My mother and father, now divorced for twice as long as they were married to each other, remain in close contact. Unless someone points out their remarkable ability to get along, I take it for granted. When my mother retired from teaching, I brought a boyfriend I had been dating only a few months to her retirement party at an outdoor pavilion in one of Minneapolis’s many beautiful parks. On the car ride over, I mentioned that my father would also be at the party. My boyfriend thought I was joking until we actually saw Dad at the park, mingling seamlessly with all of Mom’s other guests.
As the party wrapped up, Dad left with my boyfriend and me. As we walked back to our cars, two buff men ran by on the path in front of us, wearing nothing more than athletic shoes and shorts. They passed us, apparently oblivious to how stunning their tight pecs and abs looked to me, even better than the ones I first admired in the pages of International Male. When I returned to reality, I fumbled my words, trying futilely to remember what I was talking about before the joggers halted my thoughts midsentence. I wanted to recover before my boyfriend noticed my wandering eye, but when I glanced over, he was stifling a laugh.
“You should see yourselves,” he said to Dad and me. “It was like synchronized whiplash, the two of you with your eyes glued on those guys!”
Dad and I looked at each other sheepishly, unable to deny that we had been caught.
My boyfriend just shook his head and smiled: “Now I see where you get it from.”
SITTING IN THE DARK
WITH MY MOTHER
Zach Udko
I’m on my dorm-room bed, drenched in sweat, shivering, and trying to figure out if I have swollen glands.
“Where are my glands?” I ask my mother.
She feels the front of my neck.
“Are they swollen?”
“A little. Why?”
“What do you mean, a little? Are they swollen or are they not?”
It’s the night of my college graduation, and I’m having a nervous breakdown. A few days earlier, I had my first sexual encounter with a guy, a buff, blond econ major from Orange County whom I’d been eyeing for several weeks in my wine tasting class.
Now I’m convinced I’m sero-converting, and I haven’t yet told my mother that I’m gay. This, for some reason, feels like the perfect time to do so.
My roommate is Googling my symptoms and reporting back to us various diagnoses, as I pace back and forth. “Are you experiencing minor flulike symptoms? Are you feverish? Tired? Weak?” he asks.
“Yes! Yes! Yes!”
I can’t decide if I should take off my shirt and show my mother the bruises all over my chest—odd yellow blotches of various shapes and sizes. This is probably some strange skin rash associated with the disease, I am telling myself, not marks left behind from the bites of an aggressive lover of Pinot Noir.
I remove my “Congrats Class of ’02!” T-shirt. I’m standing in my boxer briefs, shaking.
“What the hell happened to you?” She’s trying to stay calm.
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“I slept with a guy.”
“You did what?! What do you mean? Why would you do such a thing?”
“Because I think I’m gay…but more importantly, I think I have AIDS.”
With the most bewildered look I’ve ever seen on her face, she turns to my roommate, pleading, as if to ask, Did you know about this?
And then she utters the only sound a devastated Jewish mother can make at a time like this: “Oy.”
Earlier that evening, my roommate and I had rehearsed this scene. For some reason, I felt that if my mother was fearful for my life, she would indulge me with sympathy, throw her arms around me, and say that my sexual orientation didn’t matter. I would distract her from my homosexuality with my hypochondria. I would scare her into acceptance. My roommate cautiously obliged.
“We must focus on the AIDS,” I remember telling him in earnest, fearing that I’d contracted the disease. “This isn’t about my lifestyle. This is a matter of life and death.”
The next morning my mother insisted that I get tested, so we packed up the car with all of my college belongings and drove from Palo Alto to Los Angeles. Six hours later, we arrived at my pediatrician’s office, where I sat pale and shivering among hyperactive toddlers, anxiously waiting to give a blood sample.
The doctor who has taken care of me since I was a baby gave my mother a hug and told her, “He’s engaged in a very low-risk activity. He’s fine. I promise.”
Three months later, we returned to be sure that I was still negative. I was perfectly healthy. Suddenly, however, my relationship with my mother wasn’t.
“Did you see that man’s bulge?” my mother whispered to me in the dark. “I mean, he’s enormous. Just look at him strut around in those tights!”
We were sitting in the audience of the Winter Garden Theatre. This was my first trip to Manhattan and my first Broadway show. My mother was referring to the rather impressive package of the Rum Tum Tugger in Cats, played by Terrence Mann. I was three years old.
After the show, my mother persuaded the house manager to let us backstage and introduce me to the cat with the huge thing between his legs. He signed my program and I told him, “I’m your biggest fan.”
While a three-year-old doesn’t necessarily know if he’s gay, looking back at that moment, I am certain of two things: First, I knew that the Rum Tum Tugger was indeed a curious cat, and second, I knew I wanted to spend as much time as possible in the theatre (an institution so glorious, my mother always told me, it deserves to be spelled the British way).
