It was seeing
one of the defendants in the Proposition 8 case
choke up, put his hand on his husband’s shoulder and say, through tears, “will
you please marry me?”
I cry at
everything—show me a picture of you daughter’s kindergarten graduation: I’ll
cry. A picture of a boy scout helping an old lady across the street? I’ll weep.
Hell, in those days when I was busy worrying about my aged mother, the very
picture of an old lady would set off sobs.
So I was
puzzled by my initial reaction, which—as I told Johnny, my brother—was to kill
Antonin Scalia.
“You could
take out the other four as well, “ he said.
What
happened?
We all came
out, or most of us; for most of us, love triumphed. It took some parents a long
time, but they got it. It took some gay people a long time, too. But the
realization of what life in the closet was like led many of us to say, “fuck
it, I’m not hiding it.”
It was a
message you didn’t want to give yourself. “I’m not ashamed of myself,” people
in the closet would say, “but I’m just not a political person….”
Here’s
another….
“It would
kill my parents. They’re very religious, very conservative, very….”
Every time
you went home, you went home wondering—would this be the time you’d finally
have the balls to be honest with your parents? I mean look, you’re in your
thirties, you have never brought a girl home, you didn’t date in high school. I
mean, do I have to draw you a map?
The amount
of energy it took was endless. Nothing was ever easy between you and your
parents; there were no relaxed moments. What would you say if they asked? And
were they hinting? What was your father saying, when he made a reference—rather
forced—to two men who had lived together for years? Was he signaling?
Gary, an
old lover, had a big party, to which he invited my parents. And so I met
Franny, who was busy chatting with a flamboyantly gay man, a man who undressed
me with his eyes, and obviously found me fetching (I may have been then).
“Marc, do
you know Rocky?” (…the name being the only masculine thing about him.)
Rocky took
my hand in both of his, refused to let go, and breathed, “Darling, I’ve waited
all my life to meet you….”
Right—and
what was that look in my mother’s eye?
The secret
meant that you always had butterflies in your stomach, sweaty palms, a dry
mouth. You were prepared to fight or flee—and remember, these are your parents,
not your enemies.
You became
hypersensitive and a master at reading faces, intonations, gestures. Your nose
was always picking up the whiff of suspicion, innuendo, barbed hints. At the
end of the day, after you had watched yourself pass on the thirty or forty
times that you could have dropped the news, you went to bed exhausted and
hating yourself. Why were you so weak?
You were
also blaming them—which made no sense, but there it was. Why the hell were they
so damn conservative? Why were they so old, so behind the times? A friend comes
out to her mother, who pulls a bottle of champagne out to celebrate? Right, and
you’re gonna give your father a coronary, and he’ll die right there on the
fucking floor, his eyes locking in horror with yours, as your mother is
screaming, “See what you’ve done! You’ve killed him!” Right, so that’ll
be the scene that replays every damn time you close your eyes at night for the
rest of your life….
This is
complete nonsense, you know. It’s also now 2AM, a time of day which twists
logic the way a psychokinetic twists forks. Oh, and you can’t get up and do
anything, because it’s not your house. You’re visiting, your mother is sleeping
in the dining room; your father is turning and snorting in the living room.
It’s a strange house, and you’re prisoner in the back bedroom.
You’re in
the car, they are driving you to the airport, you’ve failed this visit just as
you had failed all the others. Do you blurt it out? Of course not, you can’t
drop that on then, and then just take off.
You drove
your friends who were farther down the road crazy.
“Why
doesn’t she just come out to her father—I mean, her father has accepting her
brother’s male partner. Hell, if he can do that, he can take a lesbian
daughter!”
I’d say
this about a friend we both knew.
But I also
remembered being there—trapped in car lights of fear and rejection, unable to
move, watching as the inevitable came hurtling toward me.
Afraid to
make the jump to love and trust….
