Straights:
Heterosexuality in Post-Closeted
Culture
James Joseph Dean
“Chapter 6: Straights, Post-Closeted
Culture, and the Continuum of
Identity Practices”
Straights and Post-Closeted Culture
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Dean argues that a post-closeted dynamic, which is marked by the pervasive
presence of openly gay and lesbian individuals and a pattern of cultural
normalization, is increasingly common in core areas of social life, and is thus
refashioning sexual identity performances, normative heterosexuality, and
homophobias.
Dean does not claim the end of the closet; rather, though the conditions of the
closet persist, the chief patterns of sexual and gender disadvantage in the core
institutions of American society are decreasingly a product of compulsory
heterosexuality.
If the concept of a post-closeted dynamic seems to overstate the increasing
tolerance, cultural normalization, and social integration of gay men and lesbians, it
is due to the contradiction between everyday and institutional life in America.
Gay cultural normalization and social integration form an uneven pattern that is
most salient in everyday life and interpersonal relationships. A post-closeted
dynamic represents more of a micro-sociological phenomenon, and it doesn’t
capture as well the experiences of gay men and lesbians in many social
institutions, regions, and places
Straights and Post-Closeted Culture
• Straights and gays now often look and act alike. In other
words, gay integration is in part conditioned by gay men
and lesbians who embody conventional, even normative,
gender self-presentations.
• While straights attempt to use gender-normative practices
to recuperate straight privilege, gender-conventional gay
men and lesbians undercut this strategy.
• As a result, if gender-normative practices fail to project a
clear heterosexual identity, then resorting to normative
heterosexual boundary practices, which put social distance
between oneself as straight and gay individuals, signifiers,
and spaces, makes sociological sense in post-closeted
contexts.
Historical Shifts in the Closet
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The historical shifts represent broad reconfigurations in the closet, gender, and the
homo/heterosexual division since the 1890s.
Between the 1930s and 1950s in America, the closet of antihomosexual
discrimination was built— homosexuals were prohibited from being served in bars
and restaurants and fired from federal government jobs, and Hollywood films were
forbidden to portray homosexual characters or even mention their existence
(Chauncey 2004, 5–22; D’Emilio 1983, 2002). Historians, legal scholars, and
sociologists have documented the dismantling of the various parts of the closet
and its repressive practices of oppression over the course of the thirty-year period
from the 1960s to the 1990s
Following their lead, Dean claimed that a post-closeted culture has arisen under
conditions of unprecedented popular cultural visibility and social and legal
enfranchisement in the mid-1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century..
In table 6.1, Dean offers a typology of what he calls “historical shifts in the closet,”
using both the research in this book and the historical scholarship to date, to
understand the present period and its historical antecedents
Understanding Straight Identity Practices and
the Reproduction of Heteronormativity
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Dean talked with black and white straight men and women to understand the
meanings they attached to being straight, to analyze the interactions they reported
with lesbians and gay men, and to document the variety of homophobic and
antihomophobic stances (as well as the mixture of the two) that were found
among their conventional ways of speaking and acting in everyday life.
He claimed that straight identities were socially constructed through the
boundaries of social distance that the respondents enacted in performing their
identities in various situations and contexts.
By boundaries of social distance, Dean means the practices these straight
individuals used to associate or disassociate themselves from lesbian and gay
symbols, individuals, and spaces.
By capturing a range of identity practices and mapping them onto to a continuum,
categorized as moving from homophobic practices at one end to antihomophobic
practices on the other, he developed three broad categories: strongly aversive,
weak, and blurred boundaries of social distance.
The continuum provided a grading of the boundary practices that straight men and
women used, and showed how race shaped respondents’ positions on it. Table 6.2
summarizes the continuum and provides an overview of the main points of the
book.
Conclusion
• Dean argued for a social and historical approach to understanding the
shifts and changes in the social status of black and white straight men’s
and women’s identities.
• The concept of a post-closeted culture captures the dismantling of antigay
discrimination, the integration of out lesbians and gay men, and the
number of vivid LGBTQ representations in American society’s diverse
media landscape today.
• In this study Dean documented the different ways that straight people,
through actions and words, have socially constructed boundaries between
heterosexuality and homosexuality.
• As their interactions with lesbian and gay individuals, symbols, and spaces
have become more varied, numerous, and complicated, straights have
become more conscious, defensive, and deliberate in establishing their
identity status.
• With the rise of a post-closeted culture, black and white straight men and
women have started to rethink what it means to be straight and their
place in America in the twenty-first century.
Discussion Questions
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Define the term the closet. What does it mean for the closet to
be part of state formation and repression?
Define the term post-closeted. What does the term include
conceptually?
What are the key characteristics of a closeted versus a postcloseted period?
Explain the differences between straight men and women in the
strongly aversive category versus the weak category of the
continuum of identity practices.
List the key characteristics of straight men and women in the
blurred boundaries category.
What does it mean for straight masculinity and straight femininity
to be socially constructed through words and actions?