Today is National Coming out Day. It’s an unofficial holiday for encouraging timorous queerfolk cowering in the Narnia at the back of their closets to do more than take a tentative peek out of the closet door. NCOD is supposed to engender busting down the closet door, ripping it off its hinges, and emerging like a butterfly from its chrysalis singing “I am what I am.”
It’s also, perhaps, a time for those of us who are out, who are fully fledged queerfolk, to do a little retrospection about the process by which we emerged from our own individual closets. To take a look at the steps, often incremental and punctuated with false starts, by which we came to own our queer identities.
For example, I can remember the first time I kissed another boy and liked it — a lot — more than 4 decades ago, when I was a mere stripling of fifteen. I remember my first encounter with another man, receiving a hurried blow job in the side yard of a house in Pacific Palisades during a party. Similarly, I can remember what it was like to “go all the way” with another guy, in a bedroom in a fraternity house on the Vanderbilt campus in Nashville, shortly after turning eighteen. I can remember the masculine physicality, the pleasure of our mutual explorations, and how at a certain point we both attained climax and fell into each other’s arms in the blissful sleep that only men can enjoy after sex.
Yet those initial encounters, those early forays into same-sex intimacy were highly fraught. My first two underage encounters could, even in ostensibly liberal California, have called forth criminal prosecution and significant exposure. California remains a state where at least one senior deputy district attorney can proclaim that “the position of [her] office is that it is absolutely illegal in California for any person under the age of eighteen to be sexually intimate with any other person whomsoever, in any way, shape, or form.”
The situation in Tennessee was even worse. My frat house fling with that other man, even though we were both over eighteen, could have resulted in a felony prosecution against both of us for “the abominable and detestable crime against nature,” defined under Tennessee’s then applicable law as a very serious felony calling for a sentence of up to 20 years in the state penitentiary.
Moreover, in addition to being tarred with the taint and stigma of criminality, any excursions in same-sex intimacy in the late 1970s and early 1980s also and necessarily took place against the backdrop of an impending or ongoing health crisis. Even today, I remember the AIDS crisis with a combination of apprehension and deep sadness. For in truth, I came of age — both legally and sexually — at one of the most devastating times in queer history.
For what middle-aged queer man, of that certain age, then living in either New York or Los Angeles does not remember the two companion articles that appeared concurrently in the July 3, 1981 additions of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, headlined “rare cancer found in 41 homosexuals.” Having experienced the welcome, if equivocal, pleasures of masculine intimacy, I was, at seventeen, paying fairly regular, if discreet, attention to news coverage of what was then known simply as “the gay community.”
Thus, I read the story in the Los Angeles Times with great care and mounting apprehension, feeling a kind of nameless, inchoate, dread, not unlike that which millions of Americans have felt since the coming of Donald Trump to the presidency on January 20, 2017. I sensed that something terrifying was unfolding, the metaphorical candy store in which so many queerfolk had romped so pleasurably, was closing. The years of sexual liberation, of sex without consequence, were coming to an end.
As indeed they were.
The history of the AIDS epidemic is far too well-known, among both queerfolk and among our straight neighbors to require recapitulation. As gay men became ill and began to die at a frightening rate of all kinds of frightening ailments, those of us who were beginning to contemplate coming out took counsel of ourselves and perhaps a few very close friends. We redecorated our closets and hunkered down what promised to be a very, very long siege, one which might make the 900 days of Leningrad seem tame. Indeed, some of us retreated so far into our closets that we practically emerged in Narnia.
The fears the AIDS crisis engendered were often over the top and mythic in their proportion. The implication of all the fear mongering and mythmaking was that sharing even the slightest degree of same-sex intimacy was tantamount to signing one’s own death warrant, condemning oneself to a slow and hideous demise.
Much of this fear mongering came, not surprisingly, from our straight neighbors. From those who objected to our presence in the body politic, the fear mongering was delivered with ill disguised or open Schadenfreude. But worse was the “concern trolling” from those who profess themselves to be allies, in the form of “friendly” admonition or commiseration that did little but reinforce the closetedness to which so many of us felt condemned.The responses of the straight community ineluctably took the form of law enforcement "solutions" and a kind of atavistic appeal to neo-Victorian prudery which is still with us in the form of the #metoo movement.
Like many queerfolk, I allowed my own coming out to be delayed by the health crisis. Throughout the 1980s, through nearly a decade of college and law school, I remained the soul of closeted discretion. My vision of the Narnia at the back of my own closet, the West Hollywood of my fantasies, was a mythical, paradisiacal place where the men were handsome, the sex was hot, the health crisis was far away, and where one need fear neither societal censure nor the prospect of a lingering, languishing death.
