Conservative closet cases
Gay men in the 50s were less closeted than moderately conservative couples in blue metros
In April of last year I was in the Austin area to watch the solar eclipse, relaxing in the shady back yard of the house we had rented for the occasion. We were hosting some local boomer relatives of one of the attendees to our eclipse party, and I was shooting the shit with an older gentleman, beers in hand, discussing how quickly one’s retinas might be damaged by foolishly looking at the sun unshielded. Surely it was fine to just take a peek real quick-like, I joked. His manner abruptly shifted. “You’d burn your eyes out like Great Leader did,” he snarled. It took me a moment to realize that he wasn’t talking about Kim Jung Un, but rather Trump, who had been photographed squinting up at an eclipse without eye protection during his first term in 2017.
This was an obscure non-story from seven years earlier, one of a countless sequence of similar “Experts Agree Orange Man Bad, Wrong” stories published during Trump’s first term. I only knew about it from “dudes rock” memes posted by right-wing jokers on Twitter. He must have been reminded about it by his own media bubble.
“You know, I really wish somebody would just blow his head off already,” he continued, not missing a beat. I made a non-committal noise in response, took a slug off my longneck, and changed the subject back to the eclipse.
This incident was weird, but not for the surface reason. The weird thing wasn’t this retiree I had met ten minutes earlier casually wishing death on a political figure supported by roughly half the country. No, the truly bizarre thing was how pedestrian this kind of occurrence had become in my own life, how inured to it I had become. It should be unusual for someone to make inflammatory political remarks to a fellow countryman after having known him only ten minutes. But it’s not. It happens thousands of times every day in professional middle-class circles like the ones I travel in.
In these circles, being liberal is the default, and therefore all liberals are “out”: everyone knows that a lib is a lib, and they talk about their politics freely, indeed nearly non-stop in many cases. By contrast, even moderate conservatives in such circles are usually closeted. They keep their heads down and their mouths shut. If the liberals know that conservatives walk silently amongst them, they sure don’t see it as any reason to watch their mouths. On the contrary, they seem to sincerely believe that everyone around them believes more or less the same things they do. They therefore say the most nakedly partisan, divisive things in mixed company, serenely confident they are surrounded by fellow travelers, blissfully ignorant of who in their lives might disagree with them.
On the morning after the 2024 election, Mrs. Kitten and I awoke relieved that Harris had lost. We didn’t love Trump, but we voted for him, and were glad he won, especially considering the alternative1. But by mid morning, my wife had received text messages from a handful of girlfriends offering condolences, offering a shoulder to cry on if she needed to vent, reminding her that resistance was now more important than ever for women across the country. They had no idea she wasn’t one of them, and why would they? She politely avoids the topic with people who aren’t safe, they make assumptions. Gay men in 1950’s America were less closeted than moderately conservative women in contemporary blue metros.
My wife and I are closeted conservatives in a big blue metro. We work professional jobs and dress nicely. We are educated, intelligent, open-minded about culture. We keep our mouths shut about politics in mixed company. We pass.
But privately, and in hushed conversations with peers we’ve sussed out are closeted as well, we disagree with much of the progressive dogma our social circle blasts on social media. We want radically reduced immigration and the deportation of illegal aliens. We don’t want to defund the police, in fact we want more criminals in prison for longer. We don’t want elementary teachers explaining that our kids might have been born into the wrong body.
But we are coming up on a full decade in which to voice one of these opinions in the wrong company is to risk ostracization or worse. In 2015, I worried I could lose my job for making the wrong joke. Today I worry about which parents would no longer let their kids play at our house. So we stay quiet, we nod along when it’s expected of us, we restrict our forbidden conversations to safe associates, we keep our friends.
Online, when I discuss the topic of being closeted, self-righteous people show up to demand that I come out. Shouldn’t I disown all the acquaintances I can’t be out with? Shouldn’t I move my family to a conservative area where we can live our values more authentically? Aren’t I being a coward?
