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food for thought
Oct. 15th, 2006 07:13 pmBecause I didn't post anything with regard to the Coming Out Day, and because I don't seem able to conquer my racing thoughts enough to pull anything worthwhile out of my own head tonight, here is an interesting quote from Richard Chamberlain, whose autobiography (Shattered Love) I read some time ago:
(...) some gay activist cowboy started investigating and publicly "outing" celebrity types. He claimed his vision was to offer up worthy role models to gay youth, but I figured his real motivation was envy, anger, and a misguided hunger for power. In any case, the ever-predictable tabloids flashed front-page headlines that I was gay, shoving me right into the middle of my darkest nightmares.
My fears were threefold. First, I was terrified that this news would alienate fans and topple my cherished career, robbing me of the work I loved and my only source of income. Second, the elaborate and pristine self-image I had created, sustained, and lived suddenly smashed into shambles around my bare feet, sharp edges drawing blood everywhere. And third, I had to begin to acknowledge and deal with my long buried self-loathing and "subjective phobia". From early youth I had absorbed our culture's general fear of any sort of gender confusion, giving my utterly harmless sexual orientation the undeserved semblance of villainy. I had to admit to myself that I was as homophobic as the public I sought to please. When we cling obdurately to our soap operas, life has a way of grabbing us by the scruff and beating the daylights into us.
(...)
I learned to dislike gay people, myself included, from my family, and from my peers, who in their youth were frantic to prove their normalcy by quite viciously rejecting anything "abnormal" in themselves and, by extension, in other children. For these kids, the term abnormal included freckles, being overweight, and any obvious signs of intelligence. The problem with those early impressions of "goodness" and "badness" is that they root themselves so deeply in the soil of our psyches and are extremely difficult to dig out. Digging out the false sense of being "better than" is just as arduous and necessary as uprooting the sense of being "worse". But dig we must.
I don't think I have anything to add to these valuable insights; except maybe that I truly admire the openness and honesty of this self-exploration, and wish it would inspire some younger actors.;P And not just actors, of course. But obviously, being a public (and quite popular) persona makes the whole issue that much more relevant, doesn't it?
Anyway... one more quote from the same book - on a different topic this time, but just as poignant. Especially to me. Because I can relate to it so much it hit me like a sharp slap to the cheek:
(...) I had been half-consciously indulging in a lot of neurotic baggage. My unacknowledged rage at life in general (for not being at all what I wanted it to be in my early years) had from the beginning taken the form not of explosive anger, but of the passive-aggressive stance of I won't. I'd pretend to agree, but inwardly I would not cooperate. This almost total resistance to life gave me an illusory sense of control. It also kept me in a kind of living death.
Richard Chamberlain, Shattered Love
(...) some gay activist cowboy started investigating and publicly "outing" celebrity types. He claimed his vision was to offer up worthy role models to gay youth, but I figured his real motivation was envy, anger, and a misguided hunger for power. In any case, the ever-predictable tabloids flashed front-page headlines that I was gay, shoving me right into the middle of my darkest nightmares.
My fears were threefold. First, I was terrified that this news would alienate fans and topple my cherished career, robbing me of the work I loved and my only source of income. Second, the elaborate and pristine self-image I had created, sustained, and lived suddenly smashed into shambles around my bare feet, sharp edges drawing blood everywhere. And third, I had to begin to acknowledge and deal with my long buried self-loathing and "subjective phobia". From early youth I had absorbed our culture's general fear of any sort of gender confusion, giving my utterly harmless sexual orientation the undeserved semblance of villainy. I had to admit to myself that I was as homophobic as the public I sought to please. When we cling obdurately to our soap operas, life has a way of grabbing us by the scruff and beating the daylights into us.
(...)
I learned to dislike gay people, myself included, from my family, and from my peers, who in their youth were frantic to prove their normalcy by quite viciously rejecting anything "abnormal" in themselves and, by extension, in other children. For these kids, the term abnormal included freckles, being overweight, and any obvious signs of intelligence. The problem with those early impressions of "goodness" and "badness" is that they root themselves so deeply in the soil of our psyches and are extremely difficult to dig out. Digging out the false sense of being "better than" is just as arduous and necessary as uprooting the sense of being "worse". But dig we must.
I don't think I have anything to add to these valuable insights; except maybe that I truly admire the openness and honesty of this self-exploration, and wish it would inspire some younger actors.;P And not just actors, of course. But obviously, being a public (and quite popular) persona makes the whole issue that much more relevant, doesn't it?
Anyway... one more quote from the same book - on a different topic this time, but just as poignant. Especially to me. Because I can relate to it so much it hit me like a sharp slap to the cheek:
(...) I had been half-consciously indulging in a lot of neurotic baggage. My unacknowledged rage at life in general (for not being at all what I wanted it to be in my early years) had from the beginning taken the form not of explosive anger, but of the passive-aggressive stance of I won't. I'd pretend to agree, but inwardly I would not cooperate. This almost total resistance to life gave me an illusory sense of control. It also kept me in a kind of living death.
Richard Chamberlain, Shattered Love
