September 5, 2019 • 42 mins
When Bill, who grew up in a traditional, southern family, first met his wife he recognized the outsider in her – that she too felt isolated and different. Together the two of them banded together in solidarity and love and took on the world. But when Bill was 45, they came to terms with the realization that Bill wasn’t living truthfully.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. How
long have you known you were gay? She asked? Since
I was a child, then why didn't you come out?
Then the world was a different place. Being gay wasn't
an option, I said, But why did you wait so long?
(00:24):
Why did I wait so long? Why Because I made
a promise to never be like my father, Because my
mother sucked me up every single day by saying being
gay was disgusting and that I would never be happy.
Because I thought being gay was disgusting, and if I
was gay, then I was disgusting. Because I thought I
would go to hell, because religion sucked me over by
(00:45):
telling me my feelings were sinful. Because I was broken,
because I couldn't look at your sweet face and say sorry,
Daddy can't live with you anymore, because he wants to
have sex with men. Because I thought your mother would
kill her self. I lied for so long that I
didn't know how to stop. I created an entire world,
(01:07):
and how could I stop that from spending? That's William
Dameron reading from The Lie, a memoir of two marriages,
cat fishing and coming out. Bill's story is about a
secret he did his best to keep from himself from
most of his life. But as we all know, secrets
(01:28):
don't like to sit quietly in corners. They don't appreciate
being stuffed down in the silence. They grow until they
can be contained no longer. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this
(01:51):
is family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us,
the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we
keep from ourselves. I like to begin by asking you
to describe the landscape of your childhood, where you grew up,
the family you grew up in, what it was like
for you. I was born in nine in Greensboro, North Carolina.
(02:18):
It was very a southern town, very provincial. I think
social Moray's and religion played very big in our family.
My mother was Catholic, and um, she stayed at home.
My father was an attorney. I had three brothers. I
was a second born, so it was a family that
was very much a part of the social fabric. My
(02:40):
mother was a part of the junior league. We were
all into sports. I was not into basketball, but I
was a swimmer, so, um, it was all sort of
about being that good citizen. I think tell me a
bit about your like, your inner life, as a child,
this boy growing up in Greensboro. I was the second point,
(03:02):
as I said, um, three years behind my older brother. Uh.
And I always looked up to him. And he was
the basketball star. He was, um, the kid who did
so well and and and that was sort of my
childhood is trying to look up to my older brother.
And and I specifically sort of remember him sitting on
(03:23):
the corner with him and he said, you know, all
I want in life is two cars a house in
the suburbs, two point three kids. I knew I was different, Um,
but I knew the dream or the desires and thoughts
that I had couldn't be the same. I couldn't give
voice to what those were. So I sort of adopted
(03:46):
his dream is my dream. I went to a Catholic school, Um,
we all did. We attended church every Sunday. Was very important.
I remember once our car ran out of gas on
the way to church, and instead of stopping to get gasps,
we walked to the rest of the way to church.
So that was kind of an important part of our
(04:06):
lives well. And so interesting. The idea of being quote
unquote normal, being average, being like everybody else, that being um,
that being a goal, that being something to aspire to.
It was it was a goal to be like all
the other kids. And it's funny when you're a kid,
(04:27):
you know how the other kids are, but also you
don't really know what their secret thoughts and desires are.
So as a child, you don't really know that until
you learn it, or you say something out of character
and then quickly something said, oh, that's not what I'm
supposed to say or be like. I remember playing with
(04:48):
some neighborhood kids. The rest of them were playing football
in the backyard, and there were two other boys that
had a football, and we were being kind of silly
and and walking to football down the driveway and sort
of dancing behind it. And I remember one of the
mothers saying, y'all are acting like a bunch of girls.
That kind of stuff stays with you, doesn't it. It does.
(05:12):
It's so interesting to just generally the nature of childhood,
because no kid wants to be different, and yet every kid,
every child has an inner life. Um, but the idea
of sharing that inner life is too scary. It doesn't happen,
and so there's that feeling of um. Nobody else feels
(05:34):
the way I do, which is of course where literature
comes in, because then when we read, we discover that
there are these characters who feel just like we do
and have in our lives that are so similar to ours.
But there's such an isolating feeling. I think that is
universal in childhood, but more so when there's something within
(05:55):
you where you really do feel like you're different from
the large your group that's trying to be quote unquote
normal average. Tell me a little bit about your mother.
I can see looking back now that she really wanted
the best for all of us. She wanted us to
(06:15):
excel at everything that we did, whether that was jobs
or sports um or for me, I played the piano
as well. So it was really important to her that
we presented our best image um to our family and
friends and society, and there was sort of one image
to portray that that was the best. In the sixties
(06:39):
and seventies, there was no internet, so there was no
sort of way of finding different people or connecting to
other people. You only knew what was happening in the
town that you were in, in that small radius, and
my mother was very much that way. Tell me a
bit about your dad. My father was an attorney UM,
(07:00):
and he was a litigator, so I think he used
up all his words during the day in court. When
he came home, he was a man of very few words. Uh.
He came home, dinner was on the table. We did
have one sort of fun thing when he came home.
Sometimes he would have chewing gum in his pocket. We
would all sort of punch each other and run to
the door to be the first one there to grab
(07:21):
the chewing gum out of his pocket. But then we
would sit down at the table. My mother would have
dinner ready. He would drink down scotch very quickly. He
would eat his food in a minute or two. And
so there were very few really words spoken between us.
And when I look back, I sort of see that
(07:43):
he was. He was missing a lot of the time.
Even before he left us, he was sort of not there.
Did you feel like you knew him? No, I don't
think I ever really knew exactly who he was. Looking back,
I know now who he is. He had a difficult
childhood as well. He was an only child and his
mother was an alcoholic um so he was sent to
(08:06):
live with his grandparents in Fletcher, North Carolina for a
while while his mother recovered. So as an adult, I
understand that as a kid, I didn't was in this
image conscious childhood in this traditional Southern family. There was
also the matter of the body, as in Bill's body.
(08:27):
I think our bodies are for many of us, a
source of embarrassment or shame. There's just something so messy,
so exposed, so physical about our bodies. This shame came
into play in Bill's early life. I was a swimmer
for most of my childhood. My brothers and I were
all painfully skinny. We just could not seem to gain weight.
(08:48):
And as as a boy, you don't want to be skinny,
and also too, it's sort of portrayed this weakness on
the outside that I felt the inside. And I remember
swimming at the City swim Me getting out, my mother's
sitting in the stands, and I go up and sit
(09:09):
next to her on the bleachers, and I remember her
comment was, you're so damn skinny. You need to press
weights like those other boys. Um so, so there was
no there wasn't really a comment about, wow, you did
a great job, you know, swimming. It cemented that feeling
that there was something wrong with me, not only inside,
(09:32):
but on the outside. You internalized that I did, and
then you, and you carried it with you. I did
carry it with me. I think when you have something
you consider ugly on the inside, that's all you can
see on the outside. When I looked in the mirror,
I just saw all of the flaws. What Bill considered
ugly on the inside was the awareness, not necessarily conscious knowledge,
(09:57):
but something else, something thrumming deep in his interior that
he wasn't attracted to girls. He felt something for boys,
something he knew he wasn't supposed to feel. I was
in college for two years at a piano performance major.