Indeed, perhaps the greatest paradox of the AIDS crisis was how it not only brought our existence and our plight to the attention of our straight neighbors, but how, in a way, it forced us to mature as a community. For in a sense, the crisis was our own London blitz, our own Stalingrad, our own Srebrenica, our own Golgotha.
Yet, like the fabulous Gloria Gaynor, we survived. Like the Abbé Sieyès father of the French Revolution, the byword for us was “nous avons survecu:” we survived.
And not only did we survive, we thrived in adversity. We learned how to reach purposefully for the levers of political power. We learned again the lesson of Stonewall: asking nicely gets you nowhere. We learned how to appeal to the sympathy, compunction, and sense of decency of the majority of our straight neighbors. And we appealed most of all to queer “proximity empathy,” that empathic sense that arises in people who realize that a friend, a family member, a neighbor, or a coworker, in short, anyone to whom one may be emotionally connected, is queer.
And, surveying the ground, realizing that the time had probably come when I could no longer conceal this existential fact about myself, I finally came out. It was July, 1990, nine years after those fateful headlines, and two weeks after being admitted to the California Bar. I was 26 when I came out, and indeed, 26 was, at the time, the average age for coming out.
I knew what it had been like to live a life of at least ostensible straightness. Indeed, I was not inexperienced in opposite-sex sexual intimacy. I had managed, despite terrible, probably morally blameworthy, imposture on my part, to provide my opposite-sex partners with reasonably satisfactory sexual experiences. Fortunately, I congratulated myself, I had not got sucked in to an ongoing relationship with any of the women with whom I had gone through the forms of traditional heterosexual intimacy.
Coming out, formally admitting to my family and to my friends, without any quibble, cavil, or demur, that I was in fact a queer boy, a pooftah, a homosexualist (pace, Gore Vidal), a man who had sex with other men, in short that I was as queer as pink ink and as gay as a goose, proved in the event to be every bit the liberating experience it has been described by so many queer writers as being.
Being out to the family meant freedom from the exquisite discretion that I had theretofore felt necessary. I no longer had to be so careful when I looked at the paper. I no longer had to engage in the invidious pronoun shift so well known to queerfolk. I could take the occasional gander at a cute guy, even if I happened to be in the company of relatives.
Being out, in short, meant that I could be candid about myself and the existential reality of what I was and am. Queer pundit Andrew Sullivan has observed that one of the critical marks of differencing the distinguishes gay men from our straight neighbors is our candor about matters sexual. That candor can be liberating, although I don’t know a single gay man who has not been occasionally admonished by even supportive family members that he is offering “TMI,” too much information.
Yet, at some point along one’s queer journey, the personal ineluctably becomes the political. And, perhaps ineluctably, I became involved in a series of queer causes. I did the AIDS walk. I marched in the pride parade, swinging a smoking thurible 2 miles down Santa Monica Blvd. at the head of the Episcopal Church contingent. I did pro bono work for AIDS patients, and in 1993, I was one of the first attorneys to challenge California’s ban on same-gender marriage, when I took on the case of two earnest young men who desired to be wed.
And it was then that I started to realize that the queer community, which had seemed to present such a united front to the straights was actually as divided and as full of bureaucrats, careerists, and apparatchiks as any straight community. I realized that there existed an unofficial, and extremely territorial, bureaucracy that had essentially taken possession of the queer community, and was very much determined to protect what it considered its territory against those whom they saw as interlopers. They saw themselves as very much the “Official Movement,” so to speak. They had made themselves very much the go-to people whenever the media, straight or queer, wanted commentary on any development affecting the queer nation.
Not surprisingly, this Official Movement considered itself very much in charge of setting the political agenda for queerfolk everywhere. Indeed, the penalty for not getting in lockstep with the Official Movement on whatever issue was considered important by that Official Movement was to be shunned and ostracized, without limitation of time.
In 1993, the Official Movement, obsessed as it then was with the issue of queerfolk in the military, was not ready by any means to deal with marriage equality. Consequently, the Official Movement made it very clear to my marriage case clients and to me that we were “interlopers,” against whom they had set their face.
Indeed, instead of helping us, the Official Movement and its toadies in the queer media did their level best to hinder us, publicly chastising us and speaking of my clients and me that, had any straight person uttered them, would have been considered inappropriate; indeed, they were homophobic. Both my clients and I put up with many unjust slings and arrows from the Official Movement.
And that, to all intents and purposes, represented the end of my interaction with the Official Movement, and with the people who make up the Official Movement; the operators, the people-on-the-make, the checkbook activists, the gender police, the social-justice-warriors, the PC enforcers, the come-late-to-the-party types, the chow line crashers, and - let us shame the devil and tell the truth - the star fuckers and the victory pimps, the people who will shove you aside to step up to the podia to claim a piece of a victory they had no share in making.
