"Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the
annihilation of the Jews.”-Adolf Hitler
On January 20, 1942, twelve senior
officials of the Nazi regime assembled in a suburb of Berlin to inaugurate what
is now known as the Wansee Conference. It was here that Adolf Hitler’s “Final
Solution to the Jewish Question” was finalized, approved, and initiated. Here,
senior Nazi officials presented and approved a plan to carry out a genocide of
the largest scale in history against the Jewish population of the Nazi empire.
When news of Hitler’s Holocaust reached the United States, cries of dread flourished
throughout American society as America condemned Hitler’s genocide and the
poisonous ideology that inspired it: racism.
Five years later, Ralph Ellison
published “Invisible Man”, reminding
America that racism was not restricted to genocidal dictators; “Invisible Man” captured the plight of
Ellison’s unnamed narrator as he struggled to define himself in the 1940’s
American society around him, laced with disparaging stereotypes and an
undercurrent of underlying but powerfully overbearing racism, forced him into a
metaphorical “invisibility.”
American society has come extremely
far in the last seventy-three years, and the most obvious elements of racism
are now acknowledged and frowned upon. Whereas at one point those who intended to
confront the racism of the status quo faced estrangement and condemnation, it
can usually be said that today, those who perpetuate racism face alienation
instead. Despite these advances, the fear of those who are different remains a
powerful emotion in the human psyche, and this fear gives rise to a related
social problem: that of sexualism. Although our culture may have come to
accept, for the most part, that one’s humanity is not dependent on the color of
their skin, human prejudice drives many to believe that one’s humanity is
dependent on their sexual orientation. Just as the most blatant elements of
racism – that is, the institution of slavery and the political restrictions on
African-Americans that remained after its abolishment during the Reconstruction
era – were already a thing of the past in the 1940’s America that Ellison
captured in “Invisible Man”, the most
grave examples of institutional sexualism – such as the American Psychological
Association’s classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder until 1973 –
have been erased, and culture is relatively more attentive about the sexualism
that permeated society more thoroughly in the past. However, as in the society
depicted in “Invisible Man”, despite
these advances, prejudiced attitudes of the past remain in society and in
governing institutions, and the minority in question still faces a underlying discrimination
that often goes unnoticed.
It can be said that the social movements for
equality with respect to sexual orientation are decades behind movements for
racial equality, a reflection of the fact that barricades that divide humans on
the basis of sexual orientation tend to much more substantial than racial
barriers. In “Invisible Man”,
Ellison’s unnamed narrator faces the latent racism of 1940’s society, and as a
result, confronts a metaphorical “invisibility.” LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender)
Americans today face a very similar situation as African Americans did in the
1940’s America depicted in “Invisible Man”,
and as a result, they face a unique LGBT “invisibility.”
In “Invisible Man”, Ralph Ellison creates the metaphor of invisibility
as it applies to his unnamed African-American narrator to illustrate the
phenomenon wherein civilization sees African Americans as a stereotype and anticipates
them to act in accordance with that stereotype, rather than comprehending them
as human beings and understanding them based on their actions and identities.
The narrator’s invisibility stems from an underlying societal racism and
societal inequality, the unjustness of which is often unrecognized by almost
everyone in society, and the existence of which many are completely unaware.
Remnants of African American stereotypes from the past infiltrate the
collective mindfulness of American society. Whites and those in power often
trumpet ideals of racial advancement while either knowingly or unknowingly disseminating
a power structure wherein African Americans are entirely reliant on whites for
their success and achievement in society, and the stereotypes that cause
“invisibility” are fortified and intertwined into the nature of purportedly
socially progressive activities.
The narrator is first sentenced to
invisibility when he encounters the parts of society that still feature a power
structure wherein African American compliance and conformity are prerequisite
to whites allowing African Americans the opportunity for advancement in
society. In this way, African Americans and whites are bred to accept the
assumption that African Americans are fundamentally unqualified of being the
engines of their own success, and any success that African Americans do achieve
can be attributed to the charity and assistance of powerful whites. Thus, any
achievement or capability exhibited by African Americans is seen not as revealing
of the character of the African Americans themselves but of the whites who
provided them with the occasion to triumph and eased their progression.
Essentially, African Americans are expected to assimilate by “acting white”-
that is, adopting the culture and goals of white society if they are ever to
succeed in society, and they are thus required to smother their own
individuality in order to ensure that the white men allow them to advance in
society.
