The secrecy some Gay couples maintain about their relationship to each other can reach great extremes. I have known women lovers together for fifteen years who pretend to live separately, going one night to the house of one and the next night to the house of the other, each time carrying the gear, suitcases, changes of clothing they will need for the next day, for the sake of fooling a few family members and straight friends. Other Lesbian couples go to even greater lengths to ensure secrecy. One couple has lived together for nine years and also works together in the same office, where they are so fearful of being discovered as lovers and lifetime mates that they pretend not to know each other at all.
When I was working in a laboratory as a medical technician, I had a clear lesson in the secrecy of the closet. Six of us were standing around getting ready to take off our white coats and go home for a day, when one woman told an ugly anti-Gay joke. She was a young aide in training to do minor tests, nowhere near as skilled as the rest of us, and she had recently been married; no one expected her to stay long at her job. The point of her joke was See-how-stupid-and-wrong-faggots-are. It made me sick inside to hear it, but following the rule of appearing heterosexual or else, from years of habit and the desire to stay employed and reasonably accepted among my co-workers, I obediently pretended to laugh.
As I did so my eyes met the sparkling blue eyes of our boss, a man who had worked his way up to become the chief laboratory technician of the hospital. In his fifties, he had never married and was continually teased as "most eligible bachelor." His eyes flashed into mine now as, mouths guffawing, we acknowledged with a special look that straight people simply had to be indulged, that that was a part of The Life. My eyes flicked from him to his lover Robert, a technician like myself and a friend of mine. Large, broad-shouldered, and with his short hair plastered to his skull, Robert looked as if the word straight was invented just to describe him. He and I were teased in the laboratory for going out together, which we occasionally did as a front. But I knew Robert and our boss had been lovers for several years and owned a business together outside the laboratory, operating it on weekends; I had been there to have dinner with them.
From Robert's distorted, pretending-to-laugh face, my gaze passed to another technician, Rita. She was beautiful, graceful, smart and gutsy. She had recently led all of us in a strike for better wages. The highly skilled Rita was head of the bacteriology department and a specialist in her work. I had a terrific crush on her at the time, and now to my disgust here she was pretending to howl at the rude joke, and so was her lover Alberta who stood next to her with her coat on, ready to go home. The two Lesbians worked together in the laboratory, owned a house and a couple of horses, having lived together for at least ten years. I closed my mouth and stopped laughing. I was too astonished at what my eyes had registered: Of six people standing in the laboratory laughing at a vicious anti-Gay joke, five were Gay— everyone except the woman who had told the joke. The walls of the closet are guarded by the dogs of terror, and inside of the closet is a house of mirrors."]
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