A lot of gay men fall in love with Auntie Mame, but very few have mothers who plop them in front of the television, put in the video, and proclaim, “This is my alter ego. Pay attention.” My mother prided herself on being a carefree liberal-minded thinker, an aesthete, a wacky citizen of the world, full of vitality and a sense of adventure. When I was two years old, in a fit of extravagance for her friend’s birthday party, she donated Ajax, a chimpanzee, to the Los Angeles Zoo and threw a lavish affair complete with a pâté replica of the chimp. Just for kicks, she decided to stage a mock circumcision. My mother trimmed the pâté chimp’s foreskin off, and the guests spread the rest on sourdough toast points.
Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death.
Born in New York and raised in Los Angeles, my mother spent much of her childhood learning about fashion, grace, and style in her parents’ dress shop. In the sixties, she was a wild child at the University of Wisconsin at Madison—a drop-dead beauty with long hair that danced around her little waist, big brown eyes, and a guffaw that could contagiously fill a room with delight. In college, when she decided she had to meet Billy Wilder, her favorite filmmaker, she created the Wisconsin Film Society Award and made the arrangements to present the honor to him at his office. It took two hours of conversation for a very flattered Wilder to realize that she was just a gutsy fan who had faked her way in.
During senior year, her friends staged an all-nude production of Peter Pan that was shut down by the police; I’m told she was one of the dancing Tinkerbells.
After marrying my father, she decided to channel all of her creative energy into me and my older brother. While my brother showed signs of turning into a business-minded jock, I became the sole inheritor of my mother’s lust for performance.
When I was five, my mother gave me a Carmen Miranda headdress. For the next several years, I would samba around the house, singing “I, Yi, Yi, Yi, Yi, I Like You Very Much,” gyrating my hips with a fruit bowl on my head.
My mother would ask, “How much do you like me?”
And I’d answer in a Brazilian accent, “Very Much! I, Yi, Yi, Yi, Yi, I think you’re grand!”
“Who do you love most in the whole world?” she’d ask.
“You, Mommy, of course.” Then I’d direct the question back at her. “Who do you love most in the whole world?”
Sometimes she would say me. Other times she would say that she couldn’t pick between my father, my brother, and me. But I was clearly my mother’s child. I was the only one interested in discussing aesthetics, the only one who noticed that she changed nail polish and told her the new shade looked divine, the only one who shared a passion for eyebrow plucking and moustache bleaching. While some boys pretend to shave with their dads, I would look forward to sitting in her bathroom once a month for a treatment of burning foam on our upper lips.
We watched The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins until the tapes stretched out and we had to buy new ones.
“Who would you like to marry when you grow up?” she’d playfully ask.
“Only Julie Andrews. Only Julie,” I would say.
“Someday, you’re going to find a woman who you’ll love even more than me. And you’re going to love her most in the whole world.”
“No, I won’t,” I insisted. “I’ll always love you most in the whole world.”
“You’ll see.”
“No, you’ll see!”
I started writing plays when I was nine years old. During the long nights when my parents went out for social dates, I’d slave into the night with my babysitter Lydia, a U.C.L.A. student. I would dictate scenes, and she would type them up beautifully on my family’s word processor. Yitzak and the Rabbi, my first play, explored a young man’s frustrations with Judaism; with the help of a bunny rabbit friend, he embarks on a journey to find an alternative source of spiritual fulfillment.
As far as my mother was concerned, the play was brilliant. Determined to help me find my own voice as an artist, my mother persuaded our temple to produce the show for their Youth Enrichment Program.
It was decided that she would direct. Ben Savage (pre–Boy Meets World) got the starring role, and my mother cast me in a smaller part.
“It’s best for the show,” she said. “Trust me.”
She took her job very seriously: storyboards, scenic design, lighting, and music. Ben Savage complained about the brevity of our lunch breaks. My mother told him he wasn’t in a union yet and we had to push to get the finale right.
I remember sitting down with her during the postmortem. “I want you to give me a musical to direct,” she said. “Something that will speak to your generation.”
That summer, I wrote a show featuring summer camp kids, a mystical voodoo cleaning lady, singing anti-Semites, and a single mother infatuated with Ralph Nader. The production was a clunky success, but I think my mother ached for something more ambitious.
“You’re funny, Zach,” she told me, “but ultimately a piece of work for the stage needs to say something. You need to give your work some dramatic heft.”
She was right. I was ten, but I wasn’t pushing myself far enough as an artist. For my third show, I decided I wanted to save the planet by writing an eco-friendly musical. Again, my mother directed—meticulously, obsessively, passionately. In her mind, she was preparing Save Our Planet for a national tour; we ended up performing at a handful of junior high schools.
Together, we were giving each other a life in the theatre.
My parents had always exposed me to the most interesting and thought-provoking art of the day, never shying away from mature content. When I was twelve, we returned to New York for five days of theatre. Angels in America was the hottest ticket in town, and my mother was determined to get us seats. A friend of a friend pulled some strings, and we sat in the back row of the balcony. I remember loving the play. My father, exhausted from a long business meeting, slept through the first act.
At intermission, my mother wanted to leave. “We don’t need to stay for the rest, do we?” she said.
This was the first time I ever remember my mother wanting to walk out of a show. No matter how bad it was, we always stayed until the curtain call.
