The Opera Closet: Shame, Ardor, Queer Confessions

This essay interrogates the diffidence conveyed in gay autobiographical writings about opera, a diffidence that is, perplexingly, expressed not about homosexuality but about opera. The essay considers how these autobiographical writings about opera, many of which seemed to have emerged around 1993, the moment that queer emerges as a concept and an identity, are engaged with an ambivalence about relinquishing the closet. In this case the operatic closet is at once experienced both as a private (though shared) coded escape from an oppressive mainstream heterosexual world and also as a space that was, perhaps counterintuitively, always already queer, suggesting that in some circumstances the closet might have been a more liberatory space than has hitherto been imagined. The texts the essay focuses on most extensively are Wayne Koestenbaum's book The Queen's Throat and Terry Castle's essay “In Praise of Brigitte Fassbaender (A Musical Emanation).”