Laughing at myself: looking back at a life in the closet

I have made wonderful new friends here in just a few days. I feel closer to many of you than I do to any of my neighbors and even some people I regard as good friends. I wish I had found EC a long time ago, but better late than never (which, after all, is the general theme of this forum). Now that I'm here I want to stay forever, even after I'm fully out to everyone as gay, which I'm pretty sure is coming sometime this year. Today I changed my little sexual orientation ID from bi to gay. I love calling myself gay. That's not to say I won't get scared and backslide. And it's not to deny an ongoing attraction to women. It just isn't very strong any more, and I seem to want to hold onto the bi label because I regard it as a life raft. Time to jump out of the raft and swim to shore.

Some of you have read my original thread, about coming out to my wife, etc. But I decided to start a new thread to reflect on my life in the closet. There's much I have found amusing, but couldn't share the humor with anyone except my therapist. And I want to just tell all. (I wish there more more to tell, but since I've never had sex with a man there's not a lot to dish.) I want to make this my moment to just let it all hang out.

I'm a writer by profession, and I probably can't say more than that, though I'd be quite happy to tell you my full name. I'm not a writer you have heard of, although a taxi driver in New York insisted he had. I was a reporter for a national magazine, and I just landed at JFK. He starts chatting and ask me what I do. I tell him. He asks my name. I tell him. And says, "oh, yeah, sure. I've read your stuff." Ha! I have a book coming out next year, but I can't tell you the title because you could find it on Amazon and better bookshops in your area and buy several copies for yourself and friends. An outstanding xmas gift. Maybe when it comes out in fall of 2014, I'll tell you all and be exiled from EC.

One thing I posted on a friend's wall yesterday (Hi, Musician) was how my many years of therapy have helped me unravel the mysteries of my sexuality and overcome a terrible writer's block. I'm not saying that the writer's block was because I was closeted, but I think the two things originated in the same internal conflicts I have grappled with.
Unfortunately, EC has given me a new excuse to avoid work, and I have a lot I need to be doing. I have been posting here almost solidly for four or five days now. As I also noted somewhere, it more addictive than porn. I haven't visited any of my favorite porn sites since I started here. I guess I can't recommend any of my favorite videos to you, but they are pretty hot.

Porn has been a big part of my life in the closet. Forgive me for repeating things you may have already heard me say, but during my college days I use to keep gay porn magazines discretely hidden in a box near my bed. Now there was also a lot of straight porn too. More than gay. I think I relied on porn because I was too tied up in knots over my sexuality, not just the homosexual side but the heterosexual side as well. Porn made it possible to keep real relationships at a distance. I did have girlfriends and date various women I met in school. And I enjoyed sleeping with them. The relationships usually ended because I was scared of genuine intimacy, so I'd find all sorts of faults with the women I was seeing. I don't think that's because I didn't really want to sleep with women; I definitely did. But I'm sure there was some sort of connection between my problems with intimacy and my hidden attraction to men.

To backtrack for a moment for an anecdote that may amuse you. My one and only consummated homosexual encounter. It almost doesn't count, since we were both just entering puberty. A beautiful boy down the street from my house. Big brown eyes. His family had a pool. After swimming, we went into his room and changed. I don't recall exactly how I got it started. Just something like, "Look, I've got a boner. Maybe you can get a boner too. Let's see." I went down on him. I loved having him in my mouth, he tasted wonderful, slightly salty. But I knew that what I was trying to do was called a "blow job" so for a few minutes, I tried blowing into it, like it was a trumpet and the head was a mouthpiece. I guess that as my mouth slipped around, we both figured out that I was supposed to suck and he could slide his cock in and out of my mouth. Once I got him interested, I went back for more on several occasions. I especially like having him on top of me in the missionary position. He told me I was kind of like a girl. I encouraged him to go ahead pretend I was the cute girl he had a crush on in his class. His sister finally found us in the basement one day, and that brought it to an end. My family moved away to a different city, but once we went back to the neighborhood I had grown up in to visit. I was heading to down to his house to try to give him a blowjob, when my parents saw me and called me to come for dinner or something.

Porn was in many ways a lifesaver for me. I remember the very first time time I entered an adult bookstore. One of those places with no windows, just a blank wall with a sign over the door that said Adult Books and No one under 18 allowed, or something along those lines. Maybe the minimum age was 21, I don't recall. But this was new territory for me. I had been masturbating to stuff like Playgirl and at some point the first gay versions of Playboy type porn mags appeared. Hot looking naked guys. And those were available to me at the left-wing bookstore around the corner from my apartment. But the x-rated stuff I encountered in that adult bookstore was a revelation. I entered the store, wandered nonchalantly over to the gay section like I was just browsing—as though I was just sort of curious as to what those sorts of people got off on—and I saw men with hard-ons fucking and sucking and doing all the things I had fantasized about for years. I suddenly saw that my fantasies weren't at all unusual. I casually counted out the dollar bills, handed them to the bored guy behind the counter—as far as he was concerned I was just another closet fag; he saw them all day long—and I took the magazines home and had a "gay old time," as the saying goes. And that has been the essence of my closeted homosexuality for the past 40 years: masturbating to gay porn.