I had an opportunity to have a summer job with
my aunt, who lived in Denver, Colorado. She knew a
(10:20):
couple who owned the Lost gold Mine. It was a
gold mine where you could take tours through and I
would live with her. I remember my mother sitting me
down in the living room. She was a nurse, so
she was wearing her starched nursing whites, and she sat
down and said, okay, Bill, I want you to know
that your aunt is and she lowered her voice a
(10:40):
lesbian because you couldn't say that out loud. It was
almost like it was a curse word. And she said
to me, I want you to promise that you won't
let Sheila change you. I is that okay? And I'm
still not quite certain why she let me live with her.
If she was so afraid, she must have had some
sense of of who her son was. But she still
(11:02):
let me live with her for that summer. So two questions.
One is you you had a consciousness that you were
gay at that point? Yeah? Did you have language for it?
I didn't have language for it. You're exactly right. I
I could not say in my head that I'm gay,
and I never did. It just wasn't how I identified
and it wasn't an option. I knew it wasn't an option,
(11:23):
but I knew I had these thoughts and desires. So
I lived with my aunt for the summer. The Lost
gold Mine was owned by a couple of gay guys,
and it was a great summer. She eventually took me
to my first gay bar in Central City, of all places,
which is such a conservative passion. So we went into
(11:46):
the bar. I met a friend of hers don who
was twenty three. I was nineteen. I had a few drinks.
We walked out to the parking lot, and it was
the first time I kissed a man, and it was
the most amazing feeling. It was right and it was wrong,
(12:08):
and I knew that could never happen again. So now
you're twenty and you're back from your summer. Yes, And
as a matter of fact, that summer too, I remember
I um got a gym membership in Denver, and I
went to the gym as well, so I was a
little more fleshed out too, And so I was actually
feeling good about myself for sort of the first time.
(12:31):
And it felt good to have, you know, two or
three months of just being myself. But I came back
to North Carolina and I knew I had to tell
my mother. I knew I had to let her know that,
you know, the things that she said and the things
that I heard about gay people were wrong. I still
was not strong enough to say, Mom, I'm gay. What
(12:52):
I said was, you know, Mom, the love that Sheila
has for her girlfriend and the love that these other
people have, it's the same. And she was immediately incensed
and said, no, it's not that's disgusting. It's it's not
were her views informed primarily by her Catholicism, or by
(13:14):
community and culture, or all of the above, all of
the above. Yeah, I have actually spoke, you know, talked
to her, interrogated her a bit, since it was taboo,
That's what she told me. It was taboo, and I
didn't want you to experience that pain. You know, the
world would never alter, so I had to. So, now
(13:34):
you're back from your summer and you're feeling pretty good
about yourself. You've you've been able to be yourself for
three home months. What happens next? I was thrown right
back into this was so, I was thrown right back
into society in North Carolina. When you escape hundred miles
(13:56):
away from home, you fill this freedom. But when you
come act, it's sort of like the humidity of southern summer.
It's oppressive and you start to feel it and there's
your church again, and there's all the people you know.
And here was my mother saying this is wrong, this
is disgusting. You're never going to be happy. And it
(14:19):
wasn't just a one time thing. It was sort of Okay,
let's talk about this. As I came home from school
every day, do you want to talk to the priest
because the priest can help you. Do you want to
be a woman to My mother asked me, um, and
I just it was immediate. It was like, okay, this,
this is wrong, this is not good. Also, at the
(14:42):
same time, the AIDS epidemic had become national. It was
hidden for so long. I remember my aunt telling me
don't do poppers because they thought that's what caused it.
There was, you know, nobody really knew. But suddenly was
on the news and men were wasting away and here
was my body dysmorphia coming again. Okay, this is gay.
(15:04):
People are getting skinny and wasting away. And and so
it was the combination of all that guilt and shame
and being back that sort of drove me back into
the closet. We're going to take a quick break. We'll
be back in a moment. So Bill returned to the norm,
(15:34):
you know, wife, two point three kids, white picket fence.
In the South. In those days, people married young and
got on with it. His brother, his friends, they were
all getting married. He meets Catherine, the friend of a friend,
and he's drawn to her. She seems like a kindred
spirit to him. First time I met Catherine, there was
(15:56):
something I saw in her eyes. It was this this
look vulnerability. I can remember it so specifically, looking at
it and seeing something there that I connected with, and
I think it was the same thing I saw in
my eyes. She was adopted, and I've heard that adopted
kids often find each other because there's something about them
(16:17):
that connects them. I wasn't adopted, but it was feeling
like it didn't have parents, and so I think, you know,
we really connected on that level. It was our our
shared pain that we we didn't externalize, but you know,
we had it inside and so we connected. And how
long after that did you marry and begin a family?
(16:39):
We dated for a year. We dated for a while.
Um I remember introducing her to my brother and he
sort of said, she seems a little immature, And it
mattered to me so much what my older brother thought. Um,
So we stopped dating for a while. But then my
older brother got married and and Catherine, you know, I
(17:01):
called her up and said would you come with me
to his wedding and she was like, well, you didn't
call me, so I thought we were off. And when
I saw her again, um, well, she dolled up, right,
she was dogged up. You know. It was a nineteen eighties,
and she had the big hair and the shoulder pads,
and she had this tiny waist. And I remember all
(17:22):
the men they are sort of looking at her, like, wow,
she's beautiful. And I felt proud, like this is great.
And and she always had an amazing sense of humor,
and I think I love that about her too. So
I think at weddings, that's what happens, right you you're
with someone and you see all of this happiness and joy,
and you want to capture that and have that for yourself.
(17:45):
And was this the wedding of your older brother who
was admired and emulated and wanted to be like So
Bill and Catherine start to plan their wedding. The details
kind of take over the way wedding details. So often
do you talk about flower arrangements and place cards and
whether to serve chicken or duck breast, rather than actually
(18:06):
talking about what you're doing, which is committing to another
person for life. Bill had all kinds of doubts, but
he didn't articulate them, not to Catherine, not even to himself.
He was going to make the best of it. A
beautiful wedding would lead to a beautiful future. I remember
the night before my wedding, we had a rehearsal dinner,
(18:29):
and I remember thinking I should feel something different, I
should feel this immense joy and wonder and love, and
I'm not feeling it. But it's too late to change it.
Everybody's been invited, all the gifts are here, and I
can't go back. Yeah, you're reminding me of I mean,
(18:52):
I had a brief, ill fated marriage when I was
in my twenties, and I remember walking down the aisle
on the arm of my nineteenth century literature professor who
was standing in from my dad, who was no longer living,
and just thinking, this is a mistake. This is a mistake.
This is a mistake. Um. Yeah, it's not what you're
supposed to be feeling on your wedding day. Yeah. Katherine
(19:15):
and Bill begin their lives together, first in Tampa, Florida,
where he had a job working at a bank, but
Catherine was terribly homesick, so they packs up their stuff
and moved back to Greensboro, North Carolina. After a year,
Bill found another job and that's where their children were born.
Bill throws himself into his life as a family man.
(19:35):
He stuffs any feelings he has for men even further
down into the recesses of his psyche, it just isn't
going to happen. He loves being a dad to his
young daughters. He's a really hands on father, unlike his
own father, who not only was distant and absent, but
was known to be a full landerer. So this is
yet another reason why Bill is never going to cheat
(19:56):
on Catherine, not with anyone, so that part of his life,
the sexual romantic part, just ceases to exist for him.
The family moves a number of times as his daughters
go from babies to little kids to teenagers, and he
works his way up with the corporate ladder in the
banking business. I had moved from North Carolina to Virginia
(20:18):
for a job. That company declared bankruptcy and I found
a job in the northeast. My kids were teenagers. Then
we made the decision to move for my career. So
suddenly I was out of the conservative state of North
Carolina and Virginia and in the very liberal bastion of
(20:40):
New England. Same sex marriage had just been approved the
year we moved, and there was this cognitive dissonance inside
of me. So there was the combination of the move.
