During my life so far, gay—my degree of gayness—has varied over time. As an adolescent, I was aware of my attraction to girls and boys, and was not ashamed to call myself bisexual. I figured the field was open to more opportunities than as if I self-identified as exclusively gay or straight. There never was any such thing as a closet.
During my twenties, I enjoyed relations with both genders; those with women fit well with societal expectations. During the latter half of that decade, and although I still identified as bisexual, I transited more consistently to the gay end of the continuum. Those were heady and promiscuous days without threat of disease, and I thoroughly enjoyed them.
I reveled in my preference, but with the advent of AIDS in the early 1980s, was grateful for my isolated home in the mountains. There, homosexual contact was minimal. I consciously put gay behind me, and unknowingly built the closet in which I was to reside heterosexually for twenty years.
Then in 2001—I was fifty-two—my orientation shifted again and although deeply closeted, I travelled the curve toward gay. Still professing bisexuality, it required serious mental trauma—the breakup of my marriage—to make me recognize that I wasn’t just bisexual and that I was a gay man living deep in the closet. Admitting that to myself and others has proven liberating and authenticating, as if a weight is lifting off my shoulders.
In the process of coming out of the closet I didn’t know I inhabited, some days I feel more or less gay than I did, for example, the day before. By no means does that mean I feel more heterosexual, it’s just that my sexuality isn’t at the front of the desk. To enjoy the authenticity, though, every morning I say to myself, “Oh yeah, I’m gay, homosexual, queer as the day is long.” And it feels good to say it.
During my twenties, I enjoyed relations with both genders; those with women fit well with societal expectations. During the latter half of that decade, and although I still identified as bisexual, I transited more consistently to the gay end of the continuum. Those were heady and promiscuous days without threat of disease, and I thoroughly enjoyed them.
I reveled in my preference, but with the advent of AIDS in the early 1980s, was grateful for my isolated home in the mountains. There, homosexual contact was minimal. I consciously put gay behind me, and unknowingly built the closet in which I was to reside heterosexually for twenty years.
Then in 2001—I was fifty-two—my orientation shifted again and although deeply closeted, I travelled the curve toward gay. Still professing bisexuality, it required serious mental trauma—the breakup of my marriage—to make me recognize that I wasn’t just bisexual and that I was a gay man living deep in the closet. Admitting that to myself and others has proven liberating and authenticating, as if a weight is lifting off my shoulders.
In the process of coming out of the closet I didn’t know I inhabited, some days I feel more or less gay than I did, for example, the day before. By no means does that mean I feel more heterosexual, it’s just that my sexuality isn’t at the front of the desk. To enjoy the authenticity, though, every morning I say to myself, “Oh yeah, I’m gay, homosexual, queer as the day is long.” And it feels good to say it.
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