Seeking Difference/Différance

A same-sex couple's closet (to the degree that there is anything really "same" in such couples, which there isn't) is unique in its impression of uniformity. My boyfriend and I share the same small closet and we have organically grown to establish no order or division in the where we hang our clothing. There is no "my side" and "his side." We do not share clothes however, so it is not like it doesn't matter whose clothing it is. We just become quick to spot our own clothing in the closet. Which, for what is worth, has no wire hangers.

If one looks closely, however, (and here the relation between "detail" and knowledge brought up by the Mimi White essay seems pertinent) one notices that hanging on the closet door there is his blue Muay Thai boxing T-shirt (sweaty and gross -- or hot, depending on how you brushed against your mother's sentencing of male sweat as disgusting) beside my white ballet top (impeccably clean). So there IS difference in this ocean of visually interchangeable garments.

It is also fair to say that since he tends to leave his clothes on the floor or on top of pieces of furniture and I tend to pick them up and hang them where they should belong, I "decide" where the clothes inhabit. Which probably means that the aesthetics of this closet has one single author.

The "same"-sex couple's closet, at least in this instance, is a site of symptom, anxiety and struggle for the necessary establishment of difference that heterosexually-granted queer "sameness" works so hard to efface. You are all just fags. This negation, or prohibition, of detail causes the kind of ontological crisis that our white dresser isn't as friendly to. On the dresser the differences of the subjects involved in this relationship of presumed "sameness" are more apparent -- as well as their latent fluidity. His Kindle on the left, my analog poetry on the right. My cologne bottles on the ledge, his mints under it. His dull-colored underwear in a drawer, my white socks and pink dildo in the other. But who's to say I don't wear the dull-colored underwear when I run out and he doesn't borrow the dildo when I'm away? One thing is certain though: I would never EVER read the contents of his Kindle and he would never EVER consider opening, or even reading the title of any of my books.