How to Play With Fire
By: Jess Darnell
Tags: Sex, Recovery, Community, LGBTQ, Addiction

If scientists could harness the material that makes up one’s closet door, they’d have an indestructible war vehicle that could blow us all to smithereens, but they haven’t yet, so you’ll just have to trust me when I tell you that the closet door, at times, feels like steel.

It feels like cotton in your throat, it feels like water in your nose, and occasionally it feels like black smoke in your lungs.

If that’s what it feels like, I’m sure you can imagine what it does to your spirit.

The Effects of the Closet

Self-Hate and Emotional Detachment

In the closet, it’s difficult to be proud of yourself because, fundamentally, you feel slighted, oppressed, and unloved.

When I was closeted, any time I heard the words, “I love you,” I would shut down because I knew those words meant that they loved me conditionally — that they only loved the parts of me that they wanted to see.

Growing up, I was reminded of this discrepancy every day, leaving for school, and every night, when I went to bed. The cumulative result is a numbness toward anybody who — if you are not out to them — professes any semblance of affection for you.

Deluded Perceptions of Healthy Relationships

We were big classic film fans at my house and I grew up watching a lot of mid-20th-century Hollywood romance movies. I imagined meeting the man of my dreams in the same way Doris Day met Rock Hudson, or Audrey Hepburn met George Peppard. The glorious, Cinemascope love affairs I watched set a precedent for me — I wanted to meet Mr. Right, just like in the movies.

Later, I used to go for walks in the city night after night, hoping he would be leaving a department store in a wool suit and we’d catch eyes. He’d ask me for the time and then, well, want to marry me. Cue the music.

Not only was this preoccupation faulty because many classic films simply depict affairs, but people meet in all sorts of ways — not just in thematic meet-cutes. It also fuelled a delusion that drama-filled relationships were the natural mode of love and that soft-focus, teary-eyed, break-ups were necessary for a real relationship.

I was lucky to have the internet, so I fervently watched the American Queer as Folk — which isn’t much help either, if I’m honest! I secretly rented Edge of Seventeen on iTunes, and I fell down the rabbit hole of high-school Tumblr.

With no example of a healthy, functional same-sex relationship, and several Biblical examples — thanks to the parents — of why same-sex relationships could never work, it was extremely difficult to have any faith at all that I would eventually find a caring partner.

The Question of Intimacy and a Warped Sense of Self-Image

With the gay “birds and the bees” talk strictly out of the question, pornography is most likely the only example of physical intimacy that a young gay man witnesses. Unfortunately, gay pornography is extremely stimulating to a repressed young man and can become quite addictive.

Despite the facts, the message becomes clear: if I want to be with another man, I have to look like that. Suddenly, our fragile, volatile, and undeveloped bodies become an even more drastic, pubescent nightmare — what happens if I don’t look like that?