Closets: Dangerous to Your Health, and Could Kill You

I came out of my big "gay closet" when I was around 40 years-old. I started building the closet when I was around twelve years-old and living in Portland, OR. I had no role models of being a healthy gay young teenager at the time, neither in the church, school, or society-at-large. Going to a conservative college (Whitworth) for two years, followed by life within the InterVarsity and Campus Crusade bubbles at the Univ. of Kansas, surrounded by other closeted individuals at both institutions of higher education, and later Princeton Seminary, being in the closet while pretending to be straight in the rest of my life was was the only option in order to live and succeed in the middle-class, white, cisgender, non-LGBTQIA+ world in which I lived. My metaphorical yet real closet had one door that was firmly locked with every device known possible, chains included. The boards were made of all kinds of woods and metal, and other fabric that would make it impregnable, both impossible to get in or get out. I built the closet. Church, schools, and society provided me much of the materials, and some times helped in the construction process itself. Free labor!

How did I get out and start to disassemble it? Even though married to my best friend, a wonderful woman, I fell in love with another man who was incredibly kind and loving. And I kept reading these words from Ps. 139: 14, 15, to paraphrase: I was knit together in my mother's womb by God.  Wonderful are your works, O God, and thus, wonderful am I. That I was teaching in a notoriously well-known anti-LGBTQIA+ institution of higher education/seminary, and was part of a mainline Protestant denomination--Presbyterian Church, USA--that was still largely homophobic in its constitution, didn't help in terms of job possibilities in being an out gay man. But the love, and the leading of the Spirit had other plans. In one way, it was bad timing. In other ways, it was either come out, or die in my big gay closet.

I write about my coming out as a gay man from my big gay closet because of news of Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill. He was the general secretary of the US Bishops' Conference. Reporter Brian Bell of Towleroad.com reported on July 21, 2021 that he was outed as gay without his consent. By the way, when living in  a gay closet you are always worried that you will be outed by someone else, which was, in part my life story. A person that I met on the "side lines" of my marriage outed me, un-voluntarily, to other people at the higher education institution where I was working at the time.

Fr. Burrill was outed not by another gay man, but by a Catholic news outlet known as The Pillar. They used an anonymous "app data signals correlated to Burrill's mobile device" from the gay dating app Grindr to place Burrill at gay bars and in person homes in multiple cities, when Burrill was traveling on assignment for the US Bishops' Conference. They tracked his movements between 2018 and 2020. The Pillar was about to announce or out Burrill, and a memo was sent out by Archbishop Jose Gomez of the US Bishops' Conference. Some of the allegations included misconduct with minors. Gomez simply wrote, "However, in order to avoid becoming a distraction to the operations and ongoing work of the Conference, Monsignor has resigned effective immediately. The Conference takes all allegations of misconduct seriously and will pursue all appropriate steps to address them."  For more information, go to:https://www.towleroad.com/2021/07/jeffrey-burrill-resign-sex-scandal/.

My hunch is that the soon-to-be former Fr. Burrill is probably very scared, living in fear, sad, hurt, angry, lost, lonely, bitter, vengeful, with many sleepless nights, and self-medicating.

Just a hunch. 

What doesn't help Burrill curry much in the way of sadness or pity is that he was one of many Catholic priests who approved a measure of preventing politicians that voted in favor of abortion rights from receiving communion, which would then exclude President Biden and Speaker Pelosi. In other words, he was only too ready to play with certain rules and traditions of the Church, while breaking other rules, e.g., the rules of celibacy, let along sex with minors and being part of the LGBTQIA+ community.

The gay closet is dangerous to your health, and can kill you. The idea of hiding in a metaphorical closet of secrets, with each board, each lock, put in place each time one denies being gay and created in the image of God, became a powerful way of understanding what I did between the ages of 12 to 40 years-old. I worked at institutions--both in the academy and the Church--that reinforced the idea of the gay closet, suggesting strongly I stay there. As long as I kept building it, the closet comforted me. But when I started to be and live honestly, openly, the closet tried to destroy me, as did the institutions that helped me raise this edifice of pain and horror. I knew I had one of two options: if I continued to live in the closet, I lived with the constant fear that I would be "found out" and outed one day, as was the case with Fr. Burrill, in which the closet cannot protect you but suddenly disappears, and you are left alone, naked, hungry, thirsty, desirous of companionship and finding none. 

The second option is the one I chose, though reluctantly. Why reluctantly? The closet becomes a place of cruel comfort, no matter how much it will destroy or shorten one's life. I came out to myself, my then-wife, children, parents, parents-in-law, and close friends. I did not come out voluntarily to the people I worked with in the institution of higher education, because I was involuntarily outed by a former-mentor and former-colleague. I did come out to Presbytery leadership, who said she would protect my ordination, but was sure I would never work in a church again. That was five churches ago. 

And I moved to Portland, Oregon. 

And I no longer live in or around gay closets. 

I now help people out of their closets in the Church. Trust me, there is a clanking, grinding, assemblage of LGBTQIA+ closets in each denomination, each church, each jurisdictional area. 

The work goes on, and will for generations to come, for closets are still being created, as Fr. Burrill's story reminds us.

Each person needs to figure out how to disassemble their closet, one closet at a time.