In the COVID Vaccine Closet
As we all know, hell, as the entire country knows, southwest Missouri is currently a national hotbed for COVID-19 infections, particularly the Delta variant. This is incredibly disheartening, frustrating, even maddening, especially for my friends and colleagues in that part of the state. I cannot imagine how terribly difficult it must be to go to work every day knowing that so much of what you are seeing — so much sickness, so much death — was entirely preventable. Even more chilling are the stories of people who, in their dying breath, deny that COVID-19 has been the cause of all their misery and of their relatives who then spit on health care personnel at the mere suggestion that their loved one died of COVID and still refuse to be vaccinated.
It is remarkable how the human mind works, how the human mind can create these lacunae to wall off difficult and contradictory information. The ability of human beings to live in denial about so many stark realities of their life is astounding and evne mystifying.
When a human trait is this powerful and this prevalent, there must have been some sort of evolutionary advantage to it. There must be some reason why this tradeoff has continued to exist because, in some weird ways and extreme situations, it works.
I am 66 years old. I am a cisgender gay man. I’ve known I was gay pretty much as long as I’ve known I was a human being. Although I did not know that word (I did not even know the word “homosexual” until I was a teenager), I knew that what I felt was different from what other kids, other boys, felt. I tried to stuff it, hide it, run away from it. Nevertheless, unlike a lot of men in my generation, my efforts to deny it were mostly halfhearted. I dated girls infrequently, if at all. At school and church dances, I did not take a date. I would help on the decorating committee, take tickets at the door, and work the refreshment table.
The last time I seriously tried dating a woman was in college. I was, I think, a sophomore. Her name was Barb. She was gorgeous. A nursing student. Statuesque, blonde, curvaceous, smart, funny, a Scandinavian beauty. People called us Barbie and Ken. We were… cute. Unfortunately for Barb, I was about as useful to her below the waist as Mattel’s Ken was to his Barbie. I finally had to face the fact that this was not going to work, and this is one of those rare instances in recorded dating history where some man has stated with complete honesty, “It’s not you. It’s me.”
A lot of men in my generation, gay men, that is, have had a very different experience from mine. They stuffed down this part of who they were, sometimes for decades, with varying levels of success. They got married. They had kids. Some of them now have grandkids. Still, at some point many of them, at least the ones I know, said to themselves, “This is not working. This is not who I am.”
Why did it take so long for so many of these men to recognize, to accept, to embrace this core element of who he was? I can only speculate based on my short experience, but I know how much value is placed on being a publicly heterosexual man who’s measure of success is profession, marriage, and procreation and the immense pressure I felt to conform to those standards. For many of my generation, to be one of “those people” was inconceivable. To accept this about oneself, and live it publicly, was to give up so much power, so much prestige, often including active rejection by family and communities both secular and religious as well as the loss of so many other key sustaining relationships. It was to enter Terra Incognita, shunned by “normal” society and barred from the halls of power. I was quite aware of what it meant to be publicly and completely myself, but I also knew that I could not pay the immense psychic and spiritual price of living what was, for me, a colossal and foundational lie.
I can understand, then, that there are some people who are so blinded and deeply invested — even submerged — in a particular toxic worldview that they are compelled to remain in denial, both about COVID as a clear and present danger and about the spectacular safety and success of vaccines despite the evidence: the vaccinated being able to go about their lives and the unvaccinated dying of this infection right before their eyes. I can see this just as clearly as I can see those men, not that much unlike myself, who would spend dozens of years furtively looking at their waiter at the club, the pool boy at the resort, the young father sitting two pews ahead at church, feeling a desperate, unquenchable desire while sitting next to his wife and pretending those feelings don’t exist.
There is perhaps a glimmer of hope, though, even in southwest Missouri. New evidence seems to show that the numbers of people getting vaccinated are rising there, albeit slowly. Nevertheless, they are rising.
I do wonder, though, for those people in, say, Springfield, Missouri, finally deciding to get the vaccine, how publicly — or furtively — they feel they need about it? After being bombarded for months by messages from cable news, talk radio, clergy, neighbors, and a particular political party about the “hoax” of COVID and the “dangers” of vaccines, will people feel that they need to go over to the next town to get vaccinated? Do they feel that their religious, familial, political, professional, and social networks will ostracize them if they go public about getting the vaccine? Unlike so many of us who were desperate to get the vaccine when it was first rolled out, who published pictures of ourselves getting our jabs on Facebook, relating how moved and relieved we were to finally see a glimmer of hope, I wonder if people in these communities who finally decide to get vaccinated feel like they need to keep it a secret. That they need to go into the COVID vaccine closet.
I can tell you from my own relatively short period of time in my own closet how damaging it was to me and how ultimately hurtful it was to those I loved. I also know at those men who spent so many years in families have their own stories to tell. I can’t tell them, and frankly I do wonder what it would be like to have had kids. Would the price I would have paid been sufficiently counterbalanced by that benefit? I’ll never know, and that is a topic for another day.
The human mind’s ability to deny reality because of the perceived enormity of that reality can be protective, but it exacts a steep price. If you do live in southwest Missouri — for that matter if you live right here in Saint Louis — and if you have not yet been vaccinated, I am begging you to do so. And when you do, I hope you will be able to do it proudly and will feel comfortable letting everyone you love know that you have done so. And that you will then plead with them to get vaccinated.
And if you feel you still simply can’t do this publicly, please drive two counties over, and get vaccinated anyway. Please save yourself. You may also save someone you love by not spreading the virus to them. And in whatever way you can, work to change your community so that you don’t have to remain in the vaccine closet
The closet is a place to put things that we don’t want people to see everyday but may be necessary to our lives. There may be a reason to dwell there right now, but in the long run, it is not a place to fully live our life.
