It’s mid-afternoon of National Coming Out Day and I’ve yet to see a story on the topic. So I guess I’m elected. Following is what began as a comment in this morning’s Cheers & Jeers, combined with a Facebook post, also from this morning.
But first a quote. Gay writer Michael Nava, one of my favorite authors, wrote a series of six novels between the early 1980’s and the mid 1990’s featuring Henry Rios, an openly gay attorney (the character is heavily autobiographical). For the epigraph of the final book of the series he chose this quote from The Gospel of Thomas (which is apparently non-canonical and may have some connection with the Gnostics):
Jesus said: “If you bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth will save you. If you don’t bring forth what is inside you, what you don’t bring forth will destroy you.”
Being Jewish I don’t normally quote sayings attributed to Jesus (though he did say many wonderful things). Nava uses this quote to point up the dangers of being in the closet. In his novels those who chose to remain closeted either are the villains in his stories or else are the victims and in many cases it is due to their being in the closet that they become victims in the first place.
Today is National Coming Out Day. There was a time many years ago when I was so deeply in the closet that even I didn't know I was gay. That was followed by a period of time when I hoped I wasn't gay and then another stretch of time when I knew I was gay but told no one. [Edit] And then there was the time period when I approached my tentatively approached my friends and my sister, one at a time and awkwardly blurted out my newly-accepted truth. I am very grateful that I no longer live this way and haven't for a very long time.
I came out in stages. Lots of stages. In early 1972 I excused myself from taking the GREs and sat in my dorm room with a notebook, admitting to myself in writing that I was in fact gay after wrestling with it for the previous couple of years. Up until after the time of Stonewall I simply had no idea about my sexuality. And I had a girlfriend which made things more confusing. It wasn’t until the summer of 1973 that I began telling my friends (beginning with my girlfriend) that I was gay. I suppose that another marker would have been the day after Gay Pride in 1975 when I marched myself down to the foot of Christoper Street and sat there waiting for something—I wasn’t sure just what exactly—to happen. Something did indeed happen. And a few weeks later I got my heart broken by a guy for the first time. I suppose that’s a rite of passage too. Fast forward to the summer of 1985. I was in my first long-term relationship with a man. I began to feel that I needed to tell my mom and dad that I was gay and began the process earnestly, getting help from PFLAG. In the midst of this process I tested positive for HIV. I came out to my folks a few weeks later but saved the more problematic news for later. Just like my folks had long since figured out that I was gay, they also discerned that I most likely was positive as well, long before I confided that fact to my mom.
It was another ten years or so before I was fully out at work. I never made an announcement and truly I think most of my colleagues just assumed I was gay anyway. But up until about the time my partner Mario died in 1992 I simply, in the workplace, said little or nothing about my personal life. Keeping that going ceased to have any meaningful point and took too much energy.
After that began the process of coming out as HIV positive. Among my friends I had always been fairly vocal about my status, and my family was eventually aware of it as well. But work was not, other than a couple of very confidential conversations with the folks in HR. And of course my gay colleagues knew. This past Saturday, before AIDS/LifeCycle’s Kickoff Ride, which marks the official beginning of training season, I was asked to make some remarks. I chose to talk about how being asked to discuss my status in front of a television camera 16 years ago helped free me of the lingering stigma I felt about being positive. The results were broadcast not in San Francisco but in LA. But the consequence was that I became far more comfortable about being HIV positive at that point.
I’ve written a number of these stories in the past and I expect I’ll continue to do so. This is nothing original with me but I say it whenever I write about the process of coming out either as gay or as having HIV: coming out is a lifetime process. There is always more work to do whether that involves the process of self-discovery and self-definition or whether it involves the fact that as a gay man, when I meet a new person outside of a context that would make the assumption that the other person is gay a reasonable one, there is the moment when I find that in some way or another I will be letting that new person know either specifically or implicitly that I am a gay man. I’m 65; I aspire to become truly elderly at some point (my mother is almost 91; her older sister is 94 so there’s a great deal to hope for here). I understand that gay and lesbian seniors who need to be placed in some form of supervised living (congregate care, assisted living or nursing home) often feel isolated and stigmatized for being gay; some go back in the closet. I hope I’ll follow in the footsteps of my mom and my aunt and remain independent until I’m very old. If that doesn’t happen I plan to stay openly gay no matter what. I took me too long to get here to throw that away.
My most fervent hope is that every single human being will be empowered to leave their own personal closet regardless of the reason they felt the need to construct that closet in the first place.