DARKNESS ALSO AT NOON

I woke up after two hours’ sleep last night, and after an hour and a half or so, I just got up and came out to my work-room to do SOMETHING, which in this case was answer Sean’s post on his site, Down But Not Out [we should really have a Blog Title Olympics one of these days, though for me “Closet Man” still gets the gold]. I did a really honest, really stupid thing the other day; after all the careful arrangement of the seven veils of anonymity between myself and this blog, I sent the link to a friend. And I didn’t exactly try to disguise it...

That raises an interesting issue, for me: several very polite people have praised my courage. That is, to put it bluntly, a laugh. Where is the courage when nobody knows who you are? I don’t think it takes much. Likewise, the letters filed under “Month of Sundays” were once praised as courageous, which I guess they MIGHT have been, if I had served on the committee in the end [made nearly impossible by the split into two committees, unless I had agreed to serve on both, which would have driven EVERYONE else around the bend...]. As it was, it remained an arrow shot into the air... They all land somewhere, I suppose, but “out of sight, out of mind”.

BUT... if you combine the so-called “courage” of the blog and the very particular knowledge of who I am, you wind up in a very particular position. The One Called Piggo has flirted with me based on what I posted about the kinks and wrinkles of my bentness, but he doesn’t know where I live, except figuratively, where he has all the access codes and wiring diagrams -- more than a little unsettling... Several people in the immediate environs know something of my story, but I have never been quite so, um, open about what makes me tick as I have here behind the veils. (Except once: I was moved to approach a gay friend of mine in NYC about what it was I was, after I thought I heard him tell a story about someone lifting his wallet between the front door and the bar at the Mine Shaft. He responded very politely, but as a matter of fact he had lost his wallet at Splash, a very vanilla hunk club, so I sat there with electronic egg [or something even less appealing] all over my face, my mind – and wishful thinking?? – having leaped to fill in the information my failing hearing had not supplied. Let this be a lesson to the rest of you... maybe you should get it in writing...) My friend to the south, however, holds the keys to this blog and to my soul, and if he were not a superior person [see “A Very Long Way to Say Three Words”], I would be up Shit Creek without implements. He is the first person I am going to go see to discuss my eventual coming out, and the only one so far not to call forth a sense of complete panic from my wife.

In some ways, the complete openness that my decision has forced on us has been a wonderful thing; but it raises, understandably, serious issues for someone who has stood by me through the worst of my melt-down and now sees the threat of all her investment going down some well-muscled drain. We took a walk this afternoon — you gym-rats should know that my idea of exercise is pulling the refrigerator door open to see what lies behind it, and a two-mile walk is officially Exercise. [Hell, going out of my work-room to the mailbox at the end of the driveway counts in my book.] I had made up my mind that my compromise for continuing life together was to have the freedom to come out in return for a recommitment to fidelity. Perhaps I should have discussed this with her first [duh]. The idea that fidelity represented a compromise was new to her; she started from the premise, as I have indeed for the last twenty-five years or so, that fidelity was what marriage was all about. Suddenly I found myself talking out of both sides of my mouth: on the one hand, my temptations were not really that different from those of any other husband, just with a different sign out front, and fidelity was all she could ask and I could offer; on the other, I was suddenly saying that orientation was different, and I had a right [!??] to live in “grace and truth” and not live a lie. Who wanted it both ways here? Not she indeed.

Well, the moral here is that the revelation of the necessity of coming out, even blogged as having come directly from the Word of God, was beginning to look decidedly risky, not to say tawdry. My proud certainty was reduced to wishful thinking, and the thought of other prices yet to be exacted in the suffering of the other people I love most, began to trickle in. As I have said elsewhere, Risk-Averse is my middle name. My sense of honor, which is the life blood of my self-definition, and in fact about the only scrap of my self-definition that is left me after the last twelve years, was slowly morphing from the semblance of moral high ground to a quixotic crusade that was promising to deprive me of all that had kept me afloat for the last twelve years and more. And had I thought, she added, of how much pain I would cause the children by seeking to end my own? Well, of course I had thought about it, but the more she talked, the clearer it became that I had been, still am, unable to see beyond the need that engulfs me. I was willing to take the risk to be “true to myself” – a goal I gave up decades ago in the interest of not exploiting other people for my own gain – and at what price? How was my current position any different from my starting point before my much-ballyhooed conversion to a life centered on something other than myself?

Stay tuned.
More to come.