Openly Closeted: Tales of a Coming Out Doula
For too many years, people decided to hide their identities, denying themselves love and companionship in the process. Why was I impelled to help them through the process to share their stories?
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“Set up lunch with Koch!” my boss bellowed at me.
It was 2007, and the former New York City mayor had been writing a column—800 or so words that could veer from his musings on his favorite new movies to Rudy “Nasty Man” Giuliani to Israel and geopolitics in the Middle East—for New York Press, the alt-weekly where I was newly appointed as the editor. I’d inherited Ed “How’m I doing?” Koch’s ramblings from my predecessor and was instructed to only give it a “light edit.” Koch filed his copy on time, and I didn’t have to process any payments, so I complied.
He’d recently written a piece on the city’s annual NYC Pride March, plumping up his own bona fides in the process. “We now live in a city where a majority of citizens and most of its elected officials are supporters of gay rights. In fact, the Speaker of the City Council, Christine Quinn, is an open lesbian,” he wrote. “Yes, we have come a long way since I signed an executive order in January of 1978 in my first 30 days as mayor prohibiting government discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in employment and housing.”
He went on to express his support for same-sex marriage, something that in 2007 still seemed like an impossibility. Marriage equality was something progressive politicians could express tentative support for since it felt hypothetical. It burnished their reputation with left-leaning voters without ever amounting to much.
Although I was his editor, setting up a lunch date with the octogenarian was not something I’d considered plausible, but I called Koch’s secretary at the law office where he ostensibly worked to find out. She called back shortly with confirmation: “The mayor would like to have lunch at the Four Seasons.” I knew the reputation of the legendary spot, designed by gay architect Philip Johnson inside Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building in Midtown Manhattan, since it was one of my partner’s favorite modernist buildings. Now it was my chance to gather where the city’s power brokers had held court since the 1960s.
“You’ll need to wear a jacket and tie,” my gay boss barked at me when he visited my desk on a middling floor of a shabby high rise at the corner of West 28th and 7th Avenue, reminding me that he’d be joining us as well.
“I know,” I replied, trying to suppress a sigh of resignation at his condescension.
David was an arriviste with no qualms about sharing his background as a boy-made-good from Queens. His fortune was derived from cable networks before branching out into print and digital media, acquiring a bunch of gay publications and New York Press, the only “straight” one of the bunch. His scheme behind this lunch was straightforward: See if we could cajole Koch to come out publicly, a big scoop that would boost his mini-media empire’s reputation. And I was the bait.
Koch’s secretary assured me she knew which table he’d prefer, so she’d make the reservation for our trio. David reminded me three more times that I’d need to wear a jacket and tie. No other advice seemed necessary to execute this scheme. His pointed admonitions felt like a backhanded critique since I was his chronically underpaid, casually dressed 30-year-old editor. Did he not see who he was sending into the lion’s den? I still freelanced and sold books and DVDs to help support myself and my grad school boyfriend. But I wasn’t completely clueless when it came to looking spiffy at a fancy spot, and I selected a necktie with a whimsical design of striated colors that, to my eye, looked sophisticated as well as subversive.
I showed up five minutes early for the reservation, a little sweaty after I surfaced from the subway sauna, so I snuck into the restroom to put myself in order. When I told the host I was meeting Mr. Koch, he showed me up the stairs to the Grill Room, a grand space with its shimmery metal-beaded curtains, bronze railings and sculptures and a massive artwork painted on fabric by Picasso for the Ballet Russe. Koch was seated at a three-sided banquette in clear view of the stairs—no way he was being shunted off to “Siberia” in a place known for its power lunches.
“You look nice!” David said, looking me up and down. “Ready for a big fancy meal?”
“Yeah, it should be fun,” I said. “Hello, Mr. Mayor.” I smiled and shook his hand.
“Why hello, young man!” Koch said, cheerfully.
Koch resembled an ancient, wizened gnome, with sprouts of hair amid all his wrinkles and spots. He wore a dark pinstriped suit too big for his withered frame. He grinned and winked as our knees rubbed below the table. I had difficulty reconciling him with the person so many in the gay community loathed for never having come out publicly, and for doing so little during the AIDS epidemic. As a student of Larry Kramer’s work, I knew that Koch and he lived in the same storied apartment building by Washington Square Park, 2 Fifth Avenue. I’d heard Larry’s apocryphal tale about the time Koch went to pet Kramer’s dog while collecting the mail. Kramer pulled the pooch away, emphatically stating: “That’s the man who killed all of daddy’s friends.” Koch, here and now, didn’t appear evil. He just seemed like a geezer, one with secrets, certainly, but harmless.
The waiter presented menus and my brash boss guffawed: “Look at that! I bet this meal will cost over 300 bucks. I bet you never ate a 300-dollar lunch before, right?”