In terms of actual encounters with men, there were a lot of close calls where I freaked out. And some where I was good and ready, but something got in the way. As early as 16 or 17, there was a friend I got high with and we kept signalling each other about what we wanted but acted as though we had no idea what the other meant. One night, we had gotten stoned and he had fallen asleep. Or maybe he was just pretending. We were lying in different beds in the garage of his mother's house—the garage had been converted into his bedroom—so there was no one within ear shot. Pot always unleashed my homosexual desires. Still does. So I had a hard-on for him, and I called to him, but he didn't wake. I called a little louder. No response. I said at a pretty loud voice, "Peter, please come over here and fuck me." Nothing. He had to have heard me, no? On another occasion with this same friend, I was staying over at his house and we were together in his double bed. We had some sort of excuse as to why we had to share the bed. And of course, we both just had to sleep naked. So there we are, naked in bed at last with a guy. I was lying on my back with the hardest erection I had ever had, and he rolled over and let his hand "accidentally" touch my thigh, and I came instantly and was immediately filled with horror that I had been acting as if I were queer (imagine that!). Moreover, I needed to go to the bath room to wipe my cum off my stomach. When I came back, I made up some excuse about why I should sleep on the sofa. Another opportunity missed.

I know, I know. How could I possibly have persuaded myself I was straight, right? Well, I did and I didn't. Obviously, I knew damn well that I was at the very least bi-sexual. But I would put all of that stuff out of my head. Pretend it didn't exist. Insist to myself that it was some sort of neurotic symptom, because I was quite clear heterosexual but had these unfortunate, recurring homosexual desires. Everyone else seemed to think I was straight, so who was I to argue? I did have moments of quasi-honesty with myself. I bought a book called "Being Homosexual" and read everything I could on the subject. I attended a couple of meetings of the gay student union in my freshman year. I asked at a regular bookstore where I knew people for a book called, "Men Loving Men.' Went right up to the counter and asked Gary, who was out, if he knew where it was. He led me to it.

But none of this made any sense to me. I was dating girls. Enjoying sex with them. Jerking off to Playboy and Penthouse and Oui at least as much as to Blueboy or Stud Strokers or Phallic Fantasies. And everybody just assumed that I was heterosexual, so it must be true. And, god, what would my older brother think if he ever found out that I fantasized about men, looked at pictures of naked men? I idolized him. He was popular and athletic and outgoing and very masculine and he had once instructed me not to let my wrists hang quite so limply as he saw me doing. I couldn't be gay.

In the late sixties and early seventies, I took LSD several times. I had good trips and bad trips. On the worst trip I ever had, I was in the hills above Santa Barbara with some friends. It's beautiful there. And there was a little water fall and lake where we swam. After swimming, we were ll sitting naked by the lake. I didn't know it because of how stoned I was, but I had been staring at one of the other guy's cocks. Apparently for quite awhile. I was utterly entranced. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever encountered. And, being out of my mind on LSD, I wasn't quite sure what this wondrous thing was. It was like the face of god. Everybody else noticed. And the guy said, "Would you like me to get an erection for you?" to much laughter all around. I went bonkers. A very bad trip.

I'll skip over the anxiety producing tales of my friend's closeted father, who was a TV director and had loads of young gay men around. Or of how he offered to share his bed with me one night when I was on the living room couch. How one time, I left just a ahead of an out-of-town visitor who was staying at a hotel in the Valley and pretended to have car trouble so he would stop and see if I needed help and, please, god, please, proposition me.

And yet I persisted in lying to myself through college, grad school, professional life, and marriage. I told my wife before we married that I "sometimes" fantasized about men, which she had already figured out based on what I seemed to like best in bed, and perhaps because I would say things like, "Oh my god, it's almost like having a cock inside me," when she fingered me in the ass. Or suck her thumb and talk out loud about imagining it was a cock. I showed her some of the tamer porn. She was cool with it. But eventually she tired of the role playing and my saying out loud during sex that I wished she were a man. So I took the porn out of the bedroom and put it in my office, and I waited until she had gone to sleep before pulling it out to get my fill. I guess she was even more delusional than I was, because she allowed herself to believe that it was all in the past. Until one night about seven years ago when she had a bad dream and came down to my office at 2 a.m. and discovered me at my computer stroking myself into ecstasy while look at some pictures I had downloaded. She was sort of shocked. I assumed she knew, so I couldn't figure out why she was upset. Her shrink asked her how it made her feel (isn't that just like a shrink?) and she told her that it was okay as long as I wasn't doing porn-chat and possibly hooking up. My wife asked me if I was gay. No, I said, don't be ridiculous. Bi? Yes, I guess I can't deny that can I, I said. So that's how things stood until this past February. I'll go into that in another post.

