The New Yorker:

Growing up in the fifties, when homosexuality was considered shameful, I dreaded being thought queer.

By Edmund White
June 5, 2005

When a woman falls in love with me, I feel guilty. I am convinced that it’s pure obstinacy that keeps me from reciprocating her passion. As I explain to her that I’m gay, it sounds, even to me, like a silly excuse; I scarcely believe it myself. In the past, when homosexuality was still considered shameful, I was slow to confess my desires to anyone—which made my reluctance to return women’s affections seem all the more ill-natured: Who was I to reject an honest woman’s love? Was what I was holding out for so much better?

From my mother I learned just how violent and unquenchable a woman’s loneliness can be. She had been sheltered excessively by her husband and then, midway through her life, they divorced, and she was forced to earn her own living. It was as if after hobbling around with bound feet she were suddenly unbandaged and told to become a marathon runner. She made her way professionally, and she took pleasure in that success, but she spent her evenings suffering beside a silent phone, drinking highballs and listening to the same sad record. Watching her, I came to think of men as monsters with absolute power, the darlings of the Western world, and of women as their unfortunate victims.

Unhappy women! How many of them I’ve known. Sniffling or drinking with big reproachful eyes, silent or complaining, violent or depressed—a whole tribe of unhappy women have always surrounded me. An anorexic fashion model I met while I was still in college would sob in the hallway outside my apartment door all night long. An Italian woman my age fell in love with me in 1970, the year I lived in Rome, and she suffered so much that she tried to run me down with her car. For most of my life I’ve been a shoulder to cry on, and all of that time I’ve wished I could do more to ease the pain of the women in my life. If I were straight, I could have married one of them. I would have known how to comfort her. I would have worked hard to provide her with the security and even the luxury she required. I would never have run off with another woman. I would have been as sensitive to her needs as a sister, as protective as a father. And I would always have told her where I was going and exactly when I’d be coming home. This was what distinguished me from the straight men I knew, who, it seemed, were united in their ability to treat women badly and then laugh it off.

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