Sometime just before midnight, when all the shops in the area closed, Todd and I looked at each other. Something about the solemnity of this night didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel like Marcus. We knew what we needed to do. For too long, the world had bristled at Marcus’s bad behavior: the drinking, the drugs, the heavy metal and punk rock music, and then others must have mocked him as a fag or pervert. If ever there was a moment to fully embrace my big brother, well, there weren’t many left. And it seemed to us that rule number one in Marcus’s instruction manual had always been to break as many rules as possible.
Todd ran to the store and quickly returned with a package. I leaned into Marcus’s ear and said, “Hey, Marco, hey, hey.” His eyes fluttered open just enough that we could tell he was listening. “Hey, Marco…What if we stop dipping this sponge into water…”
I stopped my sentence halfway through to choke back the tears I didn’t want him to see or hear. I didn’t want to scare him more. But he took my pause as the end of my sentence and nodded. He was done with water. The thing is, I wasn’t done with my sentence: “And what if we start dipping it in Crown Royal?”
Marco’s eyes shot wide open in a way they hadn’t in a week. He was wide-awake now! He put on a devilish grin that stretched from ear to rules-be-damned ear. So I dipped that sponge into the Crown Royal Todd had just brought home and put it to Marcus’s lips. He sucked it down fast. Then it was Todd’s turn to give him a shot, and then mine again. Our unresponsive brother now seemed awake, alive, and thirstier than a cowboy in the desert.
Todd took the party up a notch, searching for the Dead Milkmen on his phone and hitting Play when he found “Bitchin’ Camaro.” Like a punk Lazarus rising, Marcus raised his bone-thin right arm into the air, his index and pinky fingers extending out like horns, and shook that devilish hand to the crazed beat. Rock on, Marcus, rock on. When the song was over, we fed him more shots, played him more music, and I laid heavy on the morphine button until the sun rose.
Marcus waited for my mom to wake up. He waited for her to come downstairs and kiss him a dozen times, not knowing that those kisses were her goodbye. She went to the little bathroom downstairs for just a moment or two, and with Todd loyally by Marcus’s right side, and just as I was stepping to his left, my big, brave brother, who at thirteen years old had defended my life with an aluminum bat, and at sixteen had tried to take our stepdad’s life to save mine—who had just come out of the closet and for the first time glimpsed hope but never got to touch it—took his last breath.
A treasured, fundamental piece of who I had always been took its last breath with Marcus that morning. It died with him.
I’ve faced some tough days, but I’ve never cried so hard, not before and not since. I lost my big brother to tragedy. There was no explaining the “why.” Death came for him in brutal fashion just as he was figuring out how to live. He had motivated and protected me for a lifetime. Now I felt sure that I had failed him.
V
Many months later, as our team stepped out of the Supreme Court and down its many steps, greeted by the sights and sounds of countless news cameras and supporters, my big brother was all I had on my mind, my phone untouched in my right pocket, our conversation forever unfinished. Yes, I was sure we were going to win this fight now, but my big brother would never taste the joy, love, and freedom this win he’d helped set in motion would bring with it.
When the decisions did come down, every news station in the nation trumpeted Kennedy’s historic words and his vote that gave LGBTQ people a “double win” that struck down Prop 8 in California and killed DOMA. I felt a sense of accomplishment, but with it came anger. I was angry with the circuit court judges who had taken years to hear and decide our case. I was furious with those who had preached incrementalism and patience from their wealthy, privileged perches. I was furious at myself for not knowing how to get this done sooner, and not knowing how to keep my big brother alive long enough to taste it.
These two decisions didn’t get us to fifty-state marriage equality quite yet, but they killed Proposition 8, brought back marriage equality to California, and bestowed federal benefits on any marriage in states that did have marriage equality. And soon, just as I had predicted, Kennedy’s equality-minded opinion brought new marriage cases raining down like a June thunderstorm.