My face flushed. David seemed like a borscht belt carnival barker, unable to restrain himself. I’d grown up in a trailer park, my parents working multiple jobs to take care of their family of six, while Dad made rank as an enlisted member of the Air Force. But I had learned that I could pass as a WASP if I just shared stories about my travels, spoke softly and smiled politely.
David, on the other hand, like a gay gorilla who’d just been let out of his cage to mate, set out to wreck our diplomatic meal. He had no idea that I’d previously been a food writer, had dined at many expensive spots – and had actually paid a princely sum for a small birthday lunch with friends while I lived in Barcelona. But if I’d said any of that, I’d seem equally boorish.
So I just smiled and replied: “Yes, it looks wonderful. Anything you recommend, Mr. Koch?”
“Oh call me, Ed,” and I got another wink and a smile and a squeeze of my knee.
Koch then pointed out all the notables in the room surrounding us: Sumner Redstone, Les Moonves, Liz Smith. Clearly the food wasn’t the focus. But the small talk ended abruptly when the blown-out blonde ascended the steps and walked our way.
Barbara Walters, dressed in a red power suit, looked at me and David, immediately sizing us up as of no importance. “Mr. Mayor,” she said, offering her hand to Koch. He kissed it. And she walked off to the table to join Liz.
“She’s wonderful,” Koch said, obviously thrilled that he could command an audience with the longtime doyenne of television news. I was awestruck by her helmet of hair, and I gawked as she strode to her spot beside Liz, who was bisexual and had her own complicated history with the closet.
Then David commenced wooing Koch into coming out. I hadn’t grown up immersed in New York City politics, but I’d read up on his tenure and knew about the “Vote for Cuomo, Not the Homo” signs reportedly orchestrated by Andrew Cuomo in support of his father’s 1977 mayoral campaign. I understood why a man who’d deftly navigated the 20th Century would be so fearful of exposing himself now. Even in the 1990s, when I came out as a teenager, it was clearly conveyed to me that by being gay, I had already failed. I’d be lonely; not be welcomed in most careers. I’d die alone. So that meant I’d need to work twice as hard to make sure in fact I did not fail. I was out but still had empathy for Koch’s reticence. He was a forever bachelor, clearly a lonely man, who cherished his coterie of trusted friends. And getting to kiss the ring of famous folk like Barbara.
“So what is it you are asking me?” Koch seemed to be growing annoyed at David’s probing.
“We want you to talk about your sexuality in one of our publications,” he said. “Jerry here could do the interview!”
Would this be some career-defining moment for me? David had already floated the idea of me taking over as the editor in chief of Genre, the luxury gay magazine he also owned and which had been important to me in high school but was floundering from mismanagement and would soon go kaput like so many of his titles. Now I needed this curmudgeon’s coming out story. I beamed at Koch, letting him know that I was a friendly reporter who didn’t mean him any malice.
“I’ll never do that while I’m alive,” he replied. “That’s the best answer you’re going to get.”
So not a denial, and not an admission. I was crestfallen but just moments before I had nothing riding on this longshot bet. Koch was going to his grave a closeted man. And he did.
Thus began my career as a “coming out doula”—a term I use intentionally
since I provided guidance and support to those who wanted to deliver
their new identity to the world.
I’d seen others pretzel themselves into this public-private situation. A couple of years previously, I’d befriended a man in music who was at the height of his creative powers. When a local newspaper asked him if he was gay, he dodged and responded: “Well, I guess I know what I am: openly closeted!” The ironic line became his gay oneliner deployed at parties.
When I was a cub reporter at the city’s alt-weekly, the musician asked me, anguished, if he was doing the right thing by obfuscating. I came to comprehend that his frustration was all the more palpable because he’d been out among his own social circles since he was 15, and had never tried to hide his amorous attentions for other men. Yet he knew he didn’t want to be “the gay one,” which is what would happen if he accepted the invitation to come out in the media. He’d forever have that adjectival modifier attached to his work, like an asterisk appended to a record-setting feat.
The ability to remain “openly closeted” is one reason why many Black activists chafed at the comparisons that the Gay Rights movement was equivalent to the Civil Rights movement. The majority of people of color could not pass and hide their identities, while some gay and bisexual men and women could make that decision to lubricate their lives to get jobs, homes and achieve other milestones. Then they could eventually make the decision to come out when it was convenient for them after resting in a secure perch. Perhaps that’s one reason mogul Barry Diller finally came out publicly in his memoir at the age of 83. Everyone already knew, but he could control the narrative before his death.
A few years after the lunch with Koch, in the summer of 2011, I started my next big job as an editor at Out magazine, the day after same-sex marriage became legalized in New York state. While I had often been the only out gay person at previous publications where I’d worked, now I was just one of many and I had to learn what it meant to have the responsibility to promote and platform queer voices to a global audience.
