Some of us are outcasts from "go". I was one of those children. Everybody knew I was different, even me. I didn’t seek out other kids to play with. I didn’t want to. We lived in the middle of nowhere when I was little, and I was happiest deep in the woods alone. That was probably a relief for my mother, who had no idea how to protect me from other kids. I had no friends. I was intelligent, but socially awkward. I didn’t have a clue how to relate to people. I was ugly. I was effeminate. I liked flowers and plants and the powers of nature. I read books and drew pictures of horses and irises and giant trees.
I had no interest in sports or cars or any of the things little boys were supposed to like. I gravitated toward little girls and found them less intimidating and more likely to like the same things I did. They thought I was icky. I probably was.
One winter, I taught myself to crochet. I took a skein of my mother’s leftover yarn, and crocheted a sweater-vest for a Cabbage Patch Doll my grandmother had given me for Christmas. (Grandma had provided my cash-strapped parents the money to purchase it when I wanted nothing else.) It just so happened that the yarn was rainbow yarn. (Uh-oh, you're thinking.)
The sweater-vest was adorable. When my grandmother visited us from halfway across the country the following summer and asked to see the doll, I proudly brought him out. Grandma, always an eye for detail, immediately noticed the rainbow sweater-vest and asked my mother where on Earth she had found such an adorable accessory.
"I don’t know," said Mom, completely flabbergasted. She looked at me. "Sugar, where did you get this?"
Little seven-year-old me looked up, proud as punch, and said, "I made it!"
My grandmother stared at my mother. In an even, almost deadpan, unnaturally measured tone I now recognize, my grandmother said, "Why, Cathy...He. Made. It."
What a carefully enunciated expression of diapproval.
Years later, in high school, I was even more outcast than I had been as a youngster. I still had no friends. I still had no idea how to relate to people. I was still ugly, and I was as effeminate as ever. The "fagmeat" taunts my brother used – for which he apologized after I came out – echoed in the halls of my school. No one was lower on the totem pole than the class fag, and that was me. I can recall faces of people calling me names in the hall, but I’ll never know their names. I can still remember the girl who walked up to me and slapped me across the face, just for being me – I didn’t fight back, and I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t dare.
I didn’t actually think I was gay, either. I didn’t really know what gay was. I was horrified at the thought, but also knew I had attractions to other guys. I couldn’t explain it, but I knew it was there. I convinced myself they were the normal stirrings of a horny teenager whose hormones were so out-of-control that they were just misfiring in any and every direction. I had interest in girls, too, I reasoned. It was normal. The attractions to women would remain and the others would fade away as I grew older.
They didn’t.
I prayed. I willed them to go away. I tried to transfer my attraction onto girls at school. I punished myself, controlling what I ate and wore and did, depriving myself of things if I felt an attraction to a male. The older I got, the more the dissonance between my denials of my sexuality and reality panicked me. I knew there was something deeply wrong growing within me, and I begged myself to stand up to it. It was like a long slow slide down a mountainside covered in gravel, clawing at the slope trying to get back up to the ridge, but never finding full traction, always backsliding toward a ledge over which there only seemed to be a dark chasm.
In September of 1993, I fell off the edge.
One afternoon, I was sitting in my bedroom, door closed, thinking about the first person who had been nice to me in a long time. I was beginning to think T was my friend. He was in my history class. We talked on the phone, had hung out together, and he treated me like a normal person. He was new to the school our senior year – and so didn’t have the long history of knowing that he should never, ever, ever be talking to me. And I thought he hung the moon.
Lying there thinking about him, I realized I wanted to kiss him. It was about 4:30 on September 17th that reality hit me with the strength of a 2x4 in a hurricane. In a hurry, I figured out what "gay" is.
"Holy shit," I said. "I’m a fag!"
I clapped my hand over my mouth, ashamed, afraid my mother had heard me from downstairs. I had unknowingly done something really healthy, psychologically – probably the first healthy thing I’d done in years. I would later call this the point at which I came out to myself. At the same time, my estimation of myself dropped through the floor. Everything everyone said about me was true. I wasn’t just awkward, effeminate, and ugly. I was a fag. But at least I knew it.
