The reason I became a total lying bastard!

Why does secrecy fascinate me?

It must be to do with my decade of closeted-ness followed by years of cringingly and embarrassedly coming out to friends, family and work colleagues.

From the age of 9 or 10 my 'dirty little secret' gradually became my whole sexual identity and lies came like reflexes to protect me from the condemnation and rejection I had been trained to believe would result from its discovery. Ten years of leading a double life. Ten developmentally significant years of keeping the biggest secret ever. What you saw was not what you got! Ten years of blatant lying. Portraying myself not as I was but as I believed others expected me to be. Ten years of damped down spontaneity, growing a false self, a hard crust to defend my true inner core. Ten years of homophobically driven self imposed social sexual isolation. Inured against authenticity and deprived of sexual and emotional intimacy. Despising those who purported to like the sham person I pretended to be. Drawn to those who disliked me. They at least seemed to have a better perspective on what I was all about. What did that 10 years of duplicity and dissimulation do to my sense of integrity? By the age of 20 I’d certainly developed the capacity to be a totally deceitful lying bastard!

Well, not totally-as a good catholic boy I tried my best to be honest about everything else but when it came to my sexuality the truth was nowhere to be seen. And because my lying was all about my sexuality, it meant that not only was lying a deeply central feature of my personality but it also became powerfully eroticised. Lying and being queer had strong associations with each other and were therefore both charged with sexiness and danger.

I’m now in my Thirtieth year of coming out. Being honest with myself and bearing witness to others in various shapes and forms that I will not allow homophobia to intimidate my nature into pretending it is anything other than it is.

However I’ve recently been toying with the idea of redeveloping a secret self (regular readers will know about my totally anonymous blog www.gaysocrates.blogspot.com)

The way I see it is that generally sexuality is a mysterious and private aspect of an individual's personality. If you’re heterosexual you aren’t expected to be explicit and specify to others what your sexual likes, kinks and preferences are. So when we come out we sacrifice a significant aspect of this secrecy, which is the birthright of our straight peers.

I’m not advocating going back into the closet, but if you’ve had years of secrecy sculpting and shaping your identity then the coming out process may have forced some of your private aspects to have been more public than they ought to have been. People shouldn’t be able to access all areas of who you are and it’s really worth discovering your private secret self in a fully conscious way.

Start writing a secret journal or create an anonymous blog where only you have influence over what you write or post.

The danger we all face is that unless we own up to our ignored secret side it has a nasty habit of inhabiting our lives anyway.

This is my column for the November Issue of GSCENE-Secrets and Lies

28 Do you need to re-create a closet in cyberspace? A blog inspired by 'The Man of Walls"

A few weeks ago I got involved in an email exchange with an anonymous reader who described himself as 'a man of walls' because he was closeted and enjoyed his anonymity.

This whole interchange got me thinking again about “Being who you are”. 

I suppose I have grown up as a wounded soul programmed to believe by my Gay Activist brethren that the only true route to happiness is through the process of ‘coming out’. That to pretend to be anything other than who you are is simply living a lie and is destined for a future of unhappiness and despair. I dutifully came out and like most who come out of their protective shell, felt naked, vulnerable and exposed but also strangely surprised that the feared catastrophe of full on homophobic attack from all quarters never actually materialised. It worked like a self-administered flooding desensitisation programme to treat my homophobic-attack-phobia.

Although there was no overt attack, instead I found myself on the other side of a set of invisible boundaries created by the subtle institutional homophobia of my church, my workplace and my wider social circles.

In retrospect my ‘coming out’ was a self-inflicted crucifixion of the heterosexual ego handed to me by my early socialisation and falsely fashioned by me into my adolescent and early adulthood selves. For me the process involved a blatant rejection of any of the cosy comforts which continuing as a closeted guy capable of passing for straight might have afforded. So, easy acceptance in straight company, the freedom to display affection openly to my lover in public, the capacity to simply form a relationship, become engaged, marry, have children, be a conventional family. All this was the bathwater flushed down the plughole of my life at the tender age of 20. It was a political gesture. A statement that all of this was worth nothing compared with the freedom to give my gay sexuality its opportunity for full expression.

Yet 30 years on and I now find that with this blog I have created a secret gay anonymous persona, which I and only I can access! It started as a vestige of my original closet because although predominantly out to family, friends and colleagues, I found that in order to grow, to think to say, feel what I need to feel, communicate what I need to communicate, I must conceal my true identity because it just might jeopardise my employment.

This alter ego is me. It is creative, productive and enjoys the shadows.

If you’ll excuse the mixed metaphor, maybe there’s something about the coming out process which, by means of ‘wearing your heart on your sleeve’, you throw your solitary creative baby out with the proverbial bathwater!

Those with sexualities that are closeted may still have something magical that straight people also have by birthright- their inner, private selves that need to rest, to reflect, and to recreate in undisturbed solitude.

So if you’re going to ‘come out’ keep your sexuality separate from your soul. And if you’ve made the mistake of giving the world 'Access All Areas' privileges to your being then it’s time to re-invent a closet for yourself. But this time, since you’re designing it make sure that it’s nice and roomy with en suite facilities; give it a roof terrace and a lovely view. Oh and make sure there is easy access to the outside world so you can leave and re-enter on a whim!