From 6/19 on Facebook, an exchange between Aaron Broadwell and me (somewhat expanded in this version):
— AB > AZ: Arnold, I wonder if you knew Miriam Petruck, who died about two months ago. [with the link below:]
Linguist List 36.1873, 6/17/25, “In Memoriam Miriam R.L. Petruck (1952-2025)”: by Hans C. Boas, dated 6/14/25
[beginning:] Dr. Petruck was born April 11, 1952. She received her B.A. in Linguistics from Stony Brook University in New York in 1972 and her M.A. in Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1976. In 1986, she received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, with Prof. Charles J. Fillmore as the head of her dissertation committee. Her dissertation on Hebrew body-part metaphors combined two of her lifelong interests, the scientific study of the Hebrew language and Cognitive Linguistics. Her dissertation was the first one to apply Frame Semantics to linguistic analysis. She became involved in the major research projects which Prof. Fillmore and his colleague Prof. Paul Kay undertook in the 1990s, developing the twin theories of Frame Semantics and Construction Grammar. She participated in the discussions leading to the creation of the FrameNet project (the practical implementation of Frame Semantics) in 1997, helping to define frames and to annotate some of the data in the FrameNet database.
For the rest of her life, she continued to publish and speak about both theories (particularly about Frame Semantics and its application to NLP), at conferences and seminars around the world.
— AZ > AB: I did indeed. Through my regular association with the Berkeley Linguistics Society in the old days. The death notice by Hans Boas on Linguist List focused on her position as a kind of international ambassador for FrameNet.
— AB > AZ: A member of our community of LGBTQ linguists?
— AZ > AB: I believed so, but she kept her private life entirely private, and I had no reason to intrude on her privacy.
Occasionally, I’ve intruded on colleagues’ privacy because I thought they needed help or to warn them that they were behaving dangerously.
And a great many colleagues have revealed details of their private sexual lives to me, because I’m a useful sounding board, someone they can talk with about how to construct decent lives into which their sexual desires, practices, or identities can be integrated. So I can tell you that (a) the variability in sexual expression and sexual lives is stunningly huge, and (b) the number of linguists who are in some sense LGBT+ is very much larger than you probably imagined.
If people do talk to me about their secret lives, their anxieties, fantasies, experiences, dreams, and so on, the deal is: I reserve the right to write about them, but only under pseudonyms with dramatically altered biographical details; otherwise, I assure people that anything they say and anything I might have observed (I have had a rich life in the subterranean worlds of sex between men) is absolutely confidential, now and forever, even after my death.
I get life histories — for a species of narrative anthropology I engage in — and they get some friendly talk, often the information that their situation is not unique. I don’t do therapy, though I sometimes recommend therapists (of particular kinds) and other sorts of help. The people who talk to me are my colleagues and students, my boyfriends and my tricks (I have collected a lot of life histories in the sexual afterglow), and new acquaintances who come to me via my writing in my blog. They all get confidentiality to whatever extent they want. (Often this is startling openness, for which I am immensely grateful, since I think it’s useful for others to become aware of the great variety of life experiences and the ways of composing a life — but withholding one or two pieces of information, as either too painful or too shameful to have made public, and of course I respect those wishes.)
Meanwhile, since roughly 1970 I have been blazingly open about the details of my own life (withholding very little), exposing my feelings and describing my experiences, which are variously awkward, ecstatic, painful, joyful, rewarding, humiliating, triumphant, and badly screwed up. Life is complicated.
June 28, 2025 at 8:51 am |
I recently watched Ride, a biographical documentary of the life of astronaut Sally Ride. I found it very disappointing and sad how Dr. Ride seemed to have been forced to be closeted, by the NASA milieu and the public at large. But your comments above on Dr. Petruck suggest that maybe there was an aspect of personal choice in how Dr. Ride presented herself. Unfortunately, no one can really know now, due to Dr. Ride’s equally sad (and untimely) death from pancreatic cancer.
June 28, 2025 at 10:51 am |
The closet and coming out are both complex matters, and neither is, from either a psychological or a social viewpoint, just one thing. Both are bits of behavior that are, as I am fond of saying, *just stuff*, corresponding to many sorts of “meaning” in different contexts. In a great many contexts, coming out is wonderfully beneficial, and should be gently encouraged for specific people, enthusiastically celebrated publicly; but there are good reasons for staying in the closet in some contexts.
But there are people who are in a sense imprisoned in the closet, entirely comfortable with themselves as lesbian or gay, but would suffer terrible consequences if they came out. I’ve had considerable experience with gay men of this sort, encountered in the subterranean worlds of gay sex; several developed into what were clearly clandestine boyfriends — satisfying sex partners meeting on a regular basis and becoming genuine friends, admiring each other as people, and sharing opinions, enthusiasms, and life stories. Each in a situation where coming out would involve sacrificing a central part of their lives: career military men in the old days, athletes in extremely gay-hostile sports, guys in workplaces that wouldn’t tolerate queers, guys who would certainly be disowned by their families, and so on.
So they made the bargain of the closet. My stance here is that no one should *insist* that other people act heroically and risk ruination. We all make bargains in life, cut our risks, balance pros and cons (people who don’t have a serious personality disorder). Everyone should be allowed to make their own choices here.
Which is why Sally Ride’s case concerns me, as it did you. It certainly *looks* like she was naturally reticent about her sexual desires, practices, and identities, but was in fact forced to stay in the closet (or risk her career) and was not comfortable with that.