Forgetting How to be Closeted
A guest essay from Jeffrey Weng on coming out, or failing to come out, in Taiwan; plus, a book drive for mothers incarcerated in Taiwan & book club details
Dear all,
Hello, everyone! We’re back! We’ve been overwhelmed with family responsibilities, and we’ll share more about this with you soon.
Today we’re so glad to share a guest essay by Jeffrey Weng. We first met Jeff at Berkeley, where Albert studied, and over the years have kept in touch. Jeff arrived to Taiwan about 20 months ago, at almost exactly the same time we did. (This was back when the 15-day quarantine was mandated; we survived it in part by texting at odd hours in the night.)
In this observant, honest, and beautifully written essay, Jeff reflects on his move to Taiwan, a place where an “undercurrent of conservatism belies its happy surface.” How does it feel to come out—or as he puts it, fail to come out—after having spent an entire adult life being out in the United States? “People say that coming out is a lifelong process,” he writes. “Every encounter with a new person is an opportunity for disclosure. But why does everyone need to know?” We savored this essay and think that you’ll love it, too.
Jeff is a sociology professor at National Taiwan University. He’s a member of the Taipei Philharmonic Chorus and also volunteers as the organist at our Episcopal church, where his heavenly postludes, especially one by Buxtehude, left us in awe.
Guest Essay From Jeffrey Weng: Forgetting How to be Closeted
Being closeted is a skill. It’s a mental balancing act of lies, half-truths, and selective disclosures. It’s remembering who you’ve told what when and where. And like all other skills, it takes practice. Without practice it atrophies, and when you return to it, sometimes years later, it can be hard to regain.
Going in and out of the closet is something many gay people find themselves obliged to do, especially those who travel from place to place. I was lucky enough, however, to have mostly stayed in the same place for some of my twenties and early thirties. In the decade leading up to 2021, I was a grad student at Berkeley, the sort of place that congratulates you when you come out. I had never felt so unremarkable, so happy, so at home. By the time I arrived in the Bay Area in 2011, gays had been a commonplace for decades. By 2015, the year the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage, we had, for better or worse, fully entered into bourgeois respectability. We were no longer cutting-edge.
In late summer 2021 I moved to Taipei for work. I had been following the progress of LGBTQ rights in Taiwan on and off for years. I had also visited relatives there annually for most of my life. I knew there was a distance between the optimism conveyed by the media and the reality of everyday life. The Constitutional Court ruling in favor of same-sex marriage in 2017 hadn’t changed the fact that most people couldn’t wrap their minds around the idea of two men marrying. A 2018 referendum that included questions on same-sex marriage resulted in majorities rejecting legalization. In spite of those results, gay marriage’s legalization by the legislature in 2019 left Taiwan in a strange position. Here was a place with some of the most progressive laws in Asia, but those laws might have gotten ahead of popular attitudes. By 2021 polls showed that a majority supported same-sex marriage, but I didn’t know what that would mean for me.
It was into this confusing state of affairs that I entered Taiwanese society in September 2021, after two weeks of quarantine. I went to work. I joined a choir. I found a church.
Work I could be fairly sure was a friendly environment. The choir was certainly gay enough, as choirs are wont to be. The church, however, I wasn’t so sure about. Although it was part of a friendly American denomination, my experience was that churches resembled their localities more than their larger denominations. Taiwanese Christians in mainline churches seemed more devout than their American counterparts. Perhaps this stemmed from being a minority sect, rather than the cultural establishment American mainliners can still sometimes imagine themselves to be. I decided to bide my time and see what people were like before revealing too much about myself.
But old church ladies, as I should have known, have their own agenda. My first Sunday, one asked me if I was married. Another admonished her: “Don’t scare him away!” Over the next few months, the question would reemerge every few Sundays. After a while, I realized that, for some old people, matchmaking the young was an engaging pastime. “Shuai ge,” they’d say. “Handsome man, what’s your name? Do you have a girlfriend?”
Early on, my answer was always no. Of course not. I had been with the same man for the past five years. But I stopped at no. I didn’t elaborate. Then one day an old man asked me where my girlfriend was. Not whether I had one, but where she was.
“America,” I blurted out.
“Ah,” he nodded, and said no more.
