From the Closet To the Grave: Architecture, Sexuality and the Mount Royal Cemetery

This paper argues that the burials of individuals who engaged, or were speculated to have engaged, in same-sex relations in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were in constant relation to the material and metaphoric closet. Due to limited archival material concerning cases of same-sex activity in Montreal, Canada, I look out toward international grave sites to construct a framework for analysis. Using case studies from French and American cemeteries alongside those in Mount Royal Cemetery in Montreal, I argue that, for those whose memory is directed by the living, the grave functions much like the closet—closing or disclosing what institutions and society deemed “abominable.” However, more powerful individuals were able to subvert the authority of the cemetery by immortalizing their “romantic friendships” in the grave. By navigating the binaries of the closet—closure/disclosure, hetero/homosexual and repression/pride— the grave has the potential to function as an important archive of identity, sexuality and memory.


The article 'Israeli Supreme Court Rejects Family Petition To Bury Trans
Woman As Their 'Son',' published by Buzzfeed in 2015, outlines how the parents of trans-activist May Peleg sought to commemorate her as "their son." 1 Emphasizing burial as an instrument to rectify her gender and sexuality, the spatial realities of the closet embedded in this article parallel the burials of those who engaged in same-sex relations in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 2 The article speaks to the continued presence of the closet-closing or disclosing gender and sexuality-in death. 'The closet is a shaping presence', argues Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick 'the fundamental feature of social life'. 3 I would like to suggest this 'shaping presence' extends to the afterlife as well, revealing unseen and complex entanglements between sexuality, architecture and memory.
As I argue, the graves of more affluent individuals-in full control of their memory-reveal potential subversions of these binaries through coded linguistic and architectural gestures.

Secrets, Closets and Graves
The closet is an architectural, social and literary convention interwoven with sexual identity invoking binary oppositions between interior/ exterior, storage/room, pride/repression, and homo/heterosexuality.
The grave suggests a similar set of oppositions: public/private, death/ life, city/cemetery, and flesh/stone. Before it was defined as to conceal or cease to conceal sexuality, the closet was described architecturally as a room for privacy, a place of devotion, and a repository of valuables. 4 It was eventually absorbed with the structure of the home in the nineteenth century as an uninhabitable space-moral property that concealed objects threatening to soil the room it served. 5 These forms of concealed storage were centers of order that protected the home from disorder and conflict. Hence, the term "skeleton in the closet" denoted a 'private or concealed trouble, ever present, and ever liable to come into view'. 6 Thus the skeleton or secret of homosexuality was contained within the closet preventing its extension into the home.
This reinforces the closet and grave as relational constructions, specifically concerning what others know or do not know about an individual. If the homosexual body is in constant relation to the architectural closet, it implies the final storage of the body, the grave, containing both the material and metaphoric skeleton.
The old churchyards of Montreal were places of fixed order unlike the new rural cemetery, built in 1854 on the northern slope of Mount Royal-then at the city's edge. 7 It was a metropolis; a cosmopolitan space at its core that granted an individual a place in the landscape of memory. Yet, this claim was not always offered to all. The new cemetery was a political and social vehicle for the Protestant English community that restricted spaces for the poor, adjacent religious affiliations, and other unwanted groups to its fringes as shown in an early plan from 1852 by Sidney and Neff Architects that excluded the common grounds for the poor and adjacency to the French Catholic cemetery Cimetière Notre-Dames-des-Neiges. 8 Though intended as a space for all to receive a respectable burial, Mount Royal cemetery reflected the order of the city and society; a controlled space with a controlled memory. 9 The cemetery constituted and organized the bodies of the dead, traces of which can be read through the architecture within. The structures and their epitaphs acted as confessions, affirming sexual orientation and its conformity to accepted standards in stone for eternity. These forms of architectural disclosure follow Michel Foucault's assertion that sex and sexuality became something that had to be confessedspecifically in the religious context that the cemetery served-while simultaneously 'mediating its insidious presence'. 10 The monuments to prominent families, like the McCord Sarcophagus ( Figure 1) that celebrates politicians and museum founders, and those of institutions, like the Fireman's Monument (Figure 2), reinforced prescribed gender roles corresponding to Victorian Montreal. This constructed vision often contrasted the family's inner workings, limiting the visibility of working-class women by placing them in constant relation to their husbands or fathers, celebrating working-class male brotherhood and sacrifice as foundations for model masculinity, and establishing a secure family unit by constructing plots as mirrors to the ideal Fig. 1 The epitaphs on the McCord Sarcophagus demonstrate the importance of familial relations that reinforced prescribed gender roles. Domestic roles and relationships to their husband or father's define the memory of the female McCords while Institutional titles such as "Founder", "President," and "Honourable" as well as military ranks including "Captain" and "Colonel" immortalize the male McCords. Photograph by author. Fig. 2 The funerary monuments within Mount Royal Cemetery emphasized heteronormative ideals of masculinity, such as the Fireman's Monument. Those who belonged to benevolent societies that exemplified ideal characteristics of the male gender, such as the Fire Brigade and the military, were designated space within the landscape of memory. Carved from stone, the structure reflects notions of strength, sacrifice, and honour as foundations for nineteenth-century male identity and positions the monument as an icon of masculine virtue. Photograph by author.
organization of the home-dragging domestic roles and spaces into the cemetery. 11 The new cemetery was not only a place for burial but contained the sexual politics that permeated nineteenth-century Montreal. 'Churchyards and cemeteries are scenes not only calculated to improve the morals and the taste, and by their botanical riches to cultivate the intellect, but they serve as historical records', wrote John Claudius Loudon. 12 The cemetery became a moral educational environment that emphasized the expectations of sexuality for the Protestant community of Montreal.

