In short,
for the son, it was a true, “oh fuck” moment.
It ended
happily, to a modified degree: initially angry, Dr. Socarides settled down,
wrote his son a loving letter, and went right on believing that homosexuality
was an illness. But family trumps some things.
I know all
this because I got hooked on what is the 21st century equivalent of Word
is Out. Remember that?
If not, here’s
Wikipedia:
Word
Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives is a 1977 documentary film featuring
interviews with 26 gay
men and women. It was directed by six people collectively known as the Mariposa
Film Group. Peter Adair
conceived and produced the film, and was one of the directors. The film
premiered in November 1977 at the Castro Theater in San Francisco, and was
released in 1978.
The
interviews from the film were transcribed into a book of the same title, which was
published in October 1978.
Well,
that’s the official story. But I suspect that—more than the filmmakers will
ever know—there are personal stories, stories that went something like this.
By the time
I saw it, after it had premiered in the film festivals and been shown in art
venues or wherever people saw such things, it would have been 1980, when PBS
could finally muster the guts to risk a slash in public funding and air the
documentary. So for days I had seen clips advertising the documentary, and I
had set aside the hour to watch. My real worry was that my old TV—black and
white with a 13-inch screen, and oh, it required two men to lift—would break
down.
Did I have
butterflies in my stomach and sweaty palms? A dry mouth? I may have, because
even to watch the film, alone in my studio apartment in Madison, Wisconsin,
felt radically subversive.
It was in
the air, but it was never spoken. “He’s a fag,” people would whisper. “Don’t
drop your soap in the shower,” people would snigger. “San Francisco” was code
word for something that was so unthinkable that it couldn’t be named. It was
worse than cancer.
Here’s how
it was, since I—blogfully
devoted to my Readers—have invested $2.51 to bring you the opening words of Consenting
Adult, one of the earliest novels about a family’s coming to terms with a
gay child:
She came
to the end and stood as if tranced, without tears, nothing so easy as tears,
stood motionless in the sensation of being smashed through every organ, through
every nerve, every reasoning cell. Love for him, pity for his suffering, pride
for his courage in telling her, horror at it, at the monstrous unendurable
it— a savagery of feelings crushed her, feelings mutually exclusive yet
gripping each other in some hot ferocity or amalgam. She read the letter again.
Then only did she begin to cry, but not the ordinary crying, nor she the
ordinary weeping woman; it was, rather, a roaring sobbing, of an animal gored.
She heard her own sounds, and went to her bedroom door to close it, though
there was no one in the apartment
Hobson, Laura Z.
(2011-12-27). Consenting Adult (Kindle Locations 28-31). Open Road Media.
Kindle Edition.
Horror,
monstruous, ferocity, gored, sobbing. Oh, sorry, overlooked “savagery….”
OK—Hobson
may never have been accused of an excessively light touch, but she wasn’t too
far off the mark, either. Because coming out meant that you had been doing laps
around and through hell for months. Even to think ‘I might be gay,’ was
unimaginably scary.
So yes, I
probably had sweaty palms that night when I turned on the TV because that, in a
way, was to invite in the possibility that yes, I might be gay. Because my lack
of the famous, adolescent, raging-bull lust for girls had been dismissed as,
“you’re just not ready yet…..” (Yeah? A 16-year old getting erections in
Algebra, and I’m not ready?) Oh, and then there was, “You’re just waiting for
the right girl to come along….” (Guys? I’ve seen short girls, tall girls, fat
girls, skinny girls—in short, every sort of girl—and not one of these is the
“right” girl?)
“The
homosexual,” you see, was an abstraction—but seeing a guy telling the story of
coming out to his father? I was in tears. So much so that I can tell you how it
went:
Son: Dad,
I gotta tell you something important.
Dad: OK,
let me grab a cigarette…
Son: Grab
the pack…
To watch
the documentary was to invite lesbians and gay men into my apartment, look at
them, size them up and—most importantly—size myself up. Would I look at them,
be repulsed, turn off the television, and embrace my newly-discovered straight
self?
Do I have
to tell you?
Well, I was
thinking about all this yesterday, as I came upon Socarides via a wonderful
project, “I’m from Driftwood.” Hmm—and what was Driftwood?
A small
town in Texas, and the hometown of the founder of the project, Nathan Manske. Manske
was inspired by a sign held by Harvey Milk, reading “I’m
from Woodmere, N.Y.” So Manske began to wonder—we are all from somewhere. What
if we went on the road, and collected the coming-out stories of everybody,
famous but mostly not, of people as they endured that most challenging moment?
The fifty state tour was born!
In a way,
it’s a bit like “It
Gets Better,” about
which I have always had problems. Why? Because too often it felt like “it gets
better” was more about us—those of us who have made it to the other side—making
ourselves feel better. We survived, we thrived, we are now on television, and
rich, and famous, and oh—here’s my perfect life, and you can do it too!
Yeah?
I’m sixteen
and have pimples and all my friends are women or fucked-up artist types, and my
father knows everybody in town, and he just told me he won’t support the ERA because it
was for homosexuals, and ALL HIS KIDS ARE NORMAL. So, look: I’m so happy for
your perfect life, but you know what? It just makes me feel worse….
Somehow, I’m
from Driftwood feels
different. I might be wrong—I often am—but I know one thing.
The project
should be much better known.
