There’s a plethora of topics that I could start with for my first post of the week - such as the proposed repeal of the law blocking gay marriage in Massachusets, the probable veto of California’s gay marriage bill, or the Federal ruling on a Florida school’s Gay-Straight Alliance. I probably will discuss these things later, when I feel like tackling what feels like the same old news in the same old fight with nothing changed but the names, cities, and states. I know we need to fight the good fight and always stay informed, but sometimes I think we all get tired of fighting. Sometimes I think we even forget why we’re fighting.
So as I look at a fresh start to a new week and mull over a mug of coffee so dark it borders on lethal, I can’t help thinking of why I feel the need to speak out openly for equal rights, and remembering my own story - partially prompted by reading Lyndsey’s story over on Lez Keep it Real. She told of how she came out as a lesbian, and reminded me of a news story I’d glanced over last week, bookmarked for possible later discussion, and then slid on past.
Dodd asks: What if your child were gay? - Yahoo News
CONCORD, N.H. - Democratic presidential hopeful Chris Dodd told high school students Wednesday that people debating gay marriage should ask themselves just one question: What would you do if your child were gay? Dodd said anyone who would deny a gay child the right to be happy isn’t being honest.
While I admire Dodd for his perspective, I have to shake my head at his naivete. The man’s a lovely idealist, and unfortunately idealists tend to have their hopeful spark crushed out like a cigarette butt in the ashtray of dirty mainstream politics. “They may grow up as a different sexual orientation than their parents,” Dodd said. “How would I want my child to be treated if they were of a different sexual orientation?”
I think that he’d be horribly surprised by the answer that many parents might give him - parents who have thrown their children out, disowned them, cursed them, even abused them or endorsed abuse towards them for being gay. I’ve heard coming-out stories that could give him nightmares (heck, they give me nightmares) and leave a few ugly scars on that beautiful idealism.
My own coming-out story isn’t particularly gruesome, but it was harsh enough to destroy my idealism at a fairly young age. Growing up gay in the south, even in a more “liberated” metropolis like New Orleans, was rather like being in the military: people might or might not like what you did behind closed doors, but they wouldn’t ask as long as you didn’t tell. It was the same with my parents - heck, my entire family. They’d always known that I was going to be “just a bit off” somehow, but as long as I didn’t end up on America’s Most Wanted, they really didn’t want to know. Sometimes I didn’t want to know; it would have made things easier if I hadn’t the faintest inkling that I was just a little different from most of the other boys.
Instead it was like living in a glass cage - able to see out, able to be seen, and yet never able to reach through and touch. The wonderful and horrible nature of glass was that it was invisible until the light reflected off it just right…and often I wondered if anyone saw the light from my cage, both feared and hoped that they did. I peered through the transparent bars and hoped to see those refracted bits shimmering around others, hoped that somewhere I’d find someone who carried the same terrible secret that rested so heavily on my shoulders. I was terrified, you see. Terrified to say a single word, terrified to even ask, because I was afraid that my friends, my family, the entire world would reject me.
I suppose that began with my parents. They weren’t bad people, certainly weren’t bad parents despite my mother’s bipolar temper swings that early on taught me how to move like a small animal in the undergrowth, creeping past a sleeping wolf. But they weren’t particularly accessible people, either. They weren’t parents that you could talk to, parents that you could turn to for emotional support. They were parents who would do anything for their kids…anything but deal with them as people.
Conversations with my father usually consisted of me babbling while he smiled vaguely and watched television. My mother wouldn’t even make any pretense of listening; she’d work her mouth angrily and stare at whatever she was doing until I got the hint and went away. She rarely spoke back save for to tell me that I was wrong. Wrong about what I wanted to be when I grew up, wrong about who I wanted to play with as a child, wrong about who I thought I was. When I tried to talk to her about my budding sexuality, tried to tell her that I was confused and needed guidance, I got the equivalent of a “shut up and don’t ever bring this up again”.
Don’t ask, don’t tell. Not even with your family.
And don’t even get me started on my older sisters.
