They will tell you you can't sleep alone in a strange place
Then they'll tell you you can't sleep with somebody else
Oh, but sooner or later you sleep in your own space
Either way it's okay, you wake up with yourself
I have long loved some of his songs which, as best I can tell, are about him being at ease with deciding to start over in the face of other people behaving very badly. The above song likely references the fact that he was seriously fucked over by his record company early in his career.
If I recall correctly, he was legally barred from cutting a new album because of the bad deal he had with them and he worked in a bar playing piano to support himself until the contract ran out and he was free to get on with his life as a professional musician. His song Piano Man is about that period of his life.
I also really like his song An Innocent Man. The song is about Billy Joel apparently being Billy Joel, at peace with the fact that he can't control what other people do and getting anything done can be hard and establishing an intimate relationship in the face of one party still having a lot of baggage can be very challenging.
It takes two to tango. It only takes one to have a cow about every little thing and kill the relationship before it can really begin.
And some people have bigger, uglier baggage than others.
It's been a lot of years since I watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, so I don't remember all the details but it's a damning criticism of a lot of "societal rules," more or less. One character is a Native American man who is presumed to be mute but he's not. He simply has chosen to not speak for a lot of years.
The main character, McMurphy, feigns mental illness to get out of a sentence of hard labor for a case of statutory rape. (Please keep in mind statutory rape means that if she had been a little older, it wouldn't have been considered rape at all and I don't recall if he knew she was underaged or not when he slept with her.)
The mental ward where he is committed is run by a psycho controlling nurse, one Nurse Ratched. One of the patients is a young man named Billy whose mother is extremely toxic. He has no confidence and terrible self esteem because of it.
One night, McMurphy sneaks two gals into the ward -- the Wikipedia page describes them as prostitutes -- and Billy spends the night with one of them. The next morning, Billy feels good about himself and confident for the first time ever and initially stands up to Nurse Ratched, until she says "What would your mother think?" (of him spending the night with this girl) which causes Billy to fall apart and return to his usual state of stuttering, not meeting anyone's eyes, etc.
The following clip is likely the scene right after that. Billy commits suicide minutes after Nurse Ratched says that to him and McMurphy tries to kill her because of it.
Trigger warnings: Suicide, violence in a mental ward.
Paul seduces the male half of this hetero couple, a young man named Rick and his girlfriend does not take the news well. She has a fit, as shown in the following clip: Not shown in the clip: Shortly thereafter, Rick kills himself by throwing himself out of a window.
If you are someone with personal baggage that tells you that getting your sexual needs met is strictly Verboten because "nice girls don't" or you are a closeted gay person and some of your closest social contacts are terribly homophobic or whatever, you may feel that you cannot possibly ever get your needs met upon pain of death.
The reality is that no one can actually force you to remain in the closet. You are the only person who controls whether or not you admit to yourself and other people that "I'm gay."
It's absolutely not unreasonable to look out for yourself in practical terms and decline to share such info with people you know will be extremely hostile who currently have power to easily hurt you, such as your homophobic parents if you are a teen still financially dependent upon them and living in their home.
But you aren't going to be a teenager forever. If you know you are gay and you know some of the people close to you just will not ever accept that, you can choose to move them out of your life instead of choosing to let them quietly strangle you.
There can be consequences for coming out of the closet but all choices have consequences. Staying in the closet also has consequences and one of those consequences is that it quietly murders you and denies you the happy, fulfilling life you could have.
A coward dies a thousand times, a hero dies but once.Past a certain point, staying in the closet is a form of self-mutilation. It's a form of letting evil quietly win while you pretend the people maiming you are good people whose homophic SHIT should be respected.
I spent a lot of years sorting my personal baggage over being molested and raped as a child, including roughly 3.5 years in therapy between my teens and my twenties. Eventually I was ready to do what Billy (in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) did and just have a good time with someone who just wanted to have a good time with me and I was ready to do so without killing myself afterwards if other people found out and were judgy assholes.
I'm an innocent woman.
I don't knowingly and irresponsibly spread disease. I don't run around being ugly to people because I find them hot and we can't be together for some reason. I'm a good mom and having kids is one of the big consequences of sex.
People who are so hung up about THEIR OWN SEXUALITY that they feel compelled to give me hell over it in spite of the fact that I'm not being irresponsible -- as Billy Joel said, they can speak their mind, but not on my time.
It's my life. I'm not hurting anyone.
How you get to a similar place from the psychological hellscape which may be imprisoning you, I don't know. But it can be done and it is vastly more likely to happen if you decide "It's my life." and stop letting the personal demons of every asshole you've ever had the misfortune of knowing matter to you more than being kind to yourself. If you can't be kind to yourself and accept yourself and love yourself, no amount of acceptance or approval from someone else will ever fill the hole in your soul.