The Dialectics of Dandyism

Abstract

Modern gay identity is pervaded by the trope of the secret. Building on the work of Michel Foucault and D. A. Miller, the literary and cultural critic Eve Sedgwick has argued that gay identity is fundamentally shaped by the dualism of secrecy and disclosure, but since "telling" is both prohibited and required, queer identity is always an internal contradiction between opacity and transparency, at once hidden and revealed. 1 It is this double bind between secrecy and disclosure that Sedgwick refers to when, arguing for the enduring centrality of the epistemology of the closet for gay people and culture, she points to the way that homosexual identity has been "distinctly constituted as secrecy" from its inception (73). 2

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