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THE OTHER SIDE OF THE CLOSET - episode 3-15
In the midst of putting this story together a good friend of mine confessed that his father left his mother for another man. It's funny, because when he first said the words, I swear I heard, "my Dad left my Mom for another woman." In spite of the fact that I was working on the story, these particular words seemed foreign to me. It's like my mind was heterosexually programmed to think that gay men don't marry. Our heterosexual bias is so pervasive that we can't even see it. We are "tolerant" and "accepting" of homosexuality until it touches us at the core of our relationships - until it penetrates our families. We may have friends who are gay but if we discover that our lover, our husband, our son or our father is gay we have to face another set of criteria. Our whole acceptance of "gay people" is often based on an intellectual and social decision, but when it happens in our own families, our hidden, deeply internalized heterosexist agenda stares us nakedly in the face. After my friend who's father came out as gay saw the show, he wrote me and this is what he said: That contradiction really rang true with me.....it was easy for me to deny my father's situation, because, for many reasons, it was easier for me to deal with my parents' circumstances as a "straight" divorce....even though we were a very liberal family that strongly and vocally condemned homophobia long before being gay was considered culturally acceptable..... That being said, my parents didn't tell me for years what the real story was, even though my father went from our house to Michael's house, where they shared a bedroom, which all of us kids knew about. I remember, at one point, my big sister pulled me into the bathroom to ask me if I thought Dad was gay......I knew what she was going to ask, and I literally pushed her out the door before she could ask and told her I didn't want to talk about it. I remember thinking that saying it out loud would make it undeniably true...and I didn't want to have to deal with it. Years later, when I finally did have that conversation with my father, I told him he didn't have to say it out loud, because I knew what he was going to say. He said it was important for him to use the words, so I said "Okay..." And when he spoke them, I honestly had such an unexpected wave of relief....it was like a huge burden had been lifted from my shoulders. The central theme of Amity Pierce Buxton's book, The Other Side of the Closet, is that families become "victims of victims of a homophobia" and once the gay person comes out, the straight spouse and the children are forced into their own closets. But more than anything, what my friend's words say is that the most important thing is being honest. You have to be honest with yourself, your spouse and your children. And as painful as honesty is, it is essentially what heals and transforms us. Michelle Melles
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