The Closet Gay and the C.I.A.

I finally saw Artis the Spoonman this weekend at the Northwest Folklife Festival. Later on Matty and his girlfriend Angie hosted a cookout. The weather wasn't the greatest, but the rain held off for the most part. Angie was talking about a new guy they hired at her firm who came from M.I.T., and it reminded me of something that happened in high school which makes sense to write about here...

Back when I was in high school, we used to play hoops down at Magnolia Field. There was a wide age range on the court, anywhere from eight to twenty eight, which made games interesting to say the least. When it was all over, we used to head around the corner to Carl's house, where we would listen to his Pink Floyd albums while his wife made lemonade for everyone and warned us about the dangers of playing Dungeons & Dragons. They were nice people.

Carl had a degree in mathematics from M.I.T., but he was bored with work so he applied for a job as a field agent with the C.I.A. We didn't find out any of this until afterwards, and probably wouldn't have found out had he been hired, but as it turns out, he wasn't. One of the requirements for fields agents is passing a psychological evaluation... it's not as though they do any sort of experiments or anything, just a regular psych test. So they gave Carl the test, and then summarily rejected him, because the test showed that he was a closet homosexual.

"But I'm not gay!" he argued. And that was precisely the problem, they replied. The fact that he wouldn't admit it made him a liability in the field. This sort of thing could be used against him. "But I'm married," he said, "I have a daughter. And isn't it discrimination anyway to not hire someone because they're gay?" Well, yes, it is, but they weren't rejecting him on the grounds that he was gay. They had plenty of gay field agents, good ones too. But they weren't closeted. If he were to come out of the closet and embrace this lifestyle, the C.I.A. would have no objections to hiring him, as he was otherwise fully qualified. But the profile said he was gay, and until he admitted it, being a field agent was, in fact, an impossibility. "But I'm not gay!"

Precisely the problem.

So he'd been rejected... or had he? One of the girls at Magnolia who had a crush on him didn't believe that he'd been rejected. It was just his cover, she said. So Carl had some fun with it. Every once in a while he would talk into his watch, or take off his shoe and hold it up to his ear like he was receiving a communique, and she'd go ballistic, trying to figure out what it was he was doing. We never believed it at the time, but looking back on it, who knows... he could have been working for the C.I.A.

It's been six years, though, and the government's never issued me a shoe-communicator, so I'm pretty sure that part was crap.