Caught halfway out of the closet
“Lie to yourself about this and you will
forever lie about everything.” —Frank Bidart, “Queer”
I’m caught halfway out of the closet, my foot jammed in the door. And I can’t tell what would make me happier: to retreat back inside and wait? But I feel like I’ve done enough waiting. I’ve known. I’ve known for a while. I’ve known for years. I’ve hid myself behind women, whose love and affection I genuinely enjoyed and reciprocated, but I was neither true to them nor to myself. I’m caught halfway out of the closet, and this is my decision to exit entirely, once and for all, and never to look back. Never to stand again in the shadows of a queer sexuality and let the homophobic forces that scatter the lands force me back inside. To take a stand, not only with a cause, but a stand with myself. To affirm that I do love, I am capable of being loved, and that I have a love to give that is a love I’ve been born with. I know no other love.
One of my friends knows it. My grandmother knows it. I think my brother knows it. My mother might know it, and so might my father. I’ve chosen not to tell them all explicitly, and this is not a condemnation of their characters, because each and every one of them would and will support me.
Which leaves me to wonder what stopped me.
Insecurity and uncertainty, largely. Paltry excuses to live a life in uncertain misery. But I have dropped clues along the way. I’ve mentioned articles that deal with epidemic homophobia. I’ve written a poem that alludes to an essay written by a gay man. I haven’t made an apostrophic gesture to Whitman in the same vein as Ginsberg, but this is due to a personal preference for subtlety. I’ve written candidly about one thing, and one thing only: suicidal depression. But I haven’t written the entire story. Even in the thick of it all, when I wrote a suicide note and stared at a bottle of pills on my counter that promised to launch me into a permanent sleep, I couldn’t bring myself to write the words. I couldn’t bear to break hearts. I couldn’t bear to open my own.
The original draft of the note: “I wonder often why I was born this way. Bipolar. Gay. Ordinary.” The final draft omitted the operative word. This was the draft I intended those who found me to discover, as though I had a reputation to protect after death. But it is the first draft I keep folded in my desk drawer, a reminder of an earlier, darker moment that I visit occasionally to remind myself to value perspective granted by time. But, most importantly, to remind me of who I am. I am gay, and bipolar, but perhaps not as ordinary as I once thought. Perhaps there’s something more to me than I’ve given myself credit for, but this credit goes only so far as I am willing to admit to the matter at hand. How can I live a life as an honest person without the capacity to admit to my own nature?
I’ve been taught at various times that homosexuality is a choice. I must vehemently disagree, dear reader, but I find myself wishing often that it was. I find myself wishing, alone in my bed at night, crying into folded napkins that I was straight, wishing for an easier life. Wishing for a life that wouldn’t restrict my travel to certain countries; for a life that wouldn’t produce a sinking feeling in my stomach when my psychiatrist asks if I “like boys or girls”; for a life that wouldn’t have warranted this small essay. But writing is the only medium I know of to achieve transparency and freedom. I figured I’d give it a shot.
Take this as a gesture of treating myself to a certain freedom. I’m trapped halfway out of the closet, my foot stuck in the door. This is my attempt to slip out of the shoe.
