Nichols Hills was a limited place, a limiting place if you let it be. My parents taught me that, even as they played along. Oklahoma occupies a no-man’s-land between the midwest, the south, and the southwest. It has elements of each, but it’s none exactly. As it is in the south, though, politeness is king in Oklahoma. You did not talk politics or religion; you smiled first and gossiped later. Nichols Hills had few postcard-worthy vistas, so the beauty you had was everything. People weren’t looking out their windows at the mountains or the ocean. They were looking out the window at one another, and at one another’s houses. The women of my hometown modeled themselves on the women of Dallas, who modeled themselves on the women of Beverly Hills. My parents half-joked: their worst nightmare was that I would grow up to stay put.
It wasn’t until the AIDS crisis that I thought about gay people as a category, or at all. I had an out gay uncle in California, but that he was an anomaly in late-seventies and early-eighties America, or in any-era America, wouldn’t occur to me until I was in grade school. My parents had told me that some men love men and some women love women, the same way that my parents loved each other. Jerry’s being gay was a nonissue within the family.
I know only fragments of the story, of what it took for my family to accept Jerry. My grandmother Elaine was Episcopalian, and her husband, Joe, was a devout Catholic. Their children went to Catholic grade school. But Elaine’s parents had been, in her words, broad-minded, and Elaine had a couple of close friends in college who were gay. And Joe, though a quiet, slight man, liked to think for himself. He’d fought in World War II but opposed the Vietnam War and, in the late sixties, wrote a scathing letter to the Archdiocese of Baltimore when the Church refused to take a stand against it. He dictated the letter to my mother, then fresh from secretarial school, and unbeknownst to her and the rest of the family, Joe mailed it not only to the Church but also to the Baltimore Sun, where the letter was published for the entire city to read.
Jerry’s son, Jason, told me this: that when our grandfather learned that Jerry was gay, and that Jerry’s marriage was ending, he took a long, slow breath. Then he stood up from his chair and went to the front door, walked to the local library, and pulled down every book he could find on homosexuality. He read for a while, walked back home, and when he came in the door, he said, Okay.
That was it. In a single afternoon, legend has it, Joe got the information he needed, metabolized it, and accepted it. Now I think, What the fuck kind of superman does that? Could this be real—that in the mid-seventies, a Catholic could respond to his son’s coming out with not only acceptance but with a desire to be educated, to understand? Almost half a century later, it still reads like myth.
Of course it was more complicated: Jerry had a wife and a child, and his coming out would upend their lives. Elaine and Joe did what they could for their daughter-in-law. But they also stood by their son. Jerry joined Dignity, a group of and for gay Catholics, and my grandparents did too. When, several years later, Jerry learned that he had HIV, he asked them to speak at schools about preventing HIV/AIDS. I remember a blurry VHS video of my grandparents in front of a classroom—Joe in brown corduroys and Elaine with her calf-length, elastic-waist denim skirt and a charm bracelet jingling at her wrist—talking to high school kids about their gay son. In my grandmother’s files, I found an interview they gave in 1990 to the National Catholic Reporter.9 “People sometimes say to me, ‘How wonderful that you treat your homosexual son so well,’” said Elaine. “Well, it’s not wonderful at all. It’s very easy and natural.”
When I was a kid, people would sometimes ask if I was adopted. My parents were brunettes, my dad’s hair nearly black. Reddish hair runs on both sides of the family, but my mother always said that I got mine from Jerry. She says I have his nose too, and his freckles. My legs are long like his, the same shape as his, and I walk like he did. When he was already sick, we posed for a picture in the driveway at Know Creek Ranch, nose to identical nose, and you can tell we’re saying cheeeeeeese.
My cousins and I were once playing at Jerry’s house, hiding from the grown-ups, when we found a book about sex for gay men. It was on the shelf above the bed Jerry shared with his partner, Tom, and as soon as we opened it, I knew we shouldn’t have. We stared for a minute, maybe not even a minute, before we shoved it back onto the shelf. But my brain held on to those images like I’d studied them for hours. I was probably nine years old, but I can still see them, black-and-whites of tall, hairy men in assorted positions, looking very pleased to be there. I wanted to see more. The feeling scared me, because I hadn’t felt it before and because I knew those pictures were not for me. But even as my face burned, I wanted to keep looking.