At AFER, we quickly sued again, this time in the state of Virginia itself. My frustration with the state our family now called home, where my brother had just died an unequal citizen, wouldn’t allow me the luxury of easing off the gas. And in every other state still without marriage equality, new plaintiffs stepped into the fight. Then, very quickly, and starting with none other than the LDS state of Utah, nearly every state’s district and circuit federal courts saw Kennedy’s writing on the wall and ruled on these new cases in accordance with his pro-equality stance. But when a court finally did disagree with Kennedy, a brave, bighearted man named Jim Obergefell, who like Edie Windsor had been denied federal marriage benefits when he lost his spouse, had his case taken up by the U.S. Supreme Court to sort out any such lower court contradictions. Now SCOTUS would have to determine once and for all, and for all fifty states, whether marriage was a fundamental federal right.
On June 26, 2015, the decisive day arrived. By chance, I was in San Francisco, of all places. Once the Supreme Court had granted Jim’s case cert, I had slowly started to dip my toe back into filmmaking, and I was in my favorite neighborhood in my favorite city, the Castro, with a house full of writers doing research for a potential new project about the wider LGBTQ rights movement called When We Rise.
I woke up early that morning to a text message from Jeff, with a photo of him surrounded by hundreds of marriage equality advocates at the Supreme Court, holding a sign telling those nine justices to “Let my son get married!” He’d made the sign, called in late to work, and crossed the Potomac River to join the rally that morning. It was a helluva way to start what promised to be a dramatic day. I logged onto Wi-Fi and refreshed scotusblog.com endlessly in hopes of reading the Obergefell decision the second it was released. When it finally came through, I saw that Kennedy had written it, and I felt sure we had won. My belief was quickly confirmed. That promise made from a very big stage a little over six years earlier had finally found an ending, and for now a happy ending—at least as far as marriage equality was concerned.
I thought about that boy in San Antonio, that girl in Provo, and the hope they might feel on this morning. From this day forward—even on hot sunny sidewalks in that corner of America I grew up in and loved—when a young person realized he or she was gay, shame and fear weren’t their only options. Now they could dream of wedding bells and happily-ever-afters. Butterflies of love no longer had to die, or turn to butterflies of fear. There were new options now, and with them had come measurable new understanding and acceptance.
But I wasn’t feeling the joy I thought I would. I walked to a corner shop down on Castro Street and bought a pack of my brother’s favorite smokes, and with sounds of celebration beginning to burst from windows all around me, I sat down on a step, lit that smoke, and quietly let my tears fall.
My brother would never hear these cheers. My brother would never know this victory. My brother would never see the promise he’d inspired me to help fulfill. He would never know the South as a place that accepted him for who he was and how he loved Larry. He would never rejoice knowing that the America he loved now valued him in return—and this was a man who had stood straight and tall for the national anthem, meant every word of the Pledge of Allegiance, and flew an American flag off the back of his truck. My big brother was a patriot—a gay patriot—and he died never seeing his country’s promises include him.
So I sat there with tears running down my face, but not the tears of victory I had dreamed of and hoped for so many times over the past six years. These were tears of rage at those in comfortable places who ha
d tossed about words like “patience” with self-satisfaction. Patience: “the capacity to accept or tolerate delay.” To my ears, sitting on those steps that morning, listening to the cheers of the living, I understood “patience” in a new way—as a word that deserves no comfortable home in a nation that has yet to fulfill its promise of liberty and justice for all.
PART III
CHAPTER 22
Our Americas
I
“If you break something, take responsibility, and do your very best to put it back together again. Heck, even if you don’t think you’ve broken something, leave it better than you found it, Lancer, not worse.”
By the time I was six, my mom had learned to stock up on ample fix-it supplies: superglue, a hammer and nails, needles and thread, a screw gun and bolts, and every cleaner they had at Albertsons—all awaiting my attempted fix of whatever had sustained damage during my latest fit of inspiration. My fits came with chaos: scraps of fabric, construction paper, and thread in every corner; glue, paint, and glitter deep in carpets; bits of tape fused to floors and desks; cracked glass, scratched tables, stained walls. It became clear that chaos and destruction were creation’s sisters. It was near impossible to build anything, least of all something brand-new, without them showing up. And I came to understand that building new things was a whole lot easier than putting back together what inevitably got broken.
