reaching to the back of the closet.
Even in a day and age where gay culture is largely front and centre, and a song about a lesbian kiss is one of the biggest in the world (not without its own mini melodrama, mind you), there are still members of the big gay family who walk among us in disguise. Homosexuality is no longer classified as a mental illness, and we aren’t burned at the stake anymore, and yet everybody knows that one person, whom you KNOW to be gay, and yet it isn’t verbalized or confirmed by the one in question. This is a special breed of gays I like to refer to as the ‘everybody-knows-he’s-gay-but-he-isn’t-gay-yet friend’.
We all have them. We all went to high school with them. The only difference between gay relations with this friend, and heterosexual relations with this friend are that us queers are able to identify them immediately, if not sooner. Our homo-sense tingles with their mere presence, and upon eye contact, the culprit knows that he’s busted.
In most cases, the old saying proves true – if it walks like a duck, sounds like a duck, and in this case, acts like a duck, it’s the natural conclusion that it is, in fact, a duck. They wear gay clothes, sound gayer than most gay men when they open their mouthes, and yet they still go out in public with ‘girlfriends’ as though they’re some kind of accessory. The closet equivalent of Paris Hilton’s chihuahua, purse and all. Sorry – ‘messenger bag’.
Once, and only once, I dated one of these for a very brief period of time. He was so far in the closet that you had to sift through everything else in it before you even found him, and so why he was attracted to me, of all people, is a question that will likely never be answered. Better yet, why I was attracted to him remains a complete mystery, as I always said that I would never be comfortable dating somebody who wasn’t comfortable with themselves. In retrospect, the best explanation is that I viewed him as my own little project – and I intended to try and lure him out from the shadows, and into the unsheltered gay world.
Except, my plan proved difficult to set into motion when we could never go out anywhere overly public – movies were out of the question, restaurants frowned upon unless there were others along as well, and definitely not the gay bar. All of these places afforded an opportunity to be caught in the act – like I was some kind of recreational drug that he was doing on the side, that no one was to know about.
I reached my limit one night while I was at a party that he was hosting, during which, right in front of me, he vehemently denied being attracted to men – one of his other male friends brought it up casually, which turned into a joke, which progressed into an accusation. Then and there, I set my drink down, grabbed my coat and left – I was astonished at how somebody could be so afraid of rejection by his ‘friends’ that he would blatantly lie about what he was. I felt silly for believing that I could coax him into an openly gay lifestyle, but during the reflection phase that follows any kind of situation like that, I realized that it wasn’t my responsibility, or place, to do such a thing. I very easily could have spilled the beans at his little party, and turned his life upside down – but he wasn’t ready for that yet, and I forever would have been that asshole who ‘outed’ him in the worst possible way.
I always wondered what story he conjured up to explain my presence in his life. After all, somebody who surrounds themselves with homophobic friends isn’t likely to just one day become acquainted with an obviously gay man. He hid me from his parents, and so he was spared the necessity of creating that portion of the program, but I was curious as to what role I played – how my existence was satisfactorily justified. Then again, anybody that’s still in the stone age enough to want to stone gays probably wouldn’t require an elaborate answer. I was probably his cousin or something lame. Foolish of me to expect a Hollywood-calibre part!
Of course, these days, he’s gay as gay can be – flirting about the gay bar like a teenage girl in junior high who has just recently discovered that she has grown breasts. Not long ago, we had a very brief conversation while waiting for drinks, and I was happy to hear that he was feeling 100% better about himself and his life – and that his old friends were no longer his current ones. My old student had finally passed his test, and was now well on his way to bigger and better things.
Ultimately, the life-long closeted gay man is something I don’t think I’ll ever understand. Life is meant to be lived, and whether you’re a Jehovah’s Witness, or just afraid of how those around you will react, at the end of the day, I feel sorry for those who go through their lives without fully embracing themselves for who they are. When I’m on my death bed, I don’t want to have any regrets – I don’t want to look at a wife who I don’t truly love, or look back on my time on this earth and view it as incomplete or lacking. That’s not fair to anybody, and everybody is cheated out of something.
It may be a while before you see your ‘everybody-knows-he’s-gay-but-he-isn’t-gay-yet friend’ bypassing the line-up to The Dark Night to go see Mamma Mia! in capri jeans. But when you do, don’t chastise or judge him – feel happy for him, and that he managed to emerge from insecurity and get to that point at all – with or without an experienced tutor to guide him.
As a guy who’s starting to become more comfortable with himself and starting to open up to those who matter most in my life, I understand everything that you wrote in this entry.
The sad part is that I even know about regret… which to this very day, I regret not telling my Dad about who I really was… and sadly, I’ll never get that opportunity.