And Another Thing: Someone Save My Life Tonight

By Carole Taylor

In 1976, not even a decade after Stonewall, I was working as an administrator at a medical sciences university in Tennessee. I was out in the sense that I knew who I was, and in the sense that I was out to hundreds of other people in the gay community in Memphis. Memphis is still just a great big small town. You could only have two kinds of parties there and not become a social pariah: a small dinner party with no more than six people, or the whole gay side of town. If you had a big party, you had to invite everyone you knew, and that usually meant hundreds.

But I wasn’t out at work. And I wasn’t out to my family. I didn’t exactly lie about my life, but like every other lesbian I knew, I would find the tallest, best looking gay man I could grab hold of and drag his tight little buns to public social things for which I had to have a date. If they thought I was sleeping with him, then it was a fantasy for their own entertainment, which is usually the case when somebody thinks about anybody else’s sex life. It wasn’t a lie that I usually loved the guy I was with. It just didn’t go as far as the bedroom. This was known as having a cover.

We were like spies in the nest of the enemy.

Everything related to being gay was an inside joke to all of us. “Bar song, bar song,” we’d nudge each other knowingly when a disco tune would come on the radio. Straight people in Memphis didn’t know much about disco or that the music and driving beat had been playing in our own gay clubs for years. Gloria Gaynor did a tour of gay bars in the South that year because she knew where her audience and fame had come from. Bette Midler had just graduated from the Club Baths in New York with Barry Manilow as her pianist. Manilow had gone solo and played a Memphis midtown haunt almost weekly. Rumor had it that it was because he had a lover in town.

One of my covers was a medical student. A gay boy. A beautiful gay boy. Allan and I were like Will and Grace. Except Grace was gay, too. He and I did kareoke long before there was a word for it, and we’d party and dance ourselves stupid. We didn’t know the all words to the Elton John song, but we’d sing “Someone save my life tonight, Sugar Bear” because the syllables fit, and we’d laugh because everybody thought Allan was such a Sugar Bear. Are those the words? I still don’t know.

But nobody was out. Not in the sense that people are out now. No gay pride, no parades, no rainbow flags. But even now, the stages of coming out are pretty much the same. First you come out to yourself. Then to one other person, maybe a lover. Then the ripples in the puddle grow.

That year, the campus where I worked only had a student population of about 2,000. Small because it was a health sciences campus: medical students, dentistry, pharmacy, nursing, allied health and graduate studies. And in that one year, our campus community had experienced four student suicides, and several more students had tried but had only gotten thrown out of school as a reward for their attempts. For their own good, so the professors would say. For our reputation, for the profession, is what they meant.

One of the students who killed himself was Allan.

At school, students who had emotional problems had a place to go for help. Nobody went, but they had an official place. Allan certainly never went. The student mental health office was part of the university’s psychiatry department. Not a situation likely to be seen as a welcoming place, certainly not for medical students, all of whom went through a required rotation in psychiatry and thus would have the psychiatrist as a professor. Students who sought counseling thought, and with some reason, that they’d be tossed out of school as being unstable. This was certainly not seen as a place where one could express concerns about such scary things as attractions or sex. The head of the psychiatry department that year sat in a meeting with me and at least four other gay people, all of us in hiding. It was just another campus committee, with random appointments. The fact that there were five of us who were gay, and that I knew were gay, had already blown the curve. A random group should only have had ten percent, according to all the studies I had read, but we were half. One of the most liberal of all the professors I knew, and I had worked with nearly all of them--the good doctor shrink said, with the five of us sitting there, “We don’t have any gay students here. And we don’t have any gay faculty or staff. It’s impossible. We would have picked that up on their entrance screening tests.”

So much for psychiatric perceptiveness and prescience.

Later that same year, the year that Allan died, I went to a professional conference and joined the gay caucus of that group. That year, my professional organization adopted overwhelmingly a resolution that gays and lesbians should not be discriminated against. My boss, to my shock, stood up and voted for the resolution. (He later fired a colleague of mine for being gay, but not by being honest about it, but rather using some trumped up excuse. The boss, poor dilbert, wasn’t known for consistency.)

At that same conference, I went to a presentation given by a gay man in his 60’s who had been out since before World War II. He lived in California, but still--it wasn’t all that safe to be out, even in California. The most important thing he said was that as gay people working with adult students, and as counseling professionals, we needed to come out. In whatever way, and to whomever we could, we needed to come out. To one other professional. Certainly to any student who came out to us. For our own mental health, for our own sanity, we needed to tell the truth.

So when I came home from the conference, I made an appointment with the head of student mental health and came out to her. I wanted to be a resource for her. I wanted her to call me if she had students who didn’t know how to cope with being gay in a profession who didn’t want them. I’d like to say that my coming out ended up saving some other beautiful gay boy’s life, but the psychiatrist never called me. I guess no one ever came to her with a coming out story. There is no heroic ending to this tale. I didn’t save anyone else’s life. Just mine.

I still think of Allan as a boy. He was only 24. I was only 29. When I close my eyes, he’s still young and beautiful. But the closet killed him. There wasn’t enough room in that little, dark space for a beautiful boy to breathe.

You never know. One truth about yourself could save a life. One truth can certainly save your own.



Carole Taylor holds a masters degree and most of a doctorate, which she used as a university administrator for much too long by all accounts. She has been a commercial artist, a journalist, a grants writer, a house cleaner and a Renaissance woman. She also wrote a fantastic must-read novel, called
"A Third Story". You can email her here.