[freya]

Here's my "take" on this....in the rooms or anywhere else: I am as open and honest about myself and my life as it is appropriate to the situation for anyone else to be.

Thus, if I'm in a situation in which it would be perfectly appropriate and acceptable for any straight person to talk about his/her life, relationships, feelings, partner, with X amount of detail and using the correct pronouns, then I do the same.

If you are talking about things that have nothing to do with your sexuality or your relationships (past, present or future), there is no need to bring that up just because you're gay.....but the opposite is also true: If you are involved in a conversation in which you cannot participate on the same level and in the same way as everyone else without saying something that indicates that you're gay, then you don't avoid saying it, nor do you "edit" it so as to keep your sexuality a secret. (...and please, please, please, never, ever refer to your partner as "they" or "them"! A partner is an individual and gets an individual pronoun of the correct gender. The only people who sanely and correctly refer to their partners as "they" are polygamists! Every time I see a closeted gay person do the "they" thing, I want to burst out laughing. Yeah, like it's soooooo much more acceptable to be a polygamist than a lesbian or gayman! Give me a friggin' break!)

I work a 12 Step program. I believe absolutely that how well my program works depends on my working it in the spirit described in Chapter 5 of Alcoholics Anonymous....and that, obviously, means rigorous honesty. I've said this before many, many times: I've been absolutely "out" in my program since the first time I spoke at a meeting....I think, for me, the kinds of issues that we all need to deal with in order to heal and to have strong, successful recoveries are such that, being "in hiding" about such a core and important aspect of my life would definitely be a huge roadblock to my progress and to my getting the kind of support I need on the level I need to get it in order to make that progress.

I am totally unwilling to compromise myself or my program in that way.

Another thing is, connections with program people need to be real because I need to be able to trust and rely on those people when I am in a really bad way and I want them to be able to trust and rely on me when they really need to, too. Keeping secrets isolates me and limits my ability to connect with others. It is also a sign of lack of trust on my part, and frankly, I insult not only individuals, but also their programs, when I refuse to trust them to be loving and tolerant and understanding enough to be able "handle" the fact that I'm gay. I mean, I don't know about you, but personally, I would be be pretty friggin' insulted to find out that someone had kept secrets from me because he or she feared I might act like an ignorant bigot. I just really don't want or need that kind of cr*p standing between me and other program people.

And finally we come to the whole self-centered fear thing. It is a fundamental principle of recovery that I must refuse to allow self-centered fear to run my life. I have yet to hear a "rationale" for closet-behavior that doesn't rely strongly on self-centered fear.

So, I guess the bottom line, for me, is that I pretty much don't see any way that a deliberate choice to be "in the closet" in any program context is helpful or healthy or compatible with strong recovery.

freya

....and, BTW, my partner and I are a very out, very obvious butch-femme couple. We go to meetings all over the place and have gone to many in very rural, conservative areas and never had a problem. In fact, we've had many really wonderful experiences.