The lack of shame usually works for my college students, in that they dare to say and do all kinds of productive things in my classes. It can also, of course, work against them, like when they blithely ask me to define the central terms of the course two days before the end of the semester. But mostly it’s an enabling lack of shame that I find inspiring. If they’re so willing to trust that their honesty and efforts will be rewarded, why am I not able to do the same?

I would say that cynicism about other people’s motives comes with age and experiences of failure, but my childhood was full of cruelty and embarrassment. If I learned anything from being a child, it was that I was too ugly and too weird to be loved, and that my motivations would always be misread. I found there was so much I didn’t understand and couldn’t do, no matter how much effort I put into it.

And then there was that magical age when no failure was enough to shame me. I got C’s in courses I worked hard in. I was rejected and betrayed by people I loved. But it didn’t get to me–didn’t change my basic assumption that I was fine.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve lost this usefully arrogant delusion. It worries me that people think ill of me, or are irritated by my personality. I soften myself, quiet myself, try not to make such a fool of myself. I stop myself from saying what I want to say, even to people I love.

My fantasy when I was young was that I would hit my peak around 45. At 45, I’d know myself, and be smart and kind and honest all the time. I’d wear my hair gray and put on comfortable shoes and be beautiful, with the peace that comes from having negotiated with all my limitations.

At 30, I find I have a long way to go. 30 is the new 12. Did I say something stupid? Does he think I’m ugly? Why doesn’t she want to be my friend? Maybe I should buy some new clothes. Maybe I should apologize. Maybe I should shut up.

It’s awkward to realize, as an adult, when I’ve never been more intelligent, mature, or able than I am now, that I lack the basic resources to try to do things that I had as a dumb college student. I like looking forward to that person I want to be at 45, but more often I look back fondly on that stupid, reckless, joyful girl I was at 19.

It feels illicit, but is totally on the level. I am going to check out some furniture from Craigslist.

A gorgeous cherry mission-style chair and sofa, not cheap but easily worth twice as much, lured me into this moment, walking into a stranger’s home here at the end of a suburban cul-de-sac, where I could easily be kidnapped and no one would be the wiser.

She answers the door while on her cell phone. Not a good sign. “I’M ON HOLD,” she stage-whispers. “GODDAMNED AT&T. FORTY MINUTES! SORRY. PLEASE COME IN.” She shows me into the living room, invites me to sit down (oh beautiful sofa, couch of my dreams! you will soon be mine…), and disappears. Weird.

After a few moments, a friendly-looking man wanders in. Weirder. He sits down and we start chatting. “They lost her entire voicemail archive. She needs it for work.” Turns out she is a state representative (mine, in fact—I should have known that!) in the midst of a reelection push, and the voicemail thing is a near-crisis.

“Um, she should be back in a minute.”

Wait. What’s an elected official doing selling her shit on Craigslist?

Over the next twenty minutes I learn a great deal. The lady and the man are getting married this summer. The invitations are exquisite. They are moving into her bungalow, even though it’s smaller, because it’s in her district. His furniture (and house, where we are currently hanging out—because that’s really all it is at this point) has to go—now. He has two children, little girls, who are charming and lovable—one who is totally un-self-conscious in that seven year-old sort of way, the other a couple of years older, skinny, teetering on the edge of puberty, but not there yet. Still a kid. She harbors ambitions to be a competitive hot-dog eater, which she discusses in all seriousness. Their dad clearly adores them. Cute family.

I look up at the bookshelves. Really good stuff—someone follows contemporary fiction pretty closely. I want to ask the man about the collection, but don’t, not wanting to seem nosy. The room has cool art. Turns out we both love biking. And we’ve already established a mutual love of good furniture. These are people I would like to know socially, I realize. They are smart and funny. They have good taste and better politics. For a second there I start to forget that I am a stranger in their home, there for the sole purpose of making a transaction.

State Rep has still not returned. “This is starting to feel rude,” the fiancé says. “Would you like glass of wine or something?”

Well, sure. Exactly the thing you share with your not-friend.