Needless to say I was a miserable and brooding child, who turned into a miserable and brooding teenager (is there any other kind?). Because I couldn’t understand myself I couldn’t relate to other people very well, and found shelter in books. Like many an outcast I took refuge in fantasy worlds, where people were explained as tidy packages that made sense, all spelled out in neatly-arranged letters. I was afraid to make friends; with my parents the threat always loomed over my head that if I finished the sentence that I never had the courage to start, some terrible punishment would descend. Banishment. Rejection. That fear of rejection extended to my almost nonexistent social life; even when others reached out to me, I thrust them away, rejected them before they could reject me. Then I dealt with my mother’s snide commentary on my limited circle of friends, and how socially maladjusted I was. I lived in an environment of constant criticism, which didn’t exactly help my shrinking-violet nature. Nothing I ever did was good enough, down to the clothing that I chose - neat, simple, but just not masculine enough for my mother. Even when refusing to acknowledge that her son might be gay, she was trying to keep my secret. Maybe if she tried hard enough, she’d make me straight. I’m sure she hoped so.
It sounds like a broken record to blame my mother for everything, doesn’t it? My mother instilled my fear of rejection that’s survived to affect my relationships even now; my mother made me bitter at a young age; my mother gave me low self-esteem. On one hand, that’s a cop-out. On the other hand, the hand that rocks the cradle is the one that can affect you the most strongly in your life. When you’re a child, mother is god. Mother is the Madonna, mother is the angel, mother is protector and punisher all in one. Mother is loved with a blind adoration, and her smallest frown can make it rain. Any child wants to please his mother. I was no different. On the surface I hated her with a viciousness that made us clash from the moment my smart-mouthed little self learned to speak. Underneath, all I wanted was for her to love me - if not as this thing that she was ashamed of, then as whatever she needed me to change into to be worthy of her love.
Without even meaning to, she made me deeply ashamed of being gay. It’s no coincidence that despite numerous secret relationships in high school that left me feeling as if I’d hidden a dead body rather than kissed a boy, I didn’t come out publicly until I escaped my mother’s influence to attend university several states away.
In university, more came out than just my sexuality. My entire personality blossomed; I learned to laugh, I learned to joke, I learned how to walk with my head held high rather than hunched down between my shoulders. I dressed to be attractive, rather than to be as plain and unassuming as possible. I flirted. I enjoyed myself. And I joined a GBLTQ foundation on campus. The moment I signed that membership roster was the moment that I became openly gay.
I have a friend to thank for that. For the sake of privacy we’ll just call him S; he was an older student, one that I talked to sometimes in classes but more at night, chatting online on AIM. I’m not even going to pretend that S was sane. I still don’t think S is sane; that boy’s got problems that make my middle-class sexuality issues look as trivial as a mosquito bite. But he made me feel as if it was okay to share my secrets; if he could confide his rather twisted thoughts to me, why would he possibly care if I happened to say, in the safe and toneless text of an IM window, that I was gay?
Nonetheless, it took weeks of conversation before I told him. I choked, I stalled, I fidgeted, I backspaced, and finally I said, “I’m gay. Is that okay?” Even then I felt as if I had to ask permission. As if I was kneeling at my mother’s feet, waiting for the axe to descend.
It was almost anticlimactic when S only said, “I knew that already.” Anticlimactic, terrifying, and relieving all at once. He’d known? How many other people knew? How obvious was I? But he knew - he knew, and yet in all this time he’d still hung out with me, still talked to me, still confided his secrets in me. He probably also knew that I had a small crush on him despite the fact that he was straight, and yet…he didn’t care.
He didn’t care.
I think that I needed that more than I needed anyone’s gushing acceptance. I needed to know that it was so commonplace, so normal, that my friends didn’t even care that I was gay, so neither should anyone else. I needed to stop feeling like a leper hiding under the skin of a normal boy, and just relax.
I still avoided him in real life for a week, until he hunted me down and told me to get over it.
And I did get over it. I got over it, I came out, I moved on.
Then I went home for spring break.
Bitter memory and skewed perspective said that my mother saw the new confidence in me and wanted to crush it before she could no longer control me. I’m old enough to know now that that wasn’t entirely true - but nonetheless the barrage on my self-esteem started the moment I walked in the door. What had I done with my hair? What was I wearing? What was that rainbow pin on my messenger bag? Did I want to disgrace the entire family?
No. No, I didn’t.
But I sure as hell didn’t want to fall out of grace with myself, either.
Telling my mother in no uncertain terms that I was gay started a fight that lasted for four years, a war fought with weapons of barbed words that hurt us both, terrible things said through grit-toothed smiles even as we put on the pretense of being a single family unit, us against the world. No conversation could go by without one side or the other tossing in a veiled accusation regarding it. That hatred for my mother festered and swelled until I was nearly bloated with it; I had convinced myself that she didn’t care about me as her son, only as a representative of her precious image, and despite the fact that I was a fairly good child - intelligent, creative, drink and drug free, and responsible for less than a fifth of the wild antics that each of my older sisters had managed to get into - I was worthless as long as I was publicly gay and supposedly tarnishing her reputation. To my credit, I refused to back down. I was out, and I was staying that way.
