I grew up in the German American-military subculture unique to the Columbus, Georgia area. My mother was a German immigrant and my father had been career military and I had friends whose families fit that same profile.
Germany isn't infamous for displays of affection the way the entire world seems to know the French and Hispanic cultures hug and kiss when greeting each other, but it was common in my social circle to kiss people goodbye that you were close to, such as family, or for two people of the same sex to walk through the mall holding hands.
One day, I walked down the hallway in high school holding hands with one of my German American friends and someone asked me if we were gay using an expression I was unfamiliar with. I ham-handedly tried to joke about what they said and I don't think it communicated to them that it was a meaningless expression to me even though I did infer it was some attempt to ask if we were gay.
For most of my life, I imagined that closeted meant a gay person who had homosexual relationships on the down low and used cultural differences like the above or similar plausible cover stories to explain any anomylous displays of affection out of step with uptight white heteronormative cultural expectations.
Because I physically hung on all my good friends, male and female alike, without necessarily being romantically involved with them. I was just a very touchy-feely person and some people assumed I must be sleeping with everyone and occasionally my friends would correct their ill-mannered assumptions by asking if they wanted both their legs broken (a la the scene in The Crying Game where he asks the guy if he wants to be picking his teeth up off the ground with broken fingers).
So I just thought closeted meant only your inner circle knew the truth and everyone else got bullshit cover stories or polite deflections because it's not really their business anyway and it made sense to me that in a homophobic world, some people would treat their sexual orientation as a private matter and not something they feel obligated to wear on their sleeve.
That's apparently not what that means. It apparently means someone pretending to be heterosexual to everyone, often even their spouse in a heteronormative marriage.
I don't think that's healthy and I strongly suspect it seriously screws people up to live that way.
And I cannot fathom doing something like that. It just doesn't parse for me why anyone would do something like that.
I'm 99 percent attracted to men but kissed more girls than boys as an adolescent simply because there was more opportunity to do so. No one batted an eyelash at two girls spending time alone together with the bedroom door shut but trying to arrange that kind of privacy with a boy was challenging.
Only once did any adult suggest there must be sexual behavior involved in me spending a lot of time with a girl and they didn't really push it. It was more like a flippant remark than an attempt to seriously police our relationship.
I was well into adulthood by many years before I realized other people simply don't operate that way. I remain baffled, so much so that I don't typically speak to it.
As best I can infer, some people are brainwashed from birth by hellfire and damnation religious relatives that being attracted to members of the same sex is extremely strictly Verboten and people will burn in hell for all eternity for that.
And perhaps that drives some people to completely deny their own needs, needs that involve nothing inherently nefarious. Because unlike some sexual predilections (pedophilia), there's nothing inherently abusive about being attracted to people of the same sex.
That doesn't guarantee it won't go bad places but plenty of heterosexual relationships go bad places, and not because being heterosexual is inherently nefarious.
Though I guess the Bible suggests even that is inherently evil.
Someone who grew up without religious baggage of that sort suggested to me that the biological purpose of the hymen is probably to keep germs out of a dark, damp, infection-prone area in an immature body with a still developing immune system.
It's not a punishment because of original sin. It's protective of a girl's health.
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