(Second try - AOL kicked me off the first time, and I couldn't save what I wrote)
TOD:
Edmund White's States of Desire.
Not quite thirty years ago, after I'd returned to Los Angeles with my physical wounds healed from that queer-bashing incident, I was reading White's (no relation) travelogue, and came to the section on Florida. White talked about a survey that was taken shortly after Anita Bryant's Save the Children campaign toppled the pro-gay legislation in Dade County. What the surveyers had found was that the vast majority of voters who had voted for the repeal could not identify anyone they knew as gay. Those few who could play spot-a-homo and win could only do so by pointing out their hairdresser, and maybe a florist. No one knew about Catholic priests, apparently.
And it occured to me, we're invisible. "They" can't spot us. They don't have a clue as to who we are. Oh, they can still arrest us. They can fire us. They can deny us an apartment. They can blast at us from their pulpits. They can even beat us to a pulp, break our bodies. But they can't spot us, because we're invisible.
Our very invisibility was part of the problem. How could they ever know who we are, as people, if we don't let them know?
And then I looked at myself. I certainly couldn't rely on anyone else to do the job. Everyone else I knew was as invisible as I was. We were cowering in the supposed safety of our invisibility, and it wasn't working. Hadn't I just spent months with my shoulder in a cast, because of that damned faulty invisibility?
No one else was going to represent me. I had to be that person others could point to and say, "Yes, I know that guy."
Shortly after this revelation, the opportunity struck. The office I worked at, it was announced, was being merged with another office, for efficiency and for larger digs, and the two offices would now be under one roof, and that roof was going to be in... Orange County.
*gulp*
I came out of the closet before we made the move. I've never regretted that decision. And yes, I became "that guy," the one people could come up to and say "Uh, do you mind if I ask you a personal question?" And that personal question would never have anything to do with me, personally. It always had something to do with being gay. They now knew someone, who wasn't a hairdresser or florist. They knew my name.
Edmund White did that, changed my life, purely by power of suggestion, by writing something and letting me think.
