From a previous post called The Closet:
At one time, I thought that being a "closeted gay" meant something like you slept alone or dated same-sex people secretly. I have come to understand that term differently over the years.
I've just left a comment on Reddit in a discussion about the past stating again that at one time I thought closeted meant handling things discreetly but that's not how that word gets used. I did so because of a reply to an earlier comment of mine where the reply says "We were closeted. To do otherwise meant you'd lose your job." because I talked about the fact that we don't really know how LGBTQ stuff was handled because the written records we have don't really give you a good picture.
I initially thought my "weirdo" interpretation of closeted was me being stupid or something but this little exchange has me rethinking that. I'm thinking now that perhaps at one time closeted was used to mean handling it discreetly, at least by some people, and the meaning or the usage of the word has changed some.
And it's possibly changed for at least two reasons.
One would be that the existence of the Internet has empowered people to reach out to others like them even if their meat space life is some incredibly oppressive, super conservative small town where they are suffocating and can find no one to talk with about their inner world.
I have had more than one online interaction where I was made aware some people online are talking about things they feel compelled to hide in meat space.
So this helps lead to the second thing: More people who aren't just flamingly LGBTQ and incapable of hiding it get exposed to information that leads to them questioning their orientation and/or gender identity because that information is out there and readily available casually.
This blog exists in part because of people in my life who are weirder than me and incapable of passing for normal. I've talked some about that: I spent time working on figuring out how to talk about the fact that I'm not strictly heterosexual because it's been decades since I hooked up with a gal and I have no expectation of ever again doing so.
It's mostly not a serious problem for me to sort of unintentionally pass for heterosexual and just let people assume what they want about me being only attracted to men because I was married a lot of years and did the full-time wife and mom thing and I'm a devoted mother. So I don't need to try to convince people I'm straight.
They typically assume that based on readily available information about me and in the short run its easiest for me to say nothing and just let people assume I'm straight when the truth is something more like men are my favorite flavor and I have no problem getting male attention and no real reason to bother to get with a woman when I know that would be a big hassle for me socially while also not being sexually a massive improvement over getting with a guy.
I have yet to meet a woman who makes me go "This person is so wonderful to me and so amazing that I need them in my life and it's worth the hassle." Though I've met some amazing men I had relationships with under difficult circumstances because it was worth the hassle.
Once someone said to me "If you were stranded on a desert island with nothing but women, you wouldn't sleep alone. But other than that, you have no reason to deal with the social piece of trying to figure out how to introduce this person to other people etc. It's just easier to have a relationship to a man and you like men more anyway, so you will never bother."
But some people don't have that as an option. Mostly for the sake of people who cannot happily let people assume they are heterosexual when they aren't, I have worked at trying to find ways to talk about the fact that I'm not really straight though everyone assumes I am.
It's a political position so to speak, even though I don't mean "That's how I vote" because I hate politics and mostly don't do politics in the sense of being involved with how laws get made and being involved with deciding who gets voted into positions of power for making those laws and policies.
My understanding is that Aristotle (or some other famous Greek guy) said in Greek "Man is a product of the polis." and polis is the Greek word for the type of city state they lived in and like a lot of words on planet Earth, it had a lot of different meanings attached to it and things get lost in translation. So it gets translated variously as "Man is a social creature." or "Man is a political creature." though it more accurately meant "Man is a product of his environment (and Greeks are a product of our specific form of city state and there's a lot of unstated details baked into that word, from formal politics to social fabric)."
So I mean political more in the sense of I explicitly have an agenda for this choice, even though I mostly don't engage with formal politics of the sort that involves joining a political party and voting for specific people etc.
The rise of the Internet has injected information into the system and this has decreased friction for individuals wrestling with certain questions such that it's possible for more of them to think about their inner landscape at all and this has increased social friction, making uncomfortable topics part of the conversation in many more cases where people don't necessarily yet know what they themselves think about themselves.
Historically, I think a lot of people didn't really know they needed to question the heteronormative assumption that "You will grow up, fall in love with a member of the opposite sex, get married and have children." They had no mental framework for wondering if that was really the best answer for them and if not, why not.
I don't use the term bisexual to describe myself because I feel like that suggests I'm equally open to a relationship with either gender and I'm not. I mostly like men, I'm not really interested in getting with a woman and it's rather annoying that people think I'm actually gay and looking for a girlfriend because I admit to being not straight for political reasons because the evidence suggests it's extremely common for people to use the term bisexual when they are actually homosexual in order to downplay their orientation.
Saying "I'm bisexual." is sometimes saying "I'm willing to admit to being attracted to same sex people but I'm not yet ready to admit I'm not actually attracted to the opposite sex AT ALL and simply throw in the towel on that bullshit I've been told from birth."
A dating site that at least at one time was writing interesting articles about its internal data published a piece saying that women who identified as bisexual in their profile mostly messaged men and men who identified as bisexual in their profile also mostly messaged men.
