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National Coming Out Day 2023 (A Day Late) [1]

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Date: 2023-10-12  

Yesterday was National Coming Out Day, an event that originated in 1987. BillInPortlandMaine did reliably cover the event in yesterday morning’s edition of CHEERS and JEERS but I didn’t see any standalone stories. It’s understandable that many of us are focused on a whole series of existential crises which has undoubtedly distracted many from focusing on less pressing though still important matters. Still it seems as though something should be said and although I’m tardy, I say better late than never.

So, if you would, bear with me and follow me past the break.

On Facebook I’ve seen any number of friends post about National Coming Out Day. Some are serious, most are humorous. I’m going to pretty serious. At this point in my life I’m surprised if anyone assumes I’m heterosexual though the reality is that I simply don’t much care how others “read” me. I’m pretty comfortable in my own skin. So in case you haven’t figured it out, I’m gay.

Coming out is a lifelong process. And for me, a Boomer born at the very height of the Boom, it began later in life than seems to be the case for many nowadays. People even a few years younger than I am began their journey toward self-acceptance in high school, some even in middle school which when I was a kid was usually called junior high. When I was in my teens being open about being gay in any public setting whatsoever, was simply unthinkable. Especially for kids.

Nowadays even in small, very conservative towns LGBTQ+ kids generally have access to information that reminds them that they are not alone. When I was a kid, apart from one single news article from 1965 documenting a group of “homosexuals” picketing the White House demanding acceptance there was nothing for me to see up to and including my final year of high school. There may have been indicators out there but I wasn’t likely to have found them. The Mattachine Society, the first gay rights group to exist in the US, was founded in the early 1950s but it was not widely known about.

Although it undoubtedly happen even back then, nobody to my knowledge was even remotely out of the closet in my high school. The Stonewall Riots took place almost exactly a year to the day after my graduation. I read about it in the Village Voice. But for various reasons I did not at that time see myself as gay. I was aware that there were other gay people around; a couple of my high school classmates appeared to be gay but to the extent I was aware of it I tended to avoid them. No, I simply assumed that I was less mature than many of my peers and that in due course I’d find myself attracted to a woman and then things would proceed in accordance with the prevailing expectations of the time. Indeed at the end of my sophomore year in college I found myself in a relationship with a woman and I assumed for the time being that I was simply successfully “growing up.”

I have to pause here. The expression “coming out” has changed meanings over time. Even when I was in the process of self-acceptance during the latter part of my college years the expression mainly meant entering the then mostly underground world of clubs and other, often somewhat sordid, venues in which gay people mostly met up. It did not mean as it mostly does now, to be out about one’s sexual orientation to family and friends unless one’s friends were also gay or else very, very close and determined to be trustworthy. It wasn’t until well into the 1970s that “coming out” meant being visible in public and owning one’s identity regardless of what others thought and despite the obvious continuing societal disapproval.

So besides acknowledging to myself, and only to myself, that I was indeed gay, which happened when I was 20, it took me a while to tell another living soul I was gay. I drove a cab in New York while I was in graduate school. Passengers would sometimes proposition me. I had never had any experiences with my peers when I was in my teens so I remained innocent of such things until the very moment when yet another passenger propositioned me. He was neither sloppy drunk nor conspicuously creepy, in fact I recall him being both personable and quite handsome. So I said yes and was able to remove any of the doubts I’d harbored until that point. Until that very moment I honestly had only the haziest notion of what two men might do with each other in bed.

The next night I began coming out to others, starting with my girlfriend. She wasn’t surprised and told me she thought that indeed I might be gay. I told my sister and then proceeded one by one to tell my (presumable heterosexual) friends I was gay. Like my girlfriend my sister turned out to be aware of my orientation. Her boyfriend was conspicuously attractive, though otherwise basically what we used to call a “juvenile delinquent.” He noticed me noticing him and reported that to my sister. While nobody expressed disapproval I did gradually notice a few of them drifting away. In the course of time, sometimes decades later, I reconnected with most of those folks.

I was “out” to the extent of turning my romantic relationship with my girlfriend into a simple friendship (one which has continued to this day). But even that went slowly. I didn’t begin attempting to find a male romantic partner for another couple of years. Actually the day after New York’s Gay Pride in 1975. The search took yet another couple of years to produce any results worth mentioning though it did finally happen. First there was a very nice man I met and dated for about six months. I ended it because he was about my dad’s age and that made me a bit uncomfortable. And then there was the first guy I can say I legitimately fell in love with. That didn’t last all that long either but he and I are also still friends.

My concept of being “out” changed when I attended my first Pride in 1977; it was to that point the biggest such event in New York’s gay history thanks in part to the beginnings of backlash to our progress in the form of Anita Bryant’s homophobic campaign in Florida. At that Pride I ran into the editor of my high school newspaper. That was my first foray into being “out in public.” By that point a number of public figures had come out as gay, often by writing memoirs. And Harvey Milk was making the news by getting elected to San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors and calling in the face of the reaction to our early success for every gay person to come out publicly, to stand up and be counted as LGBTQ. For me that was an ongoing undertaking the took another couple of decades to complete.

Although my sister was the second person I confided my sexual orientation in and I also had come out to a relative who was an actor, assuming correctly that she wouldn’t have a problem with it, I didn’t come out to my parents until 1985 in the wake of finding out I was HIV-positive. On the other hand I’d begun doing volunteer work within the gay community around 1980, in part just to be involved and also in part because it seemed like I might have better luck finding a suitable partner in that environment than in the bars. That turned out to be a very mixed blessing and ultimately led to me finding myself in recovery from an assortment of addictive problems including but not limited to substance abuse.

While it’s not like I was pretending to be straight at work I simply didn’t discuss my private life in anything but the vaguest of terms. Even after moving to San Francisco where I had a number of colleagues who were absolutely open about their sexual orientation. My particular profession (I was a real estate appraiser, employed by the federal government throughout my career) was a pretty conservative one and I felt I couldn’t risk it. I got hired, when I came to San Francisco, to supervise a group all of whose members were older than me and most of whom were also taller than me. I didn’t want to make myself a bigger target. All that fell away when my partner Mario became ill and passed away from AIDS-related complications at the end of 1992. By that time I simply had no energy to pretend in even the most general way. The final cleanup was to acknowledge publicly to all and sundry that I was living with HIV.

I wrote and then deleted a bunch of stuff about my college-years experiments with psychedelics but I’ll note that I’ve always suspected that while it eventually became clearly self-destructive my early realizations about myself may have been a by-product of those experiences.

What is likely far more true is that my ability to come out of the closet, first in the personal sense and later on in the public sense derived from paying less and less attention to the prevailing views of society and more and more attention to my actual peers within the LGBTQ community. Still that would never have happened had not other people, far more courageous than I ever could have been took the risk of being out of the closet at great personal risk. Indeed the very worst that could have happened did in fact befall Harvey Milk.

As has been widely noted by others I owe my current ability to live out and proud as an elderly, Jewish, HIV-positive gay man to giants like Harry Hay, Frank Kameny, Phyllis Lyon, Del Martin, Harvey Milk, Cleve Jones, and a host of others perhaps not quite as well-known but just as courageous.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/10/12/2198845/-National-Coming-Out-Day-2023-A-Day-Late?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=community_spotlight&pm_medium=web

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