Key to the Closet

Updated October 22, 2006

By Paul Weiser

One key feature of this October’s “scandal” of a Republican congressman exposed as a homosexual pedophile is the issue of “outing” gay men. This is a vexed topic which (perhaps unlike its victims) deserves a thorough airing.

The predicate of “outing” is “closeting” - the practice of outwardly enacting a conventional, heterosexual lifestyle while covertly indulging in sodomy. Both terms reference the phrase “coming out of the closet,” the moment of publicly admitting a previously secret homosexual existence; “outing” refers to publicly unmasking a “closeted” homosexual against his will.

The righteousness of “outing” depends entirely upon the iniquity of “closeting:” if sodomy is illegal and wrong, it’s as virtuous to expose a secret sodomite as to expose a murderer or thief. But if “closeting” is not inherently wrong - only a means to indulge a legal passion while maintaining a respectable front - then “outing” is itself a vicious and contemptible practice.

It comes down to motives. If a closeted homosexual maintains his heterosexual pose the better to seduce boys, outing him is praiseworthy - but if the “outing” stems from vindictiveness or politics, it is a reprehensible act. Open gays “outing” their closeted fellow sodomites fall into the latter class, their cries of hypocrisy to the contrary notwithstanding. Their motives also include envy (of the closeted homosexual’s public approval) and characteristic, catty spite.

But it’s the accusations of hypocrisy that tell the tale. Shamelessly open gays claim they represent all homosexuals - but they don’t, and know it. What they bitterly resent is that any fellow-sodomite would wish to pursue a normal life instead. For such a man not only withholds a measure of political power from the sodomite interest - he also, like normal society in general, withholds the approval open gays desperately, hatefully, and thus fruitlessly pursue.


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