Around the same time, I noticed a new book in the den of our house. The book was on the shelf where my parents kept art books, and it read ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE in bold gray letters down its white spine. Inside were male nudes with ball gags and leather and elegant, velvety portraits of what I would later recognize as uncircumcised penises. There was a photo of a smirking old lady, the artist Louise Bourgeois, with a giant, ropy-veined statue of a cock tucked under her arm like a clutch. I remember the afternoon that I found it, how I turned the glossy pages with fascination and fear and the strange, slippery sense that adults call arousal. I never told my parents I’d found it. It wasn’t that they would have been angry; they’d put it on the shelf, so it was fair game. Making a big thing of it would have only made us all uncomfortable. Still I didn’t want to talk about it, didn’t want anyone to know how much it confused me.
The year was 1986 or 1987, and by then AIDS was on every front page. I was learning that some people, a lot of people, thought people like my uncle were an abomination. Apparently this was sanctioned by the Bible. Some people thought people like my uncle deserved this new disease, this “gay plague.” I began to understand that the way my family understood gayness, and sex, even art, was not how everyone did.
I don’t remember how my parents told me that Jerry was sick. The last Christmas that Jerry was alive, the Christmas of 1987, my dad made a video of our holiday. He’d just gotten his first camcorder. We were at my aunt Tina’s house in California, and you can hear Mannheim Steamroller’s synth-classical Christmas album plinking in the background. The morning after Christmas we drove up to Santa Rosa, to Jerry’s house. In the final frames, the camera follows Jerry as he walks up the driveway to the barn. The way his legs work, the sun in his hair like tarnished brass: it really does look like me.
Jerry died of pneumocystis pneumonia on March 6, 1988, in a hospital bed at Johns Hopkins. He was forty-two years old. He’d flown to Baltimore to join up with my grandmother, and they’d planned to travel together to New York, where Jerry would start an experimental drug regimen. But he was sick when he got off the plane in Baltimore, and they never made it.
My mother was forty-one when Jerry died. Her family—Joe, Elaine, the six surviving siblings—tipped from its axis. But in Oklahoma, it was hard to talk about. This is how it was almost everywhere, except San Francisco, maybe New York, and maybe LA. In many towns, this is how it still is.
But even in towns as conservative as ours, people were dying of AIDS, and local groups sprung up to help them. When Jerry got sick, my mother went to meetings and marches, began to volunteer. The entire family, all across the country, got involved. My aunt Tina was a “buddy” to men with AIDS, driving them to doctor’s appointments and caring for them as they died. My cousin Katie made a panel in Jerry’s memory for the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, and my grandmother made another. Twice, in 1989 and 1992, we traveled—me, my mom, aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins—to Washington, DC, to volunteer when the Quilt was displayed on the National Mall.
I got white jeans for the occasion. We volunteers all wore white, an army of ghosts walking the tarpaulin pathways between sections of the Quilt. Each morning, we worked as Unfolders, teams of volunteers unfurling the panels over the grass. There was a beautiful ceremony to it, the way
we unfolded a square of stitched-together panels, held it taut, and lowered it to the ground. During the unfolding, no one spoke. The length of the Mall was silent, from the Capitol to the Washington Monument. Every panel was the size of a grave; each day, we made and unmade a cemetery.
During viewing hours, we took shifts as Monitors, walking the perimeter of a section of panels, making sure no one harmed or defaced them. I had just turned eleven, but they let me sign up for shifts like anyone else. I had a Swatch watch and a neon-pink fanny pack stocked with Kleenex and granola bars, and the only thing tethering me to my family was the marvelously thin rope of an agreed-upon meeting time. I had an important job to do: me, skinny hips and moussed bangs and too-big teeth, guarding an epidemic’s graveyard.
