This weekend's events, and their coinciding with the anniversary of Stonewall, are an emotional time for any gay, bisexual, or trans person. New York's adoption of gay marriage, and its embrace of true equal rights, is a clarion call to us all. It's also an occasion for self examination, confession, and new resolve. This is a long read, for which I apologize, but then I have a lot to tell. I'm even egotistical enough to think it might help sonebody, at least in an admonitory way.
I've always been a closet case. Partly that's been out of fear, partly it's been out of confusion (since I've also been atrracted to women). At 57, I've seen the entire course of the gay rights movement in my sentient lifetime, and I'm happy for (and a little envious of) those who are young now or will come after, who will have their paths to their true selves so much easier laid than I and my elders did. My path in particular has been filled with mistakes, self-hatred, denial, and temporixing. I write in the hope that I can keep at least a few other people from making the same mistakes.
At least one study has claimed that each older brother you have increases your odds of being a gay man by between 28 and 43%. I wish someone had told me that when I was a kid. Then I would have understood why the most important thing about playing Superman, to me, was the cape. Or why, along with playing war with by buddies, I had my mother teach me embroidery when I was 8. Or why I was such a drama queen as a kid, crying over most anything and everything. Or why I had an odd fascination with professional wrestling - not with rhe fake grappling per se (and God knows not with the ugly practitioners of the art), but with the concept of being ritually "beaten" to submission. My older brothers (who, make no mistake, loved and love me immensely) did their best to push me to be tough. And I knew I had to be tough - we were poor, it was a small town. I dropped the embroidery, ditched the capes, repressed my crying (and any ability to be tickled), and closed myself off emotionally. Before I ever knew what sex was, the closet had me shut off from my own self.
No wonder, when I did discover sex, I compartmentalized it too. That's what you did with strong feelings.
In 1965, 1966, every middle school kid knew the terms - faggor, queer, pussy, homo. We used them casually, with only a glancing comprehension of their real meaning. It was a generalized expression of contempt. It was at once hurtful and embarrassing to endure, and at the same time meaningless because the epithets were thrown about so freely. But they were thrown at me a lot, which made little sense to me. I was a big, athletic kid, and smart. I dimly understood peer envy, but I didn't have enough self regard to think that there was much about me to be envious of (compartmentalizing yourself does that to you, too). They perhaps saw me more clearly than I saw myself.
One day in the late summer of 1966, I got into a teasing argument in front of the local Acme with a kid a grade behind me (but just about my age - my birthday made me the youngest in my class) who I'll rename Eddie, that ended for some reason with me vowing, "I'll see you naked!" To which Eddie agreed. So we went into a bushy area off the back side of the Acme parking lot and saw each other naked, and in a state you can imagine. We pretended to wrestle (I let him win), and after a while we dressed and left.
We did that a few more times before winter set in. Then, one snowy day in my room, fully clothed, i kissed his neack while we wrestled, not knowing why or what he might do in response - hit me, run out and call me a faggot, who knew.
He kissed me back, and not on the cheek.
I'll spare you the list of what our sexual practices were that day, or became (and they were, frankly, pretty timid). This is, after all, a family blog, and I've probably already gone over the line. Suffice it to say that we continued meeting, from time to time, all through our high school years, though Eddie would often let agonizingly long periods of time, with numerous phone calls from me in which I'd laconically invite him to "come on over", to pass between our meetings. Nor was this any sort of passionate adolescent love. Eddie was dumb as a post, and uttely uninterested in anything aside from the business at hand. And when he'd leave, I would invariably freak out, dousing my torso with rubbing alcohol in an effort to get clean again.
So I was officially a faggot. It terrified me. I had no one to talk to about it, no one to confide in, no way to express the fear and exhilaration and shame and lust I felt, much less sort it all out. So I compartmentalized it, and put my deepest feelings neatly away in a box, believing that I could access them only as needed and use them only at my conscious direction.