Authors, Bachelors and a Demon Angel
What became of those who did not conform to this moral vision? As George Chauncey has illustrated in New York, men in Montreal rarely "came out" but were dragged out of their homes and public places by the police, while the media extended this outing of criminal activity into the social worlds they inhabited. 13 Yet, within the cemetery, those accused of "abominable" crimes appear absent from the city's collective memory. 14 Moise Tellier, for example, was a fruit seller who operated out of his home In 1916, author Henry James was laid to rest in the James' family plot in Cambridge Cemetery. After his death, James' literary works and letters came under the authority of his family who embarked on a campaign to purify the potential homoerotic content of the correspondence, even restricting access to the letters of his associates and those held at Harvard. Though James had wanted to distance his literary legacy from his personal life, the multi-generational guard over the author's works and letters continued until 2000 illustrating that the family had a much more influential role in the "closeting" of his memory. 20 Like the campaign, the grave functioned as an instrument for the family to veil his suspected desire.
James' physical positioning in the plot, delineated within the cemetery by a brick wall bearing the "James" family name, assisted in concealing the potential non-heterosexuality in his work. He rests beside his mother, father, and brother, consolidating the nuclear family structure while the consistent profiles of the tombstones reflect a biological family connection-shared family traits rendered in stone as similar physical characteristics. Absent of ornament, James' tombstone reads 'Novelist- writings, concluding that he is divorced from discourses surrounding his sexuality. 21 Like James' Bachelor character, his grave is disconnected from any discussion of sexuality following the argument that Victorian domestic privacy required presentation as 'a visual representation of having nothing to hide'. 22 Thus, to rectify his domesticated and feminized nature, the placement of James' tombstone within the plot and relational epitaph physically and textually presents him as a parallel to the patriarchal figure of his father Henry James Sr., void of any secret desire.
The material nature of the closet, in each case, was a significant force in positioning the bodies and memories of the deceased. The binaries of in/out were perhaps the most important forces influencing these commemorative structures. As opposed to navigating the closet, the graves and the bodies within were constituted by it; their material and metaphoric skeletons of sexuality either closed or disclosed.

