This post was submitted by Hans

This post is a response to The Comfortable Closet. It is not intended to be a rebuke, but rather an extension of the idea that one’s environment has a strong effect on one’s happiness while in the closet.

I had the luxury of coming out at the time and place of my choosing due in no small part to my manner. There’s almost nothing about me that screams “gay,” my penchant for cocksucking aside. I love hockey and beer. I’m no stranger to punk and metal shows. I’m fashionably inept, though not to the cargo shorts, socks, and sandals level. The only thing I’ve ever had to do to convince people that I’m straight is to not mention that I like guys.

As a result, though, the conflict over coming out versus staying in the closet was mine and mine alone, well out of public view. I fought with it from the time I first admitted my homosexuality to myself at age 14, until 19, when I finally mustered the courage to drop the bomb.

At that point in my life I was living in western Culpeper County – the foothills of the Shenandoah. Nothing but cow pastures and pickup trucks for as far as the eye could see. Most of my friends were self-identified rednecks as a result, ranging from hipsters with hillbilly accents who thought that Manassas was the “big city” to devout Christians who honestly thought that they could live their entire lives without ever coming into contact with a homosexual (oops… sorry ’bout that, guys). They were a little rough around the edges for the most part, but I loved them nonetheless.

I remember late one autumn night, driving down a lonely stretch of Rt 29 at age 16 with two of my friends in the car, when Jeremy announced out of nowhere, “Man, I fucking hate faggots.”

Nothing else. Just that.

Thanks for sharing.

It wasn’t uncommon. “Fags” this, and “fuckin’ queers” that – it was like their own special way of communicating – and these were my friends. I didn’t have anyone else. I had the good sense not to join in on all that, though, much the same as I had the good sense to feign shyness and innocence when it came to the pursuit of pussy (even from the closet I just couldn’t do it).

There were plenty of good times to speak of, and we were close. I had my first sip of alcohol with them, my first drag on a joint. We rebelled against our parents and tasted the freedom of impending adulthood together. I came of age with these people, and at the time I couldn’t find fault with them for speaking their minds when I didn’t even have the courage to speak my own.

But there was still that whole “gay” thing, that immutable fact sitting at the back of my mind. My heart would skip a beat, not in the good way, and the hair on the back of my neck would stand up every time the topic of homosexuality came up. It was not a good feeling.

It instilled a sense in me that – yeah, they’re my friends now, but what happens when I tell them?

Despite having so many people around me that wanted to be with me – that I wanted to be with – I felt horribly cold and alone inside. In a way I also felt like a bad friend for holding it back from them. They were always there for me, open and forthcoming, for better or for worse, and I wasn’t being honest with them.

Down in Culpeper the local out gays were well known and often discussed in less-than-glowing terms behind their backs in break rooms and checkout lanes, and occasionally in their presence. I remember one particularly flamboyant middle-aged guy that I had often seen around town. He was robbed at gunpoint in his home one night when I was about 17 or so. While greed had been the driving force behind the crime, he had been targeted specifically for his sexuality. After giving his assailants everything that they had demanded from him, they unloaded a 12-gauge farewell directly into his face at point-blank range before fleeing the state.

He survived, miraculously, but from then on every time I saw him a mix of rage, sympathy, and paralyzing dread welled up in me that probably kept me in the closet for six months longer than I would have otherwise stayed. He was no longer outgoing and funny as he had often been when I had encountered him at my menial teenage retail job, and half of his head was a knotted mass of scar tissue. For me, he was the personification of everything that I feared – a painful reminder that in small-town America, the leaps and bounds that the GLBT community had made in more populous areas were lagging drastically behind.

Moreso was the fact that it was the people around us who had committed that horrible act. Both of his attackers worked at the same crap job that I worked at, though I didn’t know them on any sort of personal level. I had seen them at work several days a week, nearly every week, for well over a year before it happened. They knew that he was gay and they knew where he lived, and that was all the reason they needed. I had no doubt that they would have done the same to me.

I don’t mean to dwell on the bad points of that phase in my life. There were plenty of good things – two very accepting and wonderful parents and droves of friends that I still remember fondly, despite my internal conflict and their hurtful language. But the words that I constantly heard around me from strangers and friends alike, and the acts of hideous, inhuman callousness that happened in that town while I lived there had a profoundly negative effect on my state of mind. To an extent, they still do. I’ve forgotten his name, but I’ll never get the image of those scars completely out of my mind.

I got through it by gradually expanding my social circles northward, finding people who were a bit more predisposed to tolerance, and finally coming out to everybody at a point when I knew that I would have friends to fall back on if things went badly back in the boondocks. Most of my old friends took it pretty well, and I truly appreciated that, but things were never quite the same between us. We started to drift apart. Life moved on, straight out of Culpeper County. I haven’t been back to the closet since, and I have been genuinely happier from that moment on than I had been since the innocent years of my childhood in coastal California.

I think a lot of the comfort or discomfort of closeted life has to do with who you’re around. If the environment isn’t welcoming, you’re more likely to have a hard time remembering the experience warmly.

---

First time here? See what we're all about... Get involved... Send us a tip!...

---