Date: Sat, 19 Aug 1995 15:21:56 -0500 From: mohr richard d Review of James Woods' _The Corporate Closet_ by Richard D. Mohr (September 1993) _The Corporate Closet: The Professional Lives of Gay Men in America_. By James D. Woods. Free Press. 331 pp. $22.95. With its illuminating account of the sexual secrecy that society enforces against gay people, _The Corporate Closet_ could not be more timely. Increasingly, gay activists are working toward liberation by blowing the closet apart -- through "outing." In mirrored opposition, anti-gay forces -- as exemplified in the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy -- have focused their energies on resealing the closet, tacitly acknowledging that their success depends upon silencing gay lives. In mapping the general rise in gays' consciousness and the general public's growing acknowledgment of gay existence, Woods poignantly conveys the feeling that quite independently of outing and backlash, closet cases have become a breed slated by history for extinction. Woods' largely qualitative study is based on interviews with seventy gay men who work in "management hierarchies necessitating interaction with coworkers." Loosely defined, this is corporate America, which includes most occupations with prospects for great upward mobility and virtually every organization by which power and meaning are structured in America. The interviews concentrate on the diverse ways in which the participants manage their gay identities in these halls of wealth and power. The picture that emerges is one of "daily humiliations and accommodations," even "spiritual imprisonment." Some men adopt a strategy of counterfeiting a heterosexual identity -- by manufacturing stories of girlfriends, arranging for female confederates to serve as "beards," dating women simply for show, and even entering into heterosexual marriages. Such charade exploits women and produces severe anxiety in closet cases. For it requires constant lying and self-monitoring and is always subject to sudden collapse -- when a confederate flubs lines, when its lies become inconsistently tangled, or when mistakes are made about who is in on the charade. The other chief strategy of closet cases is evasion. Here the closet case tries to appear sexually as a blank slate, to dodge all issues of sexuality, and sometimes to cultivate a distracting reputation as eccentric, liberal, or "private." Closet cases frequently rationalize this strategy by appealing to one of the biggest lies of the business world -- namely, that the workplace is an impersonal, nonsexual environment. Woods insightfully shows that sexuality in fact suffuses the workplace, that heterosexuality is constantly on display there, that a man's sexuality is unavoidably part of his work, and (implicitly) that if properly arranged, the workplace is better for being sexual. Indeed Woods discovers that when a man does come out of the closet at work, the quickest route for his re-integration into normal workplace practices is through the everyday sexual banter that pervades many offices. Those who adopt a strategy of evasion experience less anxiety than those who coin a counterfeit self, but have even greater difficulty fitting in. For they openly operate at odds with workplace sexual norms, which presume everyone is assertively heterosexual. Here ironically even closeted homosexuals bump into glass ceilings. In bureaucracies success has little to do with talent, intelligence, and creativity, and almost everything to do with how well one gets along with others. The "asexual" man distances himself from coworkers. In consequence, the sexual evader seems weird to those in charge, appears not to share their values and experience, and so is read as untrustworthy. Others get the important assignments -- and promotions. But the evader loses something more: "these men are often deprived of the sense that others understand or appreciate their lives." The closet is an erasure of self. The picture gets uglier still. To maintain distance from gays who even inadvertently might give them away, closet cases will intervene with personnel officers so that job candidates they know or suspect to be gay are not hired. Woods is remarkably sensitive to moral issues. He notices that closet cases frequently delude themselves, are prone to paranoia, and are ill-positioned to make rational decisions. But he oddly lets closet cases off the hook for their lying. He justifies it as self-defense, by drawing analogies to cases of lying to the enemy in wartime and lying to a mugger. But in lying to the enemy, one is putting something on the line -- typically one's life -- for the sake of others, whereas the closet case lies only to advance his self-interest. And lying to a mugger is a temporary aberration aimed at fulfilling the overall goals of justice, whereas the closet case lies systematically in a way that perpetuates injustice by pledging allegiance to heterosexual domination. Nearly half of the study's participants had come out to at least some coworkers. Not one participant regretted this decision: "even men who were severely penalized for their disclosure now point to it with pride." This empirical finding conforms to morality. Coming out is what makes dignity possible for the gay person. For the first time, the gay man can have a sense that his life has a ground, that his identity is authentic. But a commitment to an identity -- whether gay or any other -- entails a willingness to give up some of one's happiness. Identity without sacrifice is mere gesturing. On gay issues, though, this trumping of happiness by identity cuts two ways. While it guides the gay person out of the closet, it also prompts the straight businessman to make sacrifices in order to solidify his identity. Woods is therefore naive when he supposes that business decisions are made impartially with an eye only to profits and that bosses' self- interest alone will generate job protections for good gay workers. If this general scenario were true, the nation would never have needed civil rights protections for any group. Both discrimination and the closet, I fear, will linger on a bit longer than Woods optimistically predicts. The book has other problems. Woods lamely and bizarrely rationalizes the absence of lesbians from the study by claiming first that lesbians didn't want to talk with the male interviewers -- whose fault was that? -- and second that adding lesbians to the mix would just be theoretically too complicated. Virtually un-edited, the book is repetitious both locally and globally -- a needlessly tedious read. With the room pruning would have provided, we could have gotten to know better these interesting, if sometimes alarming, gay men. As is, they appear only as a welter of sound bites. These complaints notwithstanding, the book will substantially help America get right with gays in large measure by getting gays right. -30-