He leaves and comes back with three glasses and a really excellent bottle. Wow. I am developing a crush on this family.

A few moments later State Rep is finally back, clearly the orchestrator of this Craigslist thing, and we can begin. Now that she is smiling, relaxing with a glass of wine, I see that she is uncommonly young and lovely to be a government official⎯think Elizabeth Moss (Peggy on Mad Men). She exudes warmth and intelligence. We talk some more. At this point I have been in their immaculate home for over half an hour. In my mind, we are best friends. I am Auntie Rachel to the kids. Invited for Thanksgiving. Bringing pie.

“Thanks for responding to my email. This is beautiful furniture. It’s really comfortable, and the craftsmanship is amazing.” Laying it on a little thick, but nerves turn me into a flirt.

State Rep stands up, wine glass in hand, tilts her head to one side and gazes at the furniture as if for the first time, then over to me.

“You know, you’re right…I don’t think we are going to sell it after all. Sorry for your trouble.”

Before I know it, I’m back on the sidewalk.

What just happened?

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.

We’re all actual readers, of course, and sometimes the only “ideal reader” we can imagine for a text is the author. Often the idea we have of the “ideal reader” is not accurate; maybe the text allows for more probing and questioning than we can imagine. Sometimes it’s frustrating to imagine an ideal reader because the ideal reader would have to be dumb or bigoted. But very occasionally you pick up a book and you say, “This is for me. I get this.” Even if you’re not the ideal reader, the illusion that you are can feel marvelous.

Before I had this idea in my head about ideal readers, I remember thinking that there was a particular quality I looked for in friends. Around someone who seemed to be my “ideal reader,” I could be funnier, more relaxed and careless. I didn’t have to watch every word coming out of my mouth, or worry about whether I’d offend them. As my ideal reader, a friend like this would appreciate my best qualities and not worry so much about my failures.

These “ideal reader” friends were not always my best friends, or even among my best friends, who have always included those cantankerous actual readers, second-guessing my assumptions, pointedly not getting my jokes, calling me on my bullshit. To ask more from me than I am offering–that’s intimacy (sometimes). My best students are not the ones who avidly copy down everything I say and laugh at all my jokes; they’re usually the ones with their hands in the air and a doubtful furrowed brow. They don’t allow me to let my guard down or tell me I’m brilliant.

It’s been since high school since I felt like a great number of my friends were the “ideal reader” type. More and more, I seek out those people who make me be more careful, more circumspect, more thoughtful. They might praise me for a few things, but they often also disapprove of me.

But I find sometimes one wants a balance. To have a friend who just thinks you’re great, and to allow them to think you’re great, and think they’re great in return–even if it’s not all the time (which would be annoying), to be appreciated and liked, without reservation, is nice. Around these kinds of people, I lose some of my anxious fidgeting and worrying. I can stop monitoring myself. And while cantankerousness can lead to one kind of self-improvement, the chastening kind, being loved for who I am, it turns out, can create a different kind of self-improvement. It makes me want to gratify them because I enjoy seeing them smile at me.

It’s the sort of thing you don’t notice until you do, and then when you do, you wish you hadn’t. My whole life, I’ve been a sort of guy’s girl, a real tomboy who likes sports, sex, beer, and food. I’ve always had more men friends than women friends, and even took a lesser scholarship for college so I could go to a school that was two-thirds male. I still come off as “game,” someone who probably likes to wrestle when she’s drunk. (I do.) But the rape joke thing comes up and suddenly I’m not so “fun” anymore.

“Rape jokes,” in my mind, are ones in which the punch line, the thing that produces the “humor,” is the victimization of someone weaker or socially marginalized. Sometimes it’s a joke about literally raping someone. Often, they’re jokes about gay or transgendered people. Racist jokes also fall under this category for me, as well as jokes about disabled people or poor people. If the joke doesn’t make any sense if you just say “person” instead of “woman,” “fag,” “tranny,” “Helen Keller,” or pick-a-racial-slur, it is, it takes the form of what I’ve called, in my mind, a rape joke.