I was inculcated with many stereotypes of what gay men are. My mother, a teacher, taught me that we’re indiscriminate sluts. I recall her talking about a drama teacher from a different school, telling my father that he had propositioned every single male teacher he ran into at a district-wide meeting (looking back, I suspect that’s far from the truth, but you know that if a gay man is talking to a man it’s only because he wants sex). My father taught me that we were shameful predators – he said we only happened upon other men in public restrooms for sex (my mother later confirmed this and said it had happened to my father in a rest area on Interstate 35 once). My brother and sister and schoolmates taught me that gay men were worthy of nothing but ridicule. I’m sure they learned this from adults like my grandmother, who told me that AIDS was God’s punishment for homosexuals.
We had a teacher at school who was a stereotypically effeminate, well-read, well-dressed man. He was never married, an excellent, much-awarded teacher, and subject to widespread derision. He never publicly clarified his sexuality. He was interested in plants, as I was – and one year, when he was to be out of the country for most of the summer, he asked me if I might be interested in taking care of his extensive houseplant collection while he was away. I thought it would be great. My mother forbade it and explained to me that Mr. K was dangerous and known for having young men over to his home.
How I wish I had had the opportunity to even talk to a role model of any kind.
In the weeks after I had come out to myself, I started to explore what I could find out about "gay". These were the days before Google. Not knowing where else to search, I furtively looked up "gay" in the Yellow Pages. It was there. There was a bookstore, and I willfully lied to my parents for the first time to make a trip to it. I was terrified. I parked several blocks away from it and walked past it several times. I ducked inside hurriedly, and looked around. It looked like your average bookstore. Then I realized there were books I could never have imagined finding. There were books like The Joy of Gay Sex, which I thumbed through in a corner, fascinated and mildly horrified at the same time (I wasn’t ready to learn about fisting yet...really, I wasn’t...but that was the first page I found). There were political books. There were comedies. There was a whole section about talking to family about being gay (never, I thought). And there were love stories. There were love stories. I learned in that bookstore that gay people can fall in love.
There was also a treasure trove of porn, of course, which was an education all its own. I even bought a magazine – any magazine; I was so embarrassed, I just grabbed it and paid for it in 30 seconds – I almost left the change on the counter. But I went home changed. I went home with a lifeline. I had to go back.
A couple weeks later, on a Sunday afternoon, I did. As I looked at the magazines and books, another guy watched me, and I tried to look back at him unnoticed. I didn’t know what to do. He motioned me out the door to talk to him. He was attractive, a little exotic-looking. I followed him and he asked me if I was interested. Not knowing what I was supposed to be interested in, but intensely curious, I simply said yes, and followed him to his car. He drove us to his apartment. He was college student. I learned a lot of new things that afternoon, but probably not the things you expect I did. I don’t want to go into detail. He raped me – and thought he was fantastic for doing it. I remember the last thing he said before I left. As he stroked my cheek, he said, "You’re going to grow up into a heartbreaker."
The following winter was long, and dark, and suicidal. I don’t remember very much of it. I just remember a headlong dive into Hell. I buried myself in the closet and in my studies and avoided people, including the fledgling friend who had unwittingly caused me to come out to myself. It wasn’t until well over a year later, during my first semester of college, that I began to re-question my sexuality.
That December, I came home on an unusually long break between final exams. I had a week of peace at the house to study. The peace left me considering the idea of coming out to my mother. Playing a game of solitaire during my last night there, I decided that if I won, I’d tell my mother I’m gay (an unlikely prospect, I figured). The game went longer than usual, and at some point, I realized I was going to win. As I put the last card in place, I became so nervous that I knocked everything off the table on which I played. I followed through on my promise, fully expecting to be thrown out of the house and disowned.
Our family is, unsurprisingly, unusual. In many stereotypes, when a son clarifies for the family that he is gay, the men of the family react badly, and the women are accepting and shelter the son from them. My family did the exact opposite. My father said, "You know, this isn’t what I want for you. This is going to make your life harder, and I want things to be easier for you. But you are my son, and I support you. Do you have a boyfriend?"
