The Closet and Harm to Straight Spouses - A Follow Up

UPDATED: For future reference, I have modified the settings on this blog so that anonymous comments will no longer be accepted. Those who lack the courage of their convictions and want to hide behind anonymity will no longer be accommodated.

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As is not all that unusual, I recently received an anonymous comment attacking me for "using others as 'proof' of straightness that does not exist" among other things. As I have stated before, anonymous personal attacks will NOT be published. Anyone who wants to attack me personally, please have the balls to identify yourself and not hide behind anonymity. The attack, however, does raise and issue that I want to address that I believe is relevant particularly in older gays who came of age when homosexuality was still classified as a form of mental illness and before the Internet and other modern communication means provided a way to anonymously contacting others.

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In response to the commenter's assumption that I knew I was gay when I married, the answer is probably not. I say probably not since I had never knowingly been around anyone gay and I had no means of talking to anyone about the issue. In fact, I lived my life not knowing if my attractions to other males was unique to me (was I some lone freak?) or was it something others felt too, yet which did not make them gay. Given my religious upbringing that said gays were going straight to Hell, I certainly did not want to be gay. In fact, I never, ever admitted it to myself until many, many years later after an unplanned event forced me to face the reality.

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From others that I have spoken with who came out later in life after being married, I do not believe what I experienced was unique. Being gay was something seen as so horrible that I and others just convinced ourselves that we were straight and did everything in my/our power to prove it to ourselves. Getting married was obviously part of proving that one was not gay. But so was trying to push away same sex thoughts and many other exercises in denial. I - like I believe many others it seems - finally hit a point/had an experience that made the in retrospect artificial world I had created in my mind collapse. It's not that I wanted it to, but rather it simply did. And I was left in a very self-loathing and emotionally unhinged state. It took lots of therapy to get over issues of religious guilt about being gay. And it took even more years and more therapy to come to a point of accepting myself for who and what I was.

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In sum, I do not believe that I deliberately and intentionally forced anyone to live a lie. As for the commenter, if the prospect of gays marrying straight is upsetting, I recommend that the commenter start working for gay marriage in their home state and speaking out against anti-gay prejudice. An end to homophobia and the possibility of gays being able to marry would do much to avoid situations like the one I found myself in growing up. *