Like a hanger in a closet

I found this response to a recent study on gay-male closeting to be riveting.

The study entitled, The Social Development of Contingent Self-Worth in Sexual Minority Young Men: An Empirical Investigation of the “Best Little Boy in the World” Hypothesis, was published in the academic journal Basic and Applied Social Psychology.

The response basically says a large majority of Ivy League educated males who also go on to be successful in the world of work, are closeted gay males, who seek to divert attention from their sexual identity by making extra efforts in the academic and professional spheres.

Rise and fall

HBO will be airing an interesting documentary today, March 28, 2013: Emmy award winning Alexandra Pelosi's (Nancy Pelosi's daughter) Fall to Grace.

Pelosi's subject is James McGreevey, the ex-governor of New Jersey, who went through a rough and public divorce from his wife after he was charged with soliciting gay sex from an aide. Through all the rough and tumble of this very public process of exposure and perhaps a bit of a crucifixion on the side, McGreevey was re introduced to the world as a closeted gay male.

Today, McGreevey lives in Plainsfield, New Jersey, with his Australian mate Mark O'Donnell and is an Episcopalian with a degree in Divinity (he received that in his early 50's) and a career in social service:

As a recovery specialist who preaches the Gospel, Mr. McGreevey spends much of his time in the Hudson County Correctional Center in Kearny, N.J., working with women fighting addiction through the nonprofit organization Integrity House. His message: No matter how far you’ve fallen, redemption is within reach.

Pelosi claims she is interested in broken souls and deemed McGreevey to be one. She likes to look inside the lives of those who have fallen after having been in the limelight for a while. 

Indeed, as Pelosi says in her insightful interview, the fall of men and women are far worthier of attention than are the stories of their "rise." The "rise" stories are often formulaic and banal and they are also, with the benefit of hindsight, re constructed to make them inspirational.

The fall stories, on the other hand, are more human.

The title of the HBO documentary on McGreevey has a turn into a parable as well: For those who've read Leonard Kriegel's touching essay, "Falling into Life," will see a "fall" as redemption, or a freedom from certain invisible yet adamantine shackles that hold people back from experiencing their "real" lives--the one's reserved for them to achieve their full human potential.

Clearly, McGreevey's fall isn't the typical fall from the wheel of fortune, but a fall into what was reserved for him as a real and rightful place in this world--a gay man with a deep conscience and desire for social service.

The 21st century family

I remember this: I was teaching an advanced creative non-fiction class to undergraduate business students. Students who take to majoring in business are generally whip-smart, but they also tend to possess pretty deterministic world views.

As a representative of the non-business mode of thinking, I had felt burdened with the task of attempting to "break" such views, or at least instill some sort of uncertainty and doubt into them.

From day 1 we ran into problems of definition. Can one define what a "family" is?

Everybody said in unison, "yes".

It's easy--a family comprises a father, a mother and children. I had winced at the patness of the answer; but by then I had got used to such patness in every answer that a typical business undergraduate was capable of giving.

"A family could be any unit of emotional intimacy," I had suggested. "A woman with a cat could be a family." I hadn't spoken of the gay and lesbian family because the frame of reference simply wasn't available back then.

This was in 2000; the young corporate-acolytes in my class thought I was joking.

At that time corporations didn't seek to normalize the non-traditional/non-heterosexual family. (Now even Budweiser has an ad showing a soldier coming home to the embrace of a male "special" other).

Thus the J.C. Penny catalog celebrating Father's and Mother's days with images of alternative families--the one I had poster-childed with the "woman with a cat" theme--would only elicit nods of assent were I to teach that class today. To do otherwise would be unsophisticated and unmodern.