Word: closets
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...England lept into modern sanitation when Sir John Harrington, godson of Elizabeth I, published Metamorphosis of Ajax, in which he described a new kind of water closet: a raised cistern with a small pipe down which water ran when released by a valve. The Queen installed Harrington's invention in her palace at Richmond, but it took another 200 years before a man named Alexander Cummings developed the S-shaped pipe underneath the basin to keep out foul odors. At the end of the 18th century, the flushable toilet went mainstream...
...longstanding history of abuse and repression lent a political connotation to the practice. According to the Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture, a project of glbtq, Inc., coming out is not merely “coming out of the loneliness, isolation, and self-hatred of the closet,” but is “a form of political activism that participants hope will increase support for glbtq causes.” In this sense, the act can be seen as an assertion of one’s presence, a firm claim to personhood comparable...
...necessarily in a place of self-loathing until their interpersonal interactions in some way validate their identity. As Adrian Gillan of Gaydar Nation wrote, discussing United Kingdom National Coming Out Day: “Of course, the very notion of coming out implies you were once in a closet to come out of.” In a society rife with judgment and prejudice, being different is often all one needs to feel alienated and estranged from mainstream culture. Why add to this burden by demanding that individuals declare their sexuality to the world in order to fully realize...
...course, we don’t live in an ideal world. Gillan himself acknowledges that “the closet...is surprisingly all-pervading and going nowhere fast,” since we are far from an era in which “sexuality is a genuine non-issue.” But the way to phase out flawed social constructions is hardly to indulge them. Coming out has become a highly ritualized process, an often-traumatic coming-of-age requirement for all those who deviate from arbitrary societal norms for sexual behavior. Rather than demanding, as glbtq, Inc. seems...
...everyone in Harvard square a closet flasher...