Coming Out by not Coming Out

Me being butch helping to build Keith's house

 

When I turned 18 I immediately rushed up to Hollywood to a club a guy had told me about when I was 16 and began my gay career. I went up there often and would often spend the night with the guys I was hooking up with, including a guy that I was sort of seeing (in reality, I was more like his pet boy). I eventually dropped out of school for about a year to be gay. In that time I had quite a few adventures including going up to Vancouver and coming back with a souvenir key frob which said on one side "Cruising the Straits" and on the other "BC Ferries". I of course thought this was scandalously hilarious. 

 

So here I was not in school, gone all of the time from home and doing who knows what from my parents' standpoint. I really didn't make excuses, because I just didn't bring it up at all. They didn't ask, I didn't tell. Honestly, they were probably happy to have fewer people around to get some peace and quiet. In that time I did do the traditional coming out scene with my father who lived up in LA. It was the typical hand wringing "I have something to tell you" kind of coming out. My father was actually relieved and said "thank god, I thought you got a girl pregnant". 

In the summer of 1979 I met this super hot blond guy at some club in Orange County. I was smitten. We had ridiculously good sexual energy and we got along really well. This was weird because I was still 18 and he was an agriculture teacher down in Northern San Diego County. And 28. When we met he was up for the summer staying at some guy's place in Laguna Beach and I'd be over there all of the time. So we ended up becoming an item after a while. I now had a boyfriend.

This is usually where the problems of being closeted show up big time. But while I wasn't exactly out of the closet, I wasn't exactly in the closet either. I just sort of did my own thing and didn't care what other people thought. When Keith my boyfriend started coming around it had to be odd that 28 year old teacher was hanging around an 18 year old wild boy. My relatives liked him though and I did have some cover in that I'd go down to visit him and hang out with him on the school's farm. I really enjoyed that and when he decided to build his own house, I loved helping him build it. 

So I had some plausible deniability at least from the outside. I didn't view it that way though as I was just doing my own thing and they could think whatever they wanted. This went on for several years with me going down there, and him coming up. He even went with me to thanksgiving at my grandparents house. My grandmother being a grandmother would always ask about any girlfriends but that thanksgiving when she asked, I sort of pointed my elbow at Keith. She immediately went about her business and everything was good. So I sort of came out in the more traditional use of the phrase.

After about 2 some years, I decided to break up with him. In the end it really was for the best, but my reasons were really cringe worthy and I'm still embarrassed by them. The net effect though is that I stopped going down there, and he stopped being part of my life at home. Nobody asked. But it had to be obvious that he was my boyfriend all along and that we had broken up.

When I finally turned 21, my stepdad and I got into a big fight for something I don't remember what, but the net effect was that I moved out down to Dana Point. I had a job at a startup in Irvine writing low level code for various pieces of hardware they were making. So I had a real job. I also had a new boyfriend who I had moved out with. I don't recall much interaction between him and my family, but that was mainly a function of me living quite a ways away and my being busy. At work I was always a pretty serious kind of guy and wasn't much for the normal office banter. Maybe that was a function of being a little closety, but I think that most of it is that I found all of that small talk rather boring. 

Michael and I broke up about a year after I had moved out and I ended up living at my manager's house with one other coworker. The coworker unknown to me at the time turned out to be gay and also unbeknownst to me had a crush on me. This was extremely awkward as I wasn't into him and didn't like the drama it was causing, so I ended up moving out and down to Mission Viejo. After Michael I dated here and there but nothing serious for about 4 years. I was busy with work, and came and went with who I was seeing when I felt like it both at my manager's house and then the new one. So not much to force the issue and since I just went about my business, and it didn't matter to me.

Around 1985 things were about to radically change for me. Two things happened almost simultaneously. My manager and I along with two others decided to create an engineering company. We had a contract in hand to develop a laser printer controller so we were set for at least a year to bootstrap ourselves. I also met my next boyfriend, Todd. He moved in with me down in Mission Viejo and then eventually to our condo when I bought it on the lake there. So I was incredibly busy at the time working on the printer and basically being a one-man software development department as well as spinning up the necessary infrastructure to support me, future employees, and all of the developers for the company who had contracted us. 

Despite all of this, Todd and I managed to get away some weekends with my folks going up to the eastern side of the Sierra to camp and fish. We also skied when we could and sailed quite a bit in races around LA harbor and Catalina and the rest. It was really obvious that Todd and I were an item both with our sailing buddies and at work. We'd have parties for our employees at our house so it was just sort of an open secret that nobody seemed to give a shit about any more than I really cared about their straight love lives. It just was. 

I finally came out to my mother officially when we were both pretty drunk while we were camping one night. I just casually asked her what she thought about having a gay son. She then proceeded to drop a bomb on me that her brother, my uncle Ramon, had come out in some fashion in the 1940's to my grandparents which caused unsurprisingly a huge scandal. Apparently my grandmother (the other one) had always blamed herself for his being gay. But just like with my other relatives I never hid my boyfriends and it had to be obvious that I too was gay. So I never knew what she made of that. Like Ramon, the family was happy to not talk about that. 

Ramon painted a lot of South West scenes

 

The biggest part of the bombshell about Ramon was that he had died a few years earlier. I would have given anything to have had an adult relationship with him had I known because he was brilliant and an extremely talented artist. He painted in Hollywood, Laguna Beach which were obviously pretty gay for the time, but ended up in Santa Fe where he painted with a lot of Native American and Mexican themes. What was it like being gay in the 1940's? Did he have boyfriends? I know that he had a sham marriage, but nothing beyond that. What would he have thought about me basically being out in that I didn't hide anything? Did he have a similar attitude? I will never know. But chalk this one up to where not formally coming out backfired badly.

So this may come off as being sort of self-serving and a justification for not formally coming out to people. It's a fair point, and I acknowledge that. But it worked for me, and I think that I did my part with Harvey Milk's famous speech on the importance of coming out. I rationalize this at some level in that the way I behaved is the way it should actually be. That is, that being gay is just normal and doesn't require any special theatrics. It also has another characteristic in that it basically dares people to be openly homophobic. Formally coming out is an invitation for them to react badly because you are basically asking them to accept you for who you are. Just living your life puts the onus on them to be dick heads. Obviously I had a lot of things in my favor in that I was living in Southern California which even though I was behind the Orange Curtain (Orange County) was still a lot more tolerant in general than some buckle of the bible belt in the South. In Orange County at the time, the religious kooks were just starting to become radicalized. In the South, they never stopped. So I had that.

These days would I recommend people do what I did? It depends. For a lot of America, coming out is not a big deal. Yes, tears will be shed, yes there will be lots of hand wringing, yes there will be lots of education needed. And of course you won't get blindsided by a family secret until after it's too late. On the other hand just Being makes its own statement too: I'm not going to beg for your acceptance and fuck you if you don't approve. So I don't really know. Either way you can live your life in the way you see fit and not cower in the closet. Both serve the same political goal too of people knowing gay people and the positive feedback loop that creates. As I said, it's a little self-serving so you get to decide.