Quote from: singdaw on Today at 07:18:26am
DR JoseSPiano, have you seen the latest issue of New York Magazine? It's their 2007 Cheap Eats issue.
Bought it last week, and have already made a couple of notes. 
*However, there's also a somewhat "real" article in that issue about "Broadway's Test Tube Babies", Max and Laura, and the upcoming revival of "Grease". And a rather fascinating and, ultimately, sad article about married men leading double-lives.
Found the link to that
double-lived article. There's a couple of quotes that interested me.
First, a comment by the subject of the article:
Close as they were, William couldn’t imagine telling his friends about his interest in men. “No one was gay, no one even knew anyone who was gay,” he says. “It’s not that I was scared of being judged, but of being seen differently. Like if my friends were all going out to a bar to hit on girls, maybe I wouldn’t be invited. For lack of a better analogy, it’s like with actors, when you find out someone playing a straight role is gay. You don’t look at him the same way. I guess that’s always been my greatest fear.”
That pretty well seems to sum the guy up, in his own words.
On the other hand, there's that comment by the shrink, Richard Isay:
I ask him if he has ever heard of Richard Isay, a psychiatrist who has written at length about gay men, himself included, who have been in straight marriages. Isay believes that most gay men who marry do so as a way of denying their homosexuality. “Every homosexual man who marries,” he writes in Becoming Gay: The Journey to Self-Acceptance, “does so, in my clinical experience, because of early self-esteem injury that has caused him to see homosexuality as bad, sinful or sick.” Another of Isay’s theories has a Freudian undercurrent: “Every married man I have seen has needed to repeat with his spouse the sense of having been emotionally deprived by his mother. The futile hope of mastering this trauma provides one powerful but unconscious motive for these heterosexual marriages.”
What a load of crap! William, the article's subject, clearly does NOT "see homosexuality as bad, sinful or sick." He says so, repeatedly.
No, he is not religious. No, he was not raised in a religious or bigoted household. No, he does not think being attracted to men is “wrong.” No, it’s not that simple. This much he will allow: “This is not the life I was meant to live. I don’t know what that life is, what it looks like, but I know it’s not this. But I don’t think most people are living the life they think they were meant to live, so I don’t feel that bad.”
This is clearly in contradiction with what Isay espouses.
Looking over der Brucer's history, what is more probable is the idea that William is living the life he was told he was supposed to live, totally in ignorance of what else might be possible, and now has no idea of how to change that life.
Der Brucer was told, by his senior officers, to find himself a wife. That's what he did. Whether those senior officers had any idea of what and who der B was doing, we have no proof, but my hunch is that they had zero inklings, that it was simply beyond their comprehension.
But it wasn't beyond der B's comprehension, which was why he was able to walk away from that life and move on to a life that, eventually, included me.
It is my conviction that being gay, happily out-of-the-closet gay, takes imagination, to conceive that life can be different and to move towards that life.
Or, if you prefer taking your lessons from the widow of Beauregard Jackson Pickett Burnside, "Life is a banquet..." and I think you know the rest of that line.
