In The Dark

In the matter of dividing the people of the world into larks and owls, I’m definitely an owl. I function much better at night than I do during the day. Besides just having my biological clock synchronized with the moon instead of the sun, I can even offer logical reasons why it’s better to go out when it’s dark. For instance, you save a lot on sunscreen if you never go out in the sun.

I happen to like the dark. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been a stargazer. Every night that the sky is clear, I try to make a point of checking out what’s going on overhead. I live with someone who has seen exactly one shooting star in her life, while I see an average of one every other night. I even have a very nice telescope at home that I use on a semi- regular basis just to cruise the heavens up close.

One of the factors that makes it easy for me to indulge my nightly sky viewing habit is that I live out in the boondocks. I don’t live in real close proximity to city lights, which can substantially subtract from the level of darkness in the sky. The number of stars visible in the sky over my house is significantly more than the number visible inside the city limits. In the field of astronomy, light is a bad thing.

I know that it’s supposed to be a positive thing to "shed some light on" a subject, but as with astronomy or vampires or film developing, there are times and places where too much light is not good. I have no idea how many queer (and I use that word as a substitute for les/bi/gay/trans, which is awkward to me) folk are still in the closet. I don’t think anyone does, but I would be willing to bet that there are more folks in the closet than out of it. But the fact that they are in the closet does not make them bad people; it only makes them human. It also does not give anyone else the right to knock down their closet door and drag them out into the light. At the very least, that kind of behavior is not considered to be very friendly.

A person who chooses not to expose every facet of his or her life to the world at large is not an unusual person. In fact, they are just like everyone else. The person who decides to closet their sexual and/or gender orientation is no different than the person who decides to closet their home address or their credit card numbers. Each has chosen to limit the knowledge of their life that the rest of the world has access to. No one has a right to decide how "out" a person should be with their life, any more than someone else should have a right to decide whether or not your credit card numbers are public knowledge.

People who spend a great deal of their lives living a closeted existence should not be pitied. Nor should we expect them to ever venture out of their closet into the light, and we should not label them as lesser beings than those who choose to stand in the light. All of those actions amount to nothing more than imposing our standards and our labels on someone else by force, expecting them to conform to our idealized norm. The best thing that we can do, the wisest thing to do, is to simply show them that life outside the closet can be good. The decision to move out of the closet, out into the light, however, belongs only to the individual. No one should be pushed, pulled, coerced or forced in any way into doing something that they do not want to do.

We are all different. We all have varying comfort thresholds. We all have our closets, and we all spend some portion of our lives in the dark. In the end, we all need that dark, if only because we sometimes need to have a place to hide and a place from which to watch the stars.