Ashleigh Cassemere-Stanfield is an assistant professor of film and media studies at Colgate University. They work at the intersection of Black Studies, Videogame Studies, Queer Theory, Media Theory, and New Materialism. Their research examines the imaginary that subtends artificial intelligence. Specifically, it explores how the abrasive generativity of AI rhymes with a similar generativity within blackness and queerness. They earned their PhD from the University of Chicago and their M.A. from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.Visibility has long been understood to be a trap within societies that are organized around surveillance, data capture, and racial capitalism. As such, opacity has become a key term of resistance for a broad array of scholars and activists working to resist this “scopic vulnerability” (Benjamin, 2020). However, opacity is itself motivated by a desire for transparency, and this makes opacity constitutive of the very crisis it resists. That is, where surveillance, data capture, and racial capitalism threaten us with epistemological foreclosure, these systems first transform those lives into unclassifiable and otherwise obscured bodies whose illegibility occasions renewed investigation, pursuit, and capture. That is, surveillance states first render us opaque in order to then have cause to investigate us and make us visible in highly oppressive ways. This mirrors the “epistemology of the closet” whereby queers are framed as endless and endlessly dangerous secrets whose truth must be investigated and made public (Sedgwick, 1990). Thus, as in life, where one is never done coming out, at the level of the state, this secret can never be exhausted. And so, much then as the epistemology of the closet turns on the production of a secret that can be endlessly adjudicated, the black site also turns on the production of “known unknowns” that can be endlessly intercepted and interrogated (Massumi, 2015). Thus, these systems desire and catalyze the very opacity they refuse. Via a close-reading of the gender undecidability within the videogames Portal and Portal 2, this discussion will show that loosening the double-bind of visibility and opacity requires investigating the closet and the black site for their specific nexus of affect, desire, and ambivalence, as well as for the “cruel optimisms” and complicated negotiations made therein (Berlant, 2012).