So I’m a day late. So sue me.
For some years, I have been thinking about telling my coming-out story. It happened later in my life than it generally happens to most people, and now 25 years have passed. I had the help of a straight man who has no idea who I am. If you’re curious, proceed below the fold, where you will also find tonight’s comments.
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It was my 34th birthday: August 30, 1993, a Monday. I had just begun a sabbatical replacement position at a well-regarded public college in the mid-Atlantic region and was acclimatizing myself to the environment of this new milieu. The department had a subscription to the Washington Post, so there was something to help me waste time. Unlike the New York Times, the Post has a comics page, and they carried Doonesbury. Sadly, I find that younger people have little to no clue what Doonesbury was or is. A brief history of Doonesbury can be found here. For those who are unaware, Doonesbury was a creation of Garry Trudeau which started out as a light-hearted depiction of his experiences as an undergraduate at Harvard Yale. The characters of the strip began as a group of Harvard Yale students, but then expanded to a cast of what seemed like thousands, broadening to include politicians and cultural figures, including a stand-in for Hunter Thompson (Zonker Harris’ Uncle Duke). Doonesbury became famous for featuring topical and newsworthy events and settings generally (such as the Vietnam War), and in particular for skewering the Nixon White House during the Watergate crisis. It still runs in many papers, but the daily strips are reruns from the archives. Only the Sunday strips are new, and Trudeau has found a new, fat target in the current White House occupant and his minions. But it’s just not as important a cultural touchstone as it used to be, sadly.
Back to 1993: So I read Doonesbury on my 34th birthday in the department faculty lounge. It was this strip. (For reasons of copyright, I can’t post the strips in the diary.) It featured a character introduced in the strip’s earliest days, Mark Slackmeyer. After virtually running the campus radio station in the strip’s early days (and famously declaring then-president Richard Nixon “Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!”) Mark has graduated to become a journalist at NPR. At this point, he is the host of an all-night call-in show. It’s in the midst of such a show that this one week’s series begins. When a caller asks if Mark even has a life, he’s momentarily caught off-guard. I found it mildly amusing, but nothing exceptional. I had no idea what was in store.
And so came the next day’s strip (Tuesday). Another character walks into Mark’s studio: Andy Lippicott. Andy was a gay man who had died of AIDS in the strip’s past, but he still appears in some characters’ dreams. This is what has happened to Mark, as he has apparently fallen asleep during his own show. But Andy is offering help to Mark. What kind of help could that be? I’d have to wait until tomorrow to find out…
...And so, the next day’s strip (Wednesday). Now things are getting interesting. Andy has just hinted in the last panel that Mark is gay. Mark is confused, and so was I. Mark is by now a guy in his 30s or 40s with an established career. If he is gay, how could he not have known it? What’s happening here?
On to Thursday’s strip. Mark gets angry and, in the second panel, uses exactly the arguments I was making to myself as to why I wasn’t involved with anyone (“There hasn’t been time! I’m on a very demanding career path!”), and Andy brings up denial in the last panel. This strip shook me to my core. Growing up Catholic in the 1960s, homosexuality was not on the list of possible outcomes for anybody. It was unthinkable. I willed myself to conform, or as Paul Monette wrote, to wear the straight man’s suit of armor, no matter how ill-fitting it seemed. Now, seeing that suit of armor slip on Mark Slackmeyer, I was confronted with my own lonely life as well as those longings I admitted to no one, not even myself. It was on this day that I finally had to admit to myself that I was gay.
And then came Friday’s strip. Mark confronts the prospect of a radical change in the midstream of his life—just as I had to. On the other hand, I wasn't about to make any radical changes to my wardrobe—I still haven’t 25 years later.
In Saturdays’ strip, Mark calls his old friend Mike Doonesbury (the strip’s title character) and comes out, after a fashion. I wasn’t ready to do that yet. The prospect was still too new, too frightening. I had to read some books, do some exploration of gay culture, to see if I could recognize a place for myself in a world I barely knew anything about. I still hadn’t even lost my virginity yet. If I risked having sex with someone, would I get HIV? This was before protease inhibitors were introduced as HIV treatments and dramatically improved the lives of HIV+ people. At that time, some viewed all gay men as dead men walking, as surely they would all die of AIDS eventually. Further, the whole prospect of telling anyone I was gay was terrifying. How did I know I wouldn’t be rejected by my family and friends? Would I lose my job? What would my students think? These are still dangers today, but the culture has changed drastically in the intervening years.
One of the first gay books I read that really touched me was Paul Monette’s memoir Becoming a Man. By the third paragraph, he had me pegged. “Self-pity becomes your oxygen.” That’s about the size of it. I realized that I had had enough of self-pity and was ready to live an actual life.
I first came out to someone on January 2, 1995. I was fulfilling a New Year’s resolution, the last one I ever made. I chose to come out to a philosophy professor I had met at a university where I had been a post-doc. He was a man in his 60s, an Episcopal priest, married to another philosophy professor, the father of two daughters. I suppose his clerical station had some influence on my choosing to come out to him first, sort of like a confession. I e-mailed him (a relatively new practice in those days) to come out to him. He replied by coming out to me! He, too, was gay, though after decades of hiding in a perfectly respectable marriage, he wasn’t about to come out publicly. In retrospect, it was one of those things I should have recognized, the thing that we had in common in the first place. For a while after, it seemed like every male Episcopal priest I met turned out to be gay.
Later that year, I began to come out to friends, and then my sister. They all took it well. In all that experience, I lost only one friend. And in September of that year, I met hubby, during yet another sabbatical replacement. From then on, I had a companion with which to share life, and that has made all the difference.
So that’s the story of how I owe a straight man, Garry Trudeau, my coming out. Even if I had never seen that strip, I think eventually I would have come out, but seeing it when I did more or less pushed me to the realization that, despite everything, I really am gay. Interestingly, I have yet to meet another LGBT person who remembers that Doonesbury sequence of strips as anything significant. Perhaps I’m unique in that respect?
Anyway, let’s move on to the comments!
Top Comments (October 12, 2018):
From Wee Mama:
This one sentence (by extrp) sums up an awful lot of the world’s wisdom traditions. From Georgia Logothetis’ APR post.
From Youffraita:
Mathy Kathy hits a homerun with this pithy comment, from ForwardKY’s recommended post Old white dude gets stereotyped (again).
From cminus:
I nominate Villanova Rhodes' comment in Rebecca Pilar Buckwalter Posa's diary for an incredibly brief, sober, and I believe accurate explanation that yes, if there was a will (meaning Democrats in power) in the Executive or in the Legislative, something could indeed be done beyond the internal judicial investigation.
Top Mojo (October 11, 2018):
Top Mojo is courtesy of mik! Click here for more on how Top Mojo works.
Top Photos (October 11, 2018):
Courtesy of jotter.