Loose Lips	Loose Lips Archive

For most of us, in the closet is a pejorative term, and rightly so. The refusal to lie about who we are has liberated and transformed our lives. Honesty has been a positive force for us. But we need to be cautious about assuming that honesty is the right course for everyone in every circumstance.

In the recent Belgian film Ma Vie en Rose, an eight-year-old boy insists that he is really a girl and tries to wear girls' clothes at every opportunity. Ludovic explains to his friends and family that he is really a garçon-fille or "boy-girl" and that some day he will be a girl. His honesty results in him being kicked out of his private school and assaulted by the other students. His father loses his job, and the family is forced to move to another town.

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What is the best way to deal with a young transgendered person? Perhaps the best thing to tell a boy-girl like this is that there is nothing wrong with being the way he is. But because most other people will not understand, he might want to pretend to be an ordinary boy until he is old enough to make his own life as the special person that he is. That is, a boy-girl like Ludovic needs to learn the art of hiding himself from others and of constructing a social mask that will allow him to live in a hostile society. For a boy-girl like this, too much honesty is suicidal. He needs to learn to be in the closet until he can figure out how to best come out.

There are others as well, who cannot safely be honest with the rest of the world. Miss Poubelle's heart goes out to lesbians and gay men in places like Iran and Saudi Arabia, where the consequences of open homosexuality are literally grave. Unless these societies change considerably, gay people are only safe in the closet.

In situations like these, being in the closet is just prudent self-preservation. Sometimes circumstances make honesty too dangerous. And so Miss Poubelle thinks that perhaps we need a positive way of talking about the ways that gay, lesbian, and transgendered people hide themselves from their enemies.

In this light, she was interested to read that the term zorra is used in Costa Rica to describe non-effeminate men whose homosexuality is a secret. In Spanish, zorra can mean either "vixen" or "possum." Zorra can also be a derogatory term for women, meaning something like "slut." It isn't clear which of these senses of the word is most likely to be connected to secret homosexuality.

But for the sake of discussion, consider the possum connection. Possums are relatively defenseless animals; they evade predators by pretense, feigning death when faced with danger. "Playing possum" means pretending to be something that you are not, a choice many gay people make given what seem to be the unpalatable alternatives. Miss Poubelle thinks that "playing possum" might be an appropriate and fairly positive way of talking about the self-protective colorations that some of our brothers and sisters adopt to survive in the world.

Of course, we must still encourage as many people as possible to come out, even to face some risks in doing so. By making others confront the real us, our movement has made impressive gains in making the world a safer place for gay, lesbian, and transgendered people to come out in. But we mustn't deceive ourselves into thinking that it is safe for everyone. Vicious oppression means that there will be people for whom honesty would mean death. We should recognize this and respect the struggle of those who elect to survive by playing possum.