A few weeks later, a grandmotherly woman with a scheming aspect told me that I’d made a good impression on one of the young women in the church. “Ah, ah, ah,” I stammered. “Do you want me to introduce you two?” she said, conspiratorially. “Um, I’m too shy,” I managed to get out. “What do you mean too shy?” She was displeased, and I was doubly confused. Over the past few months the young woman she mentioned had always shown up with the same young man. What game were we playing?
And why was I so cautious, so reticent? I had been getting the sense that, even among the most educated folks in Taiwan, attitudes weren’t as progressive as the laws suggested. A few months prior, I was having beers with an older acquaintance of mine in Taipei when he unexpectedly launched a discomfiting question: Why were people gay? This was a question I hadn’t encountered in the U.S. since the early 2000s. He proceeded to speculate that, as men aged, they tired of their wives, so wanted to try men instead. (If this were the case, one might ask, why aren’t all older men gay?)
Later he wondered aloud why more gay couples hadn’t married since same-sex marriage became legal. Only a few thousand couples had taken advantage of the law. It’s because of people like you, I wanted to say. Had the law overtaken popular attitudes? It certainly appeared it had.
I began to wonder why. As I eased into my second year in Taiwan, I began noticing how hard it was to make friends, real friends. It wasn’t just that I was an introvert. It seemed that among the Taiwanese everyone already knew each other. Social networks were denser than in the U.S., harder to penetrate. People kept up with friends not just from college, but also from high school and sometimes even elementary school. And Taiwan isn’t a big place. These days it’s easy to traverse—you can get from Taipei to the southern port city of Kaohsiung in under three hours via high-speed rail. Last June I circumnavigated the island in one (admittedly rushed) weekend, entirely by train. You might think of Taiwan as a medium-sized, densely populated American state. Unless you leave the country, there’s no real getting away from the people you know, the people you’ve always known.
I came out to people in my first week of college. By contrast, it took me until more than a year later to start telling people from high school. College was only a three-hour drive from home, but I didn’t know anyone when I arrived. I could reinvent myself. The stakes were lower: the people who might reject me were nothing to me. In many senses, it’s easier to tell your deepest secrets to total strangers. There’s no relationship to threaten. It’s hardest to come out to those you know best, because you’re always the person they thought they knew.
For many gay people, then, parents are the last ones to find out—if they ever do. Why would you ever do that to them? Maybe it’s an oversimplification, but the idea that parents ought to know a child’s “true self” doesn’t really fly here. Why would you disturb them—hurt them—that way? There are certainly people who are out to their families in Taiwan, but in my experience they’re not the majority.
I’ve always needed—thrived on—the approval of others. I fear rejection. Born in the late 1980s, I was still a child when the acute phase of the AIDS crisis subsided. As the campaign for marriage equality in the U.S. gathered steam in the early 2000s, anti-gay rhetoric was still part of mainstream discourse. Even in college I encountered real conservatives who considered same-sex marriage a step too far. “What about the children?” a classmate in the Glee Club (of all places) once asked me. “It would be running a vast social experiment.”
Anti-gay views are now beyond the pale in polite conversation. The recent rise in anti-LGBTQ rhetoric is frightening, but it’s clearly part of a reactionary fringe, not the mainstream. Nevertheless, just because an opinion is uncool doesn’t mean no one holds it. Trans people seemed to be making great strides until the latest conservative backlash. RuPaul’s rise signaled the embourgeoisement of drag, then anti-drag laws were passed in several states. That these latest maneuvers in the culture wars are merely cynical ploys doesn’t mean they’re any less harmful. For me, the fear of concealed homophobia lingers.
Even so, being cautious takes quite an effort. It’s no way to live. And sexuality is a hard topic to avoid at certain times in life. Weddings are a case in point: they’re elaborate and explicit celebrations of heterosexual love. They’re contractual arrangements, authorizations of attachment, lust made licit. A few months ago I attended a wedding at a famous nineteenth-century neo-Gothic brick church in the middle of Taipei. There must have been three hundred guests. The banquet following the reception had fifty tables. As guests filed in, I spoke with a young grad student at my table. I mentioned the matchmaking elders. “Oh yes,” he said. “Old people love doing that.”
“The funny thing is,” I replied, in a confessional mood, “I already have a partner.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yes, in San Francisco.”
“Oh, well, then no reason to worry.”
