-closeted one. I’ve spent years now in odd professional/administrative jobs in the big cities of the Northeast and never felt discriminated against.

And my next move, going to law school, has maybe already been aided by my being out. I wove the issue of my sexual orientation into my personal statement, and I suspect it may be one of many criteria law schools look at when trying to construct a diverse class. Next year I’ll be attending the law school of which Elena Kagan was recently the dean, and by all accounts it’s a great place to be out. The types of jobs I’ll be pursuing on graduation are likewise about as free from sexual-orientation-related discrimination as you can find.

So in my professional life, being out has been a pretty costless decision. As Sedgwick says, though, it’s rare for someone to be completely out. I’m often taken for straight when I meet new people. In part this is due to what Sedgwick calls “heterosexist presumption,” the assumption that everyone is straight until proven otherwise; in part it’s because I have mannerisms, speech patterns, and (relative lack of) fashion sense that code as more-or-less straight. So I’m often faced with the choice of whether or not to come out to the new person. Will they be someone I see again? Might we become friends? Will it be uncomfortable to come out to them? Should I leave it be for now and hope they just find out from a mutual acquaintance?

There are also people who’ve been in my life for a long time I’m not out to. My one remaining grandparent: it’s not a conversation I feel like having with her. Some of my relatives: it’s more of a “telling secret,” something some of them are fine with and others are wary of, and I don’t really see them except at big gatherings where I don’t want to make a scene.

There’s also the question, we might call it the question of abstraction. When I’m single, coming out might strike some people as TMI: “Why do you want to tell me about who you like to sleep with when it makes no difference as to whether you’ll be bringing a plus one to my party?” In most ways, it’s much easier to come out when I’m dating someone: “Can I bring my boyfriend along? I’m sure he’d love to meet you.” On the other hand, that sometimes feels like relying on another person (the boyfriend) as a crutch or an excuse for doing what I ought to be doing anyway.

Coming out happens again and again. It gets easier, I find, and it’s almost always worth it. In fact, I have to admit I don’t really do it for political reasons, although I support the logic that says it’s a political act. I do it because I find living in the closet stressful and find talking openly about my life liberating. If I had been born just a few years or decades earlier, I suspect I’d be more comfortable with the old order, the days of the open secret and the need for propriety above all else, the pleasures as well as the strictures of the closet. As it is, though, I’ve had to read history books to understand how all that used to work.

I realize that I conduct my self-disclosure based on my own needs and feelings about safety and openness. I get judgmental about gay celebrities who won’t come out — these are people, after all, who are making millions by projecting a certain image that includes some degree of straightness, and who have calculated that a reduction in straightness would also lead to a reduction in profits that’s not worth the help they could be to the gay kid growing up in a culture that might be a bit more gay friendly if the celebrity came out.

But Kagan isn’t a celebrity. And of course we have no idea, and may never know, whether she’s in the closet about being gay. To the extent Kagan’s sexuality is something to be whispered about, however — and this is a matter of her lack of disclosure, partly, but much more a matter of how she has not followed the heteronormative feminine script, either because she’s a lesbian or because she’s a tremendously smart and ambitious straight woman who simply hasn’t married and had children — there is some kind of closet in place that can protect as well as harm.

I took these photos in downtown Bogota, where artist Rafael Gomezbarros covered the Colombian Congress building with this art installation of giant ants. Apparently this has been an ongoing, Christoesque project in which the ants have appeared on different public buildings throughout Colombia at different times; according to Gomezbarros, the ants “represent immigration, globalization and displacement; I’m trying to force a reflection on what we experience and see on a daily basis, and also to raise awareness about our monuments.”

What do you think?

However, I don’t have the time nor, it turns out, the inclination to do that analysis.  It’s not that I don’t care about policy, I do, and I’m generally interested in the details.  But, I feel driven by two factors: my ideological home, which is squarely on the left, and electoral tactics.  And in reality, the country is in an economic mess that any party will have problems turning around.

It comes down to this: I’m mad with Labour for allying with Bush in the Iraq war and for generally being crap and disappointing.  I’m excited that the Lib-Dems have a real chance as a third party to influence the election and potentially form a coalition government, which would completely shake up the British political system.  In fact, both my parents, life-long Conservative voters, are planning to vote Lib-Dem – which is a sign of Nick Clegg’s momentum and everyone’s disgust with both parties.  It should be noted, that if my mother were in this country, she’d likely be a tea partier.  And my constituency, Hornsey & Wood Green, went Lib-Dem in 2005, so is likely to stay that way.  But, I hate the idea of voting Lib-Dem and then watching them form a coalition government with the Tories.  I hate the Tories.  No matter how moderate they become, the ghost of Margaret Thatcher will forever loom over them.  They will always be the party of the right.

Although their new logo makes them look like a branch of the Sierra Club.

I poked around to see if I could find any policy comparisons and stumbled on this hilarious and brilliant tool for determining how you should vote on the Daily Telegraph site developed by VoteMatch.

I answered the policy questions and discovered I am aligned 57% with the Lib-Dem policies, 47% with the Green Party and 46% with the Labour Party.

When I went through the answers to compare different parties it was interesting to see how close the Labour and Lib-Dem parties are, which accounts for Gordon Brown repeatedly saying in the first televised debate “I agree with Nick.”  Compared to U.S. electoral policies, UK voters are choosing between political cousins – there is much consensus at the basis of the system in spite of the rhetoric.  It’s more like choosing a primary candidate than the actual election.

In conclusion, my constituency will probably stay Lib-Dem regardless of my vote.  Do I vote with old party loyalties and my political commitment to the Left or be part of a new force in British politics that rejects both major parties…and then forms a coalition government with one of them, but we won’t know which one until the election is done?  Hmm, maybe I should spend this weekend watching the debates and see who I LIKE best.