Word: closeted
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...campaign, more private, but just as important. Of the thousands of conversations he was having, the most interesting was the one he was having with himself. Bush is the son of a man who ran four times. He knows what it means to hang up your life in the closet and pack your heart and health and conscience into a carry-on bag, and then set out for the airport and never look back. It wouldn't be much fun. He wasn't sure he was ready. And he wasn't sure the time was right...
...feed him grapes, one to rub oil on his muscles and one named Peaches. In his boyhood he was ever the prankster and the practical joker. His idea of fun was to frighten his parents--putting a sheet over his head and jumping out at them from a closet, or tying a string to a bedroom curtain and making it move after his parents had gone...
...Other gay leaders of the day--obedient folks who toiled quietly for a hostile Democratic Party--thought it more important to work with straight allies who could, it was thought, more effectively push for political rights. Milk suspected emotional trauma was gays' worst foe--particularly for those in the closet, who probably still constitute a majority of the gay world. That made the election of an openly gay person, not a straight ally, symbolically crucial. "You gotta give them hope," Milk always said...
...openly gay person ever had. Not everyone cheered, of course, and death threats multiplied. Milk spoke often of his ineluctable assassination, even recording a will naming acceptable successors to his seat and containing the famous line: "If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door...
...urged him not to [accept the job]. I said, 'You go in and everybody on the right will say that he was a closet liberal all along, and the liberals will never accept you... they'll see you as coming in to pick up the prize," he says...