Epistemology of the Closet

Sedgwick uses the Introduction to preview the concept of social binarism with respect to hetero and homosexual identities. She reminds the reader that “homosexual panic,” or Kempf’s Disease, was coined in the 1920s by psychologist Edward Kempf and described hysteria attributable to “perverse sexual cravings” in oneself or another. This fallacious psychological diagnosis led directly to what is currently known as the “gay panic defense” in legal settings, which is the idea that someone’s terror of perceived homoeroticism can be used as an excuse for their crimes. In other words, “responsibility for the crime was diminished” because it arose from what was perceived as a sexual advance from the victim (18). In this way, the gay panic defense emblemizes misperceptions of gay identity by making “unwarranted assumptions that all gay men may plausibly be accused of making sexual advances to strangers, and, worse, that violence [...] is a legitimate response to any sexual advance whether welcome or not” (18). Essentially, homosexuality is assumed to be “so private and so atypical a phenomenon in this culture as to be classifiable as an accountability-reducing illness” (18).

The gay panic defense remains part of case law and has not yet successfully been challenged in legislation, which emphasizes how entrenched society’s rejection of homoeroticism in favor of strict binary identities is.