My chosen specialty of reproductive medicine has provided many wonderful opportunities, including the ability to help all kinds of people to have children and to build families of their own.
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It took time, a little therapy, and some gradual societal change, before I could start blending my personal and professional lives together. Throughout the ’90s I worked hard to balance being “out and proud” in my personal life, while keeping it walled off from my professional life. That foundation helped me take the next step, coming out to my sister, and being introduced to my boyfriend’s parents as a “gay man.” As seemingly all of us have experienced, this seemed impossible just a couple years earlier. It was there that I met my very first boyfriend and learned that I could be gay and still be accepted by a community. I always looked forward to my Saturday nights at the dance bar. My nights dancing, drinking, and talking with new friends made me feel like it was OK to feel the things that I had always shamed in myself. It felt so comfortable, so real, and so… “normal.” Finally. Men of all types, shapes, sizes and ages were dancing the night away and celebrating their gay lives.
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I would walk quickly, head down, from my parked Volkswagen Rabbit to the bar entrance on a Saturday night.Īs soon as I entered Backstreet I could feel and hear the exuberant and welcoming spirit. It was located in an area known for crime, so the parking lot was well-lit and bustling with security guards - guards I did not want to see me walking in or out of said bar. The first gay bar I ever visited was called Backstreet, in a strip mall in Detroit. Yet as I approached my mid-20s in Detroit, I realized more and more that I couldn’t keep hiding myself from everyone, or life and happiness would pass me by.įortunately, the secret gay world was alive and flourishing. Even before we knew what AIDS was - in the very early ’80s it was just called the “gay cancer” - gay men lived in fear of public reaction.
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How could I ever be a trusted doctor in the community if I had sex with men? Being gay was still worse than a dirty word. Being an aspiring doctor, I imagined people’s irrational fears would run to protecting themselves as well as their children, from a gay man. In the ’80s and ’90s it was not only “not cool” to be gay, it was politically high-risk for career aspirations. That was what fear of public reprisal did to so many gay men, particularly professionals, my age. If I had to bury the potential of complete personal happiness, so be it - ny professional life was too important. Nothing, I had decided, would interfere with my goal to become a physician and a respected member of the community.
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I was excellent at avoiding my sexual identity issues.
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I had learned how to hide myself in books and to suppress my sexuality for years while studying to gain admission to medical school. Keeping my sexuality a secret to virtually everyone through high school and college was paramount.
In medical school in Detroit planting the seeds for my future, having just finished my undergrad at the University of Michigan, I was as closeted as could be. In Michigan, where I went to school, sex between two men was, shockingly, illegal. There were no Will & Grace or Mitchell and Cameron on TV. Growing up, I had no gay friends that I knew of. When I was a young medical student in the early 1980s, the gay world was a complete unknown to me.