As a result, African Americans
become “invisible,” in that the role they play in society and the way they are
perceived by others is limited not by their own identity but by the
expectations and ideology imposed on them by white society; others thus do not
perceive these assimilationist African American identities but instead “see
through” them. The narrator’s invisibility is manifested in this manner when,
at the beginning of the novel, he receives a scholarship to a state black
college from a group of influential white men in his community. The narrator
gives a well-received speech at his graduation and is invited to deliver it to
the most influential white men in his community. Before he can give the speech,
though, he is forced to undergo a demeaning ritual in which he must participate
in a “Battle Royal” by fighting a number of other black adolescents in a pit
for the amusement of the white men. Following the Battle, the boys are told to
grab as much money as they can from a pile of coins and bills on top of an
electrified mat. The white men then laugh at the African American boys’
suffering while they frantically grab for the money, experiencing painful
shocks as a result. The boys later discover that this money is fake. After
going through these demeaning rituals for the entertainment of the white men,
the narrator is permitted to give his speech. Following the speech, the
superintendent of the school approaches the narrator to reward him:
"’Boy,’ he said,
addressing me, ‘take this prize and keep it well. Consider it a badge of office… Open it and see what’s inside,’ I was
told. My fingers a- tremble, I complied, smelling the
fresh leather and finding an official looking document inside. It was a scholarship to the state college for Negroes. My eyes filled with
tears and I ran awkwardly off the floor” (Ellison).
The superintendent refers to the
briefcase holding the narrator’s scholarship as a “badge of office,” implying
that the narrator should ponder it symbolic of his new status in society – but
in the framework of the demeaning ritual that the narrator had to go through to
get this “badge of office,” and the fact that the narrator only accomplished it
by obeying the whites and performing for them like a circus animal indicates that
this “badge” is representative of the narrator’s submission to the white power
structure; the “office” that the briefcase qualifies him for is not that of a
well-to-do college student, but that of a slave, because he acquired this
reward not because of his own achievements but because of his willingness to
follow the orders of the influential white men around him. This scholarship is
indirectly responsible for all of the conventional economic successes that the
narrator obtains, and the reality that the white men gave it to him only after
he participated in the barbaric Battle Royal and humiliated him-self for the
whites’ entertainment establishes that all of the narrator’s success was a
result of the white men’s “generosity.”
In this way, the narrator and African
Americans in the South are bred to accept that they can only accomplish success
by appeasing powerful white men, such that any success they achieve is not a
reflection of their own character but of the whites’ generosity. The pressure
to conform to white demands forces the narrator to suppress any individuality
or personal drive he has, instead implementing the social philosophy of those
in power and dedicating himself to satisfying the white men around him so that
they will provide him with the success he pursues. By suppressing his
individuality and basing his life around the desires of others, the narrator
becomes invisible.
The narrator sees another face of
invisibility when he uncovers that those who fight for social equality and seek
to end the more palpable and recognizable injustices African Americans face do
so in a manner that continues to suppress African American identity and
anything that originates from a nonwhite mind as a unfavorable and unconventional
approach to social justice. In doing so, they continue to suppress African
American identities, such that even those African Americans who fight for
social equality must do so by acting not on their own accord but as puppets of
a white activist establishment, thus subtly compelling African Americans to
continue to submit to a white power structure and think of themselves as lesser
human beings. Even in pursuit of social justice, blacks in Ellison’s 1940’s
America cannot act on their own accord but instead do what they are told to do
by powerful whites, perpetuating the invisibility caused by African Americans
allegedly necessary submission to white power structures even within
subcultures that accept social equality and claim to speak for the downtrodden
minorities in society.
The narrator experiences this mode
of invisibility when he joins the Brotherhood, an organization dedicated to
organizing demonstrations and advocating for social equality and social
justice. Throughout his time with the Brotherhood, the narrator is trained in
the specifics of the “Brotherhood ideology” and is commanded to promote only
this ideology in the orations he gives on the behalf of the Brotherhood. The
narrator complies with these demands until, after organizing a funeral for Todd
Clifton, a black member of the Brotherhood who was, while unarmed, shot down by
policemen, the narrator feels an internal impulse to deviate from the
Brotherhood’s “scientific” abstract rhetoric and speak spontaneously and
passionately to the attendees of the funeral. His speech appeals to a racial
identity and directly attributes Clifton’s death to racism. The next day, the
white leaders of the Brotherhood meet with the narrator and criticize him
forgiving such an “unscientific” passionate speech and for mourning Clifton,
who the Brotherhood had condemned for his disobedience and for abandoning the Brotherhood.
