To Live Is To Be Vulnerable
This came across my Facebook stream yesterday. Another chapter in the old heartbreaking story of what bigotry has done to our lives…
Paul Bettany’s father came out at 63, fell in love with a man, and spent 20 happy years with him. Then his partner died – and what happened next is heartbreaking.
While most people know him as Vision, far fewer know about the story that shaped him. After his father Thane’s partner Andy Clark died in 2015, the elder Bettany – in his 80s and a lifelong Catholic – went back into the closet.
He told people it had all been “a big misunderstanding” because he was “concerned about getting past Peter through the pearly gates.”
Paul has spoken openly about how devastating that was to witness. “He was unable to mourn the person who I think was the love of his life,” he said.
It’s part of what drew Paul to star in “Uncle Frank”, playing a closeted gay professor – his very first film role had been in an adaptation of the gay play “Bent”.
“I want everybody to just live authentically as the person they are,” Paul has said. “However hard that is, it’s absolutely better than pretending to be something other than you are.”
I have witnessed people my age and younger going back into the closet after a period of outedness rather than stand up to the pressures of family, religion or career. I’ve stood up to those same pressures and I know it can be frightening and painful, but the alternative is, as C.S. Lewis said in a different context, damnation.
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation.” -C. S. Lewis, “The Four Loves”.