The kids were teenagers and not relying on me anymore.
And I met this guy who sort of affect and
me in a way I had never experienced before. He
(21:05):
was an ideal, He was funny, he was generous, he
was kind a lot of men in the South, they're
kind of guarded, you know, and they don't really express
their emotions and their feelings. This was the first guy
that did that, and it really affected me. Bill's feelings
for this man can't be expressed. It's way too dangerous.
(21:28):
So instead he finds another outlet for those feelings. The
skinny kid whose mom told him he really ought a
lift weights. That kid asserts himself big time. So I
began to feel those feelings and it became stronger. Because
of all of that, I was still feeling like that skinny,
(21:49):
ugly kid, and I wanted to sort of shore up
the outside to help shore up what was crumbling inside.
So I began going to the gym working out. It
was an obsession. It was a way to control something
in my life when everything else was spinning out of control.
(22:11):
And I remember the first I'm sort of clicking on
the by for steroids on the internet and it was
like all my life, I've been the good boy. I'm
going to do something now that is just for me.
I'm going to control this thing. And how did that
play out? With the steroids and within your I mean,
(22:31):
you're you're living this family life. You're in this house,
You've you've got Katherine, You've got your daughters, and you
have this other life, this secret life. It's sort of
like a double secret life. It's a secret on top
of a secret. It is. I remember getting them in
the mail and Katherine and the girls were sleeping. It
(22:54):
was a Saturday morning. So I got up and I
had planned it all out. I had printed out how
to do a steroid cycle stack. I did all my
research like the Internet was the greatest teacher. Looking back,
of course, now that's so foolish, but you know, I
felt like, oh, I verified it with several different sources
on the Internet. It was foolish. I got this in
(23:16):
the mail. I had no idea who the supplier was,
except it was someone in Eastern Europe. I actually, in
order to get the steroids, my father had died and
he left me in I ra a and I needed
to cash a check every year, and I used that
money to buy the steroids, and I wired it to
the supplier. I went down to the bathroom, closed the door,
(23:40):
and I remember looking in the mirror, thinking, all right,
am I really going to do this? Is this what
I'm gonna do? And I filled up the syringe, pulled
down my pants, stuck it in, pushed the plunger in,
and then pulled the needle out. And I sat there waiting,
thinking how fast is this going to work? Is this
(24:00):
going to make me strong right away? Is it going
to cause a heart attack? Of course, none of that happened, um,
But over the weeks it became more of an obsession.
And then I began to see the scale move from
one sixty one seventy, and I became really hungry, finishing
(24:20):
my plate, finishing the girl's plates. It's interesting because I
was spiraling down, but somehow Catherine was becoming stronger in
a way. I'm not sure if she saw, Okay, something's
terribly wrong with her husband, um, but she had struggled
for a while, you know, in finding her birth family
(24:42):
and and all the results of that. But she started
to sort of question me, like what's going on? Like
you're a lot bigger and like, you're going to the
gym all the time, is you tell me if something
was wrong? And of course I was like, no, no,
I'm just stressed at work and this is just my
way of just beating distress. Within your marriage to Catherine,
(25:04):
during those years and the years prior, was there a
kind of accommodation in terms of intimacy. Catherine Um struggled
for a while with i'll call it sadness, just just
to call it that. Um she was adopted, she found
her birth family, who was wonderful. It was a wonderful
(25:26):
birth family, and as it turned out, her birth mother
married her birth father and they had another child, so
she was given up so that she could have a
two parent family. Her adopted father died when she was five,
so she didn't have that. But here was this family
that gave her up, who did have that, and a
sister and that, and she struggled with that. She always
(25:51):
wanted a family that would sort of choose her and
not regret their decision. So she struggled a long time.
And so intimacy in the beginning, it was we were
very intimate. As the years progressed, it became less and
less frequent and I would say, oh, this is what
(26:11):
all married couples do, this is what happens to all
married couples. And because she was struggling with some of
this sadness too, she was less frequently interested in it.
So I think that was sort of the accommodation. But
there was a certainly times where she would say, why
don't you ever kiss me? Why don't you kiss me
the way we did when we dated? You know, I
(26:32):
shouldn't be the one who's initiating it all the time.
This is what she said. I would listen to that
and say, Okay, I've got to make a note to
make sure that I do initiate it. And I do that.
But I'm sure in her mind it was always playing
behind it that there's something wrong, and is that thing
that's wrong me? And so I think she began to
(26:55):
think there was something wrong with her, which was extremely
painful for me because I knew what was happening, and
I was causing her to feel less desirable. And you
loved her. I did love her. That love comes through
so strongly in Bill's memoir. His bond with Catherine may
(27:17):
not have been romantic or sexual, but it was love,
So it would be a painful thing to know you're
causing the person you love pain, or that she's blaming
herself for something that's got nothing to do with her.
For so many years of our marriage, she always worked
at home, so I was always sort of the breadwinner
and the caretaker. Even when the kids were born. Um,
(27:40):
Katherine had a C section with both of them, so
I would get up with the kids in the middle
of the night. So I was always the one to
sort of take care of things. And I sort of
prided myself and that I love doing that, and and
I love taking care of Catherine as well, but I
wasn't taking care of her completely. So this period of
time where your body is changing, there is a moment
(28:03):
where Catherine finds the steroids. Yeah, the way that that
happened is I would I She was beginning to doubt,
of course, because no man goes from hundred and fifty
pounds pounds and suddenly as acne on his back. There
was a package that came in the mail well after Christmas, Um,
(28:28):
and I had told her, you know, I might be
getting stuff in the mail and it might be a
Christmas gifts. Don't open it clever. She did she she
saw this package. It was from Moldova and um I
she told me, well, their writing was sort of so
interesting and intricate, and when I opened it up, the
vial of steroids was wrapped in this newspaper that was
(28:51):
very intricately wrapped, and so she thought, oh, it's a gift.
You know. The girls were with her and she's like,
should we open it. My daughters were with her and
they opened it, and unfortunately it was all of them
that discovered sort of this vial of amber fluid at
the same time. So when I came home that night,
(29:13):
she actually called me at work and said, all right,
you need to come home. Now. We're going to pause
for a moment. Bill comes home, his wife and his
(29:34):
girls are all sitting at the kitchen counter, very solemn,
just sitting there staring at him. Catherine opens up her
hand and in her palm is the vial of steroids.
At first, Bill is just plain angry she opened his mail,
violated his privacy. He knows this is the wrong response,
but he just can't help it. His daughter, Claire says,
(29:57):
I think I know where the rest of his stashes.
She's noticed that Bill has always been protective of his
work back, he doesn't let it out of his sight.
She grabs his bag, pulls out a brown paper bag
filled with syringes, and Catherine Catherine confiscates it all. It
must have been a terrible feeling on top of a
(30:18):
terrible feeling, because those steroids are the only way that
Bill is managing to control his shame, guilt, and desires.
So how long after this does she confront you and
straight out ask you if you're gay? It took a
couple of months after that actually before she confronted me.
