So many people (and publications) seem concerned about whether this or that celebrity is out of the closet enough, as if I should care about "celebrity".
James Fallows offers a fine paean to Edward Seidensticker:
Although he would be the last person to describe himself as typical of anything, he illustrated two larger trends. He learned Japanese to serve as a Marine Corps translator during World War II, part of an important generation of American scholars, businessmen, journalists, and diplomats who became Japanologists thanks to wartime experience. And, to be careful in phrasing a point he did not publicly discuss, after the war many Western homosexuals found the Japan of the Fifties and onward a more comfortable and attractive environment than their homelands at that time.
He was a talented, honorable, and accomplished man.
Do we diminish our lives and our history if we pass into the night, acknowledged for our life's work but still invisible with respect to our life's love?
Yes, in the long run.
Silence in death is a capitulation to the deadly stigmatizations or contrived social shames that would keep a light under a bushel. For an individual, final witness to the panoply of gay lives is a moral affirmation, not a social or civic obligation. It facilitates orienting people to the Truth in creation.
While "private lives" might have been a useful contrivance during life for ships to pass without colliding (and continues to be the outmoded prescription from those still squeamishly homophobic or ambitious just enough to declare another 'class' unfit), it's important not to get inured to that construct, so as to miss the final exit without a bow and a nod.
