“I’m sorry,” he wrote, “but my life is a mess right now.” And later: “Why am I even talking to you?” Once he agreed to meet, he warned me, “You’re going to be disappointed. For weeks he has resisted the idea of talking in person. He’s wearing dark tapered slacks, a well-ironed pale-blue shirt, cuff links, and a pink tie that is flashy but by no means flamboyant, knotted half-English style. He is, as he refers to himself online, “average looking,” medium height, clean shaven, a little stocky but in decent shape. We are meeting at a pub in the West Village, desolate at this midday hour, a location chosen because it is far removed, geographically and psychically, from where William lives and works. I found what I liked on the Internet, but I was already married.” “I think I like a particular kind of guy and when I went out looking I never found him, so I gravitated toward women. “I used to think I was bi, but now I really believe that I am gay and just was not in the right situation,” William wrote to me in an early message. And yet the thing about desire-frustratingly, thrillingly-is that few things are so resistant to reason and categorization. Typically, the “closet” brings to mind small towns, intensely religious communities, and, at the most cosmopolitan level, the lives of Jim McGreevey and Mark Foley: gay men operating in a world so inherently duplicitous that their choosing to lead a shadow life follows, sadly, a certain logic. The life of someone like William-who responded to a posting I placed on Craigslist identifying myself as a writer trying to understand the psyche of a still-closeted man-seems at the very least anachronistic. It is hard to fathom, the notion of a gay man living a closeted life in New York City in 2007. And I know-here his life gets complicated-that when he is at work, and things are slow, he goes to Craigslist and, with a familiar mixture of guilt and resignation and excitement, clicks on the “men meeting men” section of the personals. I know that he has been married a decade and that he is the father of a small child. I know that he is a registered Democrat who grew up in a nearby suburb. This is what I know about him: I know that he is in his early forties and that he lives and works in Manhattan, earning around $200,000 annually in a job he wishes he was more passionate about. Over the past few weeks, William and I have been e-mailing regularly. I will call him William Dockett, for clarity’s sake. Because when you live two separate lives, as he does, and when you have been maintaining these two separate lives for twenty years, as he has, coming across as shifty and paranoid is something of an inevitability. Revealing it now would open him up to the potential of recognition, and, frankly, just imagining a scenario like that makes him wonder why he agreed to meet in the first place. He could tell me a fake name, he says, though not the one he typically uses when meeting a man in the middle of the day, since he has been using the same fake name for so long that it is almost real. When using a search engine such as Google, Bing or Yahoo check the safe search settings where you can exclude adult content sites from your search results Īsk your internet service provider if they offer additional filters īe responsible, know what your children are doing online.The man sitting across from me would like to tell me his name, but doing so is against his rules. Use family filters of your operating systems and/or browsers Other steps you can take to protect your children are: More information about the RTA Label and compatible services can be found here. Parental tools that are compatible with the RTA label will block access to this site. We use the "Restricted To Adults" (RTA) website label to better enable parental filtering. Protect your children from adult content and block access to this site by using parental controls.
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