“But,” I asked, suddenly attuned to an opportunity to acquire intelligence on the congregation, “isn’t the girl one of the grandmothers tried to set me up with already attached?”
“Oh, they broke up a few months ago,” he said.
“Goodness,” I replied. The grandmothers moved quickly.
The conversation moved on to other topics. I had failed, though. I hadn’t come out. The words for “partner” and “he” in Chinese—duixiang and ta—are gender-neutral. I’d gotten sloppy. Some parishioners thought I was single; others thought I had a girlfriend. I wasn’t keeping my story straight. And I was having trouble caring, finding it harder to summon the old fear of being found out.
A few minutes later, a twentysomething Episcopal seminarian joined our table. He was attending a Catholic seminary, as they often do in Taiwan. As we chatted, he mentioned traveling in California a few years back. He still remembered his astonishment at the big rainbow flag hanging outside University Lutheran Chapel in Berkeley. Voluble and intellectually inclined, he talked with me about Hayek. He downed at least seven glasses of red wine. By his side, his girlfriend didn’t notice, or else pretended very convincingly not to. He remarked on how happy he was to attend a Christian wedding that hadn’t mentioned how women and men had different roles to play. In the next generation of clergy, things were moving along slowly but surely, I could see.
A Catholic classmate of his at the seminary stopped by. He was wearing a lapel pin—a cross—and chided my seminarian tablemate for not capitalizing the c in catholic in the Creed: “one holy catholic and apostolic church.” Learning of my teaching job, the classmate remarked that he had a girl—no, female—friend studying in a department located next to mine. “She’s my female friend,” he repeated, “nüxing pengyou. Not my girlfriend, nü pengyou.” After some more banter with his Episcopalian counterpart, he muttered something again about his nü pengyou, forgetting to add the xing. So which was it? Girlfriend or just a female friend? Perhaps it was the wine.
Once again I had failed to come out. But what does it mean to come out, anyway? People say it’s a lifelong process. Every encounter with a new person is an opportunity for disclosure. But why does everyone need to know? The movement for LGBTQ equality in the U.S. often emphasized the importance of coming out, the better to show that gay people were everywhere and deserved to be treated equally. People would be less indifferent to the plight of gay people, the thinking went, if they knew someone who was gay. I don’t think this was wrong. In an American context, at least, it made sense to treat invisibility as the enemy—especially during the AIDS crisis, when the activist mantra was silence equals death, arguing that indifference and hostility to gay people were tantamount to murder amidst a plague.
Now, as an American of Taiwanese heritage living in Taiwan, I wonder if that emphasis on visibility still applies. My grandmother passed away last September, at ninety-three. She was born in the late 1920s in a small city in northeastern Fujian Province, and in all the years I knew her I never told her I was gay. What would the point have been? Her most likely reaction wouldn’t have been hostility, I suspect, so much as incomprehension. Why would I center my romantic attentions on someone I couldn’t have biological children with? Did I really have to take male companionship quite so far? In her twilight years, I thought, why meddle with her worldview?
This rationale seems to be common among the gay Taiwanese people my age whom I’ve met in the past year. I know one person who is completely out to friends, family, and colleagues—but he’s quite femme, and jokes that it’s always been impossible to hide his identity. Others are more discreet. They might have gay friends, but aren’t out at work, and often not to their families either. One man I met at a bar in Taipei’s Ximending neighborhood—a gay hotspot—sticks in my memory: in his forties, apart from some furtive assignations and lonely bar outings, he had no gay friends and wasn’t out to anyone.
A few months after my grandmother’s funeral, my father raised a question he’d been debating with my mother for some time. Should he tell our extended family I was gay? My mother felt it was my own business and strictly up to me, but I found the prospect of telling everyone daunting and tiresome. I was inclined to agree with my father: being gay ought to be unremarkable. If there’s nothing wrong with it, why not have others spread the word on my behalf?
Coming out, though, isn’t as noteworthy as it used to be. I once had to come out twice to the same person because he’d forgotten the first time. If we find ourselves having to do it, it’s because everyone assumes we’re straight. Gays are the hidden minority, scattered invisibly throughout humanity. An invisible tribe. Most human rights discourse still frames sexuality this way. But recently I came across a different perspective in Laurie Marhoefer’s book on Weimar-era German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who pioneered the conception of gays as a minority group. That’s how activists framed the debate for decades, and that line of thinking served a useful purpose, building the political solidarity that undergirded decades of difficult activism.
