What I Learned by Coming Out Back When Kevin Spacey Should Have
I am the same age as Kevin Spacey, so I understand the mindset he came from when he made the choice back in the 70s to be semi-closeted to establish himself as an actor. But he paid a price. “Inappropriate drunken behavior,” in my experience, is far more likely to be seen from those living an inner conflict. I used to drink a lot, and have been plenty inappropriate in a social setting, but I never imposed myself on anyone. I think you have to be angry to do that, and lying about who you are — or, rather, feeling you have to lie — will make you angry. (Recent additional revelations about Spacey seem to confirm that along with celebrity came arrogance and entitlement. I suspect that you will hear of no such scandals from gay actors who have been successfully out for decades.)
My own emergence from the closet came very early, in the mid-70s. As a very precocious junior in high school, I had met another, even more precocious kid in the Drama Society. Eddie seduced me in my basement, and once that was out of the way, convinced to join him in Manhattan on an upcoming Sunday afternoon, when we could tell out parents we were going to museums. (We lived in Mount Vernon, New York, just outside of the city.)
We headed right for Christopher Street. We walked into the bar, “Ty’s,” packed for beer bust, and it was sheer heaven. By that summer I had a whole double life going, replete with imaginary circle of theater friends in New York who often “put me up for the night” when in fact, I would just always find a trick during my Saturday night bar crawls. I might have told a few of these men my real age, but there was nothing predatory in their behavior toward me. Rather the opposite. I learned fast how to pick up men, and I loved it. It made me feel powerful. And like any 17-year old, I was very horny. (There was no “safe sex,” AIDS was still a few years away; unimagined and unimaginable.)
My mother was completely fooled — I maintained completely straight A’s, and she thought my ease with girls in high school was a sign of my heterosexuality. My father was suspicious though, and I sensed a reckoning was coming — one that would force me to give up my steady secret boyfriend, an intense 28-year old Vietnam Vet named Gene who was my first great infatuation.
As luck (or fate) would have it, my French mother had long wanted me to spend my high school senior year in France. I would have rather started college early. but my mother’s determination had the crucial advantage in granting me escape from my inevitable exposure at home. I boarded a plane for Paris on September 7, 1975, then a train for the southern city of Montpellier.
I was supposed to be in a dorm for rural kids who boarded during the week at the lyceé, but instead I found some sympathetic older distant cousins and got an apartment in the (then) rundown city center with them. I asked if they knew any gay people, and one knew one who knew another one. René Martin was that other one. We fell for each other hard. (Like Gene, he was also 28. I seemed to like that age.)
I was so used to lying by then that I just added an “e” to my new roommate’s name and told my family I’d fallen in love with “Renée,” and moved in with “her.” When my shocked mother (I had changed the sex of my amour, but not his age) announced she was visiting me, an American cousin back home took it upon herself to tell my parents I was actually gay, so my mother would have time to recover from this revelation instead of being jumped with the truth on her arrival in France.
It was not my cousin’s right, but in retrospect, I’m glad she did it. The lying was corrosive. I told myself it was worth “protecting” my mother, and indeed she took it very hard. But we had several months of correspondence before she arrived, and she made clear that my homosexuality was far less painful than me thinking I had to hide who I was from her. (Still, her visit itself was so dramatic I used it as the basis of script of my senior thesis in NYU Film school a few years later, …and he’ll grow up to be big and strong.)
I recently discovered this letter which I wrote after the forced revelation, addressed to my entire family:
Dear All:
When you get this Mom will be here, but that’s no reason for me to not to write, as I want to respond to your letters.
Dad, yours is very difficult to respond to. At times you go off into many different directions and I don’t really follow completely. I do wish you’d stop insisting I’m “tormented.”
Frankly, and this is to you all, I understand very well your feelings. I am very young for all I have done and am doing. When I was 13–14, I fought terribly against the feelings within me and hated myself. In the 2 years that followed, up until a year and a half ago, I went through the very slow and painful process of self-acceptance. I spent an incredible amount of time thinking — about myself, others and my relationships with them and they with each other. I am blessed with a mind that asks “why” all the time and thirsts for knowledge. I saw the gamut of what society has to offer and received an ample education. Is it so hard to believe that I matured to an extent that I concluded certain things about myself?
Let me stress that I do not say or think “I am a homosexual.” Above all, I am a human being. I have found so far in life that my capacity for love and satisfying sexual contact is greater toward my own sex than toward the opposite sex. I do not not rule out heterosexual relationships in the future. In November, for example, I met Tamara, a very pretty and captivating 18-year old. I liked the idea of sex with her, but what developed naturally was a friendship. With René what developed naturally was love, and I doubt I will be seriously involved with anyone else, male or female, for quite some time.
I hope I’ve cleared up some misconceptions.
Love Mark
It rather astounds me that I was a self-affirming as I was at a time when Stonewall was not yet 7 years old, and homosexuality — certainly for my parents’ generation — was still unimaginably taboo. But I see now that they were getting the letter of a son they had brought up to question received ideas, to cherish kindness, and to refrain from judging anyone without trying to first imagine being in their shoes.Ultimately, this is what I learned and can pass along.
When you hear: “I didn’t raise you to be this way” your response can be: “But you did. You raised me to love myself, to be honest, to be strong; not to live in a closet, to be a liar, to cower in the dark. I am exactly the child you raised me to be.”
In not coming out until he had to, Kevin Spacey never said those words out loud. Evidently he didn’t feel them, either. His secrecy — even after he had secured fame and fortune — sent the message that he was still ashamed of who he was. Nothing makes it harder to empathize with others than when you can’t empathize with yourself. That lack of empathy is what drives all predatory behavior — that skipped moment when you’re supposed to check — and care — whether your advances are wanted.
Coming out as soon as you possibly can isn’t an act of political self-indulgence, but an assertion of personal integrity. Spacey’s inability to do one had everything to do with his lack of the other later on. Those who keep rationalizing their closets would be smart to learn from his mistakes.
