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Small towns, deep closets

By Jim Larkin

"Straight married man looking for discreet male relationship."
"73-year-old married man who isn't getting what he needs at home looking for man for discreet relationship."
I kid you not. The above two personal ads from Holland, Mich. residents are real. There are many married men here who classify themselves as straight even though they are trying to get some on the side with men. Go figure.
Now you know some of the difficulties we face over here as we continue on the long journey toward convincing city leaders to include sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes in anti-discrimination ordinances.
One of the biggest: Holland is deeply closeted, perhaps because there are no protections for LGBTQ folks here. Very few gay people have publicly supported the changes, with the charge being primarily led by church members who feel strongly that it's the right and moral thing to do and parents of LGBTQ children who are tired of their loved ones moving away or having to hide.
Some opposing the change make the ridiculous claim that gay people here don't experience discrimination so such protections aren't needed; apparently believing Holland is somehow the only city in the world where discrimination against gay people doesn't exist. It circles all around us but some magical, invisible barrier keeps it from entering city boundaries.
Yet the difficulty we have in fighting such preposterous notions is that very few if any gay people are coming forward and citing examples of how they've been discriminated against. Heck, very few are coming forward at all.
And, equally to the point, many of those who have the most to gain by such ordinance changes are bound by their own closeted lifestyles to stay silent. We don't even know, if the issue should come to a public vote, whether they would come to the polls and – if they did – whether they would support us. That's how deep and dark their closets run.
They are the bogeymen who defy their own sexuality and scare the bejesus out of us, threatening to create nightmares for the greatly outnumbered gay, lesbian, transgendered, and yes – bisexual and questioning residents – that are willing to take a stand.
I was told two years ago when I moved here that LGBTQ folk here were very closeted, but never had anything outside of anecdotal references to prove it. So I tried recently to produce some statistics. I went to several gay personal websites that ask their clients to reveal their sexuality and marital status. The sampling included 366 people who said they lived in Holland. The results are by no means scientific, but I think it gives you a pretty good idea of the makeup of the town.
A whopping 46 percent of the Holland residents seeking relationships with other men indicated they were bisexual and 13 percent said they were straight (yes, I know, it's pretty difficult to say you're straight when you want to have sex with other men; but that's what they said. One married man who claimed to be straight even said he didn't want "any games," as if he himself wasn't playing one.). Only 22 percent classified themselves as gay.
And only 41 percent of the men-seekers were single. They remainder were married (14 percent), divorced, attached, widowed, separated or preferred not to say (29 percent). I leave it to you to figure out why they probably prefer not to say.
If you think all towns aren't like that, think again. I compared Holland to a town on a Great Lake coast on the other side of the state, Port Huron, which has a similar population. In Port Huron, of those seeking relationships with other men (and the comparison with Holland in parenthesis) 32 percent classified themselves as bisexual (46), 27 percent gay (22) and 46 percent single (41).
So you're getting kind of a creepy picture aren't you? You're picturing a very confused populace who think that having sex with other men doesn't make them gay. You're picturing a lot of residents who don't want to admit they're gay. And you're seeing the absurdities that permeate a town when the majority clearly wants to keep those not sharing their sexual persuasion under their thumb, neither seen nor heard, and without the same rights as they enjoy.
I don't want you to get the wrong picture of my hometown. People here care greatly about one another and are charitable to a fault. There are many, many good people here who are fighting for LGBTQ people and the town has a strong PFLAG chapter, while the much larger Grand Rapids just to the north doesn't have one. And I expect the City Council vote on the issue to be a close one.
But I sense it wouldn't be close at all if there were more people who had the guts to come out, more who were more honest with who they are, and the majority could see who, exactly, composes the local LGBTQ population.
It's not just the thin boy with the swish, the guys who go grocery shopping together or the two females in their fifties who have been living together for a long time. It's also very likely the rugged husband of a female friend, the widowed senior citizen who you always thought was too heart-broken to marry again, and that married co-worker who joins in when the gay jokes start then goes home and tries to hook up with another man on the Internet.
Pitiful but true.

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Topics: Opinions
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