Siblings, Mothers and Maids
The grave can also complicate, caught between closing and disclosing, like    Both the closet and the grave are documents of trauma, becoming central to rectifying absences in collective memory. Situated political violence concerning same-sex activity in Montreal suggests the absence of grave is a continuation of the archival closet. Institutions do not extend the same archival privilege to those convicted of "indecent acts" as the elite families in the cemetery. Their traces appear in newspaper clippings that, like the closet, are not part of the room or museum but located at the edge; present yet concealed. Thus, much of this research focused on more affluent or aristocratic individuals whose memories were not defined by archives that inevitably fail to contain an image of pre-liberation same-sex activity in Montreal. 33 As an archive, the grave may be the last vestige of these men in the city they once inhabited, potentially filled with personal and collective memory.
Not part of an institutional collection but an active element of the city, the grave may construct a false history, challenging the authenticity of memory while containing secret truths. Shelley Hornstein has described this challenge to authenticity as anti-memory, or a particular form of remembrance that involves 'the making of a place that derives its order from the obscuring of its own recollected past'. 34 The grave universalizes, commemorating unstable perceptions of sexuality, and it particularises, identifying the memory of a particular individual and their desire. This follows Kosofsky-Segwick's argument that queer individuals 'are located within an irreducible set of minoritizing and universalizing views on sexuality. These two views contrast the ideas that people really are gay while simultaneously preserving that desire is inherently unstable'. 35 The need to locate these graves-unpacking their relationship with the material and metaphoric closet-will remain integral to continuing to assemble an image of same-sex desire that challenges existing narratives, both nationally and internationally. Whether it functions to close, disclose, or oscillate, the grave is an important, if not integral, component of queer memory.
In embracing the Redpath Monument as an archive or form of anti-memory that refuses to entirely close or disclose, telling truths and lies, offers a window into the power/knowledge structures that continue to position our bodies and memory. In acknowledging the enduring relations to the metaphoric closet embedded in architecture, the monument suggests how we may navigate these structures from the closet to the grave.  To avoid confusion between modern sexual identity and the behaviours of the past, I refer to acts before 1900 as "sex between men" or "same-sex relations" while occasionally titling this "homosexuality" to make my point, though this term was not used. After 1900, these acts between men begin to exist within a "homosexual subculture." The term "queer" became articulated and more prominent after 1920. See for example Gary William Kinsman, The Regulation of Desire: Sexuality in Canada (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1987); George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940(New York: Basic Books, 1994; John D'Emilio. Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983; Joy Park and Mark Rosenfeld, eds., Gender and History in Canada (Toronto: Copp Clark Ltd, 1996); Mary C. Hurley, Sexual Orientation and Legal Rights: A Chronological Overview (Ottawa: Parliamentary Information and Research Services, 2005); Terry Chapman, "'An Oscar Wilde type': 'the abominable crime of buggery ' in Western Canada, 1890-1920," Criminal Justice History 4 (1983Terry Chapmen, "Sex Crimes in Western Canada, 1890-1920" (PhD Diss., University of Alberta, 1984. Ibid., 33. Ibid., 45. 20 Colm Toibin,"Colm Toibin: how Henry James' tried to keep him in the closet," The Guardian, February 20, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/ books/2016/feb/20/colm-toibin-how-henry-james-family-tried-to-keep-him-in-the-closet (accessed November 2, 2017). For an in-depth reading of the sexual dimension of James' works see "Histories of Sexuality in The Portrait of a Lady and The Bostonian," in Jeffrey Tambling, Henry James (Bassingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 2, 48-77; "The Beast in the Closet -Henry James," in Epistemology of the Closet, 185 -212. 21 Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 202. Sedgwick also argues that James' writing alludes to his attempts to remain in the closet, the secret and submerged subject of his work. Ibid., 250.