The Closets…plural
Mon, Apr 28, 2008
One day Bobby’s father convinced my father to join their family at church. By then, Bobby and I had been hooking up for sex almost weekly. I wasn’t real capable of recognizing irony yet.
The Columbia Road Baptist Church in North Olmsted – one of those little box churches in suburbia filled with white people beating each other with a bible. My mother always took some convincing to agree to drag all 4 Russo boys along to whatever overtly proud show of outer piety my dad cooked up from time to time. But we went.
White suburban Baptist bible-beating was new to a 15 year old kid in the early 1980’s, but completely recognizable and predictable today. At one dramatic point in the sermon, heads bowed, arms outstretched, room hushed, the preacher demanded that the sinners all raise their hands.
“Who in here is a sinner?” he shouted.
I’d been taught, by the nuns and priests in Catholic school, that we are all sinners. My three brothers were smart enough to just ignore the absurdity unfolding around us. I thought we were all having a moment. So I raised my hand.
I was the only one.
I looked around and saw my sex buddy Bobby holding back laughter, my brothers staring straight down, and mine the only hand raised in a sea of holy non-sinner people. Then came possibly the most humiliating moments of my young life to that point.
The preacher saw me and pretended other people had raised their hands, too, and began imploring the sinners to come up and be saved.
Well…this was not what I had bargained for, not at all. I quickly took my hand down, bowed my head again, closed my eyes, and hoped for it all to just stop – called myself an idiot over and over.
But no. The preacher had his prop, and he was gonna wait on me, until he preached and sermoned my ass up to the front so the show could go on. I had visions of being tossed into some baptismal pool fully clothed, or having this strange man lay hands on me…oh God, I’m such an idiot. I waited for him to stop, but he didn’t. He kept citing scripture, imploring the sinners, i.e, me. It felt like forever. I just ignored it and wished I could crawl into a hole and die.
Finally it stopped. I outlasted him.
Bobby never raised his hand in the church that day.
The closet door probably closed for good, then and there. Being in the closet is simultaneously comforting and terrifying. At once it feels both like home, and like hell.
The day I got out of jail after my arrest, the closet was blasted open forever, left in tiny pieces all around me. Those conversations, so completely unimaginable to me, about sex, what I liked, who I liked, what turned me on, were now not only necessary, but impossible to avoid, not just with friends, but family, parents, brothers, uncles, aunts. Everyone.
Being in the closet had forced me to accept that my bisexuality was a sin. And that this sin was so profound, so evil, that not even my hook-up buddy could bring himself to let it out, either in the raising of a hand in church, or any other way.
When we hooked up, Bobby and I were all about the sex. There wasn’t a single romantic iota about it. It was pure, animal, lust. Two 15 year old boys romping like there’s no tomorrow. And after every time, I felt sick to my stomach with guilt. Guilt about how good it felt. About how much fun I was having. About lying to everyone around me through my silence. Catholics do guilt really well.
The guilt grew every day. Once you decide your little secret is gonna stay that way, re-crossing that bridge to recapture the truth becomes impossible. Too many people get lied to. Too many relationships come into question.
My best friends are all male. Normal, yes? Not so normal if there is even the slightest hint that you’re interested in males sexually. Even your closest friends might wonder why you are so close to them. Better to keep it secret.
So when the secret comes out – when the FBI and the local TV news station help destroy the closet - the damage is catastrophic. Now try to repair the damage.
But at least the closet is gone, right?
Wrong.
I had a new secret now. A new closet to live in.
I was now a sex felon.
Try that one on for size.
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Tags: internet sex, My Story
April 29th, 2008 at 5:39 am
i try to bring people to salvation but all i attempt appears to fall on deaf ears. here. people like music, right? i’m posting a music vid that explains life. that’s right. life is contained in a music video. you also get to see a really hot native american chick from my favorite place in the world, minnesota.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTOffYj5TxU&feature=related
April 29th, 2008 at 9:59 am
Tim, how can you say your best friends are all male? What am I, chopped liver?
April 29th, 2008 at 10:49 am
Bobby sounds like quite the antagonist bastard….
As far as damnation music goes, I think that a song by the Group Squirrel Nut Zippers would be most appropriate. Not that I didn’t enjoy the Bastard Fairies.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=r5dSHFerBV4
Yours parents sound like “good people” what caused you to veer from their example? I guess they DIDN’T know best. How were they to know you were born a bi-sexual?
Here is my point, If you felt like your actions were wrong when you were a child what makes them anymore right once you are “all grown up.” Children have a much greater capacity to know right from wrong then they are given credit for. You knew the difference between right and wrong and you chose “wrong.”
What would have happened have responded to the “alter call” and confessed your heart out, told all your closet secrets???? Would you be where you are today? Arrested and career in ruins living with your parents, smoking weed when you can find it, in a prescription altered mood of bi-polar blogging.
What would your parents have done hearing the news, “Bobby and I are fucking!” ..and that was at Bobby’s church too huh. I wonder what became of Bobby? Probably still molesting children.
Your fear of REJECTION allowed you conscience to be seared closed by your peers….I guess the question is (even after coming out of the closet) has bi-sexuality brought you any closer to happiness????
Does bi-sexuality or homosexuality help you find love and acceptance that you, as every human being, are deserving of?
Or has it brought you more pain?
Bi-sexuality might be “right” for some people, but it was wrong for you because it was against your conscience. Not against some imposed rules of right and wrong. You knew it was “wrong” (for you) Maybe Bobby is ok with it, maybe he was born gay, but it bothered your conscience…THAT is what makes it wrong for you.
So wrong for you in fact that it has brought you to ruin.
Just like you said, “When we hooked up, Bobby and I were all about the sex. There wasn’t a single romantic iota about it. It was pure, animal, lust.”
Bi-sexuality hasn’t brought you to love, it brought you to sex, and anonymous offers for payment over the internet…see? NO LOVE. Had you signed up on FAGS-R-US.COM and met a nice boy to settle down with…you would be a good democrat. You weren’t hiding gay-ness you were hiding the sex with young boy-ness.
Back to “Bobby” ..you are aware in this day and age Bobby would be a registered sex offender and placed in the care of the state.
“Bobby” is quite the bastard in this story, I wonder who molested him…
Your “sin” isn’t being bi-sexual, or gay, maybe it is a sexual addiction…..
People don’t care about your gay-ness they care about your not being able to see where the line to not cross is. Everyone has had inappropriate thoughts from time to time, but most people don’t cross the boundaries of into making bad thoughts, bad actions.
That was your “sin” and that is the road that brought you to disaster…it was all about sex. If it were all about love…then to me you’d be excused, but it was about loveless sex…and THAT is your “demon” Any, any, any activity absent of love IS LOSS!
One of my favorite quotes; “They are like brute beasts, creatures of instinct, born only to be caught and destroyed, and like beasts they too will perish.”
People don’t want to know sordid details of your high school hump, people want to know if you can NOW JUDGE WHERE THE LINES of appropriate behavior are.
People want to know, CAN YOU BE TRUSTED.
That is REALLY what you want isn’t it? To be entrusted and get some kind of life back.