Back in the Closet Again: The Life of a Gay Conservative in San Francisco

When I was in my late teens and early 20s, living in New England, Virginia and southern California, I remember the torture I experienced as a result of being gay and being completely “closeted” about my sexual orientation. All I needed to do was keep my ears open and listen to the kinds of things that I heard people say about gay people to realize that according to the prevailing values of society in the late 1970s and early 1980s, being gay was “wrong.” It took me years to screw up enough courage to tell even my very closest friends, and while most of those disclosures were received positively, it never got any easier the next time around. In some cases, sharing this secret with people I knew resulted in them pulling back a bit, or sometimes, rejecting me outright.

I think it is difficult for those in the majority to understand or imagine the tension that someone who is gay experiences in a society that simply assumes everyone is heterosexual and makes it pretty clear, directly or indirectly, that homosexuality is strange at best, and evil or sick at worst. I sat in social gatherings with people I really liked, only to flinch and feel like I’d been slapped in the face when I’d hear someone make an anti-gay remark or joke. I wanted to tell them that the people they were disparaging and dismissing didn’t want to hurt or threaten them, that they shouldn’t be feared or hated, and that they shouldn’t be judged on the basis of their sexual orientation alone. I wanted to tell these people that if they could just look beyond the fact that someone is gay and see the whole person, they’d realize that we weren’t so different at all. I wanted to tell them that I was one of the people they seemed to fear and despise. But usually, I just got quiet, tried not to let anyone see that I was upset, and just crawled away, feeling hurt, betrayed and so very alone.

I was always worried about someone finding out about me. In the days before there were openly gay role models and no support groups for gay people, I was always looking for other people who were like me. I wanted to talk to someone who felt the things I felt, had the opinions I had, and had been through the same experiences as me. But how do you meet other gay people when you are trying to hide the fact that you’re gay from the rest of the world, and in all likelihood, when the people you’re trying to meet are hiding too? I recall meeting strangers, chatting, thinking that maybe this person might be gay, but how could I be sure? If I told them I was gay, how might they react? Would they be angry if they thought I’d assumed they were gay when they really weren’t? I’d search for even the most subtle of clues. I’d pay careful attention if someone mentioned that they had recently been to the gay resort towns of Provincetown, Massachusetts or Key West, Florida. I remember interactions in which I’d ask seemingly innocuous questions about which bars or restaurants someone frequented, what music they listened to, or what TV shows they watched for the purpose of gleaning whether or not they might be gay. If I met a man who mentioned the name of a gay bar I’d heard of, or who admitted to liking Cher, or who said he watched Knot’s Landing and Dallas, my “gaydar” would sound and I’d realize I might have met a kindred spirit!

I also remember, and I’m sure that anyone who is gay or lesbian can relate to this, that I went through periods where I just wished that I could be straight. I’d think, “If only I was straight, life would be so much easier for me. I wouldn’t have to live like this and feel so isolated all the time.” But of course, being gay isn’t something I could just change my mind about, and I looked at it in some ways as one of life’s tests or challenges; perhaps not being able to travel the easier road would build my character and teach me things about life that I needed to learn.

Eventually, as the 1990s arrived, things did change. Society was becoming more and more accepting of gay people, and at the age of 33 I moved to San Francisco. For the first time in my life I felt like I was part of the majority. Again, anyone who hasn't been through this experience can fully grasp the total relief that comes when someone who has lived in the confines of the closet for so long and has been unable to express him or herself is finally free. In San Francisco I didn’t feel as if I had to run everything I said through a filter for fear of giving away the fact that I was gay and perhaps alienating, angering, or upsetting people around me. I finally found the courage to tell my family and some of my friends, with whom I’d never had the nerve to be open and honest before, that I was gay. I could finally be myself.

But over the past few years, still in San Francisco and rapidly approaching my 50th birthday, I have found myself right back in the tight confines of a closet again. This realization has been slow in coming, but undeniable. I am experiencing those familiar feelings of tension and needing to censor everything I say. I am living with the almost constant fear of being rejected by the people around me. I’ve begun to realize how hopelessly alone and misunderstood I feel. Yes, the closet is back with a vengeance. The irony is that in this city that is reputed for its tolerance and its acceptance of diversity, among people who are well educated and who pride themselves on their progressive views, I have been pushed back into a closet all over again, but not because I am gay. This time it’s because I have dared to be an individual. It’s because I have become more politically conservative in my thinking.

