The Shame & Sexuality Series…

Nicholas McInerny buried the truth about his sexuality for decades. He was 45 when he decided it was time to be honest about himself and tell his wife and children that he was gay…

 


Everyone was waiting. My two daughters, aged 16 and 12, were sat downstairs in the kitchen. I stood upstairs, in the bathroom, staring at the mirror over the sink. For one moment I thought, ‘I don’t have to do this. I don’t have to tell them. I can pretend none of this happened, and go back in the closet.’

 

In July 2008 I did the most difficult thing I have ever done as a parent, and as an adult. I told my children I was gay. This was the point of no return. Up to that point my marriage had been in flux, but this would make the crisis real and irreversible. And it was all down to me.

I was often asked, how could I have stayed in a nineteen year old marriage, when I started to question my sexuality?  The truth is my marriage was in many respects very successful – and that success was a distraction from examining the elephant in the room. I met my wife at university, six years before we got married in 1989 – two years later we had our first daughter, Siobhan, followed in 1994 by Rachel. Before the wedding I wrote a feverish letter in which I said I thought I was bisexual. She saw it as youthful experimentation. I now realise it was an awful premonition.

I had also spent my adolescence in a boarding school in the 1970s, where to admit to such feelings was the kiss of death (despite the ubiquitous teenage fumblings). Boarding school taught you how to conceal things, how to lie, how to show one face to the world whilst in agony underneath – a great life lesson for the closeted gay of the late 70s. Then my second brother (I am the eldest of four) had come out at the age of 21, and my mother reacted very intolerantly. The thought of causing another huge family rift filled me with dread. I slunk back to my easy heterosexual life – and concentrated on bringing up two wonderful children.

“Moving from a monogamous marriage into the gay world is both terrifying and liberating.”

Being a parent brings you brutally up against a continual sense of failure, as you try and do the best for your children. It is reinforced continually by a literature of childrearing that conceives of the idea of the ‘perfect parent’. It comes with the territory but when you combine that with an adolescence spent acquiring skills of deception that ultimately lead to huge self-denial and a family already torn apart by one gay brother, the shame associated with that takes on a self-perpetuating quality that feels monolithic. I felt caught in a web of shame, each part subtly feeding upon each other – whilst I hung suspended in the centre.

Because whatever way you cut it, coming out to your children is an admission of failure on one level as a parent, particularly when your children are young. My need to live authentically threatened their stability, and I felt terribly ashamed about that. They hadn’t asked for this – why was I inflicting this uncertainty on them? On the other hand I was compelled to be finally truthful about myself – even if it meant divorce and separation from them. I told myself, they knew something was wrong with their father – so distant, so irritable – and that one of the best things I could do now was to show them how I could navigate this transition whilst reassuring them of my love. Could this be one way to turn all these years of toxic shame into a glorious statement of wholeness?

“Boarding school taught you how to conceal things, how to lie, how to show one face to the world whilst in agony underneath.”

Moving from a monogamous marriage into the gay world is both terrifying and liberating. I was anxious for experience of every kind, and pursued it wilfully. Perhaps I was resentful at having spent forty five years to finally be the person I was meant to be, and inevitably behaved like a child in a sweet shop – an experience common to many married men who come out in midlife. Any residual shame was not only to be spat at – but buried, too. Move onto the next hot body as you discover the power of your sexuality, expressed in a way that’s true – and don’t let anyone judge you.

But key to this acceptance was the need for my children to accept my new life. And whilst they totally accepted me as gay, they felt I started to neglect them as their father. Shame is not only about past actions that have been hurtful, but also about a sense of lost potential in the future. I carry that inside me as a gay man, as a newly married husband to Jordan, the love of my life, and as a father. Only this time I know who I am, and I will not let them down.

Advertisement

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here