Gifts of Being Closeted

-There are two greasy older boys at your all-boy Catholic high school who will somehow discern that you are gay, and will call out your name in a mincing voice and push you into lockers. Be crafty! There is a chapel in your school building. Certain Catholics—and these are truly the weirdos, the daffiest of the daffy in your deeply daffy school—gather there to get a Communion wafer Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, before class. There’s the deeply troubled Christian Brother who stands at four feet, has no teaching duties, and seems to possess neither working shampoo nor the power of speech. There’s the addled biology teacher who speaks like a Muppet and displays an ABORTION KILLS CHILDREN bumper sticker on the front of his desk. If you attend services with these loonies, then the bullies cannot get to you for a few hours every Monday, Wednesday, Friday. It may be, as you suffer through the tedious mass, that you actually think of Bette Midler, the hooker in Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame. She, too, sought sanctuary from her persecutors in the warm embrace of a big, old church. “God help the outcasts, the weak and down-trod! I thought we all were Children of God!” You might think of Scottish debtors, ducking into the monastery at Holyrood, aware that their private Javerts could not seize them while they were rooted in Holy Ground. You are Bette Midler! You are the Scottish debtors! And this is the main gift of being closeted: A feverish, over-active imagination.

-When you discover masturbation, it’s such a delight that you’re sure it’s sinful. You decide to ration the experience. It will occur once per week, on Wednesdays. This is in keeping with a Catholic ethos: Flay yourself, so that you have nothing to give either to your own soul or to the people in your life. Wander around bitchy and repressed all the time, like all of your neighbors. The Wednesday ration system doesn’t work. Masturbate all the time. When you peruse your brother’s Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, note that you might actually be having a pleasurable biological reaction to a woman in a bikini. Deny the following thought: She’s actually pictured with her husband, a linebacker, in the photo, and the husband is in a Speedo. Deny this thought: For a virginal teenager, the idea of sex with any sentient being, regardless of gender, is exciting. Toned flesh is toned flesh; you are sixteen, and it’s likely you could ejaculate while viewing photos of a particularly healthy and well-groomed goat. Deny, deny, deny. Repress, repress. Stare at the bikini as you cum—and offer that heterosexual semen to Jesus!

-If you are a closeted North Tonawandan teenager in the late nineties, this means you get to take theater classes. Your parents will drop you off in silence, and late; the chronic lateness is like a billboard, e.g. WE ARE UNCOMFORTABLE WITH THIS BUT DOING OUR BEST! Your acting coach is the first gay person you’ll know; he’s also the first African-American man in your life. (It has taken only sixteen years! The wonders of theater! This coach works at the school that once trained Buffalo’s sole gift to the world—Christine Baranski—and, gurl, this man can offer you some opinions about Christine Baranski.) The other, later gay person in your adolescence, your future English teacher, will be a bit circumspect about his private life; you’ll discern the fact of his homosexuality mainly from his Ethel Merman voice-mail message, and from his fondness for Truman Capote. But that acting coach? His stage name is Ainsley Valentine. He sashays. He spends time on the drag circuit at Buffalo’s Club Marcella, and he really, really wants you to put down all your Neil Simon scripts. “Honey,” he says, “read some Luigi Pirandello. Read A Cheever Evening. The abortion story. There is a WORLD out there, and you are not going to encounter it if you keep skimming your way through Barefoot in the Park.” Listen closely. Do your Stanislavski homework. Fold yourself into a ball, and shudder. Scream. You are recreating the Battle of Dunkirk for a small audience. There’s praise, afterward, but pretend not to hear it. You aren’t in this for the accolades. You are simply serving the gods of art.

Those, Small Kid, are the gifts of being closeted. Lest anyone tell you that that experience was not rich and worth recording. It was, and it is. More later on this Crazy Business Called Life.