by Sarah Moon
“A ranch? Wow!”
The counselor needed help. “Pays ten bucks,” your friend said.
“Cool!”
You got permission from Mom and off you went on a Friday afternoon. It was April, wildflowers blooming. You drove high into the Rockies past patches of snow in a yellow International Harvester. And that first night while your buddy slept, the cool, tall dude, who knew the names of constellations, who could spot a spruce from a cedar, a Hereford from a Holstein, he pulled you into his sleeping bag. It was late and dark and he was so warm and oh God you let him. He slipped off your underwear and touched you and you came for the very first time. The pleasure of it so deep and sharp it cut right to heaven and back and you knew right then you were damned. Ruined.
It went on for three years, the sex. Top secret. A wild need inside growing larger as your small body grew tufts of hair, your bones got bigger and your voice deepened. He was the one soul who knew, who knew what you really were: swollen bad with desire. He was the only relief from the guilt of having let it all happen.
You couldn’t hold it anymore, the secret that hummed and hounded — hounds you still, I know. First, you tried with pills you’d stolen from Mom’s medicine chest. You barfed all over the bedroom carpet. That didn’t do the trick so one night — you were fifteen — you found the twenty-two rifle that Dad had left behind when he moved out. You found the bullets in the middle drawer of the bureau in the basement. Brought them to your room, to your desk where all your homework sat screaming to be done. You loaded the gun, put the barrel to your temple, reached for the trigger. You were naked and shaking with anger. You decided better throw on pajamas so they won’t find you this way: on the orange carpet, in a pool of blood, new patches of hair hanging out. So you dressed and sat back down and put the barrel to your head. What else, you think, could blot out the blackness of the sin hidden beneath your altar boy robes. Your finger was there but the moment you squeezed the trigger (still not sure how it happened) a hand, an instinct, your angel-gut, that deepest part of you that knows you want life, you want to see what will come, that part yanked the rifle. The bullet blasted through the paneling of the bedroom wall and through the banister of the basement steps and ended up somewhere in the storeroom.
Young one, your secret is here. It is safe. It is ours and we are living. The thoughts of suicide still dog you, I know, but you’ll do me this favor, won’t you? Throw away the bullets; flush away the pills. One day (sooner than you think!) you will know that what you’re hiding isn’t you, one day what seems so heavy will weigh so little you feel you might fly. Because the very thing you are hiding, the very pain that throbs in your breast turns out to be your finest, fiercest teacher.
One day, can you believe? You will write a book about what happened. An award-winning book about the secret sex, how it brought you richest pain and knowledge even as it nearly killed you. How you learned that forgiveness was a gift you would give to yourself. The book will even be funny because your life turns out to be full of funny and full of good. You know this, don’t you? Deep inside. It turns out good. Complicated and sad and difficult, yes. But good.
Listen, young one. You’re fine. From your gut to your groin you know what you’re doing. Except when you don’t. And that’s fine too. One day you’ll know that every step happened just the way it did so that you would land exactly where you were meant to be.
You’ll go to college, you’ll sing. One day you’ll meet a man whose eyes are so startling you understand you’ll never know the end of him. So you take him into your arms and walk through life together. And on your twenty-fifth anniversary the two of you visit Paris (a city you’ve walked together many times) and you stay in a room overlooking the Seine and on your last night in town, a snowy eve — Feast of the Epiphany — you happen upon a little cinema. By chance, your favorite movie is playing there and you go in and watch and when you hear the film’s final words —
His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe
and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end upon all the living and the dead.
— you both cry so hard that you laugh so loud as you walk out to get a midnight coffee hearing all the while the lilt of Joyce’s lines in your head grateful, grateful that you are among the living.
I know that right now you feel it’s impossible that you could speak, that anyone could hear, that anyone could understand the story hidden in your gut but soon, any moment, you will find a way to lift your head and turn to the faces around you — the redheaded singing teacher; the mother of your classmate Theresa. You’ll speak of what’s inside. You can take care of yourself this way. You’ll see you do not need to carry it alone. You can write it down. You can ask for help. You can even call across the wireless where men and women just like you are on the other end. They will not judge. They can hold just as much of your secret as you wish to share. They know about secrets, they’ve had their own and they know it’s not your fault; that you’re just a kid doing a kid’s job — falling into love, falling into life.