Most of the other volunteers were gay men who’d lost friends and lovers. These men became some of my mother’s closest friends. Kids at my school talked about queers, called one another fags as an insult. Kids said you could get HIV from the water fountain. I had a black ACT UP sweatshirt with a pink triangle on the front and SILENCE=DEATH written beneath, and I wore it like a challenge, hoping someone would ask me about it. I liked being the know-it-all, explaining that gay people are born gay, the same way I was born with white skin and blue eyes. It’s not a choice, I told them. No one would choose that life. But back at home, my mother’s friends, these beautiful out gay men—they were like celebrities to me.
Those men were my lasting childhood crushes. They were lean and chiseled, well-groomed and well-dressed, and their voices didn’t sound like other men’s voices. They sounded weird, but in a way I liked: they e.nun.ci.ated, they ar.tic.u.la.ted. They were as heartthrobby as any boy I’d seen on the covers of Tiger Beat or BOP, and they were in my living room. I remember their calves, their white tennis shoes and ankle socks. They were sexy in a way even a preteen girl could understand.
I used to dream about one of them, a dancer in the local ballet company. His hair was the blond of wheat stalks, and he stood with his feet always in first position. He had a smile that made my insides itch. I wondered what it would be like to kiss him. When my parents took me to the ballet, I stared at his headshot in the program and felt my earlobes go hot. I was sure everyone could see them glowing like coals. I couldn’t believe my luck: now I had a photo of him to look at whenever I wanted. I had plenty of crushes on boys my own age, but this dancer was a different kind of creature. I knew he was a man, but he was more than that too, better than that, other than that—like there was an extra layer to him, an extra shine. He was, in the words of writer Rebecca Solnit, an “encounter with what else men could be.”10
I remember another, Michael Freed. Michael had a smooth radio voice, and his cheekbones made a tidy triangle with the point of his chin. He was a working artist, and I tried to copy his style once or twice in art class. My parents had two of his smaller paintings, and they hung them upstairs, where our bedrooms were, among the family photos and framed memorabilia. My parents also had a large painting of Michael’s, but they never hung it. It was a banana, goldenrod-yellow and nearly four feet long. The banana was painted against a white background, and along the perimeter of the canvas, under a thin wash of white paint, was a border of old black-and-white photos of boys, high-school-age, in dress shirts and ties. Above the banana was the phrase ONE IN TEN, stenciled in black paint.
That’s how many men are thought to be gay,11 my mother explained. One in ten.
The banana painting was gay pop art. There was no place in our house where it would have fit, or fit in. My parents leaned it carefully against the back wall of a closet, where we saw it whenever we went for the vacuum.
5
When I was thirteen, an older friend gave me a cassette tape of the DC hardcore band Fugazi. When they came through town, my friend’s brother, who was older than both of us, took us to the show. One of the singers had a raspy voice that swung between a whine and a growl, and I liked watching him throw his wiry body around. The room was clogged with smoke and smelled like a gymnasium, but I looked around in the dim light at the other girls there. They all looked coolly weird, streetwise, and confident. I wondered how it would be to look like them. I was a straight-A student naturally inclined to a nine o’clock bedtime.
But I could dress like those girls. Act your way into a feeling: a phrase from the back cover of one of my mom’s self-help books. I got lipstick the color of dried blood and thrifted oversize men’s suit pants for fifty cents a pair. I bought a black pleather wallet with a metal chain that I snapped onto one of the belt loops. Nirvana’s Nevermind came out, and I pulled on opaque black tights under my cutoffs and wore them all winter. I was weird, and I hoped someone would notice. I wanted to be spotted, recognized for being the kind of girl I aspired to be. I knew I was on the right track when one of the doctor’s wives grazed me with her eyes and sniffed.
I had to do a research paper in eighth-grade science, and for my topic I chose homosexuality. I wanted to know whether being gay was based in biology. Was there something different about the brains or the genes of gay people like my uncle Jerry, something you could point to that made them gay?
I found newsmagazine headlines that screamed NATURE OR NURTURE? and a couple of studies12 of gay twins. A group of researchers believed they’d found evidence that the brains of gay men were “feminized” by certain processes in utero. I read about a part of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, whose size seemed to differ between gay men and straight men.13 To me this happily proved what I’d been taught by my family, and what I’d been telling the kids at school: gay people are born that way. Sexual orientation is in our biology, went the prevailing assumption: it’s an inherent trait, built-in, and consistent over a person’s life-span. There’s no sense in arguing with it or judging it or trying to change it.
