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Op-Ed: The world’s cruel, but the closet breeds self-loathing

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

By Eamon Lynch

What Oscar Wilde described as "the love that dare not speak it’s name" now won’t shut up. And some of us couldn’t be happier.

On June 15, Stephen Gately, the 22-year-old boy-next-door in Boyzone, confirmed what many have suspected for some time: he is gay. One could almost hear the breaking of teenage hearts across Ireland and Britain, where Boyzone has achieved a level of chart success that eluded even the Beatles. Not that Gately’s self-outing was entirely willing: he did so only to pre-empt a German publication’s plans to print the story without his consent. That he chose to do so in the Sun newspaper, which recently asked if Britain was being run by a "pink Mafia," is a separate debate.

No doubt many heterosexuals find such public proclamations of sexual orientation unnecessary and tiresome, and wish those people would just go about their lives and keep quiet. In an ideal world, no such declaration would be required from Gately. Unfortunately, coming out is necessary: my friends are not presumed gay until they marry and produce children; I, on the other hand, am presumed straight until I state otherwise. One does not have to affirm that which society already assumes to be the case.

Coming out is ultimately a liberating experience, but there is a price tag attached that some simply find too steep. "The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it," Wilde told the jury trying him for gross indecency in 1895. Things haven’t changed that much in the intervening century. The day before Gately’s announcement, a friend from Tyrone was denounced as a "f…ing faggot" on the subway by a complete stranger. His basis for this? He was reading "Giovanni’s Room," James Baldwin’s classic novel of gay life in 1950s Paris. It’s hard to imagine someone spewing similar invective about serial killers had he been reading "Hannibal," by Thomas Harris. Easy to see why many gays choose to remain closeted.

As Gately, too, now appreciates, the most torturous gay experience is not coming out of the closet — it’s being in it. The closet provides an illusion of shelter, but it also breeds a silent self-loathing. In Ireland there exists a secretive sub-culture of men who take refuge in marriage or the priesthood (where they won’t face questions about their sex lives) and indulge themselves with occasional, furtive visits to the bathhouses of Dublin. Then it’s home to the family or God. To wit: in 1995 a priest died of a heart attack in the Incognito sauna in Dublin and two other priests were on hand to offer last rites. That man probably saw more dignity and honesty as he died than he was allowed to express in life.

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Some wag once asked whether, in the pantheon of oppression, it was more difficult to be gay or black. Gay, came the answer: "Because you don’t have to tell your mother that you’re black."

Gately at least has the benefit of a supportive family. The mammy has long known her son was gay, telling the London Mirror about the taunts of "faggot" that followed him home from school daily in inner-city Dublin. "Don’t worry about it, Mam," he would tell her. "I love all my children," she said. "But I love him a little bit more." Gately also revealed that he is in love with a Dutch singer named Eloy de Jong. Sounds like a porn star, but I’m sure he’s a lovely fella.

Unlike most of us, Gately’s coming out didn’t end with family and friends: there was the small matter of the millions of devoted Boyzone fans. A friend who teaches in a Northern Ireland girls school arrived at work the day Gately came out. "Ach, sir, have you heard about Stephen?" his students asked. They expressed disappointment that he was out of their romantic reach (interestingly, this didn’t apply to the other band members, all of whom are married), but none said it changed their opinion of him. Perhaps that’s because of the nature of Gately’s gayness: after all, he’s no Boy George and it’s hard to imagine him being caught with his pants down in a public place like George Michael. He’s an average guy, the kind of chap every mother would want her gay son to bring home. But, as a Sunday Independent writer suggested, if he gets photographed leaving nightclubs on one-night stands with tattooed dockers, that image will quickly change.

For now, Gately knows the truth in the old maxim "those who matter won’t mind, and those who mind don’t matter."

Those who are openly gay run the gauntlet. This year a gay American author was beaten almost to death in Ireland. His young attackers mounted the same old defense: the "queer" had made sexual advances. To be assaulted is terrible enough, but to be accused of such poor taste is the final insult. Such attacks, heaped on the daily abuse suffered by many gays, seem an unreasonably high price to pay for a little dignity.

After all, what Stephen Gately did was nothing more revolutionary than make a simple declaration of love. And for that, more power to his elbow.

(Eamon Lynch is a fee-lance writer who lives in New York.)

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