Then Comes Marriage Read Free Page B

understand what I was feeling, I nonetheless felt it: wave after wave of grief, rage, disappointment, and frustration. It is hard to explain to people who have never had to hide a key element of themselves how corrosive it is. It is not simply that you do not allow others—your family, your friends, your neighbors—to truly know you. It is also that you give up on knowing yourself. And you give up on that which makes you most human: your capacity to give and accept love. From that hurt and corroded place in my soul, I only knew that I had come back from the Soviet Union to find Kate and that she had rejected me. Or at least that is how it felt to me at the time—not that she had found love, but rather that I had lost it.
    And, in that vein, I retaliated. The Cold War might have been thawing internationally but, on a personal level, I chose the nuclear option. On some level I must have believed that Kate and I had a tacit agreement. We would be each other’s primary person but we would pretend otherwise, dating boys neither of us took seriously. Kate had unilaterally violated that agreement. She had chosen someone else—someone female who was not me.
    Rather than acknowledge that truth, I attacked. All my years of anger and frustration became focused on one target: Kate. My feelings were not wrong, hers were. Sobbing and screaming, I told her that what she was doing was wrong, hurtful, and incredibly damaging. What I did not do was explain why I was so upset. I could not name or face the sickening jealousy that surged through me, because there was no reason for me to be jealous. So instead of honesty, I went for moral disapproval.
    Kate, in turn, was enraged. Her response to my litany of criticisms was to conclude, not unfairly, that I was homophobic. We had been planning to room together again for our senior year, but she told me flatly that there was no way she could live with a person like me. Our friendship was over. Back on campus, we had to switch around our rooming arrangements—and that’s how the rumor spread throughout Cambridge that Robbie Kaplan was a neoconservative, reactionary homophobe. What else could explain the explosive reaction I had had to the news that my old friend Kate had a girlfriend?
    So my final semesters at Harvard were not the best period of my life. Kate and I did not reconcile until two decades later when I ran into her in New York and brought her home to meet my wife and son. I graduated in 1988 never having revealed my secret. I still did not know if I could live as a lesbian, and I felt less inclined than ever to try to find out. My life plan was still on track, however: just as I had envisioned, I enrolled in law school at Columbia University in New York City.
    I had a better time at Columbia, making great friends whom I remain close to even today. Yet I still could not admit that I was gay—not even to my gay friends. I was so tightly wound, so self-hating, that nothing happened until almost the end of my third year of law school—and even then only with the aid of copious amounts of alcohol. At long last, while drunk with a friend one night, I finally let myself kiss a girl. I knew immediately that it felt right. I was twenty-four years old and still petrified of coming out publicly, but after a decade of struggling with my feelings, my longing finally outweighed my fear. Once that happened, I knew that there was no going back.
    I RELATE ALL this now because, given the dramatic sea change in American attitudes toward LGBT people over the last few decades, it is easy to forget how difficult it was for gay people to come out in the 1980s and early 1990s. It is still very difficult for many people today, of course, especially those who live in more conservative parts of the country. But there is no doubt that times were different back then.
    In 1991, the year my mother banged her head against the wall, the AIDS epidemic was raging through the gay community.