This diary doesn't pretend to equal the importance of those of wire taping, the Danish comics scandal and the GOP lies du jour. I'm sorry if some feel that it is taking up space that could be occupied by more important diaries but I feel compelled to tell my story. There have been many diaries, for example, by women and their experiences with abortion and they have been extremely elucidating; sometimes a personal story does more than a hundred statistics.
Anyway, I saw Brokeback Mountain last night. I had avoided seeing it, using the excuse that some critics had labeled it overlong and depressing. But now I see I was trying to avoid addressing some deeper truths and pain which I've had buried for almost 20 years.
[More below...]
Anyway, I saw Brokeback Mountain last night. I had avoided seeing it, using the excuse that some critics had labeled it overlong and depressing. But now I see I was trying to avoid addressing some deeper truths and pain which I've had buried for almost 20 years.
Without giving away the ending to BBM, I'll just say it's not a happy one. I desperately hoped that Ennis and Jack could find a way, some roadmap to happiness. But sadly, for so many gay and lesbian people, there is not a happy ending. (In this diary, I will mainly be referring to the experiences of gay men. I know that there are many similarities in lesbian experiences but I do not presume to present them accurately. Any personal perspectives on this topic would greatly add to the discussion and are extremely welcome).
On the film itself: I thought it was brilliant. It showed in the most human of ways that it is about love first, sex and being gay are a far second. It presented love as a very human need, something that transcends the borders of straight and gay. It shows the very raw emotions when love is prevented from happening, when each and everything stands in your way but without the support of family and often friends. It illustrates the terrible toll that being forced to be what you are not can have on entire families. Instead of building a home build on love and honesty, gay people are often forced to enter into lifetime charades, trying to hold back dams on the verge of breaking and which, ultimately, do break.
I began to sob for the last 30 minutes of BBM. I continued to sob on the way home. I spent a sleepless night thinking about it. And even today I feel very off-kilter. They say writing is good for release, so here I am. Why was I so upset. Was it the fact that there was no happy ending for Ennis and Jack? No, it was deeper. It was the fact that in 2006, in America, people can't love who they want to love. Often can't build a home together for fear of ridicule or discrimination or complete rejection by those they love. They can be denied rights after a 20 year relationship that Brittany Spears would have after a quickie 2-month marriage. It was the fact that so many have followed the road of Ennis and Jack, some victims of violence, some never being allowed to have the one person that they truly love the most. And I am weeping for my country. Make no mistake - a country that is hostile to gay people is also always hostile to women, minorities, the disabled, the helpless. How gut-wrenchingly hard it is to see your beloved country move backwards, back into ignorance, back into darkness. And then I peeled away that emotional onion a bit more and realized....Brokeback Mountain was indeed my story as well...
I was a senior in 1987 and 17 in a blue collar town in northern California. I was a real loner at a high school where being an athlete was everything. I was in Advanced Placement courses for most subjects, meaning the same group of people were in the same classes. My "friends" were mainly those classmates. I never dated. Unlike many young men, I was incapable of putting up a facade of being sexually interested in women. Going to the sophomore and junior proms was the extent of my dating. Being "out" was simply not an option. There was a mucho macho environment at the school. You were accused of being a "fag" just for being poor at sports. The threat of physical violence and humiliation was real. I remember in the 7th grade, how I went to the school counselor for depression and she went without my permission to three of my male teachers to ask if I was "masculine" enough. In retrospect, I now know that a couple of my classmates were also gay but I didn't dare even think about it at the time. My straight male friends had girlfriends come and go and how horrible it was never to be able to share a major piece of myself, that I too had desires, I too yearned for romance and, yes, sex. So I found my own niche through high school: foreign languages. I had Spanish, French and German. It was something no one else was interested in and I rapidly excelled, finishing the third year book the first year.
So the first week of senior year, everything changed drastically. Some friends told me about a new exchange student from Germany, "Jens" who was having problems in the English class I had had the year before. Perfect, I thought, I could work on my bookish German and help him with his English...and then I met him. If you have ever met someone and knew immediately that you would love that person until the day you die, you know what I mean. He was very tall and dark with the most beautiful emerald green eyes on earth, silky brown hair and a smile that was...well...indescribable. he spoke a charming Schwabian dialect, meaning I didn't understand hardly a word he said at first. But I assumed he was straight. After all, this was primarily a linguistic adventure. So I tutored him. But I also had a car, meaning that we would soon go out on Fridays and Saturdays. We would go to the movies, even the drive-in. We went to discos in a nearby town. He was still awkward as an exchange student, I was kind of a misfit, so it worked out fine. My German improved vastly in just weeks, he was doing better in English class. He gave me my very first mix tape - some of Falco's greatest hits, as Falco was all the rage then. I would take him home to his guest parents in a small town that was still in the country then, when the roads were so quiet and you could see blankets of golden fall leaves everywhere. The funny thing is, I remember Bruce Hornsby's "That's Just the Way it Is" as our song but I never really listened to the lyrics, didn't realize then that it was about racial inequality, the music somehow just seemed to go so well with the autumn leaves and the beauty of the night. But the lyrics of this song have a greater significance which I will talk about later.
