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Aunt Susie

Discussion in 'LGBT Later in Life' started by I'm gay, Sep 24, 2016.

  1. I'm gay

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    I think everyone has an Aunt Susie in their life.

    My Aunt Susie is my mom’s sister. She and her then-husband Jerry lived across town from my family, and from about age 7 until 13 I spent weeks during the summer months each year with them. I adored my cousins and my aunt and uncle and had some of my best childhood memories in my time with them. What I didn’t know then, but have come to realize now, some of my worst childhood memories come from there too.

    “What’s a queer?” I once asked Aunt Susie. Although precise recollection of What age you were when… is very difficult, my best guess is that I was probably around 10 or 11.

    “A pervert,” she said. She liked the word pervert. She used it a lot. Child molesters, rapists, fags, queers, they were all perverts to her. Anti-gay sentiments were all too common in their household. This was 1979. It was all too common in many, many households.

    I didn’t know that Aunt Susie and Uncle Jerry were racist homophobes. They were my aunt and uncle, people I trusted, people who loved me.

    In those last couple of years of spending my summers with Aunt Susie, I was just beginning to realize that I liked boys in ways that boys weren’t supposed to like boys. I felt ashamed, and scared, and lonely. I didn’t know I was gay then. I knew that what I was feeling was different than what I was supposed to be feeling, but I didn’t have the knowledge or understanding to put my feelings into words. The only word that came to my mind was pervert.

    “Don’t ever do any of that fag stuff,” she told me once. “You’ll get AIDS and die.” This was towards the end of my time with Aunt Susie. I was completely aware by this point that I had gay feelings. I knew the word gay and what it meant. I was just beginning to figure out that I was in fact gay.

    One day Aunt Susie was driving my cousin and me to a movie. As we passed by two men walking along El Rancho Drive, she quickly rolled down her window. The men were walking along, holding hands.

    “Knock off that queer shit, you fucking perverts!” she shouted out her window. I wasn’t shocked. I had seen this before.

    Aunt Susie didn’t know it, but her words, attitudes, and beliefs were cornerstone experiences for me, helping me to build a wall around my gay feelings. Not a wall, really. A closet.

    My aunt wasn’t the only cause of my closet building. The early 80’s was filled with terrifying imagery to a young gay teenager. News footage of people dying from AIDS, video of gay culture in San Francisco, and, worst of all, any hint of rumor that someone at school was gay. There were so many reasons that I went into the closet during this time of my life. Aunt Susie was only one.

    Over the next 10 years, I built that closet in my mind, wrapped up my homosexuality and my feelings into a box, and I shoved that box into the deepest recesses of that closet.

    Only, that box won’t be denied.


    I am gay.

    The first time I acknowledged it in my own mind was in the summer of 2014, shortly after my father passed away. I wasn’t ready to come out of the closet, but it was the first time I came out to myself. I didn’t know that I was taking the first step of an incredible journey of self-discovery and healing. I only knew that I couldn’t continue to deny what had become obvious to me.

    I didn’t come out of the closet then. I couldn’t. I am a father and husband. I have a marriage of 20 years to a woman I love and adore, and more importantly, respect. My inner struggle with the guilt and shame that I robbed this woman of something she deserved – a heterosexual partner, so I became even more lonely and depressed. I had no one to talk to. So, like a good closeted gay man, I buried my feelings again and shoved that box back into the closet.

    Only, that box won’t be denied.

    ------------------------------------------------
    Note: I wrote the above article just before I came out to my wife. I didn't even know about EC at the time I wrote it. I was simply journaling some of my feelings at the time. I recently came across this journal entry, and I thought I would share this here, even though it was written over 3 months ago. I had planned to continue it further as part of my coming out story (I knew at the time that I wrote it that I was going to come out) but I never got back to it.
     
  2. Nickw

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    Imgay47

    Thanks for sharing this. I guess a lot of us had similar experiences growing up.

    For me, I remember my little brother (he was 12 maybe me 14) would call people "suckers". My dad took me aside and asked me to talk to him and tell him what that meant. My dad was a great father, but anything about discussing sex terrified him. He never had "the talk" with me and I learned everything about sex at a public library doing my own research. He assumed I knew how this was a bad word. But, I didn't so I asked him what it meant. He told me that was when two men "sinned naked together" Those men were suckers because....he let me figure it out.

    I was terrified. My best friend was gay and neither of us knew what it meant...good Catholic boys. But, we had been naked wrestling together and practicing making out some. At once I knew what I was and it was very very bad. I never had the talk with my brother, broke it off with my best friend, and proceeded to not think about other boys for years.

    There is still no way I can tell my, nearly, 90 year old father that I am bisexual even though he has accepted my gay siblings with open arms...I just can't. I feel like that evil young kid when I think about telling my dad even though I just don't feel that way any other time.
     
  3. nbd

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    These are such sad stories. I can't imagine what it must feel like to remember people you loved tinged with this ugliness.

    I did not grow up with much extended family. My parents weren't blatantly homophobic, but there were definite indicators when I wasn't acting the way I should be. They insisted that I keep my hair long. My mom would mock how my clothing wasn't "feminine" enough. My dad would tell me I should act sweeter, less brash, if I wanted a boyfriend. Any talk about gay people was whispered, and I remember my dad being annoyed if it was ever mentioned on TV. To be fair though, he hated when they threw heterosexual sex into TV shows, too.

    So I guess I don't have an Aunt Susie. Just vaguely homophobic parents and classmates. An undercurrent that being gay was different and therefore unacceptable, not to be something you should look too closely at because it was Wrong.
     
  4. Landgirl

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    This was pretty much my experience. No outright homophobia, but just hints that people like that were not normal, and shouldn't be copied.