Notes from a blubbering blogger

It took me a while, but I got it in the end. I have spent an hour quietly crying in a—thank god—mostly empty café.

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….

A Promise Kept

For a gay blogger, there isn’t much choice about what to write about, today. Yes, I could tell you that in Puerto Rico, a federal judge has ruled that Jehovah’s Witnesses must be given access to gated communities. My reaction, of course, is whether a community has the right to restrict access to ANYBODY. Weren’t public funds used to make the road, and aren’t they used to maintain them?

Right—I’m not gonna get very far with that….

OK—then there’s Michael Samis, whose campaign to raise funds for a forgotten cello concerto ended yesterday. And he—or we—did it! Wow—and he got 140% of his goal!

But all eyes, of course, are on nine men and women who have the chance to do something remarkable—rule on what one of the parties in the case called the “last civil rights issue.”

Today, the United States Supreme Court is hearing the case of California’s Proposition 8; tomorrow the court will hear challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act.

Good news—the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is so legally flawed that the president who signed it—reluctantly—has said it’s unconstitutional. So the justices are really gonna have to work hard to find any reason to uphold it.

Proposition 8 is different. The first big question is whether the party, ProtectMarriage, appealing the district court’s ruling has the legal right—called the standing—to appear before the court. California, you remember, is not appealing the decision—it’s a group of private citizens. If the court decides that ProtectMarriage has no standing, then federal district court’s overturning of Proposition 8 will go into effect. Or will it? Doing more reading, I find some “experts” saying that if the conservatives had no standing, then they had no standing to appeal in the first place. Therefore Proposition 8 stays in effect.

Such tortuous legal niceties would be lost, I suspect, on the lady who bought us lunch yesterday. She had wanted to do something nice for another lady, a Canadian who had spent the last month as an adopted tennis mom because of a series of family emergencies. So doña Ilia, Raf’s mom, worked the phone, corralled the family, and summoned us all to lunch.

And then sat down to give a virtuoso performance—the charm never stopped flowing, the social dexterity never waned. True, doña Ilia did stumble a bit when asked—after declaring that she adored, just adored, Canada—if she had in fact ever been there. Well, she had to admit no, but then recalled having met some very nice Canadian social workers, and had enjoyed meeting them very much.

Nor was the Canadian lady going to go unfed. “You’ll have to try a mallorca,” she said animatedly to her guest, “you can’t leave without a mallorca….” Also true for the flan de queso and the arroz con pollo.

In the midst of this unceasing flow of food and charm came a denouncing: I had completely failed my task, which was to be there early and greet the guest. “Men!” cried Ilia, “they can never do anything right, socially speaking. There she was for five minutes, sitting alone, and you were in a corner with your back to the door!” It was no use to point out that the café was tiny, and that the guest had not walked the twenty feet to the end of the room. “Of course she wouldn’t do that!” exclaimed Ilia. “She’s a refined woman—walking around searching for her host, indeed!” She was holding the guest’s hand, and patting her shoulder simultaneously.

The legal minutiae perplexing the Supreme Court also may not interest Paul Katami, one of the parties challenging Proposition Eight. All he wants to do is marry his husband-emotionally-if-not-yet-legally, Jeff Zarrillo. And the two make a terrific case—it’s pretty hard to imagine better spokespeople for a cause. And Katami has quite a history himself—an actor turned fitness expert, he had a nightmarish accident that led to his elbow being completely broken. Then, he endured two surgeries—both of which were horrific botches that led eventually to the recommendation that Paul have surgery to fuse the bones, leaving him with an arm at a permanent, fixed 90 degree angle.

He opted instead to find a new doctor—smart move, Paul!—who did a third operation involving a bone graft from the hip, titanium rods and screws. This, in addition to using a device he had invented for one of his clients, did the trick. Check him out on YouTube—you’d never know.

And he’s a guy of character—he chose not to waste his time and energy pursuing a malpractice suit against what was clearly a quack. He takes a settlement—just enough to pay his medical expenses and surgery.

And the legal question of standing might not be too interesting for his partner’s father, Dominick Zarrillo, who wrote a moving op-ed piece for the New York Times entitled “A Father, a Son and a Fighting Chance.” He talks about seeing his son get bullied as a kid, and going over to protest to the father of the lead abuser. Unbelievably, the bully’s father takes the attitude—let the kids fight if out between them. Sure, says Zarrillo, one-on-one is OK, but five against one? The bully’s father shrugged and shut the door.

Jeff did what I did, came home to his parents for years with the intention—this time I’m gonna come out. What happened? The time was never right—read, I never seized the chance—and there we were at the airport, with the words burning in the gut, not blazing in the air. When Jeff finally did it, he gets the reaction so many of us got: right, we knew all along, it’s OK.

So then it was Jeff and Paul, not just Jeff. They all go to Hawaii together, and decide to take a boat ride. Not wise—the weather turns nasty, the waves are three times the size of the boat, the elder Zarrillo grabs his wife’s hand, looks over at his son, who is holding Paul’s hand. It turns out OK, and they go to celebrate at dinner. Zarrillo writes:

I realized then that I was crying instead of laughing. I couldn’t explain it except to say there is nothing more overwhelming than seeing your child experience true love.

It works both ways, Dominick. I see an eighty-year old lady navigate her walker into the café, cheerfully give me her cheek to kiss, insist I order the steak, berate me for rudeness to a guest. My parents are dead, my two brothers thousands of miles away. But another mother, doña Ilia, is a tabletop away, beaming at me, scolding me, feeding me. A lady who twenty-five years ago wouldn’t speak to me on the phone.

A columnist for the New York Times who supports marriage equality wrote this morning that it might be a good thing if the Supreme Court didn’t come out with a sweeping ruling asserting that all fifty states must allow gay marriage: it could trigger a backlash. And I can see the logic.

I also see the enormous courage of parents who struggle and then come out to their gay and lesbian children. Because it’s not just us coming out. It’s you brave and loving parents, who are being asked to do something uniquely difficult.

You made a promise when you held us, that first day of our lives in the delivery room. You kept it when you opened the door, put a beer in a stranger’s hand, and set another place at the table.

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