Round and round...

I am saddened on this day. While much of my process creates a liberated lightness of being, today my baggage is going round and round on my carousel. Last week my former wife and my daughter left our home for a new life in California. I received my final divorce papers in the mail a day after they left.

While there is relief at closure, I also can't help going round and round with the pain and trouble caused by my being closeted and obviously not handling any of that well. I never married to hide my gayness because at the time I was enjoying life hetero. The homo part crept out, however, and although I didn't know it, I must have been unhappy. Can you really be unhappy if you don't know you're unhappy? Denial and hindsight.

So now I will climb back on the horse of my own life and process. This will undoubtedly be a good thing once the baggage spins off the carousel, especially since I figure there are only about twenty years left to enjoy honesty, liberation, freedom, and pleasure.

I cannot deny today's melancholy though, because that would short-circuit my process. I will indulge it for as short a while as I can manage. I'll get over it.

Matters of degree

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.

Accidental out

I've been wanting to somehow get out on Facebook because that would save a lot of one-on-one talking. Yet I couldn't completely bring myself to do it, because it's a big, wide and public world out there and more than a little scary.

But a minute ago I wrote something to a friend that it won't take much reading between the lines to figure out what I'm really saying. I didn't totally say it, though, so maybe this was a good way to break the news...subtly. Whatever: it's done. I wish I could take the saying closer to heart: Those that matter don't mind, and those that mind don't matter. Big world indeed!