The narrator argues with the white committee of Brotherhood leaders, explaining
to them that he found it in the best interests of the community to mourn
Clifton despite any misdeeds he may have done at the end of his life, because
Clifton’s death was representative of the underlying issue of racism. It is at
this point that Brother Jack, the most influential Brother on the committee,
reveals to him that their organization, despite being racially integrated, does
not intend to serve as a means of empowering blacks, but as another way to
control them and convince them to follow the orders of whites:
“’…and you were not
hired to think. Had you forgotten that? If so, listen to me: You were not hired to think.’
… So here it is, naked and old and rotten. So now it’s out in the open… ‘For all of us,
the committee does the thinking. For all of us. And you were hired to talk” (Ellison)
Brother Jack’s opposition to the
narrator’s actions stems not from any decision about how wise or unwise they
were, but from the narrator’s defiance. The Brotherhood committee holds
obedience to the orders of the whites in power above the judgment of African
American Brothers and above the best interests of the black residents of Harlem
that the narrator speaks for. In doing so, the white Brothers reveal that even
if their message advocates for social equality and defends the downtrodden,
they still seek to maintain the power structure the narrator experienced
earlier in life; they ultimately seek to control the African Americans advancement
of social justice causes, so that anything the African Americans do achieve is
not reflective of their own fortitude and will, but of the white elite’s
“generosity.” Just as the superintendent and the white elite of the narrator’s
hometown granted the narrator with an opportunity for success in such a manner
that he was not the engine of his own achievement, the white elite in the
Brotherhood present the narrator with the opportunity to advance the political
causes he believes in such that he is nothing more than a puppet following the
commands of the white men in control of the Brotherhood. Both the
superintendent and the Brotherhood help the narrator in a way that only
contributes to his invisibility, because they both deprive him of the
opportunity to achieve his goals due to his own character, forcing him instead
to do so by submitting to being controlled by the whites in power.
The metaphor of invisibility is
extremely applicable to the modern LGBT struggle for civil rights and social
acceptance, because today’s society is at a similar point with respect to the
LGBT struggle as Ellison’s 1940’s America was with respect to the
African-American struggle for civil rights and social acceptance. In both
societies, the minority in question faces a number or stereotypes that are passionately,
and often unintentionally, perpetuated by members of both the dominant culture
and the minority culture. As a result, LGBT Americans are often not seen as
human beings, but as a collection of stereotypes, causing them to be, in
effect, “invisible.”
LGBT invisibility stems from an
undercurrent of sexualism in society that often goes unnoticed because it is
integrated into the status quo, much like the way the narrator witnesses a
latent racism and the white power structure that is integrated into the
structure of even those organizations that seem to advance African Americans
place in society. LGBT stereotypes are still very much an actuality in American
discourse that are very rarely denounced in the slightest; due to this, many do
not recognize their status as stereotypes and continue to think about LGBT
relations in a manner that prevents LGBT individuals from being recognized as
socially equal human beings by those around them.
Just like the stereotypes the
narrator struggles against in “Invisible
Man”, stereotypes that LGBT individuals face today begin in the way that
those in the dominant and conventional culture endorse a notion of “normalcy”
and what it involves to be human that is to some extent denied to those in the
minority and unconventional culture. Those in power distribute this notion
throughout society, such that almost all Americans play a role in the
perpetuation of the sexualism and LGBT stereotypes that contribute to LGBT
invisibility.
As in Ellison’s 1940’s America,
there still exist significant parts of modern society that are plagued with obvious
sexualism and that enable the oppression of LGBT Americans. In many
environments, the prevalent mindset is exceedingly hostile towards LGBT
individuals, and LGBT individuals face constant threats of alienation,
criticism, and harassment. In some of the more conservative regions of America,
LGBT-targeted bullying is a significant problem owing to the culture in such
areas alone – but even at a well-regarded university in New Jersey, harassment
of LGBT individuals can make a powerful impact.
