Tonight for my "Sociology of Sexuality" class, I'm teaching a sizable chunk of David Halperin's important work on Foucault, Saint Foucault. I came across this quote while preparing that I thought was fabulous. Enjoy your Friday!:

"If there is something self-affirming and indeed liberating about coming out of the closet, that is not because coming out enables one to emerge from a state of servitude into a state of untrammeled liberty. On the contrary: to come out is precisely to expose oneself to a different set of dangers and constraints, to make oneself into a convenient screen onto which straight people can project all the fantasies they routinely entertain about gay people, and to suffer one's every gesture, statement, expression, and opinon to be totally an irrevocably marked by the overwhelming social significance of one' so openly acknowledged homosexual identity. If to come out is to release oneself from a state of unfreedom, that is not because coming out constitutes an escape from the reach of power to a place outside of power: rather, coming out puts into play a different set of power relations and alters the dynamics of personal and political struggle. Coming out is an act of freedom, then, not in the sense of liberation but in the sense of resistance."

-- David Halperin (1995). Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. New York: Oxford University Press, p. 30.