What Was it Like Coming Out in 1999?
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What was it like coming out 20 years-ago, in a pre-internet world?
I am a 36-year old gay man, words I never thought I’d write, at least at some point back there in my life. The life I once envisioned for myself should have been both a clue and a warning: as a precocious and closeted teenager, lodged firmly in those early teen years they now call tweens, I envisioned a life of heterosexual domestic bliss. Looking back now I feel fairly sure that a good deal of the firmament that grounded these fantasies originated in the domestic squabbles of my parents, who were anything but a model couple, straight or gay. Insofar as my sexuality contributed it may have driven me to paint swatches and rug samples—I was highly specific in detail—and admittedly a measure of avoidance, because in these connubial delusions my domestic partner was always a woman. At the age of thirteen or fourteen I could not envision domestic life with a man, though I know I had already begun to feel sexual attraction to them and them alone.
It’s hard to imagine what you’ve never seen. The world was very different then, as strange as it feels to think about that now, though encumbered by that very past I find it hard to imagine what it’s like for kids to come out these days, though I imagine it to be easier, if not much easier. It isn’t the alleged increased acceptance of the community that eases this passage, acceptance tempered by the reported 17% increase in hate crimes reported by the FBI, but modern technology itself. I kept returning to Garth Greenwell’s words on reading James Baldwin in the LGBT section at his local bookstore, about what that indicated about the sheer opacity of our own budding inner lives at the close of the twentieth century and the dawn of a new one, the way it was just so hard to find out much of anything about myself just when I needed it the most.
2000 was a strange fulcrum in queer life. Ellen had only recently emerged from her closet, Queer as Folk debuted on December 3rd of that year, and astoundingly same sex sexual relations would still remain technically illegal in many states until June 26th, 2003, when the United States Supreme Court overturned Bowers v. Hardwick in their ruling in favor of plaintiffs John Geddes Lawrence and Tyron Garner in their suit against Texas.
Queer desire was becoming emergent, at least to my eyes, then all of eighteen, continuing a gradual erasure of the clothing binding the male form in commercial and print media that had begun decades before; men now adorned billboards with little to no clothing, and most shocking of all for my new older teen self the Abercrombie & Fitch Quarterly landed on my bookshelf—or under my bed—leaping boldly from the subtle tease of older fitness and underwear ads to the outright softcore porn of Bruce Webber’s dreamworld photography, photos where the appearance of a nude female form almost seemed like the actual aberration here. (And despite the vitriol directed at the company, much of it rightful, I fail to see how anyone can deny that the magazine somehow helped other young men come out, embrace their sexualities nakedly, because the image, say, of two nude young men lounging in bed was far more affirming than the nearly sterile images of headless torsos in the back of department store circulars.)
Porn itself was inaccessible for many emerging queers. Home internet access was nowhere near as common as many younger people might today naively assume about this recent past. I can recall my own parents, upwardly mobile, dismissing the internet as something primarily used for conducting research for school, and therefore something we could easily seek out at the library. Even the horny student lucky enough to have internet access at home couldn’t safely search for porn, however, because many families shared one computer. Having come of age within a half hour drive of a major metropolitan area vastly expanded my experiences, not least with porn, because once I had turned eighteen I could go and browse the DVDs and, yes, VHS tapes on display at the sex shops of downtown Philly. But this porn wasn’t free, and it wasn’t even particularly cheap. (And yes, almost as a gag, no pun intended, I do still have somewhere an old VHS porn.)
Of course living in the shadow of a large city offered other advantages. As Greenwell noted in his essay one avenue of escape was the LGBT section of the local bookstore, as well as the gay bookstore itself, such as the aptly named Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia. I first explored the contours of my new world at the local suburban Border’s Books, where they had one solid wall of shelving full of queer books, perhaps six-feet wide by six-feet tall. Some of the books nakedly titillated with their innuendo, such as the slim volumes that promised to make me a better lover with a little reading. They were a bizarrely overwhelming and satisfying substitute for a horny teenager with an overly active imagination. Of course once I had entered Giovanni’s Room I naturally chose the titular volume, which opened a whole new world for me, with Baldwin’s description of a failed Parisian romance. I wanted to move to Paris and I wanted to fall in love with a man and have healthy sexual relations, and for the first time I really knew that was all okay, beyond okay in fact, but something to embrace about myself.
But imagine a world, if you are younger, where there is no social media to meet and make friends during the coming out process. Imagine a world where the internet may or may not offer information on who or what you are, because you’re so inexperienced in this new technology that you don’t have any idea how to even begin the search, and you don’t really know where else to turn. Imagine a world where your only real recourse is to go out, trip and fall, wade into the mess, order a drink, and try to make friends. I don’t think that was a better world, though it sounds like I’m implying it. For the kids’ sake I prefer the modern world. I prefer the modern world of visible role models and avatars and queer celebrities. But it’s important to remember where we came from in order to continue to fight for what we have, and to fight for those who will come after us, living in our legacies.
