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….