When the leopard changed his spots

In a presentation thread I relayed the absurdity that was my coming out process, including what I consider to be a pretty romantic end to my life in the closet. My continued life as a gay man is no less absurd, in the beginning, and I’d thought I’d use that to set up another debate here for you. Please bear with me through a wall of text for it all to be clear…

When you emerge from that cocoon of heterosexism that is called the closet, and bloom into the bright butterfly that is known as ‘the out of the closet gay man’ it is easy to tread wrong.

Now, it turned out that my prince charming, the one that shocked me out of the closet, and who kissed that sleeping beauty that was me, apparently worked on commission.

Before I had recorded his phone number in my mobile, he was climbing up the castle wall ivy to deflower another someone. Paul, the photographer. And there I was – out and about, without the possibility of crawling back into the closet.

It would be hard crawl back into pretence of heterosexism when you had spent the last few hours of a New Year’s Eve party sucking another man’s face off. Publically. It is a bit hard to explain away to co-workers, I think. I never tried, so I can’t of course be sure about that.

I learned a very important lesson though. And it is this: when you have romped through a couple of days of wanton abandon, feeling care free and complete for the first time in your life, remember to bring sunscreen.

You see, life in the sun, outside the closet, can give you sunburn. Too much immediate exposure to the glittering new life can, at worst, give you a bad case of melanoma. At best, you’ll whinge a lot, or possibly even cringe a lot as you remember what you actually did during that phase.

This is what happened to me.

What does a somewhat geeky lad of twenty five do when he comes out of the closet, carrying all those prejudices and preconceptions about how gay people should be? You’re right, he tries to live up to every single one of them. I mean, if you’re gay, act gay. Right?

Roger that. So, over a few weeks or so, the spotty geek that watched too much Babylon 5 and Star trek TNG for his own good transformed to a Richard Simmons on amphetamines. It was not a pretty sight. But I was gay. That repressed little faggot in me blossomed into full glorious bloom, and it was spectacular. So my co-workers and friends – who didn’t run away screaming – told me later.

That phase lasted about… three weeks. In that time I had sashayed down the sidewalk like a screaming clueless Carson Kressley without a fashion sense. I signed up for everything that dealt with gay stuff. I cringe thinking about it.

Every gay man needs a stereotypical down to earth female friend that can give you a hard slap in the face when it is warranted. Lena was that for me, and she really did slap me. So, in a matter of about three weeks or a month I went from being kissed to being slapped.

When you meet me today, there is precious little of that flamboyant drama queen left, and it would be hard to single me out from the humdrum of commonality that is the average middle aged white man. I know, I grieve for it, but that is how it is.

But the presentation got me thinking, and now I thought I’d give the pay off for reading all this text. If you haven’t, what are you doing here? Go back to the start!

It’s about truthfulness, it’s about you. I would argue that both my closet days and my days as an helium fuelled projectile against hetero privilege was equally faked. That frightened young man that spent his life fussing about The Big Secret, as well as the man that stood outside the closet door was in essence the same. A facade. It was the chameleon that just changed its skin pattern for a new background.

I didn’t know anything about being gay when I came out, and only experience could tell me. And here’s the debating point I would like to pose to you. How much did the chameleon inside you, if there was one, make you adopt an equally forged exterior? Or didn’t it?

It all started when I was thirteen

I wrote a description for my coming-out process for a site, and I was pretty pleased with it. So here it is.

My little mates were dreaming about pissing their wages up the wall in the little fishing village I grew up in, in the extreme north of Norway. The big ambition was to get into the co-op house for the Saturday night dances that the local municipality arranged. If you got into those dances you were adult, and you grown-up. And being grown-up was big.

Oh, and my little mates had also started to hold hands with girls and snog with them. At least the boys wanted to snog – the girls weren’t always so keen on that.

I, however, wanted to hold hand with Peter, and wanted to snog with him. I had enough sense not to try this at home, except in steamy dreams in my bedroom at night. There is nothing more tragic and pathetic than a thirteen year old boy with unrequieted crushes, let me tell you.

The only problem was that Peter was one of the cool kids. As an adult I could look back on the delicious irony that Peter’s favorite sport was graeco-roman wrestling… I however never dared sign up for that, as the thought of grappling Peter in certain places embarrassed me greatly and forced me to run home before anyone could spot what my traitorous body was doing to me.

Since I generally sucked at sports – and still do – my dreams of doing graeco-roman wrestling with my sweetheart never materialized, but since he was one of the cool kids I did get some exercise from him. He was part of a gang that made sure they were top dogs in the school yard, and though he was not the leader of that gang he did occasionally run me down to punch me up a bit. For the record you know. So, my sweet heart was the one hurting me.

My world was ending, and my heart was breaking. And then my parents told me we were moving to the big city. I never had to worry about getting into the co-op dances again, and with time Peter faded to be a flabby beer-gutted fisherman just like his father. And his breath was horrible too. But he was my first crush, and how can you forget that?

Now, fourteen years old, and in the big city – fresh from the innocent wastes of the Atlantic nowhere – ‭I could let my rebellious hormones loose and dive into a life of hedonism and wanton debauchery. And possibly even graeco-roman wrestling. Right.

In my first month at the new school our tech teacher decided that this was a good day to inform his charges about gayness, and the fact that he was gay. During the two hours of the class, when we were supposed to be making metal ash trays and throwing stars he told me about this thing called homosexuality.

Oh my god, that was me. I was like him! How awful!

The next day we had a new teacher, and we never saw our old tech teacher again. Whispers flew. He was sick, dead, abducted by aliens. Freddy Kreuger had got him in his sleep. But he had just been fired, and the truth got out.

And the boys from the gang that ruled this school ran me down to punch me up a bit. For the record, you know. Just to cross the t’s and dot the i’s.

So, being me was bad. Into the closet, deep into the closet, i fled. And didn’t come out for another eleven years. I had moved back to the area of my origins, near the fishing village I had grown up in, although I chose to live in the town. Peter the fisherman was 150 km away. I went to visit and saw his new him, and wasn’t impressed. But there was this guy that worked for the same local newspaper that I worked at. And he was looking at me at the oddest times and in the oddest ways.

Demonstrations of my masculinity and absolute heterosexuality aside, and sad sad sad attempts to get that girl who could cure this silly condition, I was just not very good at living in the closet and it chafed. New Year came around, and the office New Year’s party, and the fireworks. And at the stroke of midnight someone kissed me. A bloke. That bloke. My co-worker. It’s true, and I melt every time I think of it – and of me. In a split second, as I was kissed by this bloke, I thought ‘Fuck it’ and didn’t run away as I had always done before.

And here I am, writing this.

The co-worker? A week later he was shagging Pål (Paul in English). New guy, new conquest.

How did you come out?