(30:41):
That's so interesting because I think we only ask what
we're ready to know, and it would seem so completely
clear once that discovery of the steroids were made, plus
everything else that had come to for that that was
(31:02):
the case. But it seems like she couldn't take in
more than she could handle until she was able to
ask the next logical question. Right, She had to be
prepared if she asked that question for what the answer was,
and that answer might destroy everything she always knew. So
(31:23):
I think it was a series of steps to discovering
what the true nature of the secret was. We were
driving to Walmart to get some supplies for the girls
for school, and I could see she was very quiet
and she was mulling something over and she said, very quickly, okay,
(31:45):
just pull over, pull over, parked the car. I got
to ask you this or I never will. And I
knew in I had what she was going to ask me,
but I didn't know what my answer would be until
we parked there, and I owed her the truth. When
you love someone, you can't lie to them. You've got
(32:08):
to stand in the truth. And even though I knew
it would destroy everything I built, because everything was built
on that lie everything, I owed her the truth. And
what was your response to Catherine when she asked you
if you were gay? I don't want to be. And
(32:30):
it was exactly what I was thinking. And that was
also the truth of your entire life, which is you
didn't want to be exactly I had tried so hard
not to be. So after telling Catherine, there was this
immediate sense of relief. Oh my god, I've finally told somebody,
(32:54):
and the person I've told is my wife. In some
ways it felt really right, and in some ways it
felt really wrong. Catherine had been with Bill all those years.
She deserved to be the one who knew the truth
to begin with. For a while, the two of them
had a renewed connection because they both knew a secret
(33:16):
no one else knew. They clung to each other. They wondered,
where do we go from here? Do we stay together?
Because we got the kids, the house, the job. Each night,
as they laid in bed, they talked it through. Eventually
they came to the conclusion that they both deserved to
be happy and they needed to tell the kids. It
wasn't fair to lie to them. Their girls were at
(33:38):
this point fourteen and sixteen, Bill and Catherine call a
family meeting on a weekend afternoon. Okay, girls, I want
you to know something. I'm the same person today that
I was yesterday, but I want you to know this
about me. I'm gay. It was the thing he never
wanted to say to them, to anyone. Well, that makes sense,
(34:02):
one of them says, are you getting a divorce? The
other asks, we're talking about it? Your parents respond, does
this mean we'll have to move again? So many questions
and the sound of a house so carefully constructed breaking apart.
You wrote a really beautiful modern love column in The
(34:25):
New York Times about the last time that Catherine cuts
your hair. She had always cut your hair throughout your
entire decades long marriage. Was it two sixty four haircuts?
Two and sixty four haircuts? And it's this beautiful piece
about her giving you the last haircut. You know it's
going to be the last haircut, and actually you asked
(34:46):
her to just shave your head, and she shaves your head,
and she's crying as she's shaving your head. It's really powerful.
So after after we decided to get a divorce and
I came out to the children, I was sort of
so racked with shame and guilt. Then Catherine didn't have
a support system in the Northeast, and she felt like
(35:07):
she just had to take the girls back to Virginia,
where we had lived for nine years, where they would
have a support system. So she had moved back, and
I helped them buy a house and I set up
the house, and I would go back every weekend, using
all these miles to spend time with them, to set
up the house, to get things ready. And finally, after
(35:29):
a while, Catherine had had enough, like we can't keep pretending.
You can't keep coming back here every weekend and pretending
that we're a married couple. It's too hard on me.
I've got to move on um. And she had always
cut my hair. Nobody else had cut my hair. I
don't know why I was so particular about it, but
(35:49):
she had done it all of those times. And I
remember just getting the briefcase because we wouldn't even say anything.
If I got the briefcase that had the haircutting equipment
in it. She okay, it's time for a hair cut.
So I got it. She puts the cape on me
and she's cutting my hair, and that's when she's saying,
you can't stay here again. And so she asked me,
(36:13):
who's going to cut your hair? After all this time,
it was our most in a way, our most intimate
act because she would have her hands on my head
and in my hair. And so I thought, well, I
don't know who's going to cut my hair, so I
just want you to shave it all off. And so
she did. And when she saw me, she saw me
(36:36):
the person with no hair shaved off, and it was
a different man. And so for her that was shocking,
and she knew she was never going to cut it again.
And here was this man who's no longer her husband.
And so for me, that is just sort of the
heart of the book and why I published it in
(36:56):
modern Love, because we did have this love, in this intimacy,
and it was expressed through two hundred and sixty four haircuts.
And if she's cut my hair all these years, I'm
gonna shave it and nobody else is going to cut it.
Is a way to start new. So, speaking of starting new,
talk about your life today. Life today is really good.
(37:21):
After all of that. I had a few tragic encounters
with men, of course, because after forty some years, dating
men for the first time was a whole new experience.
But then I met another father named Paul, who has
three children, and I've written him about him in my book,
(37:43):
and my brother told me, you make Paul too perfect, Like, well,
he is perfect. We're married, we have five kids between us,
three of them still live with us there in their twenties.
He has a great relationship with his ex wife because
he was married to a woman before, and his ex
wife is married and has another child. And my ex
(38:05):
wife now is engaged to somebody. Um he has the
same name as me. We talked on the phone a
week ago and she asked if Paul and I would
come to her wedding, So we're all in a really
great place. It took this bomb to explode, to sort
(38:26):
of blow things apart so that we could come back
together in a new configuration, which was in truth instead
of lies, and in real love instead of this sort
of faking. Yet, so what happens when shame goes away?
When a secret is no longer sitting in any corner
(38:51):
or stuffed under any rug? What does it feel like
to walk through life? Or I don't want to put
words in your mouth? Is that the case that you
walk through life now without that feeling of something wrong
being on the inside? You're exactly right, it is. It's
gone away. You have an energy you never thought you
(39:13):
would have before. You don't have to hide pronouns, you
don't have to hide you know, when you're in the closet,
it's not just a part of you, it's all of you.
And when you step out of that, you can suddenly
see things so clearly. And I always wanted to write,
but I couldn't write because my words weren't authentic. Now
(39:35):
I had this sudden creativity and this energy, and I'm
writing and reaching out to people who were in the
same situation and helping them, And it is night and day.
It is night and day when you get rid of
a secret. And that's I think the way to see it.
It was dark before and now it's light. I asked
(39:59):
Bill to me a pass from his memoir, the Lie
that to me perfectly encapsulates the beauty and the pathos
of his story and the way ultimately that love wins.
Oh and when it comes to love, there's one more thing.
After our interview, Bill wrote to me to make sure
I understood that his mother, the same mother who once
(40:19):
berated him and shamed him for being gay, is his
fiercest and most loving supporter today. So there's that in
the richness, the fullness, the amazing span of a life
he never could have imagined. If this were a film
playing out in the camera, pand you would see a
(40:40):
family of four standing silently by the front door, with
no sense of whether they were coming or going. Pulling
further back, a set of upset kitchen chair is lying
on their backs, and then drifting above the house, and
then old branches of leafless trees hovering over the roof.
We're chattering squirrels, anst and mocked. A barking dog just
(41:03):
behind this house, where other similar homes, where warm yellow
lights began to illuminate windows, and the headlights of cars
cast yellow triangles in the dark driveways. Behind the doors
of these homes, you might hear the muffled cries of
excited children running toward the front door, holding out their
hands and shouting Daddy's home. I'd like to thank my guest,
(41:34):
William Dameron, for sharing his story today. He is the
author of The Lie, a memoir of two marriages, cat fishing,
and coming Out. You can find out more about Bill
at www dot William Dameron dot com. Family Secrets is
an iHeart Media production. Dylan Fagan is the supervising producer,
(41:55):
Lowell Bolante is the audio engineer, and Julie Douglas is
the executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd
like to share, you can get in touch with us
at listener mail at Family Secrets podcast dot com, and
you can also find us on Instagram at Danny Writer,
and Facebook at Family Secrets Pod and Twitter at fami
(42:16):
Secrets Pod. For more about my book Inheritance, visit Danny
Shapiro dot com. For more podcasts. For my Heart Radio,
visit the I heart radio, app, Apple podcasts, or wherever
(42:36):
you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. How
long have you known you were gay? She asked? Since
I was a child, then why didn't you come out?
