|
Keeping a low profile
Families, careers and personal beliefs lead most Southwest Virginia gays and lesbians to remain in the closet
By MARY BISHOP
The Roanoke Times
How many gays and lesbians are "out" in the Roanoke Valley?
The Rev. Catherine Houchins, pastor of the mostly gay Metropolitan Community Church of the Blue Ridge, pauses a few seconds to calculate. "Oh, about 25," she finally says. And not all of those, she cautioned, would be willing to be identified publicly as being gay.
Soulforce, a national gay rights advocacy group, estimates the national gay population at 4 percent. By that measure, there would be at least 10,000 homosexuals in the valley. That means more than 99 percent here still are not out.
"It is so distressing to me how hard it is to get people to come out of the closet," says Sam Garrison, a Roanoke lawyer, former Watergate lawyer and now the foremost gay activist in Western Virginia. "Because my life has been so wonderful since I came out."
He came out in the summer of 1982 by walking into The Roanoke Times & World-News and asking reporter Ben Beagle to write a story about gay people in Roanoke. Beagle did.
"At first," Garrison, 58, said of Beagle's front-page story, "I felt like I was a fish in a fish bowl, waiting for something bad to happen."
But good things happened instead. One was that Garrison's former classmates at Roanoke Catholic High School came to his side. That same group of straight men was at Garrison's wedding to Mark Harris at Roanoke's Unitarian Universalist Church in 1996.
It was entirely appropriate, though, Garrison said, for him to have expected the worst from coming out. "As a gay person, you go years without hearing anything positive."
This is true not just in Roanoke, Garrison added, but everywhere, even San Francisco, one of the most gay-friendly cities in the world.
"Until maybe very recently," Garrison said, "every gay child in America grew up being a pessimist. If you want anything in life, you feel driven to secrecy, and you expect the worst if and when anybody finds out you're gay."
On the condition that their names not be revealed, several gay people in the Roanoke Valley agreed to be interviewed about why they still are in the closet.
If every gay and lesbian in the valley gathered in one place, a 50-year-old Roanoke lesbian said, straight citizens would be shocked at the size of the crowd.
"You would see professors, you would see doctors. You would see teachers -- piles and piles of teachers. There are people who have high-profile jobs. . . . Gay people are everywhere, but people don't realize it."
She and her partner of 19 years stay out of the limelight. They are raising her partner's orphaned nephews, and until the two boys are grown and on their own, the women don't want to give anybody a reason to tease the boys.
The women never kiss or do anything vaguely sexual around the boys -- only the briefest goodbye hugs -- for fear of making them uncomfortable.
Twice, the women have worked for the same employer, and both times, one of the women said, they left because male co-workers didn't like it when they found out the women were lesbian partners.
At an automotive shop where they worked, one of the women said, "the men who worked there were very redneck. Even though they were going out on their wives, they judged me."
For a while, they lived next door to a man who was incensed that they were lesbians, even though the women said they never flaunted it.
"He would yell 'dyke' at us," one woman said. "If there was a party, he'd come over and urinate on our porch. We lived a living hell for about two years . . . He couldn't stand the thought of two women. And we were probably two of the most decent people on the street."
On an overnight visit of his partner's mother to their sunny Roanoke home, a retired Roanoke businessman slipped up at breakfast and said to his partner, "Pass the salt, sweetheart." The mother pretended not to hear.
What he feared most when he set up housekeeping with his partner 20 years ago was losing his two children's love. But his children, now grown, applauded his courage, and when the first of them got married, they insisted that his partner get a tux and sit up front with the rest of the family.
The siblings of the 64-year-old man have known for decades that he's gay, and they are close to his partner too. But the man could recall only one mention of his sexual orientation -- until recently -- among his siblings. That was 30 years ago in a chat with his brother.
The man is afraid that if he were publicly identified as gay, someone would be unkind to his relatives. "I think people would say mean, nasty, hateful things to them," he said, and he would blame himself.
The most public action he's taken was to fly a gay pride flag from his porch. The older lady next door, who didn't know what it was but liked the rainbow colors, asked if he could get her one. He didn't want to tell her he got it at a gay bookstore and he didn't want her to inadvertently display a gay symbol, so he took down his flag.
Right after Christmas, the man's sister-in-law approached him for the first time to talk about his life as a gay man. He and his brother, too, are talking about it for the first time in three decades. He says he's never felt such love and acceptance from his family.
A Roanoke businessman said he never heard a word about homosexuality while he was growing up on a Blue Ridge Mountain farm about an hour's drive from Roanoke.
He dated girls, but in class he'd fantasize about boys. It wasn't until he went away to college that he realized he was gay.
He is 65 now and impatient with the belief of some straights that gays wake up one day and decide arbitrarily to have sex with someone of their gender. "Pure bull on that," he said. "I was always interested in males."
In his college town, he met two gay doctors who finally educated him about his sexual orientation. They told him "not to feel crazy or guilty, or that I was terribly wrong."
A year after moving to Roanoke in the 1950s, he met the man he's lived with for 43 years. He likes to point out that their union has lasted far longer than many heterosexual marriages.
The man and his partner are among the conservative, prosperous gay people of Roanoke. They have dinner parties, go to a mainstream church and enjoy a host of gay and straight friends.
But the man never plans to reveal to the public that he is gay. He fears that some customers would turn away from him. He doesn't see any benefit to being out anyway. As far as he's concerned, homosexuality should remain a private matter.
He was disturbed by pictures in the newspaper of gay people at Roanoke's annual Pride in the Park festival in September and at vigils after the Sept. 22 shootings at Backstreet Cafe that left one gay man dead and six people wounded.
The photos of gay people "laying all over each other" at those events were out of line, he said.
"I can see how that makes a straight person very angry," he said. "That just inflames people. They think we're half-crazy anyway."
Two Lynchburg girls met in high school and by college they were in love.
"At that time, we didn't know what we were," said one. "We didn't have words for it."
The other did a college paper on homosexuality -- only because classmates divvied up subjects and someone needed to do homosexuality. She brought her readings home and as the two of them read over the descriptions of lesbians, they recognized themselves.
"I think that makes a really strong argument for being born that way," one of the women said of homosexuality. "We didn't have any role models. We didn't know anybody who was like that. We thought we were the only people who'd ever thought of it."
The women's families always have been supportive of their relationship. When the women moved in together, one of their mothers packed up a box of kitchen utensils, along with an old family plate her daughter had always cherished. It was the mother's way of giving her blessing.
The women are both 49 now and have been together for 29 years. One is a state employee, the other is mentally ill and is cared for by her partner.
They used to wish they could hold hands in public without drawing stares, but after years of repressing the urge, they don't think about it anymore.
They've spoken about their long-term relationship at a Roanoke meeting of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, and one of them took an active role in an AIDS fund-raiser.
But they doubt they'll ever be more public than that about being lesbians.
They live in a rural area near Roanoke and don't know their neighbors well. "They could be extremists with arsenals in their basements, for all I know," said the other woman.
People sometimes ask about their obvious closeness.
"People always say we look like sisters," said one of the women, "and we say, 'Yeah, people say that a lot.' "
|