It’s time for me to “come out” all over again. I am politically conservative. There. I’ve said it. It’s out and I can’t take it back. I am a gay man and I am politically conservative. Although I have been a life-long registered Democrat and for many years held extremely liberal views on many issues, over the years I’ve begun to look at some of the far left political decisions that have been made here in San Francisco and in California and I‘ve begun to feel that the far left perspective is every bit as frightening as the far right perspective that made me flee to San Francisco in the first place. It wasn't as if someone waved a magic wand over me and I suddenly became conservative. It was a result of societal changes, reading and research, watching politics and listening to what was going on around me.

I don’t like the fact that my mayor has made my city a “sanctuary” for illegal aliens, and I am deeply disturbed by the fact that our city officials wouldn’t allow the U.S. Marines to film a training video here, tried to cancel the Blue Angels’ performance during Fleet Week, or want to ban ROTC in the city’s schools. I support and respect the police and those in the military. I think they are heroes.

I don’t find it clever and witty to advertise the Folsom Street Leather Fair on a billboard depicting DaVicni’s Last Supper, featuring figures dressed in leather gear and harnesses. I think it’s ugly and wrong for the “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence” to mock the Catholic Church with their Hunkiest Jesus Contest at Easter or to disrupt a Catholic Mass just to make a political statement.

I listen avidly to talk radio: conservative talk radio. I’ve been entertained and have learned so much from radio personalities like Glenn Beck, Dr. Laura Schlessinger, Bill O’Reilly, Laura Ingraham, and yes, even Sean Hannity and Michael Savage. Their ideas and opinions have forced me to consider other perspectives when I look at the world.

I did not vote for Barack Obama for president; the majority of his social and economic policies scared me. I voted for McCain, and since I am coming completely out of the closet here, I voted for McCain because I liked Sarah Palin. I really liked her! And I can’t bring myself to vote or not to vote for someone solely on the basis of their stand on gay rights. Gays always say that there is more to us than just our sexual orientation; I agree, and that’s why I feel that gay rights are just one among dozens of urgent political issues facing us and that they can’t form the sole basis of how I vote.

But just as being gay was viewed with such disdain when I was younger, here in San Francisco holding any of the viewpoints or engaging in any of the behaviors I describe above is considered wrong. These are actions that not tolerated by the very liberal people I am surrounded by here, both gay and straight. These are things that I must hide from people and I find myself having to go back into the constricting closet that I thought I’d left behind many years ago.

I’ve had friends make remarks in front of me regarding how stupid and naive anyone must be to believe in God, or that people who are strongly religious are just ignorant. I‘ve listened to people who are ever-vigilant to fight prejudice and sexism and homophobia make sweeping generalizations about religious denominations or make nasty and derogatory remarks about “those people in the red states.”

I’ve know people who’ve never actually listened to Dr. Laura, but who’ve “caught” me listening to her show. They start railing at me for listening to such a “homophobe” and quote some comment she supposedly made, taking it completely out of its original context. And they make it clear to me that anyone who would listen to this woman’s show must just be stupid or backward.
I had a friend tell me that because I voted for a conservative candidate in a prior election, I should take the rainbow flag sticker off my car. He said, “You’re like a Jew in Nazi Germany who proudly wears a Star of David while you’re helping the Nazis kill other Jews.” At work, everyone just assumes that everyone else is liberal, much as most heterosexuals assume everyone else is straight. But when I finally had the nerve to speak up and disclose the fact that I didn’t share their opinions, I found that things got far more tense. I noticed that people began to “tease” me with lines like, “Oh yeah, I forgot... you’re a Republican,” with an emphasis on the word Republican that was reminiscent of someone using the word faggot. Even reminding them that I was a Democrat, or that as of this past summer I’d registered as an Independent, did not stop the teasing.

I was teased about wearing a Texas t shirt I’d bought on a vacation; Texas is apparently a bad place because George W. Bush is from there. At one time I had a “Don’t Mess With Texas” bumper sticker on my car. I thought it was an amusing slogan (it’s about keeping Texas litter-free), but evidently my fellow San Franciscans didn’t find it amusing and it was peeled off and ripped up while my car was parked on a city street. More recently I read a San Francisco man’s online blog in which he described how his car was vandalized when he parked in a rural area to go on a hike; he had an anti-George Bush bumper sticker on his car. I actually took the time to write to this guy, to condemn this act of vandalism, and to offer sympathy. I said, “I don't know what's happening to free speech in this country. I'd like to put a McCain bumper sticker on my car, but I’m afraid my car would be vandalized here in San Francisco.” His response was that if I had the nerve to display any conservative bumper sticker, I deserved to have my car vandalized. During the last few weeks of the presidential campaign, I taped a McCain/Palin bumper sticker onto the inside of my car window when I was driving and faithfully took it off the window and hid it in the glove compartment whenever I parked the car. Isn’t it wonderful to live in a place so accepting of diversity?

