A Tennessee Farmer Reflects On His 70-Year Journey Out Of The Closet

"[I had] no word for it at all," says Hector Black, 90, of being gay. "I had no idea what it was."

From: NewNowNext

Ninety-year-old Hector Black lives in rural Tennessee. His wife, Susie, passed away this summer and is buried not far from the house Black built for them decades ago.

And while they had what he paints as a happy marriage, Black tells All Things Considered this week that he lived with a terrible burden for most of his life: He was gay.

“I felt like nobody in the whole dang world was a weirdo like me,” he recalls of his first inkling about his sexuality.

“[I had] no word for it at all… I had no idea what it was. All I knew was that I was attracted to men.”

Experimentation came as a student at Harvard in the 1940s—an experience he found horrifying.

“Then, after a few months, I started thinking about it and then I realized that I’d wanted to experience this again.”

Black served in the Army during WWII and, with an interest in communal living and social justice, later moved to a commune in Paraguay.

But his desire for other men didn’t abate.

He tried treatment to “cure” his homosexuality—taking estrogen treatments until the hormones made him start growing breasts.

It was around that time that he met Susie Maendel, who would become his wife.

“I felt that I was cured. I don’t think I’d have done it otherwise,” Black insists of his marrying Susie. “It wouldn’t have been right.”

But eventually he realized he wasn’t “cured” at all.

“I was at the nursery… there was a young fellow who was sort of giving me the eye.”

Black made plans to see the man but told his wife he had to go “a meeting.” The ruse fell apart when, in front of Susie, a friend asked him why he wasn’t at the meeting.

An emotional wreck, he told her the truth, promising never to do it again.

Black became active in the civil-rights movement of the 1960s—moving his family to Atlanta, where they were the only white people in an African-American neighborhood.

“There were some things just amazing how being gay helped me to understand what it means to be different,” he says.

“I could blend in— the African-Americans could never blend in—but I knew what it was like to be a despised minority.

But Atlanta was a big city and had lots of temptation for a closeted gay man. He eventually moved his family to Cookeville, Tennessee, where he hoped he could get way from all that.

As it turned out, the Blacks moved to a part of the state that was home to an underground gay commune.

But even then, he stayed in the closet.

He finally came out at age 70, prompted by his daughter’s own disclosure that she was a lesbian.

“We both loved her just as much as ever—more even because I knew how much she had been through, how much she suffered because of who she was,” recalls Black, who worked in nurseries and on organic farms. “I just said ‘This is it. How can I love her and hate myself for what I am?'”

He offered Susie a divorce. She said no, but told him he was free to find someone.

“And she said she hoped she’d like him.”

Though he’s come a long way, Black will probably never be as at ease with his sexuality as someone of a younger generation.

But while he regrets some of the choices he’s made, he doesn’t regret the life he’s led. Suffering, he believes, can be a doorway to understanding and love.

And he’s had his share of suffering: In 2000, Hector and Susie’s daughter Patricia was raped and murdered. They petitioned the judge not to give her killer the death penalty, and Hector even began a correspondence with the man.

“Mother Teresa said, Lord, break my heart so completely that the whole world falls in. I can’t say that… but I really am grateful that my heart has been broken a good many times, because it does help me to love.”

Below, listen to Hector Black tell his story on All Things Considered.