And, the “official movement” is still very much composed of such people today, operators, young-men-on-the-make, checkbook activists, gender warriors, PC enforcers, come late-to-the-party types, chow line crashers, the star fuckers, and the victory pimps. Most of us know who the victory pimps are; they’re the people who appear out of nowhere to participate in any victory the queer nation obtains. After all, as Galeazzo Ciano (Mussolini’s son-in-law and Foreign Minister) so famously put it, “victory has a thousand fathers. Defeat is an orphan.”
When Obergefell v. Hodges came down in 2015, guaranteeing marriage equality nationwide, the Official Movement, the star fuckers, and the victory pimps emerged from the woodwork and were falling all over each other to muscle their way to the head of the chow line to claim some share of the achievement. As I observed in my blog post of June 26 of that year,
"Bitter, party of one, my table has been ready for a generation, because I see what can happen when an Official Movement muscles its way to the head of the chow line. So, while I was happy for 15 minutes, it’s now back to normal, and I see nothing to celebrate by foregathering in 115° weather to be preached at by people who haven’t got the slightest clue about how our fight developed and how it was won."
And indeed, a great many of the Doyens and Doyennes of the Official Movement really do have not the slightest clue about the manner in which our fight developed, or the manner in which was won. The coiffed, immaculately dressed, well-turned-out, passably cute twentysomethings and thirtysomethings who have become the face of the Official Movement have no idea what it was like during those days before the crisis, those liberated days of the late 1970s when anything seemed possible, even to a proto-homosexual still in his teen years.
Because, to a large extent, we have become domesticated. We are now just as much an integral Footnote Four minority in American society as the Irish, the Jews, the Buddhists, the Pagan/Wiccans and all the other communities that were once considered fashionably exotic. Like the Irish and the Jews, who also have been thoroughly integrated into American society, we’ve gone from being an exotic, quasi-criminal fringe with fabulous taste to being endotic, just like the Irish or the Jews, albeit still with fabulous taste.
And, being domesticated and endotic, should it surprise us that the average age for coming out has dropped from 26 into the early teens? Coming out is now less a process to be carried out with due introspection and complete honesty of self and purpose and more and adolescent rite of passage akin to getting one’s first drivers license. I can’t help but wonder if we haven’t lost something in the process. Like many older gay men, I wonder if we haven’t bereaved ourselves or been bereaved of some of what makes us unique -special, even- in society. In becoming a bourgeois, Footnote Four minority, enjoying significant protections in America’s most populous, bluest states, have we not lost touch with some of that subversive fabulousness which was so integral in making us us?
We queerfolk of a certain age have been tested as in a refiner’s fire. We had to learn the disciplines and protocols of exquisite discretion, of living well under both the disco ball and the sword of Damocles at the same time. Has our domestication, our transformation from exotic to endotic, deprived us of that faculty for living well in a time of crisis, for being fabulous, for seeing the irony in life and for holding up the shibboleths of society to relentless and critical examination? Have we lost our capacity for cultural dissidence? Or is it just that as we’ve get older it’s not so fabulous anymore?
About three years back, I looked in on a dear friend of mine, then still fabulous at 65— and still fabulous now at 68. Being as he is thirteen years my senior, his memories - and those of his equally fabulous husband- of the late 1970s are sharper than mine; his experiences differ from mine, yet in many ways, they and I have more in common than either of us does with an out, loud, and proud high school senior taking his boyfriend to the prom, something we could never have done at that age. We were standing by the sliding glass doors in his dining room, looking out at the pool under a rainy sky.
It was a somber moment, and my friend turned to me and reminded me of an almost untranslatable haiku from Nagai Kafu, the great Japanese novelist of prewar Tokyo. Kafu’s haiku, in rough translation, is
Falling snow,
And Meiji is far away.
Turning to me as we watched the rain fall, making ripples on the water of the pool, he offered his riff on Kafu’s haiku:
Falling rain,
And Studio 54 is far away.
His haiku was, in its own way, an elegiac lament for a time we were old enough to remember, mature enough to know will never come again, and yet still special enough to us for us to regret its passing.
I’m glad I can be out. I didn’t expect things would turn out as they have. I can be who I authentically am, but I feel as if much of the collective Outness of our community is in danger of slipping away from us, as if we had been assimilated by the Borg, until we become nothing more than overly domesticated sexual minority kitsch, like mass-produced plastic souvenir coyotes howling at the pot lights in a tourist trap on a dark desert highway.
-xxx-
PAUL S. MARCHAND is a fiftysomething attorney who lives and in Cathedral City — where he served two terms on the city Council — and practices law in the neighboring Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage,. He is as queer as pink ink, and does not apologize for it. The views expressed herein are his own, and are certainly not those of the queer Official Movement. They are not intended as and are not to be construed as legal advice. This post is a revision and extension of a similar post from October, 2016.
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