The media have been following a celebrated man’s fall into disgrace. I’m referring to the accusations against a former Arapahoe County sheriff, war veteran, honored locally and nationally for his services to law enforcement, married with children and grandchildren — and charged with offering methamphetamine in exchange for sex with a man.
This theme has legs. In Roman times through the Middle Ages, those covering such a story might have invoked the personification Fortune. Using a kind of booby-trapped ferris wheel, Fortune raised folks up to power, fame, or wealth, and then willy-nilly dashed them down again — to the horror, maybe the delight, and maybe the edification of awed onlookers.
As I’ve followed the reports, I’ve found myself pondering another possible story behind this story. Fortune’s wheel describes a trajectory. I’m more interested in the why and the how — an explanation. I don’t know that my ponderings intersect with the sheriff’s personal situation or history, and I make no such claim. What I’d like to propose is how a story like the sheriff’s might develop, might make sense, might evoke understanding.
Our hero is a gay man, an older gentle man, say in his late 60s (the sheriff is 69 ; I am 67, and gay). Our gentleman came of age in the 1950s and early ’60s. When the majority of his peers were choosing their hetero sexual orientation, he felt confused. He laughed gamely at locker room jests and boasts, but never felt clued in. He went through the clumsiness of dating girls, and found it forever awkward.
There were hints and inklings of a different desire, but that door led to panic and darkness, and had to stay closed.
He knew no one, either his age or any age, who acknowledged being gay. Why would someone do so? So his secret stayed secret, and he was full of shame. His parents, his peers, Sunday school teachers, the movies, celebrations, family photos — all the unwritten rules of social development prescribed a sequence of events that most, after all, were happy to follow.
Those drawn to a different path — yes, there were brave and defiant exceptions — often turned from it. Our gentleman fell in love (it happens), married (attaboy), had children (his folks were thrilled), made his way, came to “count” in society.
But the gay was there to stay. And suppression can do only so much. Secrecy — now a habit — increased with every homo joke, queer aspersion, holier-than-thou procla mation. Pornography was safe — well, to a point — and the Internet was inexhaustible. But virtual passion, too, can do only so much.
Unable even to imagine how he might form a bond with a man of his age, his interests, his accomplishments, our gentleman paid prostitutes or had wordless encounters in very dark bars. Sometimes there were sort-of relationships, if the man was younger or some way vulnerable, maybe needing money or protection or connections. But the risks remained great: these secrets come out, the closets explode.
I’ll let you count the ways. And the costs. Include crime and prosecution. Include murder and suicide.
Readers a generation or two younger than I may find my story as quaint as Fortune’s wheel — despite ever-new homo jokes, insults, suicides. We’re told many young people regard sexual orientation like handedness — you’re born lefty or righty, straight or gay; big deal. If so, I suspect these young folks are beneficiaries, as I myself have been, of men and women in earlier years and now — as individuals and members of organizations, and maybe their numbers were greater than I suggested above — who have struggled for an end to the prejudice and hatred that have doomed many in the closet. That struggle necessarily continues, and this column is my little hammer tinkle in support.
David E. Faris (fredavid@aol.com) of Aurora is a retired psychologist.
