by Sarah Moon
19. How am I? I’m fine. Thank you for asking. And you will be too.
Love,
Brian
Dear Stacey,
I see you so clearly, poetry-writing stoner girl that you are, the summer before college, in love simultaneously with an older man and the smartest girl in school (she really was), thinking that you have to choose, worried that you’re too weird for him, not smart enough for her, talking it all over endlessly, filled with desire and ambitions you have no idea how to fulfill. You’re kind of on fire and lonely at the same time, all the time. You listen to a lot of Joni Mitchell records. Also, you are worried that you are fat, and that you’re a terrible driver, which is a serious liability in the suburbs. And you’re beginning to be plagued by the anxiety that will shape-shift and goad you for many years to come. Here is what I want you to know that you don’t know then: You’re just as you should be. All that desire is going to turn out to be your compass in life, you are going to fall in love with incredible women, with incredible men, and they are going to fall in love with you. You’re going to have a wonderful time. You are going to discover again and again that your desire is an excellent guide; it knows when you’re telling the truth and when you’re not, and what you should do next, not only romantically, but also in figuring out what you want to do in this world. Your inability to lie about what you want — indeed, what some might call your excessive need to talk about it — and your strong wish to be recognized as you are will bring you extraordinary gifts and love and happiness and, through this honesty, you will find your way to the company of bold and generous people all your life. They will help you more than you can imagine. Okay, you’re going to get in a little hot water now and then. Big deal. Honey: You can handle it. Even the anxiety, your devil, will have some useful aspects; like a Geiger counter, it will tick faster when you’re in danger, even if the danger is on a psychically subatomic level.
Now, I have to tell you something else, which you are maybe not going to understand for a very long time. All tribes have their price. This isn’t a failing, it’s just the way tribes are. Please — and I know you’re going to ignore me on this one — try to be more understanding toward yourself, more understanding of whatever tribe you’re hanging with at any given time. No, the stoners don’t understand the lesbians, and the lesbians and the gay guys don’t always get along, and no one quite gets the bisexuals, and the literary world can be an unfair and prudish place. That is true. That’s why I’m talking to the seventeen-year-old you, as you drive the wrong way up an exit ramp in your Dodge Dart Swinger, wondering who you should really love and who you’re really going to be. The answer is: all of it. I could save you a lot of time if you would listen to me that this is it, you’re already there, this is you. But you’re not listening, because your boyfriend is yelling about the exit ramp situation and you’re thinking about the red hair of the smartest girl in school. You need to keep your eyes on the road ahead.
I understand. I’ll be here when you get here. I’ll be so glad to see you. And, sweetheart, though you’re not at all fat, you are, in fact, a terrible driver. Please move to New York soon for the safety of all concerned.
Much love,
Stacey
16 March 2011
Dear Adam,
Greetings from the new age of insecurity. Living, as you are, back in the 1980s, you’re no doubt still wondering if the world as you know it will end in nuclear war with the Soviet Union. But I’m writing to say that you will be spared that particular disaster. Our great fifty-year enmity, that prodigious engine of paranoia and fear, and the excuse for the bombing of villages and the backing of death squads, will evaporate before your eyes, and we will declare “victory” over our vanquished foe — a cynical old man of a system, it will turn out, who was dying from gangrene all along. But the reprieve from this compulsory dread, and the profitable misery that accompanies it, will, I’m afraid, be short. I know ten years seems like an eternity to you, a stretch of time you know only from reading novels, where a decade is a unit of aching regret in a stifled marriage or the span of an adult life before death in battle.
But decades do pass, moment by moment, day by day (you’ll learn that), and by the opening of the twenty-first century, the city you’ll come to live in will be shocked into rage and deep sadness by a spectacle of violence that will stun you. Its perpetrators will be post-modern religious fundamentalists. Not the sort you’re living with now — the televangelists railing against abortion and the gay agenda, reinforcing the background militarism of American life, making the country safe for bullies and political thugs — but their rather more extreme Islamic counterparts, who also loathe modernity, and the sexual equality of women, and who see homosexuality as an abomination. Alas, then, I have to report that the political atmosphere of fear and manipulation, of war profiteers and false patriotism, will return with a vengeance as you pass into your thirties.
Right now, you’re irate at the excesses of Reagan and Wall Street in your haughty, withering way. I’m afraid they will appear almost quaint in the course of time. You’re growing up during an era when the rich are brasher than they’ve been in decades, conspicuous consumption is all the rage, and while you feel repulsed by it (not to mention above it), still, I know it seeps in. Money and success are the only things that seem to promise safety, especially given how entirely you feel locked out of the comforts of love. I’m sorry to say the rich will only get brasher, and the financiers will only get better at stealing the public’s money, and the insecurities of young people reaching working age will only worsen.
