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Slave to Secrecy.
26-Sep-10The older my former students get, the more astonished I am by them – these people I knew as children now lead lives whose richness and complexity equals or exceeds mine, and it occasions strange thoughts in me – a kind of autumn feeling, watching the harvest come in, so fast, it seems.
One story just crossed my inbox today – an article in the Daily Record about Scott Ruesterholz, the young man who held together “my” debate team while my thoughts were elsewhere, who just published a book about freeing himself from secrecy – in this case, his homosexuality. Like me, he started as quite the conservative. We’ll see where he ends up.
In the article the school’s headmaster, Brother Paul Diveny, comes off wonderfully, as does the school as a whole – a Catholic institution committed to loving its students first. That this should be in question at an institution dedicated to taking Christ as its model is, of course, the (in the article unstated) problem.
I can say, from spending many years in all-boys Catholic schools, that to publicly proclaim that you are gay in a school assembly takes astonishing courage – in fact, it may well have been this courage which made all the boys instinctively respect it so much. And those of us who are older respect it even more – we know how hard it is to be yourself in front of even one other person.