You got a lot of filmstrips and lectures in health class in those days, and a lot were about the evils of just about every kind of sex. Hell, my own oldest brother warned me off masturbation by claiming that it would lead to my children having birth defects or being mentally retarded (using the term as it was then sorry if that gives offense to anyone). The class materials about homosexuality, however, were truly awful. Diseased minds, predatory old men, ruined lives, shamed families, destroyed careers - this was the fate of the depraved homosexual. I believed every word of it, sort of. I knew what I did with Eddie was loathsome to just about everybody else on earth, even though I craved it with a guilty passion. I also knew that I didn't want to end up in a police wagon wearing sloppy makeup and an ill fitting dress, humiliated beyond words - which seemd to me the only end result to openly adopting the idea of being queer. So I tried, even as I indulged. I played football (which, given how skinny I remained all through high school, was a major error - I got pasted, and had a latent fear of contact I could never quite suppress), I did Boy Scouts (and barely kept myself from coming on to my bunkmates - most of the time), I was a star student, I was the All-American boy, respectably attired in jacket and tie when everybody else was descending into being damn hippies.
And I was a faggot, forever self conscious and looking over my shoulder to see if I'd slipped up in some way, and if so plotting how to cover for it. Getting a scholarship to attend a local all boys prep school didn't help things, either. If I thought teenage boys were cute - and wow, did I ever - teenage boys in jackets and ties were beyond endurance (think Harry Potter).
Stonewall happened up in New York City the summer after my sophomore year (we lived in central New Jersey), and to be honest there was little real publicity about it at the time. The news had some disparaging stories about delinquents and vandals in Greenwich Village, and then some patronizing stories about people protesting and calling themselves "gay." My brothers were contemptuous. But I followed the story as much as I could. There were other, real people out there like me! And they didn't all appear to be freaks (though the news folks always seemed to manage to find the gooniest people to interview on camera - some things never change).
At prep school, I was especially careful. Faggot jokes, and rumors of liaisons between students, were everywhere. That was where the real news about Stonewall eventually filtered into my consciousness, that following school year. Part of me rejoiced that some people had the guts to fight for their true identities. Part of me feared that I might be confronted with the need to show similar courage. And the compartments got even more segregated and airtight, as I protected my little secret from everybody - except, of course, the few guys I slept with as time went on.
The only time they nearly broke was in college, when I fell in love with my roommate. He was my best friend, the closest thing to a true confidant I've ever had. And he was very straight. Keeping the compartments sealed was well nigh impossible, and i know I let slip far more than I ever should have. But I never admitted the fullness of my feelings to him, however much he probably saw through me. I live in California now because he lived here, and I first came here driving across the country with him - and his girlfriend, with whom he slept nightly.
Talk about bad for the head.
I only contemplated suicide once, when he decided we wouldn't room together senior year. I ran, sobbing, several miles to a cliff, stared down its face, and ran back even faster.
I loved my wife deeply - so deeply I told her about myself, fully, early in our dating relatiuonship. I had to get past my roommate, who was by then practically married himself. I tried to be open, and for a while I succeeded, to an extent anyway. But the instinct to compartmentalize is strong, and it works insidiously. I never cheated during our marriage, though my increasing emotional closedness gave her ample reason to suspect otherwise, and justifiably. The distance that resulted grew between us, and after 28 years it fell apart. I will never be with a woman again.
I can cry again now. I do it a lot, it seems. I'm ticklish once more, to my current boyfriend's delight. But the compartments, the instinctive hiding of yourself, doesn't go away like turning off a light switch. I still keep too many secrets, and I still hold back from loving, even from loving a good and gentle man who genuinely cares about me. Those are character flaws, to be sure, but they are also legacies of the twisting effect of the closet. And that, I guess, gets us to the moral of the story: that the closet is hell, and has to be avoided and shattered forever, for all people of whatever sexuality. This has sounded like a sad story, and I suppose as framed it is, though my life has been rich and full and happy (and I plan to have a lot more of that, too). But I can see, from this vantage point, at my age, the manner in which it's been distorted, truncated, and (dare I say) perverted by the pressure, external and internalized, to conform to a norm of sexuality that didn't match my true self. Much of the pain in my life derives from that inevitably fruitless struggle.
Our gay sons and daughters, and their sons and daughter after them, will have chances to live lives true to themselves that I never had (or never had the courage to embrace the way that the true heroes of the gay rights movement did). Our job is to make that way smooth as we go forward, to make sure they don't live their lives in lies and suppression, and to foster a society in which they can thrive on their own terms. We've come so far, and we have so long to go. I'm no role model, but I'm part of the fight now, and I'm done looking back.