I didn’t want to let on that I was wildly intrigued by the show. I kept my mouth shut.
As my mother guided us out of the theatre, a large African American usherette blocked our path at the top of the balcony.
“Honey, you can’t leave now, you’re gonna miss the best part.”
“I want to see the best part, Mom.”
We went back to our seats to watch the second act, and for the first time in my life, my ultrapermissive, liberal mother covered my eyes twice: once when Prior strips down naked for his medical exam, once when Louis gets buggered in the Rambles.
Watching Tony Kushner’s play, my mother was confronted for the first time with real gay men struggling through the early nineties—as fully developed characters, not as AIDS statistics in The New York Times. But why did she cover my eyes, the same eyes that she didn’t shield from such spectacles as Malcolm McDowell’s ultraviolent rapes in A Clockwork Orange? Did she know she was sitting next to an emerging homosexual? Was she horrified that such a nightmarish fate lurked in the wings? To this day, she claims she had no idea I would grow up to be gay.
“We thought we had a little David Mamet running around the house. Who knew we had a little Tony Kushner?”
I wish.
Though my mother behaved like an ultrapermissive gal pal on the surface, she didn’t have a single gay friend in her social circle. In the cab after Angels, she continued to voice her discomfort. “I just can’t relate to any of these characters and their attitudes,” she told me.
“But don’t you think it’s well-written?” I pleaded. I wasn’t ready to commit to being gay at age twelve, but I was definitely interested in everything Mr. Kushner had to say. “Wasn’t it a good story? Weren’t you affected emotionally?”
“It was disgusting. The way those men talk, the way they live. What a shame.”
That night, it became clear to me that in spite of our shared cultural preferences, my mother would be less than thrilled about having a gay son.
In the coming years, it didn’t help that I repeatedly refused to shake my mother of her denial. A mother can choose to ignore the warning signs, and a son can simultaneously give mixed signals.
I want to marry Julie Andrews. (You’re a boy who likes girls.)
I only want to marry Julie Andrews. (You have a particular taste.)
If I can’t marry Julie Andrews, I want nothing to do with women! (What a poetic, romantic, lady-killer!)
I never dated girls, but I let my mother believe that I was interested in them. At my private high school in Los Angeles, there was not a single out student. When a young man came out after he graduated, he wrote an anonymous letter to the school paper. He urged the student body to adopt a more accepting attitude toward homosexuals, but he still didn’t even feel comfortable signing his name. Driving me home from school, my mother mentioned the article and said, “Isn’t that just terrible?”
“What’s terrible? That he didn’t sign his name?” My mother always told me: Never do or say anything that you wouldn’t want printed on the front page of The New York Times.
“No,” she said. “That he’s gay.”
“Why is that so terrible?”
“Life is tough enough as it is without having to worry about all the horrible things gay men have to worry about. Right?” I chose to stay silent—and I started spending more time in the theatre.
My high school drama teacher was the first gay man I got to know well. During rehearsals for William Hoffman’s As Is, one of the first AIDS plays ever written, we sat, rather awkwardly, in our hospital gown costumes and he offered the cast a Q & A about “Being Gay.”
I raised my hand immediately. “Does your mother know?”
“No, she doesn’t.” He was approaching forty.
“How could your mother not know?” I pressed.
“I don’t want to rob her of her denial,” he said.
Stepping into the role of Saul, a gay Jewish man losing his lover to AIDS, I remember experiencing the same sensations that charged through my body when I saw Angels: a rush of liberation and self-hatred. I knew I was gay and I was terrified that my life w
ould one day become its very own stylized tearjerker. I didn’t want my mother to see the show, but keeping her away from one of my school plays was unthinkable. I told her it was a small role, no big deal. She came; she saw; she said I gave a good performance; we didn’t buy the video.
When I was sixteen, we went to London and sat in the front row of Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking. My mother braved her way through several blow job scenes, but the play’s climax, featuring an anal knife rape, was too much for her to handle. It did not help redefine my mother’s already rather limited view of gay people.
After the show, I wanted to tell her that I was gay and nothing at all like the characters portrayed in the play. But I continued to suppress my feelings, so the two of us sat in a London tea shop, sharing finger sandwiches and neutered conversation.
When I got to college, I hid behind a supersexual facade, always talking about straight sex and never having it. I kept an arm’s-length distance from the few out campus homosexuals.
I wrote a passionate column about the legs of our provost Condoleezza Rice in the school paper. (Your taste is evolving.)
In my spare time, I worked on composing a musical adaptation of Showgirls. (You’re still a very horny lover of women.)
At two hundred pounds, I was the chunky campus prankster, and the chub factor safely prevented me from being a viable sexual commodity. My mother and I spoke on the phone nearly every day, but sex never entered the conversation. When she wanted to talk about Love, I skillfully changed the topic to Art.
Then came the summer before senior year: While studying documentary film at N.Y.U., I starved myself on a strict diet of tofu hot dogs and Tasti D-Lite and lost forty pounds in five months. I felt attractive and ready for sex.
Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys Page 26