
New York Magazine has a telling article (
http://nymag.com/news/features/34985/) that, while based on events in New York City, rings all too true in places like upper class neighborhoods in GOP bastion, Virginia Beach. Here are a few quotes:
I will call him William Dockett, for clarity’s sake. Over the past few weeks, William and I have been e-mailing regularly. This is what I know about him: I know that he is in his early forties and that he lives and works in Manhattan, earning around $200,000 annually in a job he wishes he was more passionate about. I know that he is a registered Democrat who grew up in a nearby suburb. I know that he has been married a decade and that he is the father of a small child. And I know—here his life gets complicated—that when he is at work, and things are slow, he goes to Craigslist and, with a familiar mixture of guilt and resignation and excitement, clicks on the “men meeting men” section of the personals.
It is hard to fathom, the notion of a gay man living a closeted life in New York City in 2007. The life of someone like William—who responded to a posting I placed on Craigslist identifying myself as a writer trying to understand the psyche of a still-closeted man—seems at the very least anachronistic. Typically, the “closet” brings to mind small towns, intensely religious communities, and, at the most cosmopolitan level, the lives of Jim McGreevey and Mark Foley: gay men operating in a world so inherently duplicitous that their choosing to lead a shadow life follows, sadly, a certain logic. And yet the thing about desire—frustratingly, thrillingly—is that few things are so resistant to reason and categorization. “I used to think I was bi, but now I really believe that I am gay and just was not in the right situation,” William wrote to me in an early message. “I think I like a particular kind of guy and when I went out looking I never found him, so I gravitated toward women. I found what I liked on the Internet, but I was already married.”
Sites like Craigslist and gay.com and manhunt.net—along with destinations like “Bimarried Men in NYC,” a Yahoo group to which William belongs—make it possible to tailor isolated affairs to whatever specifications you desire. (On any given day searching these sites, I found about 1,000 married, closeted New Yorkers online—certainly a fraction of the true population since most men in the closet don’t identify themselves as such, even online.) Say you want to meet someone between the ages of 35 and 50, preferably dark-haired, for half an hour in midtown, between the hours of one and two in the afternoon—a few clicks of the mouse and you’ll have numerous options.
When I came out of the closet and frequently chatted on line in gay chat rooms to kill time since other than the club scene, meeting other gays is not easy, I was amazed at the number of married guys online looking for sex. Even more dumbfounding to me was their expectation that I might want to meet up with them to fool around. I routinely replied, "why would I go through all this effort to come out of my own closet so that I can climb into yours?" Equally shocking to me - I admit I was pretty naive - was that many lived in the vicinity of my old neighborhood. One even belonged to the neighborhood pool where I had served as President for two years.
For the record, I never ran around like this on my wife while living with her. I find this behavior dishonorable.