With the ice cracked, I described my own extended family: my LGBTQ family, the kinds of families some of us had already built, the families here in Utah too many had been kicked out of and missed, and the families of our own many of us still hoped to build “one day…” I was now listening to myself as closely as they were, feeling this thing I had missed out on, a thing this church had taught me to value: a family of my own that I felt sure I’d never have now. And right then I knew that for the first time in a very long while, these two opposing forces were gathered together talking about two not-so-different sides of the same coin, using a common language that I had spoken fluently in my youth, a language that men like these had taught me: the language of family and security. And at the very least, we were trying our best to see each other.
This next sentence may baffle some, but in that moment, I understood that in many ways, but not all, these men were also my people. That they felt similarly about me was made clear when they extended an invitation for my LGBTQ family to attend their Mormon Tabernacle Christmas Spectacular.
For those who don’t know, the LDS Church’s Christmas Spectacular is like the Mormon Oscars. It’s hosted by a celebrity. It boasts big production values. It’s televised. And it’s a tough ticket to land. The church extended a handful of tickets for me, Troy, other LGBTQ representatives, our families, and guests. Soon, word began getting out that we planned to attend, and not unlike with our Prop 8 case, some in the LGBTQ community lashed out, calling us traitors. I understood their anger, but I’d felt my own community’s wrath before, so instead of backing out, I invited someone along who wasn’t afraid of a little heat: Chad Griffin.
By this time, Chad had accepted an offer to become president of the Human Rights Campaign, the big, national LGBTQ organization in D.C. I had once worried was too corporate, slow, and might need replacing. He had already begun focusing the organization on building new political power, launching the largest grassroots expansion in HRC’s history, doubling its membership, and deploying grassroots organizers we had once only dreamed of to share our stories, mobilize voters, and fight anti-LGBTQ legislation in every state, including our home states of Texas and Arkansas. When I finally got Chad on the phone, I asked, “Hey, wanna meet some interesting people?” He immediately accepted.
I will never forget the feeling of walking into the Mormon Tabernacle with its famed pipe organ and its massive choir. Chad and I arrived flanked by several other groups of gays and lesbians with their families. And over the course of that truly spectacular show, I kept an eye on the “small,” soft-spoken Mormon man I’d come to care for over the past many months. He was watching us closely in return, perhaps wondering if his trust was well placed, worrying that we might pull some grand theatrics to bring their show down like ACT UP had done so many times in the darkest days of AIDS to rock the nation out of apathy. He surely had seen the TV news images of ACT UP’s protest inside St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City twenty years before. But none of that happened on this night. What he saw instead was that even with our major differences, we still had much in common. We had tried our best to look nice (albeit in our own ways), we struggled just as hard to keep our children quiet, and we gladly sang along to the same familiar Christmas carols. Perhaps with even a bit more spirit in our glorias and egg-shell-sees (excelsis).
Call me easily moved, but I left that tabernacle buzzing with a Christmas spirit I hadn’t felt since childhood. Chad had a thousand questions. I did my best to explain why our Christmas story was so surprisingly similar to the one at his church and what about the LDS Christian faith was different. It’s not a conversation most might think two LGBTQ freedom fighters would enjoy, but we did. We were curious. And perhaps we’d both caught glimpses of some of what we’d lost when we stopped being welcome in our temples and chapels: the idea that family is primary to all else, the notion that we ought to honor our neighbors, and a daily kinship with the golden rule.
When I felt a hand take mine, I looked to my right. It was the “small,” soft-spoken Mormon who had been watching us so very closely. “Brother Black,” he said, as if he were considering asking a question he feared might offend.
“Yes, Brother?” I was getting better at that now.
“Do you…do you think you might ever want to have a family?”
“As in, what? Children?”
“That’s right,” he said, not yet able to look me in the eye.
I thought my answer must have been plain by now. What did he think we had been fighting for all this time? “Yes,” I said. “You can kick the kid out of the church, but you can’t take the church out of the kid. More than anything, I wish I had a dozen little ones….Maybe you could say a prayer that I’ll meet the husband of my dreams, Brother?”
Without the words to respond to that, he squeezed my hand. I waited. Then he said, “I think some thought perhaps you wanted marriage so you could…change it. Perhaps break its meaning.”
“No,” I said. “A lot of gay people, just like a lot of straight people, don’t want to get married these days. Or have kids. But I’d love both. I’d love a big family. And we just want to be treated the same when we have those families and kids. So they’re safe.”
Now with tears in his eyes, he looked up at me and said, “I see…” Because he had seen. With his own two eyes. Because we had each been brave enough to try to fix one of the things that had been broken in our attempts at creation: a bridge, our relationship.
In this time, active Mormons began to organize a group called Mormons Building Bridges. Many of its members were mothers of LGBTQ children, mothers who hoped for a better childhood for their kids than what I’d experienced. These moms called themselves Mama Dragons. The following summer, Troy asked me to grand marshal the Salt Lake City Pride parade. He drove the convertible I sat atop. Behind us, hundreds of these devout LDS members and moms in their Sunday best helped lead the parade past the iconic Salt Lake City temple holding aloft signs expressing sentiments such as “LDS Loves LGBT.” Two very different kinds of Americans, marching as one. And today, when the latest LDS prophet has disparaged his LGBTQ members, those Mama Dragons have proven that they’ll no longer stay silent. They’ve spoken out and helped correct his misconceptions.