It's hard to place the exact moment when you realize you are hopelessly in love, when you feel like Maria in West Side Story, that you will do anything for your love, even travel down the road to damnation. We went out more and more. He then started asking me if I wanted to stay over as it was late. His host family took care of his basic needs but did little to connect with him emotionally. They were - ick - Republicans and had strict rules about house conduct. He could never bring a girl home but as a male friend, I slipped under the wire undetected. The relationship became sexual very slowly. It started with wrestling games - where you can touch yet have the facade of masculinity. Or it would start with back massages. There almost always had to be a pretext to it. And then there were the perfunctory "I'm not queer" statements, "I like girls", "This is a one time thing" etc. etc. But then one time became twenty. Sometimes I would pick him up after tennis practice after a school day and take him home. Every breathing moment I thought about Jens. We did everything together, even going bowling together on Christmas day.
But things were not so simple. Jens would get afraid. He insisted this was just a phase. He would deny sex one day and desperately want it the next. Like in Breakback Mountain, he actually became physically violent a few times - "get off me", "I don't want that....", like I was dealing with some split personality. Yes, there were risks involved. He was trying to be popular at school. His guest parents were strict and being caught would have been catastrophic, possibly resulting in him being kicked out. His guest sister would have also certainly spread the word. So quickly I realized this was something for the shadows, something for certain days, the word love was never to be mentioned.
And it got worse. A few times he went on dates. Once, he asked me if I would take him and his date out in my car. I died inside when, driving back from the movie, he and this girl began having sex in the back of the car. When he dropped her off, he got in the front and then had sex with me. It is not as titillating as it sounds - it was instead very demeaning, giving me a sense of utter powerlessness. And then, although he was pushing me away, he had this other male friend from the neighborhood. When Jens said, "Now when you meet 'John' you're going to think he's gay but he's not...", I knew what the score was. But I also knew I desperately loved him and knew he was having a real problem dealing with this...So I let it be...I spent every cent I had on him, anything he wanted I would do..because I KNEW that he loved me too..
The year flew by and soon I realized it was going to be time for me to graduate. Jens would be going home soon. I was ready to start UC Berkeley in the fall. I waited for graduation night and looked forward not to the graduation but to the all-night party and celebrating with Jens. He was my "date" to the all-night senior party. I knew people would probably talk about it but hey, I was free and would never see most of these assholes again. And then we went to his place and celebrated and made love all night long, he even told me he loved him again and again. I asked what we would do - he said there was nothing we could do - he was set to go to college to be a chemist in conservative Bavaria, I was going to UC Berkeley. I told him I would give it all up, be disowned by my parents if necessary, go to college in Germany..anything. He told me we had no place to go. Years later I would listen to the Melissa Etheridge song, "Nowhere to Go" - which basically says that if you are gay, you have no space, no sphere that you can call your own. When you try to build a home, no one acknowledges you or who you are:
There's no one to hear
You might as well scream
They never woke up
From the American dream
And they don't understand
What they don't see
And they look through you
And they look past me
Oh, you and I dancing slow
And we got nowhere to go
So my graduation present was a language course in Germany plus a visit to see Jens in Bavaria and a visit to see a straight friend of mine who was also an exchange student. At Jen's house I was greeted like family. They were very warm but I was quickly interrogated about whether I had girlfriends. I quickly grew to understand the austere Catholic environment I was in. We would still make love but there would be more and more resistance..more anger...more fear. We would make love and he would cry, saying he just couldn't do it...yet would still want the "massage".
This continued for several years. I would come to Germany in the summer and he would treat me worse and worse. Then one year I met his "girlfriend" - someone who I considered to be greatly inferior to him in terms of intellect, emotional depth and yes, even physical attractiveness. She was shallow and mean-spirited. But she was a woman. He told me a dozen times that "Silke" was not the woman he wanted forever but "she would do". She sensed our relationship and was as nasty to me as possible, flaunting her ability to grab at his genitalia and even initiated sex with him as I waited in the back of the car.