It thrilled me to work on the annual Out100 package—which celebrated people who had come out and their accomplishments—that fall. We plotted and planned the arduous task of photographing 100 LGBTQ+ with a single photographer on a shoestring budget, begging for favors and made hundreds of outlandish requests.
For one portrait, I had to make sure a freshly slaughtered lamb was transported from a halal market in Queens to the studio in Brooklyn where fashion designer Nicola Formichetti was to hold the halves to recreate an iconic 1952 image of the gay painter Francis Bacon shot by photographer John Deakin (a reference used for Bacon’s own “Figure WIth Meat” painting). That day, I met personal heroes such as Larry Kramer and George C. Wolfe, conducted interviews with politicians, military members, activists, and athletes. The series of shoots culminated in a truly bizarre moment when we asked model Andreja Peijic to go nude to recreate an iconic Avedon portrait of Nastassja Kinski with a boa constrictor. When the snake arrived in a cooler with its handler, she informed us it was excited because it could smell the blood from the lamb and hoped it wouldn’t be a problem as she wrapped it over Andreja’s naked body.
I’d even contacted soccer star Abby Wambach, who I’d been tipped off might be ready to consider coming out publicly in 2011 and be featured in that year’s Out100. Her manager returned my email with a note that explained that while Abby was enjoying time with her then-partner in Hawaii and was not yet ready to reveal her sexual identity with the world in the media, her teammate Megan Rapinoe was hoping to do just that. It didn’t work out for the Out100 package, but I did set up my first big coming out scoop for the magazine.
This was my first time navigating these choppy waters, and I was not familiar with Megan, who would go on to be a global superstar after her time in the Olympics spotlight. We negotiated a time and place, and in the spring of 2012, I spent a day with her in Princeton, NJ, where she was visiting for a soccer clinic. After the required photo shoot, she and I went to a cafe in the swanky college town and got down to the business of understanding what it meant to be a proud lesbian at the highest level of women’s soccer.
As I explained in my story at the time, it wasn’t that Rapinoe had been hiding anything; it's just that no one ever asked her directly.
“I think [reporters] were trying to be respectful and that it's my job to say, 'I'm gay.' Which I am. For the record: I am gay," she says. She’d been dating her girlfriend, an Australian soccer player, for three years, and brought her home to visit her family in Northern California last Christmas.
This began my career as a “coming out doula.” I use the term intentionally since I provided guidance and support to those who wanted to deliver their new identity to the world via the media. Over the next five years, hundreds of people trusted me with their stories and I grew comfortable with asking those deeply personal questions about their childhood traumas and romantic decisions.
Before I sat down with actor Bobby Steggert, I was told by his publicist at the time not to poke into his personal life. Then he willingly brought up being gay on his own—obviously eager to share what to him wasn’t “news” but part of his everyday existence. Oddly enough, one of my colleagues excised that detail from a draft I wrote—saying it wasn’t that interesting—and I had to put it back in, reminding him that it was part of our role at the publication to help people in the public eye share their stories as they saw fit. When the story went live, it spurred many other sites to run headlines trumpeting the news.
Later, Bobby shared his surprise that people seemed to care, since he’d come out in college and was openly affectionate with his boyfriend. Yet it also caused him to face up to the “realization… that being gay is the core to my success in the first place” and that by “holding on to the residual shame of being gay, by not living with total openness and self acceptance, I have felt even more effective in my work.” As he eloquently explained, he believed his “quiet struggle was worth it, a kind of subversive civic duty of sorts” since the “turmoil was the gas which powered my artistic motor.”
Many of us retain these deeply held myths—that to achieve greatness, an ambitious person, artist or leader must be tortured or have some deep well of sadness that motivates them. That if they resolve these inner conflicts it will sap them of the strength that propels them. If a person were happy, wouldn’t they just be content with a life of domestic bliss, not feel the urge to strive for greatness? Unfortunately, despite so much progress, these fallacies persist, and even I continue to unravel these romantic notions within myself that one must suffer to be creative.
It’s a question that I hoped to ask others who had struggled with living dual lives in the closet. I reached out to art world legends like Jasper Johns and Ellsworth Kelly, hoping they’d share their stories. Kelly’s partner and I corresponded for years, and just as the minimalist master said he was ready to speak, he died in 2015 at 92 before I had the opportunity. I’ve been told that Johns, who recently turned 90, will never talk openly about his past loves and lovers and has recanted his relationship with Robert Rauschenberg.
Luckily, artist and poet John Giorno detailed so much in his memoir before his death about these artists and many others, but I’m still curious about the conflicts and toll it took on their lives. And to further deflate the idea that you have to be tortured to achieve artistic heights: John Cage and Merce Cunningham lived their lives without hedging about their relationship; and Ivo van Hove & Jan Versweyveld, the Belgian duo behind dozens of acclaimed stage productions, have blended their creative and romantic lives together for decades.
