Thanks for answering. You're right. It took guts I didn't know I had to go ahead and send you that first e-mail. Thanks for understanding. It was spontaneous, all right! I saw your ad and went right into Hotmail and wrote you that letter. Yes, it was honest. Maybe the first time in my life I have been honest even with myself about what I am. You say being gay is not so bad. Maybe you don't live in the real world. I don't mean to be rude, but if my family, friends and customers knew this about me, I wouldn't have anybody to play golf with on Wednesday afternoons or poker with on Saturday night. Nobody would come to my restaurant for fear somebody with AIDS had his thumb in their soup, and I suspect my daughter wouldn't want to leave me alone with my grandkids. That's the way people are. I live a hundred miles away from a large, sophisticated city, but out here it's red neck. They even signed a petition to close down the adult book store. Hell, I wouldn't walk within a mile of that place when it was in business for fear somebody might see me and think I had been in there! Yeah, that's silly. You don't even have to say it! Dumb! The only person who would think that is me. My guilty conscience. Guilt! That's it. How do you live with your guilt about being such a total misfit in society, about betraying the principles you tried to instill in your children? Oops. Forget I said that. I'm new at this. I still think along the party line. Sodom and Gomorrah. Gays are sick people. Excuse me. Maybe I should delete the stuff I just wrote. No, I have to be honest. We'll never meet anyway. I couldn't talk like this face to face. Now that I think about it, I don't talk a lot face to face with anybody. Not about anything in my heart. I smile and greet my customers at the restaurant, and I walk around from table to table and ask them if everything is okay, and I sometimes step behind the bar and give the bartender a hand when it's busy and make a few inane jokes with the crowd. Even on the golf course, I don't make much conversation. My golfing partners and I might talk about the stock market or the scores in sports, but that's it. My poker buddies are guys from the church. We just try to behave like regular guys, telling some slightly off-color stories, but not too rough because we have to face each other the next morning in church. It makes me wonder how many people I know are hiding their real selves from me, too. Is that what being in the closet means? Living in everybody else's real world, but not in yours?
|