I'm not entirely sure what is going on there. They assumed it meant the men in question were really gay and hiding that fact and the women were just trying to sound more adventurous, but the global norm in our heteronormative world is that men typically initiate. So I don't know if that's a good interpretation of what is going on there but I also know of at least one famous person who historically self identified as bisexual but later began calling themselves gay and quit having heterosexual relationships.
So I'm confident that it's very common for gay people to downplay the fact that they are gay or to go through a process of discovery and my position gets misinterpreted through that lens as "Really she's gay and not admitting it because most of us don't really want to admit it."
Yeah, no. That's not the case here.
I mostly like men. I just have known and deeply cared about people like Genevieve who were not "normal" by the standards of heteronormative culture and they had no hope of successfully pretending they were and also making their lives work, so I CHOOSE to talk about ME in part because long experience tells me there's NO good way to talk about uncomfortable social stuff but using ME as an example is LESS of a shit show than using specific other people by name as the example and more effective than not using a real world specific example at all.
I choose to use me as an example of the fact that our inner wiring concerning what floats our boat and our actions that you SEE by which other people infer our inner identity don't necessarily match up that way. What you see may not be telling you what you think it does.
Maybe it's telling you "Men are Doreen Traylor's favorite flavor and she has no compelling reason to flout heteronormative social expectations. It's worked fine for her to do all the stuff heteronormative culture expects of women, like get married and have kids."
Maybe it's telling you "That's a private matter and it's not really your business whether or not my roommate is my common law gay spouse or just my best friend and long time companion. How about if you shut your trap and not go asking what happens behind closed doors, mmmkay?"
I recently read a piece on Reddit saying roughly "I knew two men who lived together for years and everyone in town assumed they were gay but really they weren't. One had been traumatized, didn't want to ever again pursue a woman and didn't want to talk about that, so they just let people assume they were in a committed gay relationship to avoid wearing their trauma on their sleeve."
I considered cross posting the piece to r/GenevieveFiles but I felt like people wouldn't get the connection or understand why I felt that belonged there.
I think I had this idea that closeted meant handling it discreetly because that was my historical experience of the idea in a time and place pre-internet when people just generally talked less about things like sex.
I think it was handled that way because it was just RUDE to talk about sex at all.
Gays are currently MOSTLY fighting the wrong battle. They are currently fighting for the right to have sex as they please behind closed doors and you can ALREADY do that no matter what the law says IF you aren't a troublemaker and you STAY out of TROUBLE.If you are a troublemaker and also have illegal sex behind closed doors, someday someone will find out and USE that against you.They should be fighting for the right to PUBLICLY say "No, I'm gay." and it not be a BIG DEAL and to PUBLICLY appear at normal social events with their same-sex partner on their arm and have NO ONE care about that detail.That's the actual right heterosexuals have. We can implicitly and explicitly admit "I like members of the opposite sex." and appear in public with our lover on our arm and if we are married or otherwise have a socially acceptable relationship to that person, NO ONE CARES. No one goes "OH MY GOD. YOU BEING HERE WITH HIM is an ADMISSION you two are FUCKING!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
I think historically, before the Internet and social media and etc., it was easier to politely have a defacto don't ask, don't tell cultural policy for the LGBTQ crowd and that's probably where that official historical military policy came from and perhaps that's kind of a Southern thing. Perhaps it's not merely coincidence that I was born and raised in the Deep South and it was a Southern president who had that policy for the US military.
I have a long history of having social drama in part as a side effect of having done therapy and being out of step with other people about "You just don't talk about certain things." and inadvertently talking about things other people aren't talking about and may think they've brilliantly hidden from everyone else when the truth is people know and are just not saying anything about it.
Historically, it was perhaps more a detail of etiquette that "Look, I have anal sex with my wife but I don't TELL people that and we don't want to assume you are having anal sex because you are both men even though maybe you exclusively have oral and we also don't want you rebutting that assumption by loudly announcing you exclusively have oral. Just don't make other people wonder exactly how you two do it. We don't care what you do behind closed doors, but don't make us think about those details. Call them your roommate and leave it at that when in public."
Yes, it's a potentially life ruining rule of etiquette that "We don't care what you do behind closed doors, just don't make us think about that!" because if it comes out that you're gay, you can lose your job over it. I get that this is a serious problem for people and the fact that I get it is exactly WHY I choose to publicly share information about myself that actively makes my life harder when I could just LET people assume I'm straight because I've exclusively had relationships with men for decades.
And it's WHY this blog exists AT ALL: Because one of the consequences of being LGBTQ is that this population is at high risk of homelessness and I have a long history of writing about homelessness, but the risk of homelessness for LGBTQ people cannot be fixed by simply building more affordable housing. I've said previously on this blog:
This blog was dreamed up as an LGBTQ resource. I started it because the LGBTQ community is at high risk of homelessness.