But perhaps, Marhoefer suggests, it’s time for a change. Many years and no small amount of costly genetic research later, no recognizable patterns have been established linking sexuality to genes. There is no gay gene. Human sexual fluidity is the constant. We encounter all sorts of pressures in life to be straight, and most people go with the flow. But some of us just can’t.
As I look back at the U.S.—my home—it’s obvious that what we have isn’t good enough. Far from it. The Obama-era illusions of a post-racial, post-discrimination America, one safely past the culture wars of the nineties, were dispelled in 2016 by eighty thousand votes in three Rust Belt states. These days, it seems, no one is happy about anything.
So it’s easy for me, as a recent arrival, to look at Taiwanese society with relief and envy. It’s one of the world’s best places to be gay. Same-sex marriage is legal. Anti-gay violence is nearly nonexistent. Each October Taipei hosts one of the largest Pride events in Asia, if not the world. And yet an undercurrent of conservatism belies that happy surface. Even here, there’s a ways to go before we reach—well, what? Utopia?
In an era of growing uncertainty, such dreams seem quixotic. But perhaps it’s precisely in unsettled times that we must imagine alternative worlds, better ways of living, better ways of being human together, learning to embrace the vast and sometimes frightening differences that divide us, so that, when we find the courage to be ourselves, we need no longer fear that others will be dismayed, no longer feel bound to keep our tongues bitten or secrets held in for the sake of the community. In spite of everything, we must build a world in which all of us can breathe freely, safe in the knowledge that our own flourishing is bound up inextricably with the flourishing of everyone around us.
If you’d like to reply to Jeff’s piece, you can reply to this email or in the comments section.
You can find Jeff’s academic work on language, race, ethnicity, and nationalism here, among them an excellent article called “What is Mandarin?”
Taiwan links, plus Ukraine festival today
Ashish Valentine has a terrific piece at The China Project on independent bands, Taiwanese identity, and the Megaport Festival, which brought 40,000 people this year.
This delightful post by David Wilson explores transnational music in Taiwan and includes clips of the Japanese enka that inspired Teresa Teng.
Not about Taiwan per se, but read this excellent piece of investigative long-form reporting on the “Lithium Triangle,” which holds more than 50 percent of the world’s lithium reserves. Kwangyin Liu of Commonwealth Magazine traveled to the world’s largest lithium salt flat and documented both the promises and perils of these resources. Also check out Commonwealth’s new podcast here.
The wonderful Emily Wu has a new show called “Game Changers” over at Taiwan Plus. We particularly appreciated her feature on Oleksandyr Shyn, a Korean-Ukrainian activist living in Taiwan. Emily’s episode chronicles the dogged work that he and others in Taiwan have done this year. Read our interview with Olek when Russia first invaded Ukraine, and follow Ukrainian Voices and Taiwan Stands With Ukraine.
Happening TODAY (Sunday): If you’re in Taiwan, come out to the Ukraine solidarity festival happening from 12 P.M. to 6 P.M. at Maji Square. There will be snacks, arts, crafts, and music.
Book Drive for Children and Women Imprisoned in Taiwan
If you live in Taiwan and want to support mothers incarcerated with their children, Forward Alliance, where Michelle volunteers, is organizing this book drive. A select group of incarcerated mothers raise their children in prison until age three, at which point they are separated.
We're looking especially for (1) Mandarin and English picture books suitable for children under three years old, (2) parenting books suitable for mothers (in Mandarin). Books can be either new or lightly used.
You can either mail the books to the Forward Alliance office, which will collect and sort them, or directly drop them off. The deadline is April 30, 2023. We'd like to deliver them to the prison before Mother's Day. Please also fill out this form.
Book Club: Francisco Goldman, Monkey Boy
We loved talking about My Name Is Lucy Barton with you. Next up is Francisco Goldman’s Monkey Boy. (Thank you Siobhan Phillips for the recommendation!) It will take place on Friday, April 28th at 5 PM PST / 8 PM EST / Saturday, April 29th 8 AM Taiwan time. Please reply to this email for the zoom link. Looking forward to seeing you!
Forgetting How to be Closeted
Moving, thoughtful essay. Thanks for posting.
Love this piece! Thank you.