Coming Out
Concerning how Twinkles came out of the closet and why I put him back in it, and also a peep back at how I came out of the closet and stayed out.
When my secretary and good friend Karen announced she and fiancé Paul had finally set a wedding date I was delighted. They’d been courting for long enough. At that point in time I’d been seeing Twinkles for almost two months and we were still at a madly in lust stage of our relationship. As such we selfishly considered socialising with each other to be far more important than socialising with anyone else. As a result we’d more or less cast ourselves adrift from the world and were in danger of developing prison pallor as a result of spending too much time indoors. When not at work we were under his bedcovers or mine. Plenty of people had heard about Twinkles, but few had met him. When Karen sent me an invitation to the wedding she made a point of writing it out to: Tarn & Guest…aka the mysterious boyfriend you’ve been guarding so jealously and keeping in the closet…bring the boy out and soon because we want to see who’s been putting the sparkle in your eye.
I duly asked Twinkles if he’d do me the honour of accompanying me to the wedding. He said yes and then asked if there were any chance of him being allowed to be a bridesmaid, because he’d always wanted to be a bridesmaid and wear yards of rustling taffeta and a fragrant floral headdress. I regretfully told him that Karen had all the bridesmaids she needed, which disappointed him a bit, well okay, a lot. Being bridesmaid at a straight wedding would have been a large and very fancy feather in the cap of his feminine doppelganger, Miss Stardust Twinkles.
People often ask me how I could have fallen for a man who likes to wear women’s clothes, and doesn’t it mean I’m just a closet heterosexual or something? The truth is I didn’t fall for a man in a frock. I actually fell for a good-looking boy in a suit. I made the acquaintance of Mr Jonathan Lane before I ever knew of the existence of his alter ego, Miss Stardust. He came out to me about being a transvestite early in our relationship. It’s not something you can really keep hidden for long. He said that as soon as he suspected our relationship was going to be something more than a few grunt and groan bed sessions, he felt he had to put me in the picture about this other aspect of himself, even if it meant being rejected, which in his experience it usually did. His philosophy being it was better to be hurt sooner rather than later.
To be perfectly honest, Jonathan wasn’t the type of man I usually went for in the first place, either in appearance or personality. I usually gravitated towards quietly athletic, masculine men. The type who liked to keep fit, but who weren’t obsessed, men who were well toned, but not too muscle bound, blondes usually. I had a thing about blondes back then. Jonathan was, and still is, lightly built with short brown hair and a boyish, fresh-faced complexion. He also has a slightly effeminate tone to his voice, which combined with an overt style of presentation leads most people to immediately assume he’s gay, and of course he is, but that said it’s not always a guarantee. I have a cousin who speaks exactly the same way and in addition walks, or rather prances, like a figged horse, but he’s not gay. In fact he’s begat more kids than a Biblical Patriarch.
There was a fair amount of astonishment in the family when I turned out to be gay instead of him, though as my aunt Helen disparagingly said, what could you expect with a name like Tarn? She blamed my parents. Apparently if they’d named me Dave or Pete or something more obviously masculine then my chances of being gay would have been greatly reduced. The fact that her own daughter, my cousin Debbie, drives a Heavy Goods Vehicle and is more butch than Bruce Willis, is something she refuses to acknowledge. The gay gene is strong in my family.
Debbie herself has never come out of the closet as a lesbian. As she said to me once, there was no closet big enough to conceal her in the first place, so she’d never tried hiding in one. People could draw their own conclusions and take her or leave her just as she was. I like Debs, but to be honest, I doubt anyone could take her, not even Bruce Willis, not without the aid of a small army and several heavy machine guns. She’s a tough lady. Twinkles is terrified of her. He reckons she has so much testosterone raging through her veins she could probably make a fortune as a testosterone donor. He says she could wipe out male infertility just be donating the amount she has in her little finger, not that he’d ever dare say it to her face, not without Bruce Willis and a small army standing protectively in front of him.
copyright Tarn Swan 2011