Detonating The Walls Of Closet Life

A nuclear explosion at Mururoa in France on October 30, 1971 — National Geographic

I came out of the closet to the world yesterday. Holy shit!

I came out of the closet to my wife three yers ago. I came out to my family earlier this year. I have been talking with fellow pastors over the last couple of years and I thought this would prepare me for publicly announcing on National Coming Out Day. Oh, was I wrong.

Everyone has an opinion. I mean everyone.

Most of those opinions are vocal. Most are heartfelt, but many if not most didn’t reason their way into the heart of the opinion’s owner, so reasoning them to understand my life of pain and shame was fruitless as reason wouldn’t remove something that reason didn’t work to instill it as a norm in the first place.

"Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in."

— Isaac Asimov

People pretty much responded the way I would have imagined. Some family members however, did not.

I shared my story with my wife and family before sharing publicly, because I love them and wanted to introduce them to the real me. I also wanted to give them time to process and wrestle with the startling news that Dad is queer or their husband is queer. I trusted that once over the shock, they might learn to love an authentic me rather than the me that’s always been around. The key there is trust.

Coming out publicly yesterday was like an atomic bomb being dropped on some of my family members and as such, trust was a casualty. So the real casualty of yesterday’s coming out was me or at least the me I had created in the closet. I saw the past years as a sort of hospice and yesterday was the pulling of the plug ending the life of David-The-Hetrosexual. Trust though was also a casualty.

“Trust is a central part of all human relationships, including romantic partnerships, family life, business operations, politics, and medical practices. If you don’t trust your doctor or psychotherapist, for example, it is much harder to benefit from their professional advice.”

— Paul Thagard, Ph.D.

Dr. Thagard gives five definitions of trust that I’d like to explore.

Trust is a set of behaviors, such as acting in ways that depend on another.

Being transparent, sticking to commitments, demonstrating trust, being personal, being consistent, appreciating others, listening well… All of these characteristics I value.I can also readily admit that I was beginning to falter in practicing these characteristics in my daily life. Rephrased: Years ago, I began having a hard time being transparent, because transparency to the life I was living was fake and who wants to be transparent about that. I had a hard time constantly appreciating others due to the self-hatred that overwhelmed me.

“We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their behaviour.”

― Stephen M.R. Covey, The Speed of Trust: The One Thing that Changes Everything

It would be easy for me to understand that over the past five or so years, my behaviors were not consistent with my values, because I did not value life in the closet any longer and so someone not knowing of my closeted struggles must have just given up on me as a non-trustworthy kind of man.

I was ready to give up on the shame that kept me in the closet, but fear and inner turmoil kept me stumbling.

I have had people who have depended on me for leadership. I let them down. A life outside of the closet has an opportunity to be better.

Trust is a belief in a probability that a person will behave in certain ways.

Trust is the foundation of positive and nourishing relationships.

People may have difficulty with me coming out, because I have betrayed their trust in who they believed me to be.

A true leader creates transparency, which means there is a high degree of emphasis on telling the truth, be real, being genuine, being open and above all being authentic. This is who I am in stepping out of the closet. What people came to trust was the David that hid who he really was, covering up his true identity, and was a believer in obscure things. These people people bought into the David that had hidden agendas (keeping the closet a secret ALWAYS) and withholding information as to who David really was.

Now read that correctly. my friends and family members who feel betrayed by me coming out of the closet bought into and loved the David that wasn’t real or genuine or authentic. If these can can get over the thought of being betrayed, I believe they will learn and get to know a better me. If I didn’t believe that, I would have remained closeted

“Each betrayal begins with trust.”

― Phish, Phish - Farmhouse

Trust is an abstract mental attitude toward a proposition that someone is dependable.

“The Way Things Ought to Be” is a fantasy world. Complaining that you don’t live there is pointless. We all have the ability to imagine how our world ought to be, but we need to be careful that when things don’t turn out the way we thought they ought to be, we don’t lose heart.