Right now you’re making $7.25 an hour scooping ice cream in Wellesley, Massachusetts. In twenty years, most everything will cost twice as much but that wage will remain the same (so be glad for what you’re earning, my friend). As free market fundamentalism rages on, a whole lot of people will come out of the closet, you’ll have sex in college, and plenty more afterward, and though it’ll take a while, you’ll have a boyfriend too. He’ll be a med student and you’ll be amazed he likes you and he’ll teach you that sex doesn’t always have to be so fraught and serious, that it can be a lark. And that will be an enormous relief, a gift he doesn’t even know he’s giving you, and luckily you’ll be ready to receive it and hold on to it. From there, even after he’s gone, things will be better because you’ll realize you don’t just have a mind, you have a body too, and it, or rather you, are capable of giving pleasure as well as receiving it. I know this matters more to you at the moment than politics because it seems much more closely tied to the chance of some barely glimpsed, ill-defined salvation from the intimate prison of loneliness and grief that you find yourself in. This prison will never vanish entirely. But it will become a ruin, with no walls left to hold you, a ghost of a place, always there in memory, and sometimes, strangely, almost comforting in its familiarity (beware its cold siren call on low days).
What you’ll learn over the years is that while the love and sex and intimacy that seem so unattainable now can be glorious and sublime, they aren’t the full answer to the riddle of your life. There’s so much going on in your young mind, it seems almost unbearable, and you feel certain that if a cute boy would only hold you and kiss you, your fervid brain would go blissfully calm and all the world’s problems would recede. But when you get older, and your heart has opened wide enough to let yourself be loved, you’ll realize the opening doesn’t stop there, at the door of the apartment you share with your boyfriend; it keeps going, opening to your friends and your aging family, into wars and politics, and sadness for your country, and, yes, sometimes despair. You see, love doesn’t end despair. It deepens the poignancy of it by opening your eyes to what there is to lose. No matter how I describe this to you now, you can’t understand it. Only time can do that to you.
If anything, I do wish I could tell you to enjoy yourself. Your worry doesn’t help those you worry about, least of all yourself. It’s a toothless clock wheel. You can let it stop and you’ll be fine wi
thout it. You won’t do this, I realize. After all, who’s to say I’ve put it entirely aside myself? I just wish you knew that it can be put aside. Worries will only multiply, but your attachment to them can loosen. And that can make all the difference.
Finally, as cynical as your 1980s may be — “a low, dishonest decade,” as Auden called the ’30s — enjoy the pace of life you have now. You still write letters by hand. You call friends at home and if their phones are busy you call back later. You don’t have a computer, much less the Internet. It’s hard to appreciate absences, I realize. But perhaps this letter, typed on a laptop with email and twenty-four-hour-a-day news shot wirelessly from the heavens onto its screen, can help. Speed is all very sexy, and in our new age of insecurity it can often feel like the only way to stay ahead of the latest disaster at home or overseas. But information in excess becomes a fog and no matter how fast it rushes at you, it still obscures the actual landscape. So when you can, here and there, enjoy the dear old world as it was.
Best wishes,
Adam
Dear Terry,
I know you. Sex is the only thing we think about. While everyone else in Mrs. Lane’s second-period Solid Geometry is puzzling out trapezoids, we’re checking out the hair under Tommy Brown’s arms and wondering when we’re going to sprout some of our own. Sometimes he catches us looking at him and he rolls up the arms of his T-shirt one more turn. That’s when we know it’s time to lower our eyes and try to look at that trapezoid in front of us as if we meant it.
And every time Pete Welsh leans back at his desk and stretches, his T-shirt always rides up just enough in front to see that line of golden hair running from his navel down his belly to where it disappears under his 501s. We don’t have a name for it but it’s driving us crazy. It’s called a Treasure Trail. We’ll get one of our own any day now. It just won’t be as beautiful or dangerous as Pete Welsh’s.
Our school should be called Horny High.
At home, our nana has strong hands and can open jars of Smucker’s that no one else in the family can and she always smells good when she hugs us, but we can’t talk to her about sex. Our parents would freak out and our little brother’s too young.
And sex is the only thing we want to talk about. No wonder: We’re the only boy in the world who falls in love with other boys. We don’t feel lonely; we have lots of friends. We feel alone, cut off, isolated, weird, maybe a little scared. Are we always going to be the only boy in the world who falls in love with other boys?
Having sex is never the problem. Nice girls don’t put out at Horny High. It’s easy to jack off with their disappointed boyfriends. Almost all of them are up for that. No big deal. It’s what straight guys do. Except we aren’t straight guys. We’re the editor of the school paper and having sex with our friends is what we do. It’s a perfect arrangement.
It’s what comes after that we’re beginning to hate: the pretending that it hadn’t happened. You know, we were both drunk or we were just fooling around. Whatever you call it, we weren’t making love.
When you’re in love you kiss and you look the other person in the eye and tell them you love them and you would do anything in the world for them, even die.
But this, what we do with other boys, can never be acknowledged or talked about, ever. He will go to his grave first. Don’t look at him, pull your pants up, and get in the car.
We don’t feel ashamed when we get home. We feel empty. We drink a Coke. We smoke a Lucky Strike. We fall asleep thinking about James Dean and how we would kiss him on the lips and tell him we loved him. With Jimmy it would be so much more than tonight. He would kiss us back and he would tell us he loved us too — but only if he did. Jimmy isn’t a liar.