It didn’t stop me from crying myself to sleep nights after every last one of those fights. It didn’t stop me from hating myself, thinking that I was worthless, stupid, talentless, and unattractive, constantly needing affirmation from others to remind myself otherwise and yet too ashamed to even seek it. No matter how much I told myself that I hated her, I still needed her to accept me more than anything else.
The war finally culminated in one last grand battle, a few months after my graduation from university. I was staying with my family while I looked for a job after uni, and in such close quarters after years of separation things finally came to a head. I don’t even remember what sparked the final fight; it wasn’t anything to do with my sexuality, but by the time it was over and I finally told my mother what I’d been aching to say to her for years - something best not repeated in polite company - that old horse had been dragged out and beaten into dog food.
And I was on my way out the door, not to speak a word to a single member of my family for almost four years.
In that time I moved back to Texas, found work, grew up a little, blitzed my way through a few bittersweet relationships, and started to get over things. Started to get over her, mainly by forgetting my mother and anyone else with any kind of blood tie to me save for my grandmother, the most beautifully loving and wry woman on the face of the earth. As bitter as it was, it was actually good for me; it gave me a chance to start over as myself, rather than this hybrid of who I was and who my family wanted me to be or told others that I was. No expectations other than my own; no belittling influence that could cut me down just as well over the phone as it could in person. Everyone in Houston knew me on my own terms, rather than on my family’s terms. It allowed me to settle, grow comfortable enough in my sexuality that it was no longer an issue that affected how I presented myself to others, and finally stop being afraid that everyone who met me would find something lacking in me and eventually reject me.
I thought I’d be happy never speaking to a single person in my family again, until Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Even as I dialed frantically I told myself that I only cared because of my grandmother; that my grandmother’s line wasn’t working, so I had to call my mother, my father, anyone who could tell me that she was all right. When I couldn’t get through to anyone, I panicked.
When my mother actually called me - not knowing that I’d been trying to reach her - from her refuge at my uncle’s in Baton Rouge, I cried from relief. Not just that my grandmother was all right, but that my mother, the woman that I swore that I hated, the woman that made me ashamed to be gay, was alive. Some ties you just can’t break, even when you want to.
In the time since then we’ve started talking more regularly. It’s hard for both of us. It’s difficult for her to accept me as an adult, and as someone other than the person she decided that I was. It’s also difficult for her to accept me as gay, but she will try to talk to me about it, occasionally. I try to be considerate and not bring it up too often so as not to make her uncomfortable, but there are times when I refuse to avoid saying “my boyfriend” in a sentence just because she can’t handle it. She still makes snide comments, sometimes even nasty ones. Sometimes I take the high road and brush them off. Sometimes I’m regrettably human and I fire back.
I don’t hate my mother anymore, even if I don’t particularly like her. But I refuse to let her make me feel shame anymore.
The fact that I can accept myself now doesn’t mean that she can accept me on more than limited terms, and I get the feeling that she’ll be making her nasty little comments for the rest of her life. That’s okay. I don’t have to let them bother me anymore. And strangely enough, I know that she loves me even though I’m gay. What bothers me is that she loves me despite the fact that I’m gay, rather than loving me regardless of it. There’s a difference.
But the point, and a lesson for Chris Dodd, is that sometimes parents can be as cruel or crueller than outsiders. Some parents can and do reject their children for being gay, and don’t care if we have equal rights or not, as long as we’re not around embarrassing them.
It’s sad, but it’s reality.
When looking at it that way, I wish that I could have a touch of Dodd’s idealism. I don’t, and I can’t remember when I did.
But I do remember why I fight. I remember why I speak up for myself. I remember that no one can or will make me ashamed of who I am - and I remember that we have to be strong enough to support ourselves when even our own flesh and blood abandons us.
I remember who I am.
And I remember that I’m worth fighting for.
gay life, gay rights, coming out, gay stories, homosexuality, gay in the south
All right, I’ll leave the rhymes for those more talented with verse and address the real issue. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been to gay events and actually been embarrassed by the behavior of my cohorts - not because it was too “out there”, but because it was below the standards of decent public behavior that I’d expect out of anyone - gay, straight, bi, tri, whatever label you want to apply to yourself. Have we become so obsessed with saying “I’m here, I’m queer, get used to it” that we’ve forgotten how to act like mature, responsible human beings?
