Today, I came across another article related to my continuing interest with people who apparently don’t know any gay people. This one is from a town in Pennsylvania whose high school has canceled a performance of Spamalot because there’s apparently a same-sex marriage. I’ll take the principal’s word on that, but the local news article, while largely sympathetic to those protesting the move, seemed to only reinforce the school’s claim that “homosexuality does not exist in a conservative community such as South Williamsport” with its reference to a “homosexual wedding” as if its some odd foreign custom, rather than an act that has been legal in Pennsylvania for a couple months now.
Evidence, however, apparently exists that homosexuality does, in fact, exist in South Williamsport: “I’d just seen one of my friends walk with her girlfriend the other day. It’s definitely in my school and all around,” said Gianna Goegard, a student from South Williamsport. I love this. Goegard had “seen” one of her friends walking with her girlfriend. Did her friend not introduce the two of them? Had the friend told Goegard that she was gay? Did they ever talk about girlfriends and boyfriends? Did those gay people who were “all around” reveal themselves? Its a quick quote, to be sure, but Goegard seems to be making an assumption, rather than speaking on the basis of actual knowledge.
Even in its attempt to poke at the principal’s assertion that there were no “homosexuals” in South Williamsport, the article enforces that very view by raising evidence that relies on the closet itself. In other words, even the attempt to reveal the existence of homosexuality in a “conservative community such as South Williamsport” relies on enforcing homosexuality’s otherness by virtue of its continuing status as the “secret which always gives itself away” (David Halperin, Saint Foucault