Honestly!

A couple of Saturdays back, I had the rare pleasure of having Little Agony Uncle all to myself for a whole afternoon. LAU had scored a pair of free tickets for ‘La Dolce Vita’, an exhibition devoted to all things Italian at Kensington Olympia, and correctly thought that I would be interested in joining him for a couple of hours of free wine and hot boys in SW5. After a few laps of the hall in hunt of Pinot and penis, all we’d come across were a few perma-tanned gentlemen-of-a-certain-age flogging Tuscan villas and hordes of bridge-and-tunnellers queuing – queuing! – for the thimble-sized free samples of gut-rot Chianti, a depth to which even I was not prepared to sink. So, with the great honesty that true friendship enables, I told LAU that I’d had basta of this and we buggered off to The Coleherne to put the world to rights over a few lagers and chuckle about ‘La Dodgy Vita’ as we soon re-christened it.

The conversation took in many themes but the one that really got my cogs whirring was that old problem page staple of coming out to one’s parents. Over their years in the job, both Big and Little Agony Uncles have advised dozens, perhaps even hundreds of gay, bi and uncertain boys on this particular and, to my mind, by far scariest aspect of the coming out process. Go into any gay bar, club or gym, anywhere in London – hell, anywhere in the UK – and I will guarantee that there is at least one person in there whose coming out to mom and or pop was facilitated either directly or indirectly by the culture of possibility inspired by these two caring and wise men. But here’s a thing – neither one of them is actually out to their respective extant parent, nor in one case to his siblings.

Both has his reasons - broadly, religion and old age – for believing that the degree of distress an admission to being gay would cause the parent is disproportionate to that which the concealment causes him personally, and therefore keeps schtum. Day-in, day-out this causes few problems; the parents live miles away, both Agony Uncles are young enough to not yet attract speculation as to why they’ve not ‘met the right girl yet’, and familial visits are arranged sufficiently in advance for them to have plenty of time to make up the spare bedroom into a passable facsimile of one’s wholly-discrete-from-the-other’s sleeping quarters and hide all the toys. But what worries me, and I admit it’s a rather macabre worry but it really does exercise me, is what would happen if God forbid one of them died? What then? It was bad enough that each had to go through the loss and interment of a parent in recent memory without the other by their side, but what, I asked LAU, would one do if he had to bury the other all the time pretending to be just his housemate, his friend?

I don’t seek for a second to advise them – physician, heal thyself as Luke would put it – but I did share the view that in my experience there is far more to be gained from the telling of an inconvenient truth than from concealing it, be that through honest silence or actual deception. It certainly got me to thinking whether, in fact, ‘honesty is the best policy’.

That maxim has existed in one form or another for over two millennia and is found, with little if anything lost in translation, in most world languages. There are hundreds of other time-worn quotes, proverbs and anecdotes about honesty (indeed, the moral education of every American schoolchild is founded on the example of George Washington’s inability to lie) of which my personal favourite has always been Mark Twain’s assertion that, “If you tell the truth, you will never have to remember anything.” It’s a rather beautiful point if you think about it: when we lie, or otherwise conceal the truth, we create an alternative reality which becomes someone else’s truth. They will then share that with others, to each of whom we may have told the truth, part of the truth, or an untruth, or from whom we may have concealed the truth completely by our silence. This then creates stress and confusion for us as we struggle over time to recall who knows what about what and which version of events, all of which will sooner or later come back to bite us, as Twain may also have put it, on the ass. Tell the truth on the other hand, however unpalatable it may be, and you can carry on with life not having to remember a darn thing because everyone knows what’s what and once it’s out there it can’t hurt you.

I base this view on recent experience, some of my own, some of others. I’ve certainly benefited enormously these last few months from being honest with myself. First of course, there was the drinking. Admitting to myself that there could be a problem led to a major overhaul of behaviour that was damaging me physically and emotionally. I’ve still not got it licked; Saturday just gone saw me slip back into very bad old habits at a birthday party and I awoke Sunday morning on the hosts’ sofa not recalling any invitation to stay. [I should mention that my behaviour at said party was no worse than many others; Glenda called me on Sunday morning to ask if I had any idea how he’d got home, and Princess Timmy threw up in a carrier bag.] I am, now, reflecting on how I feel about that lapse and whether I should act on it, all the way being honest with myself; that’s a big change from just a few months ago when I’d have been laughing it off on the outside while ripping myself to shreds on the inside, and I’m thankful for that.

The other truth I’m thankful for having told myself of late has been my finally – finally, after years of denial – facing up to the dreadful mess I was in financially and doing something about it. Years of living, wilfully, beyond my means and a reckless belief that there would always be a Peter to rob in order to pay the many and various Pauls, led me to the edge of a frankly terrifying abyss that someone of my age and earning the kind of salary I do should never have to stare into. In the same way as I faced up to my drinking being out of control, I faced up to the need to marry what’s going out rather more closely with what comes in. Now, thanks to some hard-nosed negotiation, learning to say, ‘No, I can’t afford it’ – to myself as much as to others, and crucially, the support of friends generally and one friend in particular, in just a couple more months I’ll have the kind of disposable income that I would always have done had it not all been owed to the banks. I can’t begin to describe how much less anxious, depressed and out of control I feel having dealt with the truth of my monetary quagmire than I did all the while I was living the lie.

Others are feeling the benefits of tacking unpalatable realities too. Since my last post, the two boys who were settling have, quite sensibly, parted, having realised that they were not being true to themselves and that it would come to naught. Without a trace of animosity or recrimination each has reverted comfortably to the role of friend and to see them together is to see two chaps each blessed with the priceless gift of a true and life-long friend in place of a transitory and expedient partner for partnership’s sake. Another couple also went their separate ways, through rather less mutual a decision process but for the similar reason that, for one partner at least, the truth of the matter was that it just wasn’t what he wanted or what was right for him, and to have hidden that truth only to spare the other’s feelings would with time have only hurt them both.

Without exception everyone involved in these events has found that the consequences of their honesty have been far less severe than they feared. I think sometimes, to paraphrase Jack Nicholson in that electric scene in A Few Good Men, we hide the truth from others because we say they can’t handle it, while all the time the reality is that it’s we that can’t, through fear, or insecurity, or lack of support. After speaking with LAU that afternoon I cast my mind back to the months before I came out to my mother; the angst I went through, the fear I experienced, the best- and worst-case scenarios I played over and over in my head before finally, one evening, knocking back a bottle of Beaujolais and coming out with it, only for the news to be greeted with an “Oh!” and an offer to open another bottle. Sure, that wasn’t the end of it; mum struggled to accept that my homosexuality – which she never sought to criticise or deny – was simply a state of being without any scientific, sociological or philosophical explanation, and over the course of the next couple of weeks she came up with all manner of crackpot theories which I diffused as gently and patiently as I could. The one thing that helped us both through the process of coming to terms with my coming out was, you’ve guessed it, honesty, talking openly about our feelings and fears and taking the consequences of doing so.

I’m conscious that this is starting to sound very holier-than-thou and that I may be coming across as an evangelical know-it-all who holds himself out to be a paragon of virtue. Far from it. I may have faced up to a few harsh truths of late but I’m still not as honest as I’d like to be. I hide things from people. I make things up. I sometimes pretend to like people I don’t, and to not like people as much as I do (usually to conceal that I fancy the pants off them.) I’m not immune to telling a little white lie if it will help me get what I want, or a great big stinking black one if it’s something I really want. But I do think, pretty much, I’ve stopped the worst dishonesty of all and that of course is being dishonest with myself. I know and like who I am and that makes me happier than I think I have ever been.

And that’s the truth.