Fifty Shades of Gay

No, this is not another S&M post. But June is bustin’ out all over, and so are eager gays looking to declare their pride.

As one of them, on this first day of Pride Month, I am reflecting on what it means to come out of the closet. It is a phrase that once meant something singular and unambiguous. Today, it’s anything but.

With a penchant for the theatrical, I came out to my mother at age twenty-five over high tea at New York’s Mayfair Regent Hotel -- an anticlimactic declaration that was practically geriatric by today’s standards. I love a good high tea, but this one was surreal. It felt like a scene from a movie, an out-of-body experience. 

Mom called and informed my father why I had requested that she fly in from Cleveland to have tea. They both told me they loved me and always suspected I was gay; then we dodged the topic for at least another five years. 

Tea and Sympathy indeed. Glad I got that over with. 

I came to realize that coming out was something I would have to do over and again -- not just at high tea. I am always having to correct microaggressive new acquaintances who ask me about my presumptive wife. I am so taken aback whenever anyone inquires about my wife that I wonder if there isn’t one somewhere whom I’ve forgotten about or misplaced.

Continually affirming one’s identity in a heteronormative world takes courage and stamina. Recently, at the airport, a well-meaning but clueless man at baggage claim referred to Joe as my “travel companion.” My hair stylist -- rather than ask if we are married -- clumsily implied that he and I are “dating.”  “Marriage” is a word that dares not speak its name.

For some, coming out still means what it always did: angst-ridden conversations with friends and families, shunning double lives, and the victory of owning oneself after years of suppression.

But in 2023, many are refusing to gravitate toward a singular or even permanent self-definition. For them, identity is a spectrum, and they are declining to pinpoint where they are on it. Many find affirmation in ambiguity, not categories. Coming out as one thing or another serves no real purpose.

Call Me by Your Name is a beautiful novel and film, a contemporary love story that never uses the word “gay” to describe the relationship between its two main characters. Whatever one may infer, the story’s protagonists seem to be saying, “Just be sure not to call us by your name.” 

One of the hottest young Hollywood stars of 2023, rising actor Lukas Gage, got engaged to a man this past spring while refusing time and again to label himself. In the past, this kind of reticence would be attributed to closetedness and internalized homophobia -- consider the sad examples of Montgomery Clift and Rock Hudson. But today, it’s more a matter of “Why bother?”

In February, The New York Times had this to say:

Younger people who use “L.G.B.T.” or its longer variants do so primarily as shorthand for a range of options, from asexual to pansexual to questioning to intersex to trans-masc to bi-curious, among theoretically limitless other possibilities, the embrace of any one of which does not have to be a permanent thing.

That’s a lot of options. 

As for me, I am still glad I was able to claim my unambiguous identity back in 1986. It has served me well all these years. There have been other teas on special occasions -- none as high-drama as the one with my mama.

I also appreciate that not everyone’s journey leads to decisive declarations like the one I made all those years ago. 

During Pride month, I salute anyone who does not heed the call of high tea. You do you.