The Matter of Closets

A blog thing is a weird thing. It brings up many issues. Mainly, “How honest to be?” Or, “How much to recount?” Or if the answer to that question is, “Everything,” then, “How detailed is ‘Everything?’” Sooner or later, every attempt at coming out leads to another closet door.

I’ve been analyzing my own closet structure over the past 10 years, and I’ve come to two main conclusions about it:

1) The more I “out-ed” myself, the more I threw myself back into some closet;
2) The more I tried to eliminate closets from my own life, the more I
created them for those around me (e.g.: those whom I professed to love).

I certainly don’t mean to use these statements as a defense for remaining closeted, despite how it might appear. But the law of opposites, as it would appear, applies just as much to matters of coming out as it does to any other action/reaction. It’s simply a matter of physics.

What do I mean when I say that “The more I ‘out-ed’ myself, the more I threw myself back into some closet?” It’s pretty simple, really. I refer you to Portland, Maine in 1987. The already “out” Greg (that is, “out” to everyone from his lover to his college friends – his parents suspect but will not allow themselves to believe), surrenders the bulk of his worldly possessions and packs what little remains into a 1985 VW Jetta. His sole intent? To move to San Francisco. San Francisco, even to this day, reeks of homosexual innuendo. But in 1987, especially to the New English, it equated to “screaming.”

Was I, at that point in 1987, “out” to my parents? No. But what with having lived with a male lover for the previous three years and taking the $5,000 graduation gift they’d given me (in hopes I’d find a bride and settle down somewhere in Massachusetts) in order to transplant myself in Gay Mecca, it would be safe to say that the writing was on the wall. In other words, I took a gay situation and made it gay-er. Ergo, one closet opened into another. In essence, I “outed” myself onto a higher “out” plane, without ever bothering to actually “come out.” Even if I had told my folks the basics, the mere fact that I was moving to SF upped the ante, to the point where just being “out” wouldn’t have been enough. I could, after all, have remained in New England and pursued an assimilationist gay existence. (The lover. The brownstone. The labradors and the flannel…) But nooooooo,,,

I had to be gay-er than gay. I had to move to Gay Mecca. And would that THAT had been enough, but still it wasn’t.

I never intended – consciously, that is – for my SF karma to result in such extremes. All I remember is knowing I had to be surrounded by my own kind. And by “my own kind” I don’t just mean those who prefer to fuck members of the same sex. No, what – or should I say “whom” – I needed to be around were not only other gays, but other homosexuals who fought for their civil rights and, at that time in particular, their right to self-test experimental AIDS treatments. I suppose the whole AIDS factor was ultimately random, but its randomness never bore out over its reality in the eyes of my generation. Random or not, it was real, and it had to be dealt with. Hence, I was welcomed to my next closet: that of the AIDS activist.

It was around the time I commenced my activism that the dike (pardon the pun) between myself and my family finally cracked. And nowhere around was there a butch with a big enough finger to stop the flow. In 1988, at the dawn of the Larry Kramer/ACT-UP era, I “came out” to my parents.

They didn’t take it well. Dad withdrew into denial and Mom asserted that I could be converted, “If only [I] cared enough to…”

Despite my parents’ reactions, breaking open the preliminary closet door didn’t serve to be very satisfying to me. I had by then already crossed deep into the heart of SF counter-culture. Not only was I an activist, but I was also discovering my artistic sensibility. Sure, I had been creative all through high school and college, but this time, I was declaring my creativity/bohemianism as a lifestyle and not just an adolescent phase. I surrounded myself with other artists who actually made their living as artists. Up until then, that concept had been unimaginable to me. It was utterly liberating to be immersed in the subculture. But on the other hand, the subculture became yet another closet to confront.

My parents knew I was gay. So what? What did that mean, in their tiny little suburban world? The “gay” they envisioned from what they were able to pick up via mainstream media not only didn’t equate with the kind of “gay” I had become, it was downright sugar-coated compared to my reality. And even though it only served to hurt them more, I made damn sure my parents knew what a Radical Leftist Queer I had become. I was trying to make sure one closet phase wouldn’t lead to another. (Heck, being an activist was chic in those days, so it was the least I could do.)

But as fate would have it, one closet phase did lead to another. It wasn’t a mandatory evolution, by any means. In fact, it was pretty extreme, even when compared to the extremism with which I had surrounded myself. To this day, I don’t know which came first – my extremism or my extreme desire to live extremely. Regardless, have I ever “come out” to my parents as a prostitute? Oh, come now. There’s only so much a parent can handle, and believe me you, they haven’t been able to handle what I’ve dished out so far – so why would I dish out any more?

At the time of this writing, I’m 41. That makes my parents 71 each. 71 friggin’ years old, each with their own respective version of reproductive/genital cancer: prostate for Dad, and breast/cervical/uterine for Dear ol’ Mom. Now, would YOU want to tell the proud recipients of such diagnoses that their only son is not only a homosexual, but a homosexual whore? If indeed you possess that cruel a streak in your spine, then God help you. As cruel a streak as I have, and as much as the adolescent in me would like to hurt them, I simply can’t imagine wanting to hurt them that much. I mean, Enough already!

Would they – could they – ever understand that I consider my practice to be a vocation? Could they ever comprehend that some of us view sex for pay as a necessary component to human society? Would they ever be able to wrap their brains around the idea that I am content in my status? Probably not.

I had seen how tough it had been on my lovers, my boyfriends and even my friends to admit freely that I was a whore. No matter how much they wanted to be OK with it (and even though they really were OK with it), I saw how my baggage became their baggage, strictly by association. My justifications became their justifications, and suddenly, by the mere desire of my being “out” as a whore, my lovers, boyfriends and friends were placed in a defensive position. I didn’t like that. I was OK whenever I had to do the defending, but I didn’t wish having to be so defensive on anyone in my social circle.

That’s when it hit me, for sure. As “out” as I proclaimed to be, there was one closet I would have to retain.

And despite over 15 years of struggling to prevent closets, I still remain in one. I suppose there are always secrets we need to keep from our parents. I love the metaphor that is “growing gray.” It’s nature’s way of making us see the grays, after an entire adolescence and young adulthood of fighting to make things black and white. That was the story of my young adulthood. The struggle to live closet-free was nothing less than an attempt to live life either totally black or totally white. It doesn’t matter which, because they’re both extremes, and everyday life doesn’t exist along the extremes. Sooner or later life (like water, or air, or anything in the physical realm) seeks equilibrium.

When I look back on my young adulthood, now that I’m middle-aged, I can see how black and white I made everything out to be. But as much as I hated closets, I never opened to my parents the closet of my sexual extremism. Why bother? As the grays began to emerge in my hair, I learned to see the grays of coping with parents. They’d struggled enough just to come to terms with my homosexuality. As much as I’d rather they’d have come a lot further into acceptance (PS: they didn’t; it was awful), I had to accept that they could only come as far as they could come. There was no pushing them.

After realizing that, I finally realized all I was fighting was MY journey. And I came to realize that just living it is enough. I don’t need to throw it in my parents’ faces to justify it. All I have to do is live it.

That’s not being “closeted,” it’s being wise. Or at the very least, it’s being compassionate.