When I was your age — and that was a lifetime ago — the last people I wanted to hear from were old ones, which is what I am now.
You will grow up. Adolescence will be a distant, but always a vivid, memory. You will meet the one other boy in the world who falls in love with other boys. Maybe you won’t fall in love but you will kiss each other on the lips and you won’t pull your pants up the moment you’re done.
You will meet more and more only boys in the world who love other boys. Then, if you’re lucky, and you’re out, really out, 24/7, and you’re comfortable with who you are, you will meet Tom Kirdahy and you will kiss each other on the mouth and tell each other “I love you” and you will mean it and you will be able to marry and have a family and you can both go about the wonderful business of the rest of your life.
I love you. I envy you. We will always have Horny High.
xxxx
Terrence McNally
Dear Faggot,
Well, that’s what you are, isn’t it? Why else did you have the hots for your first girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend? You were supposed to get jealous, but you couldn’t resist his slender legs in those tapered jeans, his masculine jaw, his rebellious nature, or the package at his crotch. They say everyone has a bad boy phase. Didn’t realize it would apply to you. But you kept the urges inside, hidden from the rest, the ones who would have told you what a faggot you were.
Remember those kids at outdoor education camp? I know, some of them were cute, but that’s not what I’m talking about. They put you up on that stump and told you, in an act of faith, a team-building exercise, to fall back into their waiting, crisscrossed arms. You were the only one who wouldn’t do it. You did not have faith in them. You were not part of the team.
You didn’t really know, though, or were afraid to admit that something strange was bubbling inside you, beneath your perfect, shiny shell. Fear kept it inside and tried to squelch that bubbling for so long, along with all your other emotions. But, like when you were six and got caught peeing between the dressers for no apparent reason, what flowed inside had to come out. It took you a while.
The first image you saw of gays shown on the television was that of Sister Boom Boom, a drag nun of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, leading the gay pride parade in her humongous habit and her magnificent makeup. Not unlike current times, the reporter forgot to mention that the Sisters, a charity organization, used drag to call attention to various forms of sexual intolerance — homophobia, discrimination against those with HIV/AIDS, and other gender issues. They surely also forgot to pan across to the other folks in the parade, all as normal or abnormal as the rest of society. As you watched the news that day, you felt as if you had just walked into an adult-only movie. Mom promptly and indignantly shut the TV off, protecting the eyes and ears of her young faggot-to-be.
Several years later you found yourself listening to the songs of Erasure with the speakers turned down to about one decibel. Incredible! Even at that low volume, the lyrics of “Hideaway” blared out, as if they were singing about you, or singing to you: One day the boy decided, to let them know the way he felt inside … When Mom did find out, though, she probably would have preferred for you to pee between the dressers again. First she cried. Then, she “loved the sinner but hated the sin.” And later, she taught you that people can change at any age. “Who am I to judge?” she said to you not that long ago, and, “Did I ever tell you I was sorry?” Sometimes things get worse before they get better, but they do get better.
Finally, “faggot” became a label that you were proud of. Now, you wouldn’t have it any other way. In reality, what frightens you most is often what you ought to do. If you’ve learned anything, it’s that the ignorance persists. It doesn’t mean you speak out or fight every time you hear it. One has to pick her battles. But it does mean you never let their fear take anything away from you, or make you less than what you are.
So now being a faggot isn’t such a terrible thing. It reminds you that we are everywhere, that we will prevail, and that we have a lot to be proud of. There is so much more about you to be proud of besides being gay, but somehow sexuality posed the Mount Everest of life’s obstacles — once you conquered it, you could conquer anything else.
Okay, so now you are over forty. Always
thought you would have had everything figured out by now, right? Didn’t happen. But you have survived enough hard times to appreciate the good ones. You try to keep it simple and not worry about trifles. You try to let go of the things you can’t control. You try to give your part, or more. You try to show people the same acceptance you wish they would show you. You try to have faith. Though you don’t always succeed in these things, or may not always know how, you never stop trying. You try to fall back on the team once in a while. How else would you have become an accomplished teacher, counselor, writer, Ping-Pong player, life partner, Spanish speaker, and faggot?
Affectionately,
Erik Orrantia
Dear One,
You were only twelve when it started. I know. You’d never had sex of any kind. You didn’t have a hair on your body except what was on your head. You knew something mighty was on its way. You were waiting for the big dream, the trigger. The one they mention in Sex Ed or Biology. Wet dream. First splash of sperm — magic-gonna-be-a-MAN! potion. You’d heard about it, read about it, in the back of the scout book. Nature taking its course. But it was all thrown off course. You allowed the dream to be stolen.
Or so you feel. So you believe. And so it hurts and haunts like mad. I know.
It began (Remember? ‘Cause I know you’re crazy busy burying it, hiding it, forgetting it. I know you are sure you could never ever speak of it) when a friend from the neighborhood, a fellow paperboy, Catholic kid like you, asked if you wanted to go on a weekend trip. He knew a cool dude, a counselor from the church camp, who was fixing up a ranch, a special summer place for boys.