Kintsugi Heroes
Gene Moore
Gene Moore spent 20 years in silence building a paradigm that dismantles homophobia by revealing it as a system that harms everyone.
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Gene Moore spent fourteen years in a marriage, seeing a Christian psychologist who promised to cure him of what he experienced as sinful desire. He was taught that his sexuality was not who he was, but rather a problem that prayer and the right thinking would resolve. When he finally came out, he lost everything: his place in the evangelical Christian world, his marriage, his identity as he had known it. He nearly took his own life before the break came.
After moving to the South Pacific to rebuild, Gene eventually enrolled in a PhD studying the history of gay identity. This choice was driven by a single question: what is the closet, and how does it damage people? His answer took twenty years to fully form. In 2000, while working with the New Zealand military, Gene discovered research by David Plummer showing that homophobia itself, not fear of homosexuality, is what drives men to perform exaggerated masculinity. Boys learn to fear being slurred as gay, not to hate gay people. This fear becomes invisible because admitting it would suggest you might actually be gay. Gene realised the closet is not a place but a performance, and that straight men are trapped in the same performance as gay men, both policing themselves and each other through this unspoken terror.
Working with military and police internationally, Gene found that when men understand how they are being victimised by this system, they become reliable allies, not through guilt but through enlightened self-interest. A hostile Navy captain became the first to call for action. An entire ship reported a calm they had never experienced before. For two decades Gene held this paradigm in silence due to safety concerns. On his birthday in 2023, which is also World Suicide Prevention Day, he made a choice: he could no longer keep this to himself. The lives it could save demanded he speak.
⚠️ Content advisory: this episode discusses grief & loss, which some listeners may find distressing.
If you need support, you're not alone. Help is available: • Lifeline (24/7 crisis support): 13 11 14 · lifeline.org.au • GriefLine: 1300 845 745 · griefline.org.au
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