Closet Space

Writes Fenton Bailey: I've just got back from deep throating Australia. Ba dum bum. I had a thorough oral workout giving about 50 interviews in five jam-packed days. The joy of being asked the same sorts of questions over and over again is that you end up with fresh insights about something you thought you'd exhausted. Like, for example, the idea that Deep Throat is a film about the closet, and that the closet is still the political issue of our times.

(More after the jump)

Linda is a kind of Everyman figure. Her clitoris in the back of her throat is a metaphor for the unique sexual DNA that we all possess. The point being that there is no such thing as sexual normalcy. We are all freaks and deviants. 

Through the example of Linda's predicament, Deep Throat rejects the idea that anything about sexuality is a cause for shame or embarrassment. Instead of stuffing sex in the closet, it advocates leading an honest and authentic life. The moral of the film is that it is our responsibility (through experimentation and exploration) to find our unique sexual identity.

This message is the antithesis of the puritan mindset which needs to divide sex and sexuality into the good and the bad: the married vs the adulterous, the faithful vs the promiscuous, the natural vs the perverse. But who can abide by these distinctions? Least of all the priests and the politicians who preach them. As we all should know by now, their's is a set of arbitrary and false distinctions. The only way anyone can live by them is to create a disconnect between the public preaching and private practice. In other words, to build a closet.

The closet may begin with sex but it permeates every area of public life. Maybe that seems overstating it. But just days after Deep Throat was released the Watergate break-in occurred. Watergate is the classic example of closet activity, of public appearances at odds with private realities. And so what else could the source that outed Nixon have been called but Deep Throat?

My favorite moment in Inside Deep Throat is when Roy Cohen (hiss) says to Harry Reems, "You act as if the constitution of the United States was created just for you." Well, hello! And even today the idea of leading an open, honest, and authentic life is still a heresy. No wonder, then, that the gay movement is so inevitably political. In rejecting the notion of the closet, we are attacking the institutionalized hypocrisy that is both the keystone and Achilles heel of the puritan mindset. Which perhaps explains why its such a bitch of a struggle.