My mother didn’t speak to me for 7 months.
My sister took a religious right turn, accusing my father of "having a party for the gays". She got over the religious part, but never really recovered from the homophobia. It continues even today.
I didn’t expect my brother to be supportive. He had decidedto make fun of me, as young males in a culture that denigrates homosexuality often do, by labeling me as a homosexual from the time we were very, very young. I recall once spilling my milk when I was very young. "Mom!" he called. "The homosexual spilled his milk!" As we grew up, he nicknamed me "Fagmeat" and called me any and every variation of the name he could think of. When Alexander Haig did his much derided "I am in control" news conference after President Reagan was shot, I became "Alexander Faig" for a while. I didn’t actually come out to my brother; he found out by other means.
He was furious. It wasn’t because I was gay – it was because I hadn’t told him. His only question: "Are you happy?" I was. "Great," he said. "Bring your boyfriend by our place for dinner." I did. Never an issue. It was great to stop hiding who I was – a tremendous weight off the shoulders of a very depressed young man.
I had been through Hell to get to that point.
So the following summer, when my grandmother again came to visit, I was in a very different place from the little boy who had crocheted the rainbow sweater vest. Among the gay genes I am blessed with is the hairdoing gene. My mother had grown her hair long, and didn’t know how to French-braid it. Her newly-out gay son, of course, did, and so I stood behind her at the kitchen table one summer morning, braiding her hair. My sister sat in the next room reading. My grandmother walked into the kitchen to get a cup of coffee, spotted me braiding my mother’s hair, and abruptly halted.
"Sugar...you know what they say about men who do women’s hair," she started, and then trailed off. I stopped mid-braid and looked out the window. In the next room, my sister uttered an audible gasp, unsure what I’d say. All the color drained from my mother’s face, as she, too, faced what might come next from her 19-year-old son.
I looked my grandmother in the eye and said, "Yes, grandma. They’re dexterous, and very handsome."
Without a word, Grandma pivoted around and walked back up the stairs. As my sister howled into a pillow in the next room, all the color returned to my mother’s face with reinforcements. "Good save," she said. I beamed, and secured the end of the braid with a hairband. Proudly.
******************************
Gay kids shouldn’t have to go through the abject Hell I did. No kid should. During my 20s, I talked to a lot of other gay folks about what they went through, and, sans the rape, which still complicates my life, what I experienced didn’t seem all that uncommon. The self-loathing, the self-blame, the praying, begging, and pleading to be made normal, the long, dark, lonely journey to discovering that there was really, honestly, not a damn thing wrong with being gay – all far too common. Too many kids didn’t survive that journey. A lot of them killed themselves. I’m certain that at least two of the four suicides I knew of during my senior year in high school were gay kids. I was very close to having been a third.
One of the most amazing things that LGBT folks can be is ourselves. Openly, truly, honestly ourselves. If no other pro-LGBT legislation passes during the Obama administration’s tenure, I hope the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) does – because then we can come out at work, anywhere in the nation, and live just that much more openly. The more people see us, the more people know us, the more people grow accustomed to us, the more they realize that we’re just people. We live, we work, we love, we raise families and, yes, many of us would really like to get married, preferably in our hometowns, surrounded by family and friends, just like anyone else. I hope Mainers don’t deny their LGBT neighbors that right tomorrow.
So much has changed since I was a kid. Kids come out in high school, heck, even in junior high now. Back when I used to date younger men, I knew guys (several years my junior) who had come out as young as 14. I couldn’t possibly have done that, especially not in Texas where these guys grew up – but they did. And their schools generally embraced them. We’re far from out of the woods, but people are seeing gay people as part of the American patchwork. They’re seeing us marry now. They’re realizing that we, too, make homes and raise families. We’re proud. We’re visible. We’re winning.
It’s far from over. But I am hopeful that tomorrow, we will see the first hints that the tide has begun to turn, and that someday no gay American boy or girl will live what I and many others have survived. This is my prayer for Kalamazoo. This is my prayer for Washington. This is my prayer for Maine. This is my prayer for me.
This is my prayer for all of us.