A lot of jokes follow this format, I guess, because it’s a lot easier to make fun of suffering than it is to make fun of, say, the powerful or the wealthy. It’s even harder to come up with good jokes that require wordplay or knowledge. Jokes tend to be based on the idea that you share some knowledge or opinion with your interlocutor, and that you can use familiar signifiers. When someone tells a “tranny joke,” he’s assuming that the fact that you’re not a transgendered person means that you find your position of cisgendered privilege as hilariously pleasurable as he does. We haven’t all read the same books or seen the same movies, but appeals to the pleasures of being “normal” are almost universal.

And the fastest way to gain acceptance among the “normals” if you’re in a minority is to tell jokes that victimize your minority. It’s a way of saying, “Hey, straight white dudes; it’s OK–I’m cool!” I can’t tell you how many times I heard white guys at college defend their racist jokes by pointing at their token minority friend and saying, “He always laughs, so I’m allowed to say this!” or even, “I got this great fag joke from my friend who’s gay, so it’s OK.” It’s OK!

I learned at a very young age that the only way to win my dad’s love was to laugh at women. They’re so pathetic and always crying and shit, amirite? The fact that my mom was suicidally depressed for many years went unnoticed while Daddy and his little collaborationist joked in the other room about moody ladies. When you’re little, you learn pretty quickly that laughing at the right things is how you survive. It’s how you prove to people that you deserve love and acceptance, and getting that love from the most powerful person you can find is the strategy that makes the most sense to a four-year-old. When you don’t get the joke, you violate the normativity contract, and the consequences can be really scary.

I did high school theater with a very popular and charming young man who, whenever directed to make mumbling conversation behind the main action, would approach one girl at a time and threaten to blow her brains out while she sucked his cock. He was trying to get us to break character and laugh. Because that’s hilarious. If you didn’t laugh, he’d follow you around for the rest of the day, screaming his threat in your ear. Until you laughed. Because it’s so funny. Don’t you get it? I’ll shoot you in the head while you suck my cock. Get it? Eventually, everyone gave in, to get him to stop bullying us. Big smile, big laugh. Oh, now I see! You’re going to shoot me in the head while I suck your cock. That is a good one. It was so funny, in fact, that he wrote it in my yearbook, next to “Have a great summer! Love, You Know Who.”

It sounds psychopathic, right? I’m sure if someone had described that behavior to him, even at the time, as if it were someone else, he would have been appalled. Who would do that? He was the most popular boy in school. The weirdest part of the rape joke, to me, is that, unlike regular bullying, in which the bully gets off on seeing fear and hatred in his victims, the rape-joker seems to want love and acceptance, while saying the most appalling imaginable things. He wants you to laugh and verify for him that it’s OK to make light of very real threats to the safety of a group of people, even when those people are you.

I currently work with a rape-joker. It’s his way of communicating that he likes me, and thinks that I’m fun, and that we’re somehow the same. He’s always got a new one, about bitches getting what’s coming to them, or LGBT people, or some racial group, and when I don’t laugh, he insists that his other female/queer/non-white friends found that joke hilarious. What am I so humorless for? Can’t I just enjoy life? Why take things so seriously? Then there are the explanations that these jokes are actually about making light of sexism, racism, and homophobia. Geddit now? He’s just talking about how life really is. What am I, some kind of censor? Don’t academics believe in free speech? All I did was not laugh.

Finally, I interrupted one of his infuriated rants at my humorlessness by smiling calmly and saying, “If I hadn’t been a victim of physical and sexual abuse, I probably would think that joke was really funny. Does that help?” It seems to. So does, “Last week a transgendered friend got the shit kicked out him for walking down the street, so I guess that one isn’t hitting my funny bone.” Does he deserve this much information about me and my friends? Of course not. But the harassment has stopped.

What seems to confuse people like this is that I laugh a lot. I joke around all the time. My students think I’m hilarious. I talk openly and lightheartedly about sex. I am just less willing to fake laughter to get someone off my back now than I was when I was younger. I’m not out to change the world or lecture people. I just don’t laugh at rape jokes.