Yes, it is true that much of the LDS Church and its leadership is still homophobic and exclusionary, but in 2015 Utah became one of the only red states to pass nondiscrimination protections in the workplace and housing through a Republican legislature, and it didn’t experience the backlash of anti-trans bathroom bills that landed in so many other states. That was at least in part due to countless more meetings between LGBTQ people and the church that began with saying yes to a Christmas concert.
But on that special night in December, as I stepped toward the Mormon Tabernacle’s exit, Christmas carols still ringing in my ears, I couldn’t have known all that lay ahead. Then, it was just me and a soft-spoken Mormon leader walking together hand in hand. But in that moment, I understood that his faith, the faith that had once been mine, belonged to America. And thanks to Justice Kennedy, what had long been in my bones was also evident now: that I too belonged to America. We hadn’t rebuilt a bridge across our divides quite yet—we were still feeling out the best place to lay the foundation for that bridge—but for the first time since our fighting began and all the chaos took over, we were holding hands. Literally. And we could see each other clearly across the rift. This was our America. Not one, not two, not only his, or mine. This. This moment was evidence that there was hope for the vision I’d long been reaching for: we, a nation of vast, seemingly irreconcilable differences—yet stepping forward together in a home we could embrace as ours.
II
A step closer to home, my sweet aunt Josie in Texarkana had been battling blood cancer for a few years, and although her prognosis was fair enough, she had phoned my mom to say a sort of goodbye just in case. She was happy to keep fighting f
or her children’s and grandchildren’s sake, and she worried about how her husband, James, might get on without her. They had been together since their school days, and something told her that she didn’t have as long left as the doctors thought.
When my mom called to tell me, I could hear a tightness in her voice like sticky gravel. She’d been holding back tears all morning. She’d lost her own mother just before I was born. In many ways, Josie had filled the maternal void. For me, Aunt Josie was the one person I’d trusted enough in my shyest days to come out from my hiding spot behind an armchair during a big family reunion. She took me into the darkened kitchen and we sat there alone together. She didn’t mention my debilitating shyness; she just let me enjoy a bowl of strawberry ice cream in the safety of her silence. She was so strong and gentle at a time when the world around me was far too brutal. My entire life, she had been the matriarch of our good Southern family. But I hadn’t seen Josie—or the rest of my mom’s big family—in many years.
My mom was finding it near impossible to recover from the devastation of losing her oldest boy. She called me every day, wanting to know if she had been a terrible mother, apologizing for shortcomings I couldn’t see, and breaking down when she’d land at the same conclusion: “I should have been able to keep him alive. Baby boys aren’t supposed to go before their moms, Lancer.” There was nothing I could say to convince her of the truth: that she had been a remarkable mother, and that perhaps we’d never understand the whys of Marcus’s death, but it most certainly wasn’t her fault.
With depression taking a terrible toll on what little health she had, the thought of losing her Josie was too much to bear. Now she admitted, “I can’t get on a plane if it happens, Lancer. I’m on oxygen all night long now.” Her spinning mind was keeping her from sleeping, and that lack of sleep left her too weak to breathe. It was a vicious, potentially fatal circle.
I could hear in her voice she was shaking from this rare admission of weakness. It was as if the cancer treatments had brought her polio back to life, robbing her muscles even further. But the truth was, her muscles had never been as strong as she had let on. Since childhood, she had performed and protested so others would allow her more freedom. And she’d come to believe those white lies about how tough her arms were because she was a crazy optimist who felt anything that could be imagined was possible. She had imagined being able to walk upright using her arms, hold a job, get married, have kids, and live until a ripe old age, holding grandbabies in those same eternally strong arms.
But after sixty years of optimism, she had taxed her battle-worn muscles to within an inch of their lives, then punished them all over again with chemo and radiation. What little strength her diaphragm had left was nearly gone. Coughing was excruciating work. Her new muscle pain demanded painkillers that further weakened her, and for the first time, she’d begun letting Jeff carry her around in full view of others; she’d stopped using her crutches and braces altogether and accepted her wheelchair as a necessity.
All of this worried me terribly, so I insisted she attend her checkups. She was happy to do so because they only proved her point. At each post-cancer checkup, the news was stellar. “If she sticks with the oxygen treatments, and we get her pain figured out, well, I’d say she’s got ten years easy. That’s a helluva strong heart in your mom.” Great, tell me something I don’t know, doc. But I feared she was performing for them too, and that no one was paying enough attention to the deleterious effects of her heartbreak.
The big call came within days. My aunt Josie had taken her last breath at home, in her sleep. She had gone peacefully, just as she had always lived. My mom was a wreck when she called me. She had to take long breaks between sentences to suck in oxygen from the little tubes going into each nostril, then return with another sentence or two. She was still convinced she would die if she got on a plane now, so she took a long breath, then lowered her voice: “But you could.”