Then the world was a different place. Being gay wasn't
an option, I said, But why did you wait so long?
(00:24):
Why did I wait so long? Why Because I made
a promise to never be like my father, Because my
mother sucked me up every single day by saying being
gay was disgusting and that I would never be happy.
Because I thought being gay was disgusting, and if I
was gay, then I was disgusting. Because I thought I
would go to hell, because religion sucked me over by
(00:45):
telling me my feelings were sinful. Because I was broken,
because I couldn't look at your sweet face and say sorry,
Daddy can't live with you anymore, because he wants to
have sex with men. Because I thought your mother would
kill her self. I lied for so long that I
didn't know how to stop. I created an entire world,
(01:07):
and how could I stop that from spending? That's William
Dameron reading from The Lie, a memoir of two marriages,
cat fishing and coming out. Bill's story is about a
secret he did his best to keep from himself from
most of his life. But as we all know, secrets
(01:28):
don't like to sit quietly in corners. They don't appreciate
being stuffed down in the silence. They grow until they
can be contained no longer. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this
(01:51):
is family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us,
the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we
keep from ourselves. I like to begin by asking you
to describe the landscape of your childhood, where you grew up,
the family you grew up in, what it was like
for you. I was born in nine in Greensboro, North Carolina.
(02:18):
It was very a southern town, very provincial. I think
social Moray's and religion played very big in our family.
My mother was Catholic, and um, she stayed at home.
My father was an attorney. I had three brothers. I
was a second born, so it was a family that
was very much a part of the social fabric. My
(02:40):
mother was a part of the junior league. We were
all into sports. I was not into basketball, but I
was a swimmer, so, um, it was all sort of
about being that good citizen. I think tell me a
bit about your like, your inner life, as a child,
this boy growing up in Greensboro. I was the second point,
(03:02):
as I said, um, three years behind my older brother. Uh.
And I always looked up to him. And he was
the basketball star. He was, um, the kid who did
so well and and and that was sort of my
childhood is trying to look up to my older brother.
And and I specifically sort of remember him sitting on
(03:23):
the corner with him and he said, you know, all
I want in life is two cars a house in
the suburbs, two point three kids. I knew I was different, Um,
but I knew the dream or the desires and thoughts
that I had couldn't be the same. I couldn't give
voice to what those were. So I sort of adopted
(03:46):
his dream is my dream. I went to a Catholic school, Um,
we all did. We attended church every Sunday. Was very important.
I remember once our car ran out of gas on
the way to church, and instead of stopping to get gasps,
we walked to the rest of the way to church.
So that was kind of an important part of our
(04:06):
lives well. And so interesting. The idea of being quote
unquote normal, being average, being like everybody else, that being um,
that being a goal, that being something to aspire to.
It was it was a goal to be like all
the other kids. And it's funny when you're a kid,
(04:27):
you know how the other kids are, but also you
don't really know what their secret thoughts and desires are.
So as a child, you don't really know that until
you learn it, or you say something out of character
and then quickly something said, oh, that's not what I'm
supposed to say or be like. I remember playing with
(04:48):
some neighborhood kids. The rest of them were playing football
in the backyard, and there were two other boys that
had a football, and we were being kind of silly
and and walking to football down the driveway and sort
of dancing behind it. And I remember one of the
mothers saying, y'all are acting like a bunch of girls.
That kind of stuff stays with you, doesn't it. It does.
(05:12):
It's so interesting to just generally the nature of childhood,
because no kid wants to be different, and yet every kid,
every child has an inner life. Um, but the idea
of sharing that inner life is too scary. It doesn't happen,
and so there's that feeling of um. Nobody else feels
(05:34):
the way I do, which is of course where literature
comes in, because then when we read, we discover that
there are these characters who feel just like we do
and have in our lives that are so similar to ours.
But there's such an isolating feeling. I think that is
universal in childhood, but more so when there's something within
(05:55):
you where you really do feel like you're different from
the large your group that's trying to be quote unquote
normal average. Tell me a little bit about your mother.
I can see looking back now that she really wanted
the best for all of us. She wanted us to
(06:15):
excel at everything that we did, whether that was jobs
or sports um or for me, I played the piano
as well. So it was really important to her that
we presented our best image um to our family and
friends and society, and there was sort of one image
to portray that that was the best. In the sixties
(06:39):
and seventies, there was no internet, so there was no
sort of way of finding different people or connecting to
other people. You only knew what was happening in the
town that you were in, in that small radius, and
my mother was very much that way. Tell me a
bit about your dad. My father was an attorney UM,
(07:00):
and he was a litigator, so I think he used
up all his words during the day in court. When
he came home, he was a man of very few words. Uh.
He came home, dinner was on the table. We did
have one sort of fun thing when he came home.
Sometimes he would have chewing gum in his pocket. We
would all sort of punch each other and run to
the door to be the first one there to grab
(07:21):
the chewing gum out of his pocket. But then we
would sit down at the table. My mother would have
dinner ready. He would drink down scotch very quickly. He
would eat his food in a minute or two. And
so there were very few really words spoken between us.
And when I look back, I sort of see that
(07:43):
he was. He was missing a lot of the time.
Even before he left us, he was sort of not there.
Did you feel like you knew him? No, I don't
think I ever really knew exactly who he was. Looking back,
I know now who he is. He had a difficult
childhood as well. He was an only child and his
mother was an alcoholic um so he was sent to
(08:06):
live with his grandparents in Fletcher, North Carolina for a
while while his mother recovered. So as an adult, I
understand that as a kid, I didn't was in this
image conscious childhood in this traditional Southern family. There was
also the matter of the body, as in Bill's body.
(08:27):
I think our bodies are for many of us, a
source of embarrassment or shame. There's just something so messy,
so exposed, so physical about our bodies. This shame came
into play in Bill's early life. I was a swimmer
for most of my childhood. My brothers and I were
all painfully skinny. We just could not seem to gain weight.
(08:48):
And as as a boy, you don't want to be skinny,
and also too, it's sort of portrayed this weakness on
the outside that I felt the inside. And I remember
swimming at the City swim Me getting out, my mother's
sitting in the stands, and I go up and sit
(09:09):
next to her on the bleachers, and I remember her
comment was, you're so damn skinny. You need to press
weights like those other boys. Um so, so there was
no there wasn't really a comment about, wow, you did
a great job, you know, swimming. It cemented that feeling
that there was something wrong with me, not only inside,
(09:32):
but on the outside. You internalized that I did, and
then you, and you carried it with you. I did
carry it with me. I think when you have something
you consider ugly on the inside, that's all you can
see on the outside. When I looked in the mirror,
I just saw all of the flaws. What Bill considered
ugly on the inside was the awareness, not necessarily conscious knowledge,
(09:57):
but something else, something thrumming deep in his interior that
he wasn't attracted to girls. He felt something for boys,
something he knew he wasn't supposed to feel. I was
in college for two years at a piano performance major.
I had an opportunity to have a summer job with
my aunt, who lived in Denver, Colorado. She knew a
(10:20):
couple who owned the Lost gold Mine. It was a
gold mine where you could take tours through and I
would live with her. I remember my mother sitting me
down in the living room. She was a nurse, so
she was wearing her starched nursing whites, and she sat
down and said, okay, Bill, I want you to know
that your aunt is and she lowered her voice a
(10:40):
lesbian because you couldn't say that out loud. It was
almost like it was a curse word. And she said
to me, I want you to promise that you won't
let Sheila change you. I is that okay? And I'm
still not quite certain why she let me live with her.
