11.20.05

Come out, come out, wherever you are

Posted in Sunday Times Columns at 3:08 pm by Sarah

Come out, come out, wherever you are

Normally, I don’t buy VIP magazine. The pages of 40-something women with too much make-up make me cringe. But last week’s cover was headlined “Mark is happier now than we’ve ever seen him”, and that prompted a temporary policy change. Not being a tabloid reader, I had missed the news that Mark Feehily from Westlife is now gay. (If you’re confused, he’s the one that takes the second-last chorus up a key.) I wish more men would come out. The older I get, the more convinced I become that the world is full of latent homosexuals. Their failure to accept their sexuality means the rest of us have to put up with their consequent misery.
I am a bit paranoid about this, because most of the straight men I knew in college turned out to be gay. By our late twenties, most of them had come out. The transformation was always enormous. Some of them were simply unhappy in their youth, but there were also the nasty, sarcastic men who were cruel to women and everyone else. Meeting them years later, I was always astonished at how announcing their gayness made them so, well, gay. Not only had they turned out to be gay, but they had also turned out to be nice.

Then I started eyeing up the other nasty bastards and thought, hmm, they must be gay too. The problem was, they weren’t coming out. Unfortunately for us, they probably never will.

There are two types of latents. You have the macho crew who adopt the masculine symbols of their social class. If they are rich, you’ll find them obnoxiously strutting around in slightly dated pinstripe suits. With their chests out, and their voices deep and loud, they find the office a rich environment in which to indulge their misogyny. They’ve had to distance themselves from their instincts and therefore from their emotions. This makes them appalling managers, but they can be very successful because the other latents on the board find their bravado appealing.

Rugby matches are a fertile source of rich, macho latents. Scrums, communal showers, collars standing up, plenty of sexist jokes and a fondness for big-arsed women. Latent, latent, latent.

The lower-class ones also assume aggressively masculine postures such as shaved heads, leather and plenty of tattoos. The tougher they look, the queerer they are. Like the rich latents, they have girlfriends and wives, but are still happiest back-slapping with the lads. Scoring goals gives them the opportunity for allegedly nonsexual embraces.

The second type are the snobs who can hide behind the cover of the “metrosexual”. Mark Simpson, who invented the term, says a metrosexual is “a young man with money to spend, living in or within easy reach of a metropolis — because that’s where all the best shops, clubs, gyms and hairdressers are. He might be officially gay, straight or bisexual, but this is utterly immaterial because he has clearly taken himself as his own love object and pleasure as his sexual preference”.

David Beckham is the best example, but there are metrosexuals all around us. They throw excellent dinner parties in their beautifully decorated homes and share a love of fashionable clothes and gossip. Occasionally they are given to adopting affectations that are cute in the elderly but odd in the young, such as pipe smoking, drinking port or peculiar brands of tea. They date glamorous women, but it rarely works out. They are great company if you can live up to their aesthetic and/or intellectual standards. Otherwise, they are judgmental snobs.

A true metrosexual’s orientation is irrelevant, but the latent version is just another form of nasty bastard. The arrogance and condescension of Sherlock Holmes springs to mind.

Common to both the machos and the snobs is intense homophobia. So well recognised is this characteristic that the Harvard Law Review recently elaborated on its use as a defence in murders. The “homosexual advance” defence can reduce murder charges to manslaughter. A related defence, known as “homosexual panic”, is part of an insanity or diminished-capacity plea.

Homosexual panic “is premised on the theory that a person with latent homosexual tendencies will have an extreme and uncontrollably violent reaction when confronted with a homosexual proposition”.

The Harvard editors found that “even when defendants . . . do not raise homosexual panic as a defence, the admission of evidence of a victim’s homosexuality often results in undue lenience towards such defendants”. So when gay-bashers go to court, they get lesser sentences than other violent criminals.

While their sexual preference may be latent, the homophobia of the judge and jury certainly isn’t. Of course, the homophobia prevalent in the general population is the reason why the latents remain latents. Even very liberal people who genuinely don’t judge their gay friends or family are uncomfortable with public displays of affection between homosexuals. Byrne Fone, author of Homophobia: A History, calls it the “last acceptable prejudice”.

Boys who bully each other will often use words such as faggot or queer as a term of abuse. Is it any wonder that some people argue that the high rate of suicide among young men can be partly attributed to their struggle with their homosexuality? Of course, I could be wrong. I remember insisting to one friend over too many bottles of wine that he was gay. In excellent good humour, he assured me he wasn’t.

I remained sceptical until the day he married a gorgeous woman whom he clearly loved. Ooops!

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