Epistemology of the Closet

“Homosexual panic,” or Kempf’s Disease, was a term coined in the 1920s and described hysteria attributable to “perverse sexual cravings” in oneself or another. It was an official diagnosis in the revision of the DSM I. Sedgwick provides a clear and wrenching description of the legal phenomenon resulting from this fallacious diagnosis known as the “panic defense” in Chapter 1. “The widespread acceptance of this defense [shows] that hatred of homosexuals is even more public, more typical, hence harder to find any leverage against than hatred of other disadvantaged groups,” Sedgwick writes (18).

For Sedgwick, there are two key points to keep in mind related to the panic defense. First, the federal US court system and many US states continue to accept it as a legitimate defense in cases where an individual harms or murders another on the basis of their sexuality because one of the central homophobic ideas that structures the legal system in the United States is that the unknowability of another person’s sexuality overrides the right to life of persons who are perceived as non-heterosexual. The second point, related to the first, is the fact that sexuality, unlike race, gender, or other identity markers, is a mode of personal identity that is not immediately legible to others in public.