It's absurd that David Laws, the Cabinet Minister who has just resigned after 18 days in the job, felt he still had to conceal his homosexuality at the age of 44.
He resigned over expenses-fiddling, but in the process he was outed as gay and having a quasi-secret relationship with another man.
We don't know exactly why he was so defensive about his sexuality. Presumably from fear of other people's reactions - his parents, his friends, his work colleagues, the media, the public. Who knows?
But it's extraordinary, and sad, that a middle-aged man, a successful, well-connected, well-heeled millionaire, should feel it necessary to hide a major aspect of his personal life and go to such lengths to fabricate a heterosexual facade that falsified his real self.
Asked about his domestic situation a week ago, he declared himself to be "single". Asked whether he was paying rent to a sexual partner, he implied the relationship was not sexual but purely platonic. The constant wriggling and evasiveness must have been an agonising ordeal, yet he had been doing it for decades.
I should imagine that after he has got over the initial shock and dismay of being unexpectedly outed, he will be relieved that the truth has finally emerged and he can freely admit his sexuality and drop the endless, excruciating pretence.
It's ridiculous that so many years after homosexuality was decriminalised, when so many gay men and lesbians have no reservations about revealing their sexuality to the world, there are still many people like David Laws who feel compelled for one reason or another to keep their gayness under wraps like some tawdry, squalid obsession.
Will this sense of shame never disappear?
Pic: David Laws