I have a feeling that a couple of my loved ones felt they could handle the news of my coming out if it remained controllable. In other words, if I remained in the bedroom adjacent to the closet and didn’t go out into the whole world with the new revelation, a sense of control remained intact. I’m pretty sure this kind of mental practice leads to anxiety.

I don’t sit down to write to correct anyone else’s behavior or mental anxiety. I observe those behaviors as a mens of seeing how I can lift those anxieties and frustrations up in prayer.

Trust is a feeling of confidence and security that a partner cares.

I learned in coming out publicly that this level of trust was tested and found wanting. My wife was more concerned with the board of directors at the church and me losing my job than she was with my mental state. Never before had I felt like just a paycheck, but that being said, I know my wife loves me and I’ll always love her.

Perhaps my wife never thought I would go public and so a trust she created for herself was broken. Although I never promised to push myself back in the closet once I stepped out to her, having a hope that it would remain our little secret might have been a coping mechanism for me. I understand that completely. I’m one of many who have developed coping mechanisms most of their life — a closet life.

I love me enough to let go of that closet life and just be who God created me to be.

"I don't trust people who don't love themselves and tell me, 'I love you.' ... There is an African saying which is: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt."

— Maya Angelou

My hope in coming out of the closet at 59 years old was to be my most authentic self.

This is what I shared when I came out to my family. For the longest time, I preached Jesus’ commands  to “’Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’ and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’” For so long, I hated myself. I hated that I had to wrestle with pushing the thought of being queer back into the deep recesses of my mind, so my secret could remain intact. I hated it when I thought I had trapped myself into never being able to be authentic, because a man with a wife and three kids couldn’t be authentic if he is secretly queer.

Yesterday’s atomic bomb will settle. Debris all certainly be strewn about and certainly the landscape is bound to change, but some things are meant to be blown up. Trust may always be damaged, but true healing must be possible. I have to believe that anyway.

Trust is a complex neural process that binds diverse representations into a semantic pointer that includes emotions.

Dr. Thagard suggests, mistrusting someone is not just a prediction of betrayal, but also a bad emotional feeling about the untrustworthy person.

Trust is considered a feeling, but Dr. Thagard suggests we can treat it as an emotion. Either way, feelings and emotions are far too man-made to place life emphasis on it. At some point, love has to be the over-riding emphasis.Trust can be broken, rebuilt and broken again. When trust is placed in something uncontrollable or in an outcome developed our of preconceived ideas, then disaster is nearly imminent.

Relationships are the key and relationships must be based to some degree on love.

"Love is the strongest emotion any creature can feel except for hate, but hate can't hurt you. Love, and trust, and friendship, and all the other emotions humans value so much, are the only emotions that can bring pain. Only love can break a heart into so many pieces. "

— Amelia Atwater-Rhodes (In the Forests of the Night (Den of Shadows, #1))

I disagree with Amelia Atwater-Rhodes in that love, trust and friendship is all about emotion. Love isn’t man-made. Love comes from God.

God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.

— 1 John 4:16b (ESV)

The Love of God is impenetrable.

The love of God unconditional.

The love of God is not gained by anything you or I do and therefore cannot be won or lost.

The love of God is the end all and be all.

I have so felt God loving in my journey of living a closeted life and sensed that now was the time to let go and trust the source of love.

I lived near Asheville, NC — arguably the gay capital of North Carolina.

I lived in Minneapolis, MN — arguably the gay capital of the midwest.

In neither place did I feel the same urge to live an authentic life and come out of the closet. Both of those communities were filled with many who would support and love me. Moving to Port Saint Lucie, FL is not such a community. It’s a mostly politically conservative community with sprinkles of progressive thinking here and there. I wouldn’t have imagined that God would have me come out of the closet now, but here I am. I have trusted in a loving God to see me through this coming out phase.

I pray God will support my loved ones as they navigate the new uncharted waters of my authentic life.