If she was so afraid, she must have had some
sense of of who her son was. But she still
(11:02):
let me live with her for that summer. So two questions.
One is you you had a consciousness that you were
gay at that point? Yeah? Did you have language for it?
I didn't have language for it. You're exactly right. I
I could not say in my head that I'm gay,
and I never did. It just wasn't how I identified
and it wasn't an option. I knew it wasn't an option,
(11:23):
but I knew I had these thoughts and desires. So
I lived with my aunt for the summer. The Lost
gold Mine was owned by a couple of gay guys,
and it was a great summer. She eventually took me
to my first gay bar in Central City, of all places,
which is such a conservative passion. So we went into
(11:46):
the bar. I met a friend of hers don who
was twenty three. I was nineteen. I had a few drinks.
We walked out to the parking lot, and it was
the first time I kissed a man, and it was
the most amazing feeling. It was right and it was wrong,
(12:08):
and I knew that could never happen again. So now
you're twenty and you're back from your summer. Yes, And
as a matter of fact, that summer too, I remember
I um got a gym membership in Denver, and I
went to the gym as well, so I was a
little more fleshed out too, And so I was actually
feeling good about myself for sort of the first time.
(12:31):
And it felt good to have, you know, two or
three months of just being myself. But I came back
to North Carolina and I knew I had to tell
my mother. I knew I had to let her know that,
you know, the things that she said and the things
that I heard about gay people were wrong. I still
was not strong enough to say, Mom, I'm gay. What
(12:52):
I said was, you know, Mom, the love that Sheila
has for her girlfriend and the love that these other
people have, it's the same. And she was immediately incensed
and said, no, it's not that's disgusting. It's it's not
were her views informed primarily by her Catholicism, or by
(13:14):
community and culture, or all of the above, all of
the above. Yeah, I have actually spoke, you know, talked
to her, interrogated her a bit, since it was taboo,
That's what she told me. It was taboo, and I
didn't want you to experience that pain. You know, the
world would never alter, so I had to. So, now
(13:34):
you're back from your summer and you're feeling pretty good
about yourself. You've you've been able to be yourself for
three home months. What happens next? I was thrown right
back into this was so, I was thrown right back
into society in North Carolina. When you escape hundred miles
(13:56):
away from home, you fill this freedom. But when you
come act, it's sort of like the humidity of southern summer.
It's oppressive and you start to feel it and there's
your church again, and there's all the people you know.
And here was my mother saying this is wrong, this
is disgusting. You're never going to be happy. And it
(14:19):
wasn't just a one time thing. It was sort of Okay,
let's talk about this. As I came home from school
every day, do you want to talk to the priest
because the priest can help you. Do you want to
be a woman to My mother asked me, um, and
I just it was immediate. It was like, okay, this,
this is wrong, this is not good. Also, at the
(14:42):
same time, the AIDS epidemic had become national. It was
hidden for so long. I remember my aunt telling me
don't do poppers because they thought that's what caused it.
There was, you know, nobody really knew. But suddenly was
on the news and men were wasting away and here
was my body dysmorphia coming again. Okay, this is gay.
(15:04):
People are getting skinny and wasting away. And and so
it was the combination of all that guilt and shame
and being back that sort of drove me back into
the closet. We're going to take a quick break. We'll
be back in a moment. So Bill returned to the norm,
(15:34):
you know, wife, two point three kids, white picket fence.
In the South. In those days, people married young and
got on with it. His brother, his friends, they were
all getting married. He meets Catherine, the friend of a friend,
and he's drawn to her. She seems like a kindred
spirit to him. First time I met Catherine, there was
(15:56):
something I saw in her eyes. It was this this
look vulnerability. I can remember it so specifically, looking at
it and seeing something there that I connected with, and
I think it was the same thing I saw in
my eyes. She was adopted, and I've heard that adopted
kids often find each other because there's something about them
(16:17):
that connects them. I wasn't adopted, but it was feeling
like it didn't have parents, and so I think, you know,
we really connected on that level. It was our our
shared pain that we we didn't externalize, but you know,
we had it inside and so we connected. And how
long after that did you marry and begin a family?
(16:39):
We dated for a year. We dated for a while.
Um I remember introducing her to my brother and he
sort of said, she seems a little immature, And it
mattered to me so much what my older brother thought. Um,
So we stopped dating for a while. But then my
older brother got married and and Catherine, you know, I
(17:01):
called her up and said would you come with me
to his wedding and she was like, well, you didn't
call me, so I thought we were off. And when
I saw her again, um, well, she dolled up, right,
she was dogged up. You know. It was a nineteen eighties,
and she had the big hair and the shoulder pads,
and she had this tiny waist. And I remember all
(17:22):
the men they are sort of looking at her, like, wow,
she's beautiful. And I felt proud, like this is great.
And and she always had an amazing sense of humor,
and I think I love that about her too. So
I think at weddings, that's what happens, right you you're
with someone and you see all of this happiness and joy,
and you want to capture that and have that for yourself.
(17:45):
And was this the wedding of your older brother who
was admired and emulated and wanted to be like So
Bill and Catherine start to plan their wedding. The details
kind of take over the way wedding details. So often
do you talk about flower arrangements and place cards and
whether to serve chicken or duck breast, rather than actually
(18:06):
talking about what you're doing, which is committing to another
person for life. Bill had all kinds of doubts, but
he didn't articulate them, not to Catherine, not even to himself.
He was going to make the best of it. A
beautiful wedding would lead to a beautiful future. I remember
the night before my wedding, we had a rehearsal dinner,
(18:29):
and I remember thinking I should feel something different, I
should feel this immense joy and wonder and love, and
I'm not feeling it. But it's too late to change it.
Everybody's been invited, all the gifts are here, and I
can't go back. Yeah, you're reminding me of I mean,
(18:52):
I had a brief, ill fated marriage when I was
in my twenties, and I remember walking down the aisle
on the arm of my nineteenth century literature professor who
was standing in from my dad, who was no longer living,
and just thinking, this is a mistake. This is a mistake.
This is a mistake. Um. Yeah, it's not what you're
supposed to be feeling on your wedding day. Yeah. Katherine
(19:15):
and Bill begin their lives together, first in Tampa, Florida,
where he had a job working at a bank, but
Catherine was terribly homesick, so they packs up their stuff
and moved back to Greensboro, North Carolina. After a year,
Bill found another job and that's where their children were born.
Bill throws himself into his life as a family man.
(19:35):
He stuffs any feelings he has for men even further
down into the recesses of his psyche, it just isn't
going to happen. He loves being a dad to his
young daughters. He's a really hands on father, unlike his
own father, who not only was distant and absent, but
was known to be a full landerer. So this is
yet another reason why Bill is never going to cheat
(19:56):
on Catherine, not with anyone, so that part of his life,
the sexual romantic part, just ceases to exist for him.
The family moves a number of times as his daughters
go from babies to little kids to teenagers, and he
works his way up with the corporate ladder in the
banking business. I had moved from North Carolina to Virginia
(20:18):
for a job. That company declared bankruptcy and I found
a job in the northeast. My kids were teenagers. Then
we made the decision to move for my career. So
suddenly I was out of the conservative state of North
Carolina and Virginia and in the very liberal bastion of
(20:40):
New England. Same sex marriage had just been approved the
year we moved, and there was this cognitive dissonance inside
of me. So there was the combination of the move.
The kids were teenagers and not relying on me anymore.