In late 2010, a student at Princeton
University secretly taped Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi having sex
with another man multiple times and posted the videos of the encounters on the
Internet. Posting the videos online in effect revealed Clementi’s sexual
orientation as being gay to the campus community, as Clementi had otherwise not
made his sexual orientation public. Clementi was so gravely traumatized by the
harassment that he committed suicide shortly after. Clementi’s suicide was the
last of four different incidents in which LGBT teens were harassed for their
sexuality into suicide to occur in a span of three weeks. Incidents like these
make it clear to LGBT Americans that even in the moderately tolerant coastal
regions of America, and even in the communities of well-regarded universities,
sexualism exists and can make campus environments extremely hostile to LGBT
individuals.
In such environments, LGBT individuals are
often forced to deal with with invisibility, because they must choose to either
hide their sexuality and romantic desires from the world, or risk potentially
life-threatening harassment and alienation. In this way, LGBT individuals are
unable to freely express an essential and significantly important part of human
identity: the sexual and romantic impulse. Sexuality and love are perhaps the
most primary contributors to one’s humanity, which is why it is so
fundamentally debasing those LGBT individuals, are forced to hide this aspect
of themselves from society in order to assure their safety and social
well-being. Thus, those around ‘closeted’ LGBT individuals – that is, those who
hide their sexuality from the world –do not see these individuals as who they
are but instead see them distorted through a lens of forced assimilation and
hetero-normativity. They do not see an sincere and unfiltered expression of
LGBT individuals’ identities, and thus do not really “see” these individuals at
all, making LGBT Americans, in effect, invisible.
When LGBT individuals do “come out
of the closet” and make an effort to express themselves honestly as individuals
and confirm their identities, the result is often violence or severe
alienation, since, in homophobes’ eyes, these individuals lose their status as
human beings. Homophobes too see sexuality and love as integral parts of the
human identity and experience, but do not offer this qualification to
non-heterosexual sexuality and love. Their inability, and in some cases refusal,
to comprehend and accept LGBT love and sexuality makes them fail to perceive
LGBT individuals as human beings, since they “see through” this substantial part
of LGBT identity. Because homophobes qualify LGBT individuals as “less human” due
to their inability to completely experience sexuality and love heterosexually,
they find it morally justifiable to harass, bully, hurt, or kill these
individuals.
To protest the invisibility confronted
by these students, LGBT activist networks have proclaimed April 15 to be a
national “Day of Silence” on which participating individuals take a day-long
vow of silence to symbolically represent the silencing of LGBT students in
America. The symbolism underlying the National Day of Silence parallels with
the invisibility metaphor Ellison develops in Invisible Man; LGBT individuals
are compelled by social pressures to remain “silent” with respect to their
sexual orientations, thus obscuring their sexual and romantic impulses – which
make up an enormously significant part of an individual’s identity and humanity
– from the world. The “silence” protested by those partaking in the Day of
Silence is what condemns LGBT Americans in today’s society to the same
invisibility experienced by Ellison’s narrator in Invisible Man. The mere fact
that the silencing of LGBT students is such a significant issue today that an
annual day of protest is still held to raise awareness of the issue is are
flection of how deep-seated the sexualist tendencies that lead to LGBT
invisibility are. Because America features a hetero-normative culture and the
majority of Americans are heterosexual, LGBT Americans’ sexualities remain
hidden by default unless these individuals make the decision to “come out” to
their community and reveal their sexualities to the world. Unlike race, sexuality is not immediately
apparent, and it is only through coming out that an LGBT individual can
overcome invisibility in a hetero-normative society. As long as the
undercurrent of sexualism that dissuades LGBT Americans from coming out exists,
LGBT invisibility will be a widespread and persistent struggle that most LGBT
individuals have to face.
Despite the advances the LGBT rights
movement has made in recent years, there remains an inescapable institutional
sexualism in many parts of human society that renders LGBT individuals’ civil
rights insecure. Civil rights are an essential institutional recognition of an
individual as a human being deserving of certain inborn freedoms and opportunities
that should not be violated. By denying LGBT individuals certain rights that
are otherwise theoretically to be universal to all humans, sexualist
institutions regard LGBT individuals as something lesser than humans; these
institutions are blind to LGBT individuals’ humanity and they thus perpetuate
LGBT invisibility.
