The Shattered Closet

In a couple of recent posts, I have been attempting to describe my experiences and mindset during my many years in the closet. In the wake of the Lord Browne resignation from BP, Andrew Sullivan has a great column in the Sunday Times of London (see the Timesonline at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/andrew_sullivan/article1752275.ece) that does a good job in describing Lord Browne’s apparent mindset and my own back then. The pertinent quote is as follows:

“Try to think of it from his perspective. Think of the world that the 59-year-old Browne has inhabited in one lifetime. When he was a teenager, homosexuality was literally unspeakable in polite society. British authorities were injecting the great Alan Turing with hormones to “cure” him of his orientation just as Browne was leaving primary school.

For the first 19 years of his life Browne could have been imprisoned for a relationship with another man. During his formative years of adolescence, Browne learnt what every gay boy or girl had to learn at the time: if you do not keep this a terrible secret you will perish.

Even after being largely de-criminalized in 1967 the culture remained a strong force sustaining the stigma that Browne internalized. In the 1960s and 1970s it was far from easy for an ambitious scientist and businessman to have a life – that is, a mature relationship with another man – while having a serious career. The secrecy and fear that were soldered onto a gay man’s psyche were not as easily detached from the world as a piece of Victorian legislation. And as the gay rights movement first blossomed as a countercultural force, it did not easily include Browne and his ilk – Establishment, mannered, private men and women. . . .

Gays are a unique minority because we are almost all brought up as if we were heterosexuals in heterosexual families. We learn what it is to be gay from the general culture we imbibe as children and teens. As it changes, gay kids change. And quickly.

The difference between a culture that can safely mock “the only gay in the village” as comedy and a culture that would have beaten that gay to a pulp five decades ago is a vast one. And yet we have forgotten it so easily. A gay man who has lived through each of those decades is not in such an easy position.”

One of the commentors on Andrew’s article also had insightful remarks the power of denial and of the self-imposed closet:

“These influences on behaviour are difficult for heterosexuals to understand and even many gays (particularly gay rights radicals and younger gays) have little time or patience for understanding how one's formative experiences can create a glass (or in some cases, concrete) closet of one's own making from which it becomes impossible to break free due to - by adulthood - fundamentally ingrained psychological and behavioural traits.”

While I am not as old as Lord Browne, I am more or less of that generation and can identify closely with some of the societal and emotional constraints that kept him feeling that he could not truly admit parts of his life. Here in Virginia, until the Supreme Court ruling in Lawrence v. Texas in 2003, homosexual sex, even in the privacy of one's home, was a felony. I will continue my posts about my own experiences and, perhaps if I am successful in my narrative, the mindset of that shackled me and, I suspect many others.