And I met this guy who sort of affect and
me in a way I had never experienced before. He
(21:05):
was an ideal, He was funny, he was generous, he
was kind a lot of men in the South, they're
kind of guarded, you know, and they don't really express
their emotions and their feelings. This was the first guy
that did that, and it really affected me. Bill's feelings
for this man can't be expressed. It's way too dangerous.
(21:28):
So instead he finds another outlet for those feelings. The
skinny kid whose mom told him he really ought a
lift weights. That kid asserts himself big time. So I
began to feel those feelings and it became stronger. Because
of all of that, I was still feeling like that skinny,
(21:49):
ugly kid, and I wanted to sort of shore up
the outside to help shore up what was crumbling inside.
So I began going to the gym working out. It
was an obsession. It was a way to control something
in my life when everything else was spinning out of control.
(22:11):
And I remember the first I'm sort of clicking on
the by for steroids on the internet and it was
like all my life, I've been the good boy. I'm
going to do something now that is just for me.
I'm going to control this thing. And how did that
play out? With the steroids and within your I mean,
(22:31):
you're you're living this family life. You're in this house,
You've you've got Katherine, You've got your daughters, and you
have this other life, this secret life. It's sort of
like a double secret life. It's a secret on top
of a secret. It is. I remember getting them in
the mail and Katherine and the girls were sleeping. It
(22:54):
was a Saturday morning. So I got up and I
had planned it all out. I had printed out how
to do a steroid cycle stack. I did all my
research like the Internet was the greatest teacher. Looking back,
of course, now that's so foolish, but you know, I
felt like, oh, I verified it with several different sources
on the Internet. It was foolish. I got this in
(23:16):
the mail. I had no idea who the supplier was,
except it was someone in Eastern Europe. I actually, in
order to get the steroids, my father had died and
he left me in I ra a and I needed
to cash a check every year, and I used that
money to buy the steroids, and I wired it to
the supplier. I went down to the bathroom, closed the door,
(23:40):
and I remember looking in the mirror, thinking, all right,
am I really going to do this? Is this what
I'm gonna do? And I filled up the syringe, pulled
down my pants, stuck it in, pushed the plunger in,
and then pulled the needle out. And I sat there waiting,
thinking how fast is this going to work? Is this
(24:00):
going to make me strong right away? Is it going
to cause a heart attack? Of course, none of that happened, um,
But over the weeks it became more of an obsession.
And then I began to see the scale move from
one sixty one seventy, and I became really hungry, finishing
(24:20):
my plate, finishing the girl's plates. It's interesting because I
was spiraling down, but somehow Catherine was becoming stronger in
a way. I'm not sure if she saw, Okay, something's
terribly wrong with her husband, um, but she had struggled
for a while, you know, in finding her birth family
(24:42):
and and all the results of that. But she started
to sort of question me, like what's going on? Like
you're a lot bigger and like, you're going to the
gym all the time, is you tell me if something
was wrong? And of course I was like, no, no,
I'm just stressed at work and this is just my
way of just beating distress. Within your marriage to Catherine,
(25:04):
during those years and the years prior, was there a
kind of accommodation in terms of intimacy. Catherine Um struggled
for a while with i'll call it sadness, just just
to call it that. Um she was adopted, she found
her birth family, who was wonderful. It was a wonderful
(25:26):
birth family, and as it turned out, her birth mother
married her birth father and they had another child, so
she was given up so that she could have a
two parent family. Her adopted father died when she was five,
so she didn't have that. But here was this family
that gave her up, who did have that, and a
sister and that, and she struggled with that. She always
(25:51):
wanted a family that would sort of choose her and
not regret their decision. So she struggled a long time.
And so intimacy in the beginning, it was we were
very intimate. As the years progressed, it became less and
less frequent and I would say, oh, this is what
(26:11):
all married couples do, this is what happens to all
married couples. And because she was struggling with some of
this sadness too, she was less frequently interested in it.
So I think that was sort of the accommodation. But
there was a certainly times where she would say, why
don't you ever kiss me? Why don't you kiss me
the way we did when we dated? You know, I
(26:32):
shouldn't be the one who's initiating it all the time.
This is what she said. I would listen to that
and say, Okay, I've got to make a note to
make sure that I do initiate it. And I do that.
But I'm sure in her mind it was always playing
behind it that there's something wrong, and is that thing
that's wrong me? And so I think she began to
(26:55):
think there was something wrong with her, which was extremely
painful for me because I knew what was happening, and
I was causing her to feel less desirable. And you
loved her. I did love her. That love comes through
so strongly in Bill's memoir. His bond with Catherine may
(27:17):
not have been romantic or sexual, but it was love,
So it would be a painful thing to know you're
causing the person you love pain, or that she's blaming
herself for something that's got nothing to do with her.
For so many years of our marriage, she always worked
at home, so I was always sort of the breadwinner
and the caretaker. Even when the kids were born. Um,
(27:40):
Katherine had a C section with both of them, so
I would get up with the kids in the middle
of the night. So I was always the one to
sort of take care of things. And I sort of
prided myself and that I love doing that, and and
I love taking care of Catherine as well, but I
wasn't taking care of her completely. So this period of
time where your body is changing, there is a moment
(28:03):
where Catherine finds the steroids. Yeah, the way that that
happened is I would I She was beginning to doubt,
of course, because no man goes from hundred and fifty
pounds pounds and suddenly as acne on his back. There
was a package that came in the mail well after Christmas, Um,
(28:28):
and I had told her, you know, I might be
getting stuff in the mail and it might be a
Christmas gifts. Don't open it clever. She did she she
saw this package. It was from Moldova and um I
she told me, well, their writing was sort of so
interesting and intricate, and when I opened it up, the
vial of steroids was wrapped in this newspaper that was
(28:51):
very intricately wrapped, and so she thought, oh, it's a gift.
You know. The girls were with her and she's like,
should we open it. My daughters were with her and
they opened it, and unfortunately it was all of them
that discovered sort of this vial of amber fluid at
the same time. So when I came home that night,
(29:13):
she actually called me at work and said, all right,
you need to come home. Now. We're going to pause
for a moment. Bill comes home, his wife and his
(29:34):
girls are all sitting at the kitchen counter, very solemn,
just sitting there staring at him. Catherine opens up her
hand and in her palm is the vial of steroids.
At first, Bill is just plain angry she opened his mail,
violated his privacy. He knows this is the wrong response,
but he just can't help it. His daughter, Claire says,
(29:57):
I think I know where the rest of his stashes.
She's noticed that Bill has always been protective of his
work back, he doesn't let it out of his sight.
She grabs his bag, pulls out a brown paper bag
filled with syringes, and Catherine Catherine confiscates it all. It
must have been a terrible feeling on top of a
(30:18):
terrible feeling, because those steroids are the only way that
Bill is managing to control his shame, guilt, and desires.
So how long after this does she confront you and
straight out ask you if you're gay? It took a
couple of months after that actually before she confronted me.
