"Closets are for Clothes"

12 January, 2000

Many times, in many situations, I've been asked about how I came out (of the closet). Or when I first realized I wasn't heterosexual (or like "normal" boys, as it is sometimes phrased). How old was I? How did I first know? Or some variation of those questions. Sometimes the person posing the question seems to expect a fairly simple answer. Other times they want to hear a long, heart-wrenching tale about rejection, oppression, and triumph over adversity. There are elements of all those things in my story--but that's just scratching the surface. There isn't a simple answer.

When I was four years old my mother had an extended stay in the hospital after the cesarean delivery of my younger sister (with a lot of medical complications). My maternal grandmother came to stay with my father and I for a while to look after us and then to help take care of my mom and the new baby once they came home. One day during this stay my grandmother asked me if I had a girlfriend. I replied 'No, but I have a couple of boyfriends.'

I was only four years old. I didn't fully understand what adults meant by words such as 'boyfriend' and 'girlfriend.' Since by temperament I am very rational and analytical, I seem to have deduced that the word 'girlfriend' was a compound of 'girl' and 'friend' and meant a friend who happened to be female. Similarly, 'boyfriend' referred to a friend who just happened to be male. The more subtle implications had escaped me.

But my grandmother understood those more subtle meanings far too well. She had fit. She asked me a lot of questions, most of which I didn't understand. It was rather frightening for a four-year-old to see an adult became that upset over such an innocently-meant statement. She proceeded to tell me that little boys do not, ever, have boyfriends. If ever anyone asked me again, I was, under no circumstances, to refer to these two boys as my 'boyfriends.' I was, instead, to call them my 'little friends.' She made me repeat it several times. Boys, she went on to explain, could have a lot of 'little friends' who could be either boys or girls. We also should have a girlfriend, and that this girlfriend would be the one, special girl that we liked more than anyone else in the whole world. And one day, she told me, I would grow up and find a very special girlfriend who I would ask to marry, and we'd get married and have children together and I would be a daddy, just like my father.

That's an incredible burden to lay on a four-year-old kid. Particularly when the adult telling you this has become so emotionally agitated. I couldn't understand why what I said was so very wrong. All I knew, as she made me repeat back everything she told me, was that it wasn't true. I can't say how I knew, but I was certain that something about what she was telling me wasn't going to be what happened to me. I suddenly knew that I wasn't normal. And it scared me.

For the next several years I lived in a state of mixed fear and confusion about this incident. I would spend long periods of time staring into the mirror, trying to see what was different about me. Was I a changeling, left by the elves who stole away my parents' real son? Was I just switched at birth at the hospital and sent home with the wrong family? Was I an alien sent here to be raised as a human, and later be picked up by my people who would debrief me about the natives of earth?

In the spring of 1972 my body began changing. Back then they used to line up all the children twice a year in school and put us each in turn on a scale to record our weight and height. The teachers would usually make a comment about how much we'd grown. That spring my teacher said that it looked like I'd had a growth spurt. He was wrong, I was just starting. Over the course of the next fifteen months, I grew from 4 feet, 10 inches tall to 5 feet, 5 inches tall. And then I stopped. I've never gotten one centimeter taller than I was on my thirteenth birthday.

But in the spring of '72, all I knew was that things were changing. I was getting taller. My feet outgrew several pairs of shoes. I was hungry all the time, but all my relatives commented on how skinny I was getting, and would ask my mom if I was eating regularly. She would make jokes about how I had a teen-ager's appetite already. But the scariest thing was something I couldn't tell anyone about. I was getting erections. And with them were coming strange feelings and imaginations that I didn't understand. While at the age of four I may not have understood what the word 'boyfriend' meant, at eleven I knew that if there was one thing we were never allowed to talk about with anyone else, it was our "private parts."

I didn't know what was happening. It was scary. Although my parents had given me a very simplified explanation of where babies come from clear back when I was three or so (during my mother's second pregnancy, which ended in a stillbirth), the actual mechanics of how it happened had been left out. I had heard a few contradictory things from other kids, over the years, but nothing had prepared me for this.

Somehow, I got the courage to ask a friend, and though he teased me mercilessly over it, he said enough to send me to the forbidden bookcase in my parents' bedroom. Among the books there was a one entitled, "Everything you wanted to know about sex (but were afraid to ask)." While the information in that book helped to calm some of my fears, it raised a large number of new ones.

Since my sexual fantasies were predominantly about other men, that meant I was, as the book called it, "a homosexual." And though the book was very liberal and affirming while talking about hetero-sex, it was much more ambivalent on homosexual activities. My church's teachings were quite clear that homosexuals were sick, perverted tools of Satan. I was in big trouble.

Nothing I did would make the feelings go away. No amount of praying would drive those desires away. No matter how I cried and pleaded with god (and I did a lot) my erotic dreams wouldn't change. As the summer of '72 unfolded, I and one of the neighbor boys (who was just a few months older than I) began fooling around together. It was wonderful and terrible all at once. It is so amazing that the human body has, built-in, a capacity for such joy. Yet I knew, without a doubt, that I would burn in hell for all eternity because of that joy.

Over the next many years I rode the roller coaster between resignation to my fate and denial of my feelings. I had a number of relationships, both with other guys and with girls. Some were very platonic. Others not. I went through a large number of dysfunctional coping strategies. I tried to become completely celibate, to suppress all romantic or sexual feelings. I threw myself into 'god's work.' I indulged in wildly promiscuous experimentation for short periods, then spent months wallowing in guilt and self-denial. I decided that I was bisexual, and that only in imagining that all humans were bisexual on a fundamental level could I rationalize away all the uncomfortable feelings.

None of this was without price. People were hurt. I did almost irreparable damage to my own sense of worth. So much of my energy got re-directed into these coping strategies, that I became physically ill several times. So severely so that I had to go to the emergency room, where the doctors could find nothing physically out of order to cause my symptoms. I thought about suicide.

I was in love. I was also married. Unfortunately, the person I was in love with wasn't my wife. Which isn't to say that I didn't love my wife. It was rather that I had learned the unpleasant truth that two people loving each other wasn't necessarily the same thing as two people being in love with each other. Untangling the mess I had made of my life (and several other people's) wasn't easy. But I finally stripped away all the lies I'd been taught, all the lies I'd constructed, all the fears I'd been conditioned to feel, and all the shame I'd absorbed. What remained, in the battered, tattered vestiges of my innermost self, was the understanding that I was gay; that I was attracted to other men, and that I wanted--no, I needed--to share my life and my love with other men.

And as I looked around at the shattered remains of all the denials and rationalizations, as I saw the incredible amount of pain I'd endured and had unwittingly inflicted on people who cared about me, I finally saw that honesty was the only salvation. Lying about myself nearly killed me. Even allowing other people to presume something which wasn't true chipped away at my soul, like acid slowly eating the foundation of a building.

The nine years since that moment haven't all been perfect. But now that I'm no longer buried under all of those lies, fears, and shames, the normal ups and downs of life are infinitely easier to deal with.

So, to answer the questions:

When did I first realize I wasn't the same as "normal" boys? When I was four years old.

When did I first realize I was homosexual? When puberty hit, just before my twelfth birthday.

When did I come out of the closet? Not long after my thirtieth birthday.

Maybe I'm a late-bloomer. But the sunlight feels marvelous, and I'm glad I made it.

This page is copyright 2000 by Gene Breshears. Photograph is copyright 1998 by Julie Rampke. All Rights Reserved.