Here’s a very insightful essay by leftist gay writer, Michael Bronski, on the question of Susan Sontag’s closetedness. What he homes in on is the fundamental contradiction at the heart of her work, a contradiction betwen her public commmitment to elucidating the political implications of personal cowardice – and her own cowardice in refusing to deal honestly with a central fact of her own identity, a fact that had huge public consequences in her own time:
But if she could not have come out in 1969 after the Stonewall riots, couldn’t she have done so in the 1970s as feminism became mainstream? Couldn’t she have done so in the 1980s as AIDS ravaged a generation of gay men, something she wrote about so movingly in her short story “The Way We Live Now” and her book “AIDS and Its Metaphors?” Couldn’t she have done so in the 1990s as the secret nature of her relationships with other women evolved into an “open secret” (open to everyone, that is, except for the intrepid reporters at the Times)? Of course, she could have. But she didn’t. She obviously decided – this was a woman who took all of her decisions very seriously – not to.
This raises some complicated questions: What does it mean to set yourself up as an arbiter of moral issues who plumbs the intersections of public action and personal responsibility even as you avoid discussing vital, personal issues? In most of her political writings Sontag explicated how institutionalized power structures – racism, colonialism, state-sponsored violence – hurt individual people as well as nations. It is not as though she did not understand how homophobia works.
Coming out as a public intellectual who is also gay entails risk. I have dealt with this for years. A huge amount of criticism of my own work (on the right) is tinged with homophobia, and the ransacking of my private life (by the left) was imbued with homophobia and HIV-phobia as well. If I had not come out as gay at the beginning of my career, or as HIV-positive a decade ago, I would have had to deal with none of it. But so be it. If you are an honest public writer, you deal with the person you are, not the person it would be easier to be. You fight through the attempt to marginalize and belittle you and your work. Look, for example, at Camille Paglia, an openly gay woman whose eclectic and universal interests, whose plumbing of high and low, whose capacity for analysis of art and literature and candor and history easily rivals – and often surpasses – Sontag’s. The difference between Paglia and Sontag is courage and integrity. Just don’t expect many on the so-called left to point this out. Kudos to Bronski for going there.
The Dish 