I've gone on a long time here and need a break, but I want to slip in a couple of stories that make me laugh. More porn stories. There was a very nice sex emporium, mostly gay, on a stretch of Melrose Avenue. Not at all sleazy. A nice, airy space. About a decade ago, I stopped in after work on a Friday to peruse the latest offerings. By this time I was a connoisseur of gay porn. I had favorite directors, knew the different kinds of men featured by the different studios. I was a smart shopper, checking the value of one video or magazine compared to another. I could spend a lot of time, comparison shopping. Well this video has six cum shots, that's pretty good. Oh, the guy in that magazine is gorgeous (any of you ever gotten off to Jeff Stryker? You could practically set up a little trailer on his majestic cock). I chatted with the sales people to get their opinions as to what would drive me into sexual hyperspace. I think I was my most honest version of myself when I was in there. I just relaxed. Everyone was there for the same reason. We were all gay. It was just taken for granted. So anyhow, on this particular day I bought three magazines and bottle of lube. At the counter, there were three young guys who waited on me. On asked me if there would be anything else today. I said, no, I thought this ought to get me through the weekend. We all had a good laugh.

One last thing. Earlier today I was posting on a thread about euphemisms for gay. I mentioned a couple i thought were pretty funny. "Light in the loafers," which is actually a pretty good description of how I have often felt since I came out as gay a couple of months ago. I also noted that I live in the Hollywood Hills, a neighborhood I have heard referred to as "the swish Alps," which I also like. Slightly off-topic, I wanted to mention the name of the psychoanalyst I saw while in grad school, a name guaranteed to produce anxiety in a man desperately not wanting to be gay: Faguet. pronounced in the French manner, fag-gay. Or, if you didn't know French pronunciation, you might think it was faggot. Ah yes, just the ticket for a total closet case like me.

more to come, i'm sure. . . .

 

Thanks, gravechild (what an upbeat monicker you have!)Yes, it does feel awfully good to speak the truth. And while I don't doubt I'll continue to have genuine interests in women, I do feel that identifying as gay just kinda gets to the point quicker.

But, actually what I have thought in the past hour is how I don't feel all that different. I'm still the same me, with all of the same good and bad qualities I had before, the same likes and dislikes, the same sense of humor. I still think that the Lakers made a mistake by not hiring back Phil Jackson back as coach. I still don't like the gay guy across the street who drives too fast down our winding streets in the hills and is probably going to kill a pedestrian some day. I'm still me.

I think I may have had the rainbow effect the day after I came out as gay to my wife. I was walking on air all day. Things made sense. Oh, all this is exactly what I should feel because I'm gay. Duh!

 

Thank you Erik. I'm not sure how good a guy I am. I can be pretty obnoxious when I put my mind to it. But I do think that my anxieties about my sexual orientation are reminders that we're all just people trying make it through life. Society imposes all sorts of rules and we obey them because life seem precarious if you don't. But screw that. The sky isn't going to fall if you go to bed with a man, the oceans won't swallow us up if two women want to lie together and show tenderness to one another. It's just people doing what people do. That's part of why I wanted to be so blunt but try to inject a bit of humor. To show how silly we can be in worrying about everything—because in the end, none of it really matters. That's the big cosmic joke on us.

Bill

 

Thank you Cool Bananas. I emphasized the fears, etc., in this post. I was in many ways a fairly "normal" happy guy. Obviously this stuff was all just beneath the surface, but it only got in the way some of the time. On the other hand, I suffered from pretty severe writer's block, and the more honest I have become with myself, the more that block has eased up. I doubt it's a simple one-to-one correlation. There was no "Eureka!" moment where I said I'm queer and suddenly I could write again. But there's obviously some connection there.

ANTM: I'm not sure how much you should make of your 12-year-old self's writings. Boys at that age are all trying to figure stuff out, and they all want to act as though they're cool "lady's men" even if they have never touched a girl. I sure as hell wouldn't want to go through puberty and my teens again.

On the other hand, I have recently remembered a few things I had forgotten and that I now see as very significant.

One of the most helpful things I have gained in my few days here is listening to other men with similar stories. I knew they were out there, but I had never spoken to any. (You can't exactly ask some other married man if he might just happen to be in the closet.) And the most helpful things has been hearing from others about their fluctuating sexuality. I still find it hard after all these years. I feel like there are two versions of me, one straight and one gay, and they refuse to recognize one another's right to be here. My goal is to get them to come to terms with one another and be at peace.

 

Great post, wrhla. Relate well to most of it. BTW you can ask married men if they might be gay. My fear of hitting on to men that I am uncertain are gay always held me back. I am slowly getting over that fear with a fair bit of success. funnily I am a writer by profession too.