Living A Lie

We watched "Brokeback Mountain" tonight again, and a different kind of sadness overcame me.  The first time I was crying for myself, I think, but this time I grieved for all the damaged lives that such repression causes in a society, all those sad women, the broken hearted parents and of course, the severely frustrated males, not just sexually, but so much more emotionally.  It is a film about bankrupt lives, and those of us who live in the supposedly more enlightened coastal areas have no idea of the privations of persons out in the rest of the country.  And yet, even in these parts, I have two friends of long standing who are so damaged, one by his family's stern disapproval and withholding of any respect, the other by his life long inability to tell his parents why he is not married and will not give them the grandchildren they beg for whenever he comes for a visit.  I once sat in a discussion group of elderly gays in Manhattan, who were all working class stiffs who in retirement, owing to their meagre funds, had had to move in with a relative, usually a widowed sister in Queens, it seemed.  It seemed that they were all Catholics, and so there they lived a life where never once could they acknowledge their feelings, never once have a gay friend to visit, really because in a long life of repression and deceit they had never made a network of gay friends.  Coming to these meetings once a month was their only escape from a totally unreal existence.  All these people in hiding. How long, oh Lord, how long?