In the weeks that followed each of our big marriage equality wins, my mom would comment that I must feel so proud to be a part of this struggle: “Imagine when gay people start getting married in Texas, Lancer.” She was right. I would be thrilled. So she asked why I seemed to only get bluer with each win. I had been trying to convince myself that with this grand task’s purposefulness filling my heart, of course victories left an empty space in their wake. But I knew that wasn’t completely it. I’d never suffered from a lack of ideas or purpose before helping take on Prop 8. So was it the quiet concern that we might win marriage equality but, not getting any younger, I’d never enjoy the right myself? That may have been a small part of it. But the truth is, something deeper had long been breaking apart, and in the throes of creation, I just couldn’t see the damage yet.
My first grown-up, decade-long creative fit helped manifest projects like Pedro, Big Love, Milk, and J. Edgar. That energy morphed into the struggle for marriage equality and wins in district, circuit, and at the U.S. Supreme Court. But a price had been paid. As when I’d raided the craft box in my younger days, unexpectedly precious things had broken in the creative process, things I wasn’t even aware I’d begun missing. This list included my mother’s family in the South, my own roots there, and even my relationship with the Mormon Church. In big ways and small, I hadn’t left any of these relationships better than I’d found them. Now they were all quietly demanding repair.
And so, I started from the furthest away and worked inward.
A new friend named Troy Williams called from Salt Lake City. Troy had been a very good Mormon. He’d gone on a mission to help convince others to join our church. But he also knew that he was gay, and that to be honest with himself and the church he cared for meant his expulsion. Now he dedicated much of his time to securing LGBTQ equality in one of the toughest areas there was: the heart of Mormondom, Salt Lake City. On this phone call, he asked if I had any interest in meeting with some of the leaders of the LDS Church. It was a startling ask. I immediately booked a flight to Utah.
During the run-up to the Supreme Court case, I had helped a passionate journalist and filmmaker named Reed Cowan finish a documentary called 8: The Mormon Proposition, which followed the money from an instruction by the LDS prophet to rank-and-file Mormons to help fund Proposition 8. Reed’s documentary held our childhood church responsible for the divisive initiative, and the film brought plenty of negative attention to our old church’s doorstep. That documentary, and my work on Big Love, likely had me on the church’s list of adversaries. So this was a very surprising invitation.
Even more surprising, while I packed, I didn’t feel the now-familiar pangs that signaled I was flying in for a fight. This trip felt more like a long-overdue reunion, albeit one littered with land mines.
As the small aircraft came in for a landing in Salt Lake City, I gazed out the window. It was a perfectly sunny day, and I could clearly see the Mormon Temple Brigham Young had broken ground on well over a century before—its five spires and golden trumpeting Angel Moroni reaching for the “Celestial Kingdom,” an iconic vision for any good Mormon. I thought back to how I’d once dreamed I might get married in that temple, start a family, work my way up in the church, and perhaps become an apostle one day. I thought back on how that dream was cut short when I learned I was too different to be a part of the only thing I thought I belonged to as a six-year-old boy. I remembered the heartbreak of exclusion.
The plane’s wheels touched down, and my nerves finally set in. I hadn’t stopped to consider what these church leaders might want to confront me about. Should I have brought a lawyer? I must have seemed a sort of worst nightmare to them—most of my work to date had spilled the beans on our church’s fundamentalist, polygamist roots, or pointed a bright light at one of its great political miscalculations, all of which branded the church too extreme to potential newcomers—and this was a church that still needed newcomers and their monthly tithing to thrive.