And in the piece where that quote comes from, it links to: LGBTQ Individuals Are At Increased Risk Of Homelessness
But the reality is that a world where it's a rule of etiquette that "We don't want to know what you do behind closed doors and please don't make us think uncomfortable thoughts. You can do what you want, but don't bring that up in public spaces." is a world that neither forbids homosexuals from being "practicing homosexuals" nor leaves a written record of the actual cultural practices that politely allowed you do what wanted so long as you didn't make it into an issue.
And THAT was my point in the Reddit thing that led to this blog post.
I am sixty years old and I KNEW gay people who had respectable jobs and most people knew they were gay, you just didn't TALK about it.
I'm not convinced that was a truly gruesome experience because I married an extremely introverted individual who joined the military and I spent most of my marriage living far away from both my family and his family. My son has told me he didn't really get the "interfering in laws/relatives" trope until he was older because that simply wasn't a part of his firsthand experience.
I had a very PRIVATE relationship to my husband though people absolutely knew I was married to him and the gay people I knew were gay when I was a teenager had gay relationships, they just had them privately in a way that is similar to my marriage: People KNEW the relationship existed and just didn't get into it with them because they didn't want to talk about it.
I intentionally arranged to tell planet Earth "Butt the hell out of my marriage, mmmkay?" because I was molested as a child and saying "I was molested" IS the POLITE version of a much uglier truth more accurately stated as "I'm the victim of incest twice over."
I had a difficult marriage in part because I had terrible baggage and it wasn't anyone's business THAT he was willing to put up with me and my shit nor WHY he was willing to put up with me and my shit nor HOW exactly we worked our shit out. And that privacy is part of why I healed from things planet Earth seems to think people simply never get over.
I divorced him for reasons wholly unrelated to the personal baggage we each brought to the marriage even though I believe we BOTH brought substantial personal baggage to the marriage and he put up with MY shit and helped me get over it because I did the same thing for him.
I divorced him because I got a better label than "crazy" or "hypochondriac" for my chronic health issues and he completely reasonably agreed with doctors and scientists and planet Earth that people like me don't get well. I believed that him agreeing with them would help kill me, so I left him, but I'm not even mad at him that he believed what everyone else believes about my genetic disorder.
I'm "the kook", the weirdo, the mad scientist tilting at windmills and "hoping against hope" to get better. Only NOT crazy at all and NOT actually hoping against hope because I was ALREADY getting better BEFORE I divorced him and have gotten tons better since leaving, so I happen to be right and eight billion other people happen to be wrong and that happens to be a dangerous position to be in that can
get you killed by people who THINK you are crazy.So odds are high that I'm alive at all because I had a very private relationship to my husband and this helped me get what I needed in myriad ways, including a proper diagnosis which I got BECAUSE I was married to him and he's career military and the US military has an EXCELLENT medical system, superior in many ways to the civilian US medical system.
And also I felt clear he was good to me and not actually TRYING to kill me, which helped me leave on amicable terms and get on with getting betterer without making a big deal out of the fact that his callous disregard was likely to help kill me. I never wasted time on talking to a therapist about my FEELINGS or whatever about "My husband's bad habits are threatening to KILL ME!!!!"
I left and got on with upping my game, health wise.
Most people do not have a clear bright line concept of what their road not taken looks like. I can say with confidence that the path I chose to leave was a path leading to certain death and ending with people blaming my death on my genes, not on my husband.
And I can say with confidence he wasn't actually TRYING to kill me and would have sincerely believed my genes caused it.
And I can say with confidence my marriage helped me stay alive when I should have died for a long list of reasons, including my previously undiagnosed genetic disorder and the fact that I'm a survivor of incest twice over and was suicidal for decades because of it.
Most LGBTQ people who quietly "had a roommate" for decades likely were focused on the stressful aspect of not being able to SAY publicly that this was really their lover.
Guess what? Most heterosexual people don't typically use the word lover to describe their own lover. The say "boyfriend" or "husband" or "guy I'm dating."
Even if you're straight "Person I HAVE SEX WITH!!!!!!!" is mostly NOT how you talk about that relationship. Because even if you are straight, other people mostly don't want to think about YOUR sex life.
They need to know your last name changed when you got married so they know what to call you and that implicitly tells them "We're having sex" but socially it's generally something your acquaintances don't want to get into.
Prior to the Internet, it was easier to gloss over what was really going on with calling them your roommate while most people KNEW you were probably fucking and just didn't want to get into that, so SAYING "Actually we're FUCKING" by admitting it's a homosexual relationship was a firing offense but actually HAVING the relationship was NOT.
At least where I was.
Guess what? Standing on your desk at work and screaming "This is the person I'm FUCKING!!!!!!!! Just wanted you to KNOW that!!!!!!" would likely get you fired from most jobs today too.
We are just trying to work out how gay people can say "This is my boyfriend" instead of roommate without people reacting like "OMG! You said WHAT? You're ADMITTING you're FUCKING?????????"
And I think historically in some places that's effectively what was going on. But there's NO written record explaining that fact.