The end came a few years later when we went to Portugal together. Sometimes he wanted a "massage", other times he would violently push me away. He generally treated me like garbage. Again and again he told me about this "Silke", how he hated her, but "she would do..."
I never saw him again. But it was devastating. I knew he loved me. We could have built a life together, but he was too afraid. I often wonder what my rival "Silke" won. A husband, now a chemist, who spends endless hours at the lab? A husband who takes long "walks" on weekends? A husband who ultimately cannot stand to look at her and her children?
And sadly, that is the fate of so many. In Russia, another chapter of my life, I had a relationship with a man only to discover 2 weeks later that he had a wife and two kids. I broke off the relationship but became good friends with the family. How quickly I learned that the wife felt completely ignored and resented. She knew something was wrong, even probably suspected the truth, but for economic and other reasons, she stayed in that relationship in despair. His saw his children as obstacles instead of a joy. And for those who think having a straight affair is the same thing, it's not true. A man who has an affair with another woman wants validation of himself by having what he considers to be a more attractive, more interesting sexual partner. When a man has gay affairs, he often doubts the whole structure of his familial life because it was constituted under sham circumstances. He was replete with self-loathing and would tell me about his visits to psychiatrists to cure him, that the only problem lied with his aversion to certain scents.
And then came the most terrible point: his family had a boarder, a man over 80 who was very, very poor. "Misha" caught this old man in a compromising position with another man. He threw the old man out, leaving him homeless for doing "that", leaving him homeless. That to me is the definition of self-loathing. I left then, only to get a letter from his wife 4 months later that Misha had abandoned her and the children, stowing away on some ship that came to the US, certainly in part due to the above reasons. Everything but the stowaway part is very typical in Russia - almost all gay men get married, most end tragically like this one. Often gay people are subject to blackmail, physical violence, even murder. I feel that that is the path we are going down now as a nation. I think of Elton John's American Triangle on the murder of Matthew Shepard:
Somewhere that road forks up ahead
To ignorance and innocence
Three lives drift on different winds
Two lives ruined, one life spent
We are headed back down the wrong road, one to violence. One to forcing families to be built not out of love but out of some pretend societal constructs. We all will suffer from this, not just the GLBT community.
I don't know the biographies of the Ken Mehlman's, Jeff Gannon's but I can say that, in most cases, this self-loathing comes from a desperate desire to find love. Promiscuity arises from a desperate attempt to glean any feeling of love and emotion from the sexual act itself. For many, both straight and gay, this ability to find love is cut away. But it is worse in a gay relationship - to be denied who you love out of such immense societal pressure, out of lack of a roadmap for success. And when it ends, there is very often no family to tell you there are other fish in the sea. They do not want there to be any fish or any sea, ever. If you can't play the game by the rules, sit down and shut up. And imagine the double pain of losing the one you lose most and then losing your family on top of that. Thank God that didn't happen to me but it has happened to many.
As I said above, the oppression of gay people is always tied with the oppression of women, minorities and the most helpless in the society. It all comes from the same place, that culture with a small "c", that bigoted, unenlightened part of your history that lives in fear and darkness, not the Culture with a big "C", the one that is joyous and celebratory, that celebrates the community as one people and which is forward-looking and innovative for the future. It all comes from the same, nasty spigot. Which I why I loathe these discussions of whether "black/women's/x" oppression is worse than that of gays. I always say, I can give you the worst one: being an African American lesbian. There you get the hatred and resentment from all sides. We are all in the same sinking boat together. I think back to the lyrics of Just the Way It Is:
They say hey little boy you can't go
Where the others go
'Cause you don't look like they do
Said hey old man how can you stand
To think that way
Did you really think about it
Before you made the rules
Change "look" to "love" and you have a picture of my life as a young man.
But also hope that films like BBM will change these attitudes:
That's just the way it is
Some things will never change
That's just the way it is
But don't you believe them
Luckily, I went on to find a partner who I truly love. We've been together 10 years in the moderate environment of Connecticut. But so many are denied the right to have the one they love. Not a day goes by that I don't think of Jens and what could have been had he not been afraid.
I hope people will see BBM and realize the terrible price of not letting people love the ones they want to, on individuals, on families, on society. The threat to heterosexual marriage is not gay marriage - it is forcing gay people to marry just as an empty exercise while denying the people who truly love each other the ability to build a home.