The LGBT rights movement had success
when the US Congress passed a bill repealing the US military’s “Don’t Ask,
Don’t Tell” policy concerning LGBT individuals serving in the military. The
DADT policy inhibited LGBT individuals from serving openly in the military. The
repercussions of DADT for LGBT individuals are simple: either LGBT individuals
must acknowledge a denial of the right to serve in the military afforded to all
other capable citizens, which amounts to the government’s denial of LGBT
Americans’ civil rights and, by expansion, their humanity, or they must
suppress their sexuality if they wish to serve in the military. The former
option renders LGBT individuals invisible in the eyes of the government, for
invisibility is, in substance, the result of a denial of another individual’s
humanity. The latter option is nothing more than a call for an LGBT
individual’s self-inflicted invisibility for the length of their service in the
armed forces. LGBT Americans that wish to serve in the military had no choice
under DADT; they were forced to either accept institutional invisibility or
accept self-imposed invisibility.
The most prevalent issue in the
politics and activism surrounding gay rights has been and continues to be that
of the right to same-sex marriage. On April 1, 2001, the Netherlands became the
first jurisdiction to legally recognize same-sex marriage; Massachusetts became
the first US state to do so in 2004. However, as of now, same-sex couples can
only legally marry in nine of the fifty states, and only three additional
states acknowledge same-sex marriages legally performed outside of the states.
Efforts to transformation the status quo and to legalize gay marriage face
substantial opposition from religious groups who object to homosexuality on
moral grounds and do not want to see the state condoning or recognizing it.
Numerous initiatives have been mounted to “define marriage to be between a man
and a woman” or to “protect the traditional institution of marriage.”
Marriage is the definitive act of an
institution recognizing the legitimacy of a couple’s love, commitment, and
sexuality; denying marriage to homosexuals by “defining marriage to be between
a man and a woman” is, in effect, denying to acknowledge the legitimacy of LGBT
love. By extension, this amounts to a negation to recognize a significant
aspect of LGBT humanity. Conceivably the next most momentous objective of the
LGBT activist community is to protect adoption rights for LGBT couples. There
is no federal law governing the legitimacy of LGBT adoption, but instances of
this has only established its legitimacy in twenty of the fifty states, and
five states have explicitly outlawed LGBT adoption. The efforts to refuse LGBT
couples adoption rights are possibly as offensive and as conspicuously bad as
attempts to deny marriage rights; childbearing is just as fundamental a human
activity as is love and sexuality; furthermore, love, sexuality, and
childbearing are intimately intertwined, and all of these must be taken into
account in order to fully recognize the legitimacy of homosexual relations.
LGBT Americans who are deprived of the
right to marry and adopt children by their governments are forbidden civil
rights that extend to heterosexual citizens. Since civil rights serve as an
institutional acknowledgement of one’s status as a human being, these LGBT
Americans who are robbed of civil rights are not recognized fully as humans in
the eyes of the institutions that govern them; in essence, these individuals
are “invisible” in the eyes of their government.
Attempts to support and transform the
system are usually a legitimate means of confirming LGBT identity and humanity,
and a necessary step to battle institutional sexualism and work to battle LGBT
invisibility. However, these movements are often met with counter-movements
that endorse ideologies that further seek to perpetuate LGBT invisibility. The
most prominent opposition to movements for LGBT acceptance and civil rights
comes from the powerful American conservative Christian lobby.
Numerous verses of the Bible “allegedly”
condemn homosexual behavior as sinful, which often serve as moral justification
for homophobic behavior or moral criticisms of LGBT rights movements. Not all
Christian organizations accept the sinfulness of homosexuality as an important
part of Christian doctrine, but among those who do, the most socially harmful organizations
are undoubtedly those responsible for organizing what is known as the “ex-gay
movement.”
The ex-gay movement is most contentious
for its claims that homosexuality can be “cured” through the use of “conversion
therapy.” Ex-gay organizations such as Exodus International and People Can
Change offer services for “Christian homosexuals” who wish to eliminate their
homosexuality, pledging to help homosexuals “pray away the gay.” Focus on the
Family, an influential Christian conservative lobby and one of the strongest
proponents of conversion therapy, cites an oft-criticized 2009 study confirming
that religious meditation can change one’s sexual orientation. Despite this,
most conventional health organizations disapprove conversion therapy as
pseudoscience, and no major medical organization has endorsed its legitimacy.
As of now, the scientific and
medical consensus is that conversion therapy is psychologically damaging and
can arouse unnecessary feelings of remorse, fretfulness, and low self-esteem,
leading to depression or even suicide. Despite the fact that the American
Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association maintain
that current research has established that homosexuality and bisexuality are normal
variants of human sexual behavior, ex-gay organizations endorse the belief that
homosexuality is a lifestyle choice that is ethically wrong and therefore a
reflection of poor character.
