Closet Case by Gillian

What’s the difference between a Skoda car and a Jehovah’s Witness?
You can close the door on a Jehovah’s Witness.


Doors are what closets and closet cases are all about. And one thing you can say in defense of the closet, you have closed the door on yourself; you have the key in your pocket. It’s up to you when and if that door opens. There are other doors that close from the outside, and someone out there has the key.


A very closeted friend warned me, when I announced my plan to exit the closet,
“Think about it very carefully. Remember, you can’t go back. Once you come out, you are out for ever, like it or not, for good or ill.”
And of course she was right. That closet door, like the Skoda door, is either stuck wide open, exposing your sins to the world, or rusted shut since you de-closeted. You can’t go back in, to that dark, safe, if miserable, place you once inhabited.


Slamming that closet door firmly shut as I exited, in fact did me very little harm and a great deal of good, but that is not the story for everyone. Brave GLBT people lose families, jobs, friends; practically all of life as they had known it, and are still willing to pay that price for freedom from the closet and all it implies.


Betsy and I recently watched the movie, “Chely Wright: Wish Me Away.” This woman risked all in leaving the closet, and it cost her much of her very successful country music career and some of her family and friends, but it also offered huge compensations. None of the negatives were a shock; she knew what she was risking but she had to do what she had to do: a compunction most of us know only too well.
So, for most of us, no regrets about leaving that cold dark closet. For most of us in this time and place, that is.

I spent some months in Hungary at the time they were attempting to transition from Communism to Capitalism (yes, yes, I know, I should say to Democracy!)
World War Two is very in your face throughout Europe and I felt compelled to visit Auschwitz in nearby Poland.
I gazed at the photographs. Those pink triangles; those flesh free faces with fear filled eyes.
What the hell did I know of fear?


Those faces knew fear. Real fear.
And they could not return to the closet.
“Oh but it was just a phase, I’m OK now!” wouldn’t work any better for a homosexual than for a Jew.
“Well I thought I was Jewish for a while, but …. “
No. No escape.
They died for being what they were. At what stage of their journeys to Hell did they regret being “out?” For certain by the time they staggered under that Arbeit Macht Frei sign, but by then of course it was far too late. The closet option was long gone.

Alan Turing was responsible for breaking the German Enigma code during World War Two and is widely considered to be the father of computer science and artificial intelligence. He was a brilliant mathematician, but he was also gay, and homosexual activity was still illegal in postwar Britain. In 1952 he was arrested, and chose the offered alternative to a prison sentence, that of “chemical castration.” This meant taking large doses of estrogen, which messed with not only his body, but also his brilliant mind, and in 1954 he committed suicide.
At that time I still lived in England; in 1954 I was twelve years old.
No wonder I was so deep in the closet that my sexual orientation was a secret even from me.
In 2009, Prime Minister Gordon Brown made a public apology on behalf of the British government, for the “appalling way” in which Turing was treated.

Alas, not all governments have become so enlightened over time. In many countries homosexuality still results in a prison sentence, or indeed a death sentence as in Nigeria, Somalia, Mauritania, Sudan, the Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Yemen, and parts of Indonesia

So as we live with pride, with our heads held high, as indeed we should, let us spare a moment for all those who were, in the past, or are, in the present, not granted such privileges.
Yes we are brave and yes we are strong. But things come in different degrees.

If we faced the horrors that so many of us have done, and still do, I, for one, fear I would be a confirmed closet case.

Gillian November 2012

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.