Troy met me at the airport, and together we headed to the Joseph Smith Memorial Building, the world headquarters of this powerful American religious institution. When we stepped inside, a very different kind of small man appeared—a soft-spoken, white-haired man in a simple navy suit. He was not so much physically small as tenaciously unassuming, a model Mormon. And although a man of substantial power and influence, whom most outsiders would have perceived to be my mortal enemy, he was deferential.
Over time, faced with LDS president Spencer W. Kimball’s rejection thanks to my “homosexuality,” I had rejected everything about my old faith in turn. I had thrown out any good with all of the truly bad, willfully forgetting the feel of this family’s embrace. But when this soft-spoken man shook my hand and said, “Brother Black…it’s so good to see you,” I chose to believe him, and I felt a warmth I hadn’t in many decades.
“Yes…Brother…I’m glad to see you, and to be here too.” I was rusty with the old “Brother” and “Sister” this and that. He noticed but didn’t mind.
He led me and Troy up a set of perfectly clean, pastel-carpeted stairs and into a boardroom where a half dozen more white-haired men greeted us with soft handshakes, kind voices, and more “Brother Black”s.
Now, as easy as it would have made things, I couldn’t pretend there were no problems between us on this sunny day. There were. Big ones. It was still a sin to be gay in my old church, so LDS kids were at high risk of being kicked out of their homes—leading to high rates of teen homelessness, and one of the worst LGBTQ suicide rates in the nation. None of that was okay by me. And don’t get me started on the church’s treatment of women, not after how I’d seen my mother’s pleas for help go unanswered in the name of honoring the “priesthood.” I could still feel the sting of Merrill’s punches, the shame of lying at school, and my own unanswered appeals.
And most certainly these men had big issues with me as well. Mormons don’t like their history being trotted out for public inspection, a spotlight aimed at the most uncomfortable, tenuous “truths” of faith. What religion could withstand such scrutiny? And it’s exactly the kind of public examination I’d been putting their baby-faced religious history through for years. Then, of course, there was the openly gay activist thing. That, and I really loved a good cup of hot coffee, which was also banned.
With Troy and me on one side and all that white hair on the other, I looked across a table that seemed far wider than its few feet—a canyon where bridges once stood, bridges that had sustained terrible blows in my youth and had been left to rot. Since
then, both sides had stopped seeing each other, stopped speaking, stopped listening, and in fact lost all interest in bridges. That was the chaos and destruction left over from our respective attempts at creation. For them, a proposition called 8. For me, a right called marriage equality. But today wasn’t for changing anyone in that room. I wasn’t here to get them to wave a white flag, or better yet, a rainbow one. They weren’t here to turn me straight or get me to switch to decaf. I had been invited to take a smaller step, to see if we might attempt what we so seldom do in our personal and political fights, to repair something we could agree had been broken in our opposing efforts, to build a bridge so that we might at least see each other again.
I was immediately heartened by a lunch menu that included a shocker: Pepsi Cola. It seemed caffeine was now allowed as long as it wasn’t warm. Hallelujah! I was halfway home to a latte! Kidding aside, this signaled to my LDS brain that there might be some flexibility in this Mormon world after all, that these men might actually be willing to listen and be moved by an unfamiliar story. So I mustered my courage and shared some of my own personal stories from the years before and after I had been forced from their church. Troy did the same. They listened. Then the white-haired men took their turns, telling moving stories about their communities and LDS families: brave pioneer relatives, grandparents, parents, wives, and children. Troy and I could relate to much of their family histories, but we sat silent during the wife-and-children portion. We didn’t have those stories, but I could feel the men’s pride and joy, and I enjoyed feeling it. I had missed this most about my old church: the focus on community and family.
Then, hoping to break the ice even further, I took a big risk—I commented on the terribly dated drapes and paintings around the room, and suggested that perhaps the exclusion of gay men had hurt their church in more ways than they had even considered. “You could really use some new interior design in here, Brothers.” There was a stunned silence. I let it linger, then reassured them, “That was a joke. You can laugh.” And those white-haired men burst at the seams, any tension breaking into tearful laughter.
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