Claiming homosexuality is a choice rationally
implies that homosexual yearnings are not fundamental impulses (as are
heterosexual desires) and thus that LGBT desires are not a consideration of
one’s humanity, but rather of a lack thereof. The reality that this choice is
associated with sin and moral wrong in Christian ideology means that many
homosexuals are influenced that a fundamental characteristic of what defines
them and their humanity is abnormal, blemished, and morally contaminated; it is
foreseeable that the scientific community has found that such an ideology can be
the precedent for individuals that lead to depression and suicide. Such a conviction
compels LGBT individuals either to acknowledge that they are fundamentally
inhuman or to make an effort to “overpower” their homosexuality. Such an exertion
essentially amounts to a self-imposed withholding of the romantic and sexual
impulses that comprise a significant part of LGBT identity – that is,
self-imposed invisibility. Trying to “pray away the gay” is a methodical and translucent
attempt to make LGBT individuals conform into heterosexual culture and destroy expression
of their identities at all costs, guaranteeing their invisibility.
Throughout “Invisible Man”, the narrator perceives many expressions of racism
and comes to comprehend that every facet of society influences him to accept
invisibility in one way or another. At the conclusion of the novel, the
narrator comes to terms with his invisibility, and even settles that
invisibility is sometimes a trait to be incorporated and taken advantage of. He
retreats from society into a basement underneath a whites-only apartment
complex to make his home in what he describes as his “hole of invisibility.” It
is here that the narrator reflects on his journey and comes to understand the
fundamental pressure that has defined his struggle throughout the novel:
“Whence all this passion
toward conformity anyway? – Diversity is the word. Why,
if they follow this conformity business they’ll end up by forcing me, an invisible man, to
become white, which is not a color but a lack of one. Must I strive towards
colorlessness? (Ellison).
The narrator determines the “passion
toward conformity” as the fundamental social difficulty that he has been grappling
against throughout the course of his life. Instead, he demands an embracing of
“diversity” – which, in the context of the deconstructionist, existentialist
tone and message of “Invisible Man”,
can be interpreted as a call for Americans to embrace the identity that emerges
from one’s mind and individuality, rather than accepting socially prescribed
ideology and suppressing one’s identity in the process.
Indeed, when each person is identified
by his own internal impulses and emotions alone and none adopt ideologies and
philosophies that are suggested by others, society has reached the height of diversity.
It is worth noting that the narrator’s resentment of being forced to “become
white” and his condemnation of white’s colorlessness is not an assertion of the
inferiority of the white race or culture but instead should be read as a
metaphorical condemnation of the bland, soulless nature of the ultimately
homogenous society.
Ellison’s narrator struggles with
the pressure to conform in the context of race relations and social protest,
but the message he reveals in the epilogue applies to a wider, more universal
struggle: that of individuality versus conformity. Ellison’s existentialist
call to action fits neatly into the modern LGBT struggle with invisibility,
particularly with respect to the invisibility LGBT Americans are pressured to
impose upon themselves. The narrator’s existentialism appeals to the value of
defining oneself based on inner passions and emotions – and what are sexuality
and love but terms for those inner passions and emotions that are most visceral
and crucial to the human experience? Ellison’s narrator in Invisible Man seems
to have come to peace with the pressures he has combated against for most of
his life by embracing that which he values as the most important influence on
human thought and action: his own internal impulses and emotions.
Applied to the LGBT struggle with
sexualism and invisibility, the narrator makes one thing clear: above all else,
the most important thing to preserve in fighting the pressures imposed on an
individual by the society around him is one’s definition of self. To LGBT
Americans, this amounts to a calling to embrace the totality of one’s identity
as they see it, regardless of what pressures may convince them to do otherwise,
be they from government, from peers, or from religion. The narrator’s calling
goes out not to the wider society or to the bigots and sexualists that
perpetuate LGBT invisibility, but to the invisible LGBT men and women
themselves: however you are seen by the society around you and by the
institutions that govern you, and whether you are inside or outside of the
proverbial closet, do not suppress what you know to be who you are; do not make
the mistake of “striving towards colorlessness.” Instead appreciate, celebrate,
and embrace your “color,” whatever it may be.
Works Cited
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York City,
NY: Vintage International, 1947. Paperback.