(30:41):
That's so interesting because I think we only ask what
we're ready to know, and it would seem so completely
clear once that discovery of the steroids were made, plus
everything else that had come to for that that was
(31:02):
the case. But it seems like she couldn't take in
more than she could handle until she was able to
ask the next logical question. Right, She had to be
prepared if she asked that question for what the answer was,
and that answer might destroy everything she always knew. So
(31:23):
I think it was a series of steps to discovering
what the true nature of the secret was. We were
driving to Walmart to get some supplies for the girls
for school, and I could see she was very quiet
and she was mulling something over and she said, very quickly, okay,
(31:45):
just pull over, pull over, parked the car. I got
to ask you this or I never will. And I
knew in I had what she was going to ask me,
but I didn't know what my answer would be until
we parked there, and I owed her the truth. When
you love someone, you can't lie to them. You've got
(32:08):
to stand in the truth. And even though I knew
it would destroy everything I built, because everything was built
on that lie everything, I owed her the truth. And
what was your response to Catherine when she asked you
if you were gay? I don't want to be. And
(32:30):
it was exactly what I was thinking. And that was
also the truth of your entire life, which is you
didn't want to be exactly I had tried so hard
not to be. So after telling Catherine, there was this
immediate sense of relief. Oh my god, I've finally told somebody,
(32:54):
and the person I've told is my wife. In some
ways it felt really right, and in some ways it
felt really wrong. Catherine had been with Bill all those years.
She deserved to be the one who knew the truth
to begin with. For a while, the two of them
had a renewed connection because they both knew a secret
(33:16):
no one else knew. They clung to each other. They wondered,
where do we go from here? Do we stay together?
Because we got the kids, the house, the job. Each night,
as they laid in bed, they talked it through. Eventually
they came to the conclusion that they both deserved to
be happy and they needed to tell the kids. It
wasn't fair to lie to them. Their girls were at
(33:38):
this point fourteen and sixteen, Bill and Catherine call a
family meeting on a weekend afternoon. Okay, girls, I want
you to know something. I'm the same person today that
I was yesterday, but I want you to know this
about me. I'm gay. It was the thing he never
wanted to say to them, to anyone. Well, that makes sense,
(34:02):
one of them says, are you getting a divorce? The
other asks, we're talking about it? Your parents respond, does
this mean we'll have to move again? So many questions
and the sound of a house so carefully constructed breaking apart.
You wrote a really beautiful modern love column in The
(34:25):
New York Times about the last time that Catherine cuts
your hair. She had always cut your hair throughout your
entire decades long marriage. Was it two sixty four haircuts?
Two and sixty four haircuts? And it's this beautiful piece
about her giving you the last haircut. You know it's
going to be the last haircut, and actually you asked
(34:46):
her to just shave your head, and she shaves your head,
and she's crying as she's shaving your head. It's really powerful.
So after after we decided to get a divorce and
I came out to the children, I was sort of
so racked with shame and guilt. Then Catherine didn't have
a support system in the Northeast, and she felt like
(35:07):
she just had to take the girls back to Virginia,
where we had lived for nine years, where they would
have a support system. So she had moved back, and
I helped them buy a house and I set up
the house, and I would go back every weekend, using
all these miles to spend time with them, to set
up the house, to get things ready. And finally, after
(35:29):
a while, Catherine had had enough, like we can't keep pretending.
You can't keep coming back here every weekend and pretending
that we're a married couple. It's too hard on me.
I've got to move on um. And she had always
cut my hair. Nobody else had cut my hair. I
don't know why I was so particular about it, but
(35:49):
she had done it all of those times. And I
remember just getting the briefcase because we wouldn't even say anything.
If I got the briefcase that had the haircutting equipment
in it. She okay, it's time for a hair cut.
So I got it. She puts the cape on me
and she's cutting my hair, and that's when she's saying,
you can't stay here again. And so she asked me,
(36:13):
who's going to cut your hair? After all this time,
it was our most in a way, our most intimate
act because she would have her hands on my head
and in my hair. And so I thought, well, I
don't know who's going to cut my hair, so I
just want you to shave it all off. And so
she did. And when she saw me, she saw me
(36:36):
the person with no hair shaved off, and it was
a different man. And so for her that was shocking,
and she knew she was never going to cut it again.
And here was this man who's no longer her husband.
And so for me, that is just sort of the
heart of the book and why I published it in
(36:56):
modern Love, because we did have this love, in this intimacy,
and it was expressed through two hundred and sixty four haircuts.
And if she's cut my hair all these years, I'm
gonna shave it and nobody else is going to cut it.
Is a way to start new. So, speaking of starting new,
talk about your life today. Life today is really good.
(37:21):
After all of that. I had a few tragic encounters
with men, of course, because after forty some years, dating
men for the first time was a whole new experience.
But then I met another father named Paul, who has
three children, and I've written him about him in my book,
(37:43):
and my brother told me, you make Paul too perfect, Like, well,
he is perfect. We're married, we have five kids between us,
three of them still live with us there in their twenties.
He has a great relationship with his ex wife because
he was married to a woman before, and his ex
wife is married and has another child. And my ex
(38:05):
wife now is engaged to somebody. Um he has the
same name as me. We talked on the phone a
week ago and she asked if Paul and I would
come to her wedding, So we're all in a really
great place. It took this bomb to explode, to sort
(38:26):
of blow things apart so that we could come back
together in a new configuration, which was in truth instead
of lies, and in real love instead of this sort
of faking. Yet, so what happens when shame goes away?
When a secret is no longer sitting in any corner
(38:51):
or stuffed under any rug? What does it feel like
to walk through life? Or I don't want to put
words in your mouth? Is that the case that you
walk through life now without that feeling of something wrong
being on the inside? You're exactly right, it is. It's
gone away. You have an energy you never thought you
(39:13):
would have before. You don't have to hide pronouns, you
don't have to hide you know, when you're in the closet,
it's not just a part of you, it's all of you.
And when you step out of that, you can suddenly
see things so clearly. And I always wanted to write,
but I couldn't write because my words weren't authentic. Now
(39:35):
I had this sudden creativity and this energy, and I'm
writing and reaching out to people who were in the
same situation and helping them, And it is night and day.
It is night and day when you get rid of
a secret. And that's I think the way to see it.
It was dark before and now it's light. I asked
(39:59):
Bill to me a pass from his memoir, the Lie
that to me perfectly encapsulates the beauty and the pathos
of his story and the way ultimately that love wins.
Oh and when it comes to love, there's one more thing.
After our interview, Bill wrote to me to make sure
I understood that his mother, the same mother who once
(40:19):
berated him and shamed him for being gay, is his
fiercest and most loving supporter today. So there's that in
the richness, the fullness, the amazing span of a life
he never could have imagined. If this were a film
playing out in the camera, pand you would see a
(40:40):
family of four standing silently by the front door, with
no sense of whether they were coming or going. Pulling
further back, a set of upset kitchen chair is lying
on their backs, and then drifting above the house, and
then old branches of leafless trees hovering over the roof.
We're chattering squirrels, anst and mocked. A barking dog just
(41:03):
behind this house, where other similar homes, where warm yellow
lights began to illuminate windows, and the headlights of cars
cast yellow triangles in the dark driveways. Behind the doors
of these homes, you might hear the muffled cries of
excited children running toward the front door, holding out their
hands and shouting Daddy's home. I'd like to thank my guest,
(41:34):
William Dameron, for sharing his story today. He is the
author of The Lie, a memoir of two marriages, cat fishing,
and coming Out. You can find out more about Bill
at www dot William Dameron dot com. Family Secrets is
an iHeart Media production. Dylan Fagan is the supervising producer,
(41:55):
Lowell Bolante is the audio engineer, and Julie Douglas is
the executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd
like to share, you can get in touch with us
at listener mail at Family Secrets podcast dot com, and
you can also find us on Instagram at Danny Writer,
and Facebook at Family Secrets Pod and Twitter at fami
(42:16):
Secrets Pod. For more about my book Inheritance, visit Danny
Shapiro dot com. For more podcasts. For my Heart Radio,
visit the I heart radio, app, Apple podcasts, or wherever
(42:36):
you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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