When people learned that I volunteer for an organization called “Soldiers’ Angels”, writing letters of support and sending care packages to our troops, they reacted as if they’d learned that I was doing something illegal or immoral. When I introduced people to a dear friend of mine, a police officer from France who was visiting me and who because of his job, cannot divulge that he is gay, friends criticized him and questioned why I would want to associate with someone who was so closeted and was, in their words, “too straight-acting.”

At work, people made comments about how anyone who could like Sarah Palin must be a “moron” and someone made a reference to “those pigs who would vote for McCain.” I felt the tension rise, my heartbeat raced. Do I tell them? Do I come out and let them know that they are talking about me? And because I am now almost 50 rather than 20, I did calmly and politely explain that, "I must then be a moron or a pig." When the gist of what I’d said had sunk in, I was met with the kind of disbelief and shock that I used to see when I told some people I was gay. One person noticeably stepped back and away from me as if I had some communicable disease. I can’t even recount all of the names I have been called in the rare situations in which I’ve actually tried to discuss my political views regarding the election and the candidates, but selfish, uninformed, myopic, and racist are a few that come easily to mind. As I search the on-line profiles of gay men in the Bay Area, all too often I see things prominently displayed in their profiles such as, “I don’t date Republicans” or “I’m open to various political ideas but don’t you dare bring Bill O’Reilly into my house.”

And so, just as I learned to hide my homosexuality from a disapproving world, I again have had to return to the closet and conceal my political viewpoints. I don’t even know how to go about finding other, like-minded gay people. The San Francisco chapter of the Log Cabin Gay Republican group appears to have gone out of business, and when I have dared to advertise in my online profile that I am politically conservative in hopes of attracting someone else who might be as well, I receive nasty e-mails from those who read it. There have been many lonely times when I think to myself, “I wish I could just go back to being a liberal. If only I could just agree with the people around me, it would make my life so much easier and I could fit in again.” But I can’t just go along with political positions that I really feel are wrong, any more than I could just change and be straight. So I wonder why life has sent me this second daunting challenge: to be gay in a straight world, and to have conservative viewpoints in an increasingly liberal world, which in turn makes being gay even more difficult. What is the lesson I am to learn from this?

In a bizarre parallel to the days in which I lived in the closet and tried to carefully determine if someone I met might be gay, I find that conservatives here in the Bay Area engage in similar, furtive rituals. As I'm talking to someone I don't know well, one or the other of us might tentatively toss out the fact that, "I listen to a lot of talk radio." With a quickened pulse, tensed muscles, and breaking out into a sweat, the other casually asks, “Oh yeah? Who do you listen to?” Literally looking from side to side to see if anyone else is around, the other drops his or her voice to a near whisper and offers, “I really like Glenn Beck.” In the same way that hearing how someone went to Provincetown last summer gives away their sexual orientation, the admission that one listens to Glenn Beck or Laura Schlessinger opens the door to the fact that someone has more conservative political views, and a connection can be established. But still, at work, in cafes, on a busy street, people with political views that conflict with the norm here are careful, self-conscious, and terrified that someone might hear them and “out” them. What an irony in what is supposed to be the most tolerant city on earth.

But maybe there’s hope that one day, just as society has grown increasingly accepting of and comfortable with gay or lesbian people, perhaps the liberal place where I live or the overwhelmingly liberal gay community itself can come to grips with the reality that not everyone subscribes to the same world view. Even more importantly, they need to realize that the name-calling, bullying and outright hatred and prejudice that they level at political conservatives, religious people, or “middle America” is every bit as unfair and wrong as homophobia, racism, or sexism. The other night I was in a national online chat room. I actually had conversations with three other gay men from various parts of the nation who admitted that they had not voted for Barack Obama. One of them actually prefaced this confession with, “Please don’t hate me, but...” Another said that I was the first person he’d actually been able to tell this to since the night of the election. How sad is that?

The closet is a place where no one should have to live, for any reason: whether it’s because they are gay or because they don’t agree with a particular political agenda. And this should especially be true in a city or a state or a country that strives to be accepting of diversity and to value the right to free speech and freedom of thought. Being gay is just one facet of who I am, but I want and expect the same rights and respect that anyone else in our society is given. Likewise, being more politically conservative is just a part of what makes me who I am. I want and expect the same right to express my opinions and to be treated with respect by people who, because of their own experiences or because of their education or because of their sincere desire for social justice for all, should know better.