Suzanne Harrington: The closet still exists... it serves no one

I now know more than about Tommy Fleming's life than feels comfortable, says Suzanne. 

In Douglas Stuart’s brilliant new novel, John of John, a man who is a pillar of his conservative religious community spends his entire adult life hiding his gayness because he is terrified of his community’s reaction. Shame has nailed him into the closet.

The novel is set in the 1990s.

The man’s son “knew his father could not move forwards into truth and there was no way to call him on his lies, to have him deconstruct himself now. He had spent his whole life concealing this truth…”

Maintaining a false carapace has taken lifelong precedence over the man’s happiness, relationships, authenticity, peace of mind, and self-acceptance.

Not unlike Tommy Fleming, who I’d never heard of until recently — he wouldn’t be in my musical food group — but whom I now know more about than feels comfortable.

I now know that Mr Fleming so desperately didn’t want to be gay that he spent decades hiding inside a straight marriage, like someone from the 1950s.

I know how pretending to be straight took such a toll on him that he self-medicated himself. I know he tried to end his own life. And I know how this devastated his ex-wife.

Mr Fleming was born in 1971. He would have been in his early 20s when Irish legislation finally stopped criminalising gay men. He’d have grown up, like the rest of us, absorbing all kinds of cultural homophobia, reinforced by legal homophobia.

You cannot but help feel sympathy for anyone who is so covered in shame about who they really are that they spend a lifetime lying to themselves and others, rather than owning it.

It seems quite mad in 2026 that anyone should feel obliged to hide their orientation — but then again, Mr Fleming is not from 2026. He’s from 70s rural Ireland, a place not famous for its progressive social values.

Women were not liberated, men were not gay. Feelings were not discussed.

Masculinity was — and, in much of the world, still is — a rigid, narrow, macho construct. The kind of masculinity James Baldwin, in his 1985 essay Here Be Dragons, termed “infantile” because it terrorises boys and men into thinking that anything outside this blueprint chokehold is defective, unmanly.

Women are given a pass with sexual fluidity — I kissed a girl and I liked it — whereas boys and men are granted no such leeway. You can’t quite imagine Justin Bieber singing ‘I kissed a boy and I liked it’ unless he was making a major U-turn statement about his own sexuality, rather than acknowledging rigid heterosexuality is as much a construct as rigid masculinity. It’s manmade.

What James Baldwin called “the ever present danger of sexual activity between men” is not just about who puts body parts where and with whom, but a wider societal terror of male intimacy and vulnerability.

Imagine the homophobic messaging in 70s Ireland, and you can see how individuals would have shame and fear baked into their psyche.

Not everyone is brave. Even now, the closet still exists. It serves no one.