Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson is about a girl, Melinda, with a secret she is so freighted of even thinking about she locks up her speech in order to keep herself sane and protected. Melinda is feel so violated after an encounter with IT at a party she feels as though her very self has been lost. She spends the entire book trying to figure out what part of her has been lost and how to make it through high school being incomplete.

Melinda dissects every part of her life, body and soul looking for a ‘closet’ to hid the secret she is keeping. Don Latham looks at this ‘closet’ for both the metaphorically and physical in this essay Melinda’s Closet: Trauma and the Queer Subtext of Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak Latham tries to compare the two closest Melinda hides away in with the metaphorical ‘in the closet’ that has come to mean a homosexual who has not told anyone they are in fact gay.

Latham says that “Melinda’s performative strategies are designed largely to conceal and to deflect attention. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that she adopts a performative strategy long associated with the gay identity – namely, the closet.” (12) I’m not entirely sure where he gets off saying that largely to conceal and to deflect attention is a gay identity. It seems to me that it is a human identity to deflect what we don’t want others to see or know, to only show attention to what we want them to see. Magicians do this all of the time in their shows, creating a scene you can’t take your eyes off so they can hide their assistant in the back part of the ‘closet’.

Latham continues in saying, “the reticence of closeted gay people concerning their sexuality hits to the very secret inscribed with in the closet’s boundaries.” (13) When reading this I get the impression that only gay people have big secrets about sex. My next thought is about the phrase, ‘he has a lot of skeletons hiding in his closest!’ Does that mean any person this phrase is uttered about is gay? I think not. How many politicians have tried to keep secrets about who they have had sex with while running for office (regardless of male or female)? What is it about secrets which ultimately go to being homosexual?

Every person which to deflect certain attention or hide secrets that they feel make harm them. Just because poor Melinda finds solace in a small room where there is enough space for her to be alone and not be suffocated by the outside world Latham believes this is a subtext for homosexuality. Melinda is like every person wishing to rediscover themselves, to find out they have not become incomplete and they have truly not lost any part of themselves.

I feel most safe in bed with my stuffed bear, Huggy Bear, or at the top of a climbing wall getting ready to be lowered by my husband. I hope everyone could feel that safe.