I thought then, and well into adulthood, that each of us has an essential self, and that self is solid, stable, dependable. There would be things I could always count on, like science, and teachers having answers, and the USA having fifty states, and me being me, some elemental me that would be constant over my lifetime. Sexual orientation was a part of my essential self.
This made sense to me not only as a person who took comfort in the firm ground of science but also as a kid who wanted vindication for her dead gay uncle. The born-this-way narrative was, and still is, a vital refrain of the LGBTQ+ rights movement. If gayness is something you’re born with, like skin color, you have a right to protection by the law. This is also how we talk about transness. Homosexuality was absolved of its classification as a mental illness in 1973, but the rights of LGBTQ+ people still depend on our framing the “condition” as involuntary and fixed.
My mother’s artist-friend Michael let me interview him for my research paper, and I called with a list of questions. When did he know he was gay? How did he know? What did his family say? What did he think made a person gay? I remember referring to his “sexual preference,” and him gently corrected me: Try using “sexual orientation” instead, he said. We’re not talking about who or what a person prefers, because that implies choice. We’re talking about who a person is.
I liked boys. That was who I was. It was easy to figure out. In kindergarten, I liked a first-grader named Eli. He was so cute that the sight of him panicked me, as though I’d narrowly missed being hit by a car. One of the teachers at school taught us origami, and I folded love notes into brightly colored swans and dogs. I never talked to Eli, but I invited him to my birthday party that year. He couldn’t come, but he and his mother drove to our house to deliver a present. I was in the bathroom when the doorbell rang, and when my mother called to me, I found I couldn’t move my feet. I was terrified to see him. I short-circuited, hid behind the bathroom door. I was six. When I opened the wrapped package they’d left, it was just a necklace of ugly plastic beads in primary colors. But I kept it, because he gave it to me.
The next year, in Mrs. Fightmaster’s first grade class, I had a crush on a boy named Aaron
. My best friend had a crush on him too. He had big earnest eyes and a sweater with his name stitched across it. I didn’t even mind when he vomited up his lunch on the rug in front of our cubbies. My friend and I sometimes invited him to climb trees at recess, and when he agreed, I was so excited I could hardly speak.
My mother still remembers her confusion the first time she met a woman with HIV. You just never saw that, she says. Then, as now, gay men were the demographic most affected by HIV and AIDS. The women we met through volunteer work were mostly sisters of men who had died, best friends, or ex-girlfriends. I’m sure some were straight and some were not, but I didn’t think about it. My understanding of “gay people” was that they were mostly men.
Gay men packed our living room for support group meetings. I wondered how they had sex, tried to picture it. They fascinated me. One summer vacation in California, I went with my aunt Tina, her husband, and their daughters to the San Francisco Pride Parade, where we saw the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence drag troupe, their outlandishly made-up faces above dark, flowing habits. On Castro Street, there were men in gold lamé thongs dancing in cages on flatbed trucks. Gay men were thrilling, heartbreaking, tragic, wild. I wanted to be close to them. I wanted them, even though I knew they were not for me.
The idea of being a lesbian seemed boring. Lesbians were less visible than gay men, for one thing. I attributed this to a statistic I’d picked up somewhere, possibly from that conversation with my mother about Michael Freed’s one-in-ten banana painting. One in twenty women, the statistic went, is a lesbian. I thought, That’s why we don’t know any gay women. There apparently weren’t a lot of them. I remember seeing them on motorcycles at the front of the Pride Parade. They weren’t like women I knew. Lesbians were butches. That was how you could tell who was a lesbian. They wore scuffed leather boots, short hair, and lips the color of lips. They weren’t pretty. Why, I thought, wouldn’t a woman want to make herself beautiful? “Like most people around me,” writes A. K. Summers in Pregnant Butch, “I unthinkingly conflated butch with ugly.”14
The Fixed Stars Page 5