HQ 76

It’s a curious thing when the focus shifts, and you peer out again.

It may have started when I heard music coming from Raf’s computer speakers. It was mildly interesting, so I went over to take a look.

And saw the San Francisco Gay Men’s Choir performing Testimony, a debut by Stephen Schwartz. It’s all part of the It Gets Better project.

That I did know about; when I worked at Wal-Mart, I used to cruise the news incessantly—ostensibly for articles for the students to read….

(Really, I was just waiting it out until the end—which we all knew was coming….)

So I knew that that poor kid—the violinist at Rutgers—had jumped off the bridge after being outed by his room-mate…and I knew that kids were offing themselves in various ways after being bullied in school.

Then the axe fell, or rather the guillotine, and my head sorta got disconnected for awhile….

So there I was listening to the Schwartz piece—quite nice, quite moving—but…

…not convincing.

Why, I wonder? Why shouldn’t I be convinced by what is a very sincere, laudable goal—reaching out to kids and telling them, “hey, it gets better….”

Didn’t it get better for me?

So I called up Johnny, who knows about who I was, and asked him who was I. 

Anguished—is the upshot. He remembers reading Steppenwolf, and thinking, ‘wow—how did Hesse know my brother so well!’

Darkness Visible—to borrow from William Styron who, I just found out, took it from Milton’s Paradise Lost.

OK—so what about It Gets Better?

I think back to my own days of being 18 or 19—freshly confronted by my gayness, struggling with the cello, battling depression.

What did I do?

I went to the library and checked it out.

HQ76—the Library of Congress number for books about being gay.

So I read…

…and read…

…and read some more.

I was, I see now (and saw then) not a practicing homosexual (frequent term in those years) but a lectoral (invented term) homosexual.

Meaning I wasn’t actually having sex.

Not surprising, since I was the only homosexual in Madison, Wisconsin.

Or so it appeared.

I knew it wasn’t true, of course. I knew that there was a gay bar—The Pirate’s Ship—that I passed every day. There was the 7% Society—a gay campus group.

But I couldn’t get there.

It was a frequent theme in those years—people would ask: “how many times did you walk around the block before you got the courage to go into a gay bar for the first time?”

The answer was never “none.” 

The average was 4 to 5 times.

Right—so they were there and I was there and… why didn’t we connect?

They were reaching out, but I couldn’t grasp the hand offering the help.

Which is—I think—my problem with It Gets Better.

A woman who is vital in my life spent years anguishing over whether she could tell her father she is a Lesbian. Her father knew; she knew her father knew; her father had coped with the issue of his son being gay, and overcome it (not without some struggle).

So what was the issue?

What was my issue?

For I never looked Jack directly in the eye, and said “Look, Dad, I’m gay.”

I showed him the apartment that Raf and I were living in….

The apartment with one bedroom.

…and one bed.

He looked at me, grasped the situation…

…and I waited for the question.

Which didn’t come.

We locked eyes instead….

So maybe I had told him, without telling him. And maybe my eyes had said, “ask, and I will  tell you…”

There were other hands, reaching out. There was the documentary Word is Out—which I saw every time it appeared on Channel 21, our PBS station.

It was fascinating, it was compelling, and…

…I still didn’t know how to get there.

And it was almost a reproach—those brave guys who had crossed to the other side of the river, and were turning back to me, coward and afraid to cross.

But somehow I did, or am.

It never stops, you see.  

Which is why I found myself in the CEO’s office of Wal-Mart Puerto Rico, along with the Vice President for Human Resources, formally telling them that I was married, and that my spouse needed to be in the health plan. And wasn’t it just a bit inconsistent that Wal-Mart, so fiercely embracing diversity, wouldn’t allow that? Just because it was a “him,” not “her.” And then took a walk in the parking lot, to hear my racing heart beat and taste my dry mouth.

Yeah, I had done it. 

And I never, at age 18, imagined I would do it….

But how had I done it?

I don’t think we need to tell kids—It Gets Better.

I think we gotta figure out—and then give them a river chart and oars—how we all crossed the river.