Sullivan on Larry Craig's exquisite Hell

Larry Craig was interviewed by Matt Lauer on his exposure as a deep-in-the-closet homosexual. Andrew Sullivan reports on what he saw in the interview.

Why on earth they decided to subject themselves to prolonging this agony is a question worth asking. And the answer, I think, is: they have to. At this point in their lives, to allow the possibility that Craig is indeed homosexual, that he has sustained, lived, internalized a fundamental lie for his entire life, and involved his wife and children in that lie, would be to destroy themselves. [Snip]

He grew up in a different time, and a different place, where even the possibility of being gay was inconceivable. I don't think he even thinks of himself as gay, or has any idea what being gay might actually mean. I think he thinks of his sexual orientation as a "lifestyle" (to use that hideous term Lauer kept referring to) that can be overcome the way one overcomes smoking or poor eating or sexual compulsion. And he constructed an identity in opposition to this "lifestyle" early, out of pain and defensiveness and terrible fear. He is now wedded to this life he created - more than to his wife, which is why she was kept in the dark for two months after the arrest, as he went through the terror of feeling caught finally in his own contradiction. He cannot break free of it at this point without psychic collapse. And so, even though it becomes absurd to everyone around them, the Craigs keep going. They have no choice, apart from total breakdown. [snip]

Craig was seeking in that toilet stall a connection, a shard of intimacy, that the world would not give him, or that he could not give himself. No one should have to live without that intimacy and dignity - no one. Living a life like that - a deeply lonely, compromised, painful interior existence - is a very sophisticated form of hell. No human can keep it up for ever. No human should have to keep it up for ever.

Sen. Craig's denial of the obvious does nothing more than expose both the obvious (he is a deeply closeted gay) and his deep, deep denial of that obvious fact of his own life.

As we grow up, we each create the conscious identity that we use to identify our self in our memories and our dreams. When we devise an identity that is constructed to conceal a core portion of our very existence from society, we create a set of tensions that will fill our entire lives with pain and rob us of all real joy forever. Larry Craig has designed such a self-identity and built his entire life around the lies that self-identity is based on. As Andrew Sullivan says "He cannot break free of it at this point without psychic collapse. And so, even though it becomes absurd to everyone around them, the Craigs keep going. They have no choice, apart from total breakdown."

Sullivan, of course, understands this. He is both explaining Sen. Craig's Hell, and explaining why he, himself, came out of the closet.