Public Service Alliance of Canada BC

“Why are so many gays still hiding in the closet? Prominent Persons Need to Come Out for Sake of Young People”

Toronto Pride has chosen the theme “Fearless” this year. Yet the number of gay and lesbian athletes, politicians, business and labour leaders who are still in the closet gives the theme a tinge of irony.

Being out of the closet starts when you stop speaking in the third person about a group of which you are a member.

When I was 16, it confronted me for the first time. A football player made a really denigrating joke about “fags”. Do I defend “us” or “them”?

When my father told me he beat up queers when he was a teenager, do I say “we” or “they” have a right to live without constant fear of being bashed?

When you are rising in Parliament to fight for equal marriage, do you refer to them or us?

It happens throughout your life, the terrifying moments of identifying yourself as the object of someone’s hate, indifference or tasteless humour. All that anxiety and all that fall-out from using a one-letter word to be honest and true to one’s self.

When I came out to my father, he said, “You can’t be gay, you play football!” There is still not a single “practising” professional football, baseball, hockey or basketball player on this continent who has declared himself gay. No, Virginia, they are not all straight.

It was 1988 when I decided to seek a city council seat in Winnipeg. I was scared to death when I annnounced that I was running. I’d tell myself that I couldn’t do it, that no one would vote for me.

The only gay I had ever heard who got elected to anything was Harvey Milk to the board of supervisors in gay old San Francisco - and he was assassinated. I didn’t think that Winnipeg was the next likely place for a big breakthrough in gay electoral history and I couldn’t go back into the closet.

When first I was elected to city countil and later to the mayor’s chair, i realized the world had changed.

I never forgot the times I had lost a job for being gay, lost an apartment, all the hate mail, threats on my family, a planned attempt on my life or the night I woke up to see someone torching my front porch. I remember the lost friends and alienating years as a teen when I had a secret so big and heavy I thought it would crush me. I was glad that in this country those times were behind us.

But it all came rushing back when I received an e-mail froma single mother in a western Canadian city about her 14-year-old son David, who came out and is being bullied and tormented in school. She is overwhelmed by his depresssion and anger. She wrote that I was the ony succeessful gay male she knew of and she needed someone who could offer her son hope. She said her son needed to know that he could be gay and have al ife, career and be respected and judged on the content of his character, not on any human charateristic.

So, where are our role models? Where are the “fearless” ministers of the Crown, the opposition critics, the hockey stars, the physicians, the labour leaders?

The trails have been blazed for these closet cases. I see these great gay and lesbian Canadians in Church Street’s many fine establishments enjoying the sense of community and living a private life they deny in public. I know many and consider some friends.

Don’t they realize the world has noticed what they are really saying about themselves and, for that matter, the rest of us? But it is what they are saying to David, who has shown more courage in the last year of his life than these folks, have in 20, that really leaves me cold.

Ontario is home to a handful of great “out” folks, including Kathleen Wynne, George Smitherman, Kyle Ray, Mark Tewkesbury, Molly Johnson and Alex Munter. They provide living proof that there no longer is any excuse to hide.

It took every sinew of courage for David to say “I” and “we”. Unlike far too many of the powerful members of our community, he is fearless.

source: Glen Murray, Toronto Star, June 18, 2006