aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Saturday, September 30, 2006

On the closet

There but for the grace of God go I. I came out at 18, in 1973. I got lucky. And now I have a happy healthy committed relationship. The kind of relationship that would not have been possible from behind a closet door. Had I not come out, God only knows how that proclivity might have been made manifest.

I sincerely believe that the closet is a dangerous and unhealthy place - for the individual and for all of us - and perpetuating it in any way is damaging to society.

Today Andrew Sullivan writes:

Maybe we should feel anger at these people. I don’t. I feel sadness. Sadness at the compromises they made and the misery they fueled for themselves… We are all human, and my own life has its own share of emotional and sexual mistakes. Equally, the news about Mark Foley has a kind of grim inevitability to it. I don’t know Foley, although, like any other gay man in D.C., I was told he was gay, closeted, afraid and therefore also screwed up. What the closet does to people - the hypocrisies it fosters, the pathologies it breeds - is brutal. There are many still-closeted gay men in D.C., many of them working for a Republican party that has sadly deeply hostile to gay dignity. How they live with themselves I do not fully understand. But I have learned you cannot judge someone’s soul from outside. That I leave to them and their God, and some I count as good friends and good people.

What I do know is that the closet corrupts. The lies it requires and the compartmentalization it demands can lead people to places they never truly wanted to go, and for which they have to take ultimate responsibility. From what I’ve read, Foley is another example of this destructive and self-destructive pattern for which the only cure is courage and honesty. While gays were fighting for thir basic equality, Foley voted for the “Defense of Marriage Act”. If his resignation means the end of the closet for him, and if there is no more to this than we now know, then it may even be for the good. Better to find integrity and lose a Congressional seat than never live with integrity at all.

If we know the “the hypocrisies it fosters, the pathologies it breeds,” the “lies it requires” and that it “corrupts,” how is it that we can stand by “good friends and good people” and do nothing?

If I have an alcoholic friend I will try to do something. I may fail, but I will try. The analogy isn’t perfect, and their are degrees of friendship (especially in Washington), but if I had a friend in the closet I would try. If I failed, I expect that friend and I would drift apart.

I live in a place far different from Washington but just as deeply closeted. I may yet be tested.