This was no simple observation. There was a helluva lot of subtext beneath those words: “Go in my place. Represent our family at my big sister’s funeral. Our matriarch’s funeral.” This gathering promised to include all of the living family members who had gathered around me as a six-year-old to pray me back to health on Christmas Eve.
I knew this request showed great trust. It was an honor. But I hadn’t been back to Texarkana in decades. Aside from one family reunion spent playing tennis with Todd, I hadn’t seen my extended Southern family since well before I’d come out, and that was ages ago. Now, thanks to Milk, the Oscar speech, the court cases, and all the national news shows, I was miles from any closet as far as they were concerned.
I had long since convinced myself that I’d lost contact with my mom’s family because of physical distance. “We moved to California, my mom moved to Virginia, so…” But that was bull. Todd had moved to Austin, Texas, a decade earlier to finish college at the University of Texas, and after a brief stint in California, he’d moved back to Texas with his girlfriend, Allie, so they could enjoy real Texas barbeque again. I’d made more than a few trips to see them. I could just as easily have made a pit stop in Texarkana. But deep down, I felt that when I’d come out, when I’d waged the public battles I had, I’d stepped into another country, and maybe even betrayed my roots. I worried that I’d be rejected by the people I’d once called home, and it’s one thing to be rejected by strangers but quite another to be rejected by family. Thanks to my father’s disappearing act, I’d had enough familial rejection for a lifetime. So I had chickened out. And in my lack of courage, I’d let something vital break.
I got off the phone with my mom and called Todd and asked if he’d come with me. He was in. I called my mom back: “I’ll go. We’ll both go. So yes, Mom, you will be there for Aunt Josie in spirit. Through us.”
My tough mom wept with relief and pride. Yes, pride. Of all the things she might have felt with the death of her beloved sister, pride wouldn’t have been my first guess, but if rule one is “family comes first” and close behind is “we show up for one another,” then Todd and I were doing her proud.
So the odd blond kid who’d rarely said a word at reunions, and who was now an “unabashed homosexual” from “liberal Hollywood,” was returning home to the South. But I didn’t want those labels hanging off of me. Not for this trip. I wasn’t headed to Texarkana to create any new understanding. All I wanted was to represent my mother well, maybe enjoy a bit of familial kinship, some pecan pie, fried chicken, and hell, if things went really well or tits up, a few swigs of our reliable cousin: Jack Daniel’s.
I landed in Texarkana first, Todd drove in a little while later, and we made it to Josie’s service just in time. Familiar enough faces filled the chapel, just recognizable through gravity-kissed skin, darkened eyes, and gray hair where blond or brown had been.
Josie’s daughters, Debbie and Sandy, were so busy organizing that they kept their emotions at bay, but Todd and I received tight hugs and we shared ours and our mother’s in return. Their brother, Lynn, kept his distance. I hadn’t seen him in I don’t know how long. I remembered him as an incredibly handsome, strong young man. He was a bit rounder now, but still tough and good-looking. His reception wasn’t warm, but I thought, Why would it be? He’d just lost his mom, and he hardly knew me anymore.
Inside was a viewing. We’d held a viewing for Marcus months before, but I hadn’t approached his casket. I already knew he was wearing his best jeans, his work boots, and his prized leather NASCAR jacket. I’d picked them out. But by his funeral, I only wanted to remember him as the strong, handsome man he’d been. With Josie, whom I hadn’t seen in ages, curiosity got the best of me. I approached her casket. Inside was her body, much smaller than I had expected or remembered. I could only recall her through my youngster’s eyes, when she had towered over me, easily able to keep me safe. So I looked away from this unfamiliar body and again chose memory over truth.
The rest was sound. Todd and I sat near the middle of the church during the service. I’m sure that words were said and songs were sung, but all I remember was the sound of our uncle James’s pain, like a child gasping for air three or four times before forcing himself silent again. I felt like an interloper into something private and precious, an invader stealing the end of his love story. I had abandoned this family too long ago to be here now. I had denied myself this part of our American life, this American family of mine. I felt I’d given up the right to be there.
That feeling made what came next quite meaningful. Tough little Debbie, who had once taught my mom how to drive her yellow Chevy Malibu with hand controls, came up to me and Todd with two pairs of white gloves: “Now ya gotta help carry her, boys.” This wasn’t a request. This was a demand. We’d shown up; now there was work to do. We would be pallbearers for Aunt Josie. She had carried me as a child, and now I would carry her. So alongside our uncle Don and cousin Lynn, Todd and I helped lay our family’s matriarch to rest. I had never felt so unworthy of such a great honor. And no matter how practical my inclusion was, I felt very grateful to have been asked.
Todd and I followed the rest of the mourners to the wake at Josie and James’s house. When I walked in a side door, I was struck. Piecing together old memories, I slowly recognized this as the same house where I had once hidden behind the armchair, with the same kitchen table where Josie had sat me down with ice cream when I was still too afraid to been seen. It was like stepping onto a familiar stage, every object a prop from dreamlike memories, all right where I’d left them as a child, all right where they should have been.
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