Perhaps the most surprising experience was when I talked to Robert De Niro about the responsibility he felt about his dead gay dad’s story, Robert De Niro, Sr. He’d made a documentary about his father’s artwork and life, and in a way it was as if he were coming out for his dad after his death by revealing his struggles and their difficult relationship. “I felt I had to. I felt obligated,” he told me. When I asked why he needed to recuperate his father’s legacy, and whether it was difficult sharing a name with him, he broke down with sobs, a moment I’ll never forget. To see a 70-year-old macho movie legend cry because he and his dad hadn’t properly reconciled taught me that the stories we tell, the identity we reveal, the unresolved traumas can create ripples for generations.
“We come out more than once. There’s no such thing as coming out. It’s never over. We come out every day in different ways.” —Tom Duane
When Koch died in 2013, people finally felt released from their omertà. Many who had pilloried him for his years of denial and silence discussed the harm he had done. The gay writer and editor Maer Roshan wrote an essay for New York magazine that summed up his years of weekly dinners at his apartment and how he’d tried to coax him to come out. He’d finally tried to get Koch to run a faux “personal ad” on the cover of New York’s “Singles” issue. He wouldn’t say who or what he was into, but he finally got Koch to agree to something benign and quirky: “Have belatedly concluded that everyone, straight or gay, needs a partner in life. How’m I doing?”
By that time, I’d met so many more icons and legends and people who stretched my understanding of what it meant to be L, G, B, T, Q and other. One of the first lessons I learned was from a prominent New York state politician, Tom Duane, one of the first politicians to come out as HIV positive. He’d survived the Koch years, living with the reality of a plague that might kill him, that decimated so many people he knew and loved, nearly silencing a generation.
“We come out more than once,” he said. “There’s no such thing as coming out. It’s never over. We come out every day in different ways.”
I understood what he meant. Those times I kept silent when a woman tried to flirt and introduce me to her single daughter; when I didn’t mention to a doctor that I was partnered to a man; or I decided not to kiss my partner good-bye at the airport since PDA made me feel targeted. So many micro decisions that changed us in so many unnoticeable ways. Yet it was our ability to resist shame and share with others that allowed us to forge connections and feel less alone. It can remain difficult. Just the other day, I joked with my dad that, since we share the same name, and because he’s not on any social media platforms, his old friends and colleagues who search for him online inevitably find me.
“They probably wonder, ‘When did he become gay?’ and are confused when they see me sharing so much personal info,” I said, and we both laughed.
Afterward, I realized it was the first time I had said I was gay to my dad since I’d come out to him when I was 15. It was something that was divulged and then never openly spoken about again, although both my parents have met boyfriends and are quick to tell my husband that they love and cherish him. Yet, it still felt awkward to say it to my own father who has lived with this knowledge for over 30 years.
If all this seems like a middle-aged man harping on a problem that’s now obsolete, I’m sorry to say it’s not true. Yes, many of the openly closeted people were from the previous century—and most of those who lived in the “glass closet” have since come out to great applause—but the struggle persists to this day. For every Jonathan Bailey or Lil Nas X flaunting their queer flamboyance on a red carpet, there are multitudes who continue to struggle with what to divulge in case it hurts their chances at fame and fortune. I hope they don’t have to lie to achieve their desires, but many people still believe finding love takes a back seat to everything else.
Koch is buried in Trinity Cemetery in Upper Manhattan, over a dozen blocks from where I live. I’ve visited his grave, because it saddens me to think that Mister Mayor remained trapped, rarely expressing himself—and then only to a select few in secret.
Why did I feel it was important that he should publicly proclaim something? Why did I think I should be the one to help him do it? I was young and earnest, ambitious and egotistical. Maybe I wanted it more for what it meant to me, rather than what it would do for him. Maybe I should let him rest in peace, take him at his word and believe he had a range of satisfying intimacies that I couldn’t fathom from the outside. As he stated with his enigmatic declaration: “That’s the best you’re gonna get.”
Roy Cohn-the most evil gay (besides Peter T) and sadly Barbara Walters was friends with Roy as well! (and even was his beard at some points)
What a title and essay! You took the word “doula,” to a whole new level. I used to know someone who worked closely with Koch during his regime in NYC. He was very young then. The stories he told me! They’re all as sick as their secrets (and there are many), openly closeted, some married, with children, and broke constant bread with Roy Cohn. All part of Manhattan’s elite. That’s when I met people who truly have no souls, like that scene in “The Devil’s Advocate,” where Charlize Theron’s character sees their real faces. And they chased a lot boys by the way…like those parties that Roy Cohn used to have in P Town. They did nothing while people were dying of AIDS, couldn’t get meds, were fired from work, getting evicted…I really do hope that hell is a place on earth, where all debts are settled.