And, dear boy, do this, please. When you finish reading this letter, walk over and look into the mirror and take a breath — I am serious — breathe and look there to see the fierce young man who will travel miles and who will help so many because of the pain that taught him about being human. Look at your face, your eyes; your sweet, good body, and behold the greatest secret of all. Look there, at the boundless strength. You see? No kidding, friend.
With love,
Marty
Dear Me,
Remember when you knew there was no turning back?
It was a muggy summer afternoon in Raleigh, and you had just dropped off your grandmother at the beauty parlor in the old Carolina Hotel on Nash Square. Killing time, you had wandered into the newsstand — the “blind stand,” as it was called back then, since it was run by a blind man — and you and this sightless cashier were the only people in the room. There’s no way he could have known where your eyes were fixed so feverishly, but you wondered if he was already on to you. What if his handicap had heightened his other senses? What if the mere sound of your footsteps had betrayed your exact location and the object of your lust?
You could easily have flipped through that magazine. Hell, you could have bought the damned thing. You could have told him it was Time or Field & Stream, and he would have been none the wiser. But you were so scared that you just left it there unexplored, fleeing the newsstand with a feeble “thank you, sir” to make it clear to him that you hadn’t been shoplifting. It wasn’t until you had reached the safety of your car (your first car, that cherry red VW) that you could let yourself reassemble the image that had so undone you. You had seen photos of shirtless men before — in the Sears catalog, for instance — but the guy on the cover of Demigods magazine, he of the oaken arms and golden chest, had not been there in the name of haberdashery; he’d been lolling in bed amid a tangle of silver satin sheets.
You turned on the car radio to collect yourself, only to hear a song called “Walk on the Wild Side,” which seemed the perfect theme music for the moment, since it proclaimed with sultry trombones that you had already begun your long slide into hell. How could you argue with that? Apparently there were whole magazines out there devoted to your secret mental illness, or, as the state of North Carolina liked to put it, your “abominable crime against nature.”
Okay, stop. Here’s what I want you to know, son:
Forty years after that queasy epiphany you’ll tell a friend this story, and he’ll smile knowingly. The next day he’ll come to your house with an old issue of Demigods — not just any issue either, the very one — and you’ll see that your heartthrob had been just as beautiful as you remembered (the arms, the chest, that rakish curl across his forehead), though his name (Larry Kunz) will leave a little something to be desired. As for those silver satin sheets, they’ll prove not to be sheets at all but a plastic shower curtain wrapped around his waist. He�
�s not even in bed, in fact — that’s a bathtub he’s sitting on. Never mind. He’s all yours now, for as long as you want.
But you’re wondering, of course, what you’ll find inside the magazine. Alas, no more photos of Mr. Kunz, but lots of other young bucks with names like Troy Saxon and Mike Nificent, decked out in posing straps and sailor caps. You’ll also appreciate the page of mail order gifts, exotic items apparently indispensable to the manly household of 1962: An Indian pith helmet, an antique dealers’ handbook, a 21-inch imported Italian peppermill, a musical cigarette box that played “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.”
And what will strike you most about this fading artifact is how brazenly innocent it seems to you now. You’ll be hard pressed to recall how it had once filled you with scorching shame, invoking that ominous war chant of a word — ho-mo-sex-u-al — you’d been trying so hard not to hear. But you could never have known then that what you feared most in yourself would one day become the source of your greatest joy, the very foundation for your success.
Which is why, when Demigods finds its way back to you, you will frame it and hang it on your kitchen wall. It will stay there for years, a souvenir of bygone fears and a source of daily amusement to you and the man you married.
Love,
Armistead
Dear Arthur,
Maybe you could have used this letter when you were a little kid. Remember the rule your mom had that you couldn’t play with a girl for two days in a row after school? You had to find a boy to rotate in? Your parents were too sophisticated to come right out and say, “Boys don’t play with girls. Boys don’t play with dolls. Boys are supposed to chafe at rainy days; they don’t prefer to stay inside and draw. Boys like throwing balls, not playing hopscotch. Or talking.” They just implied it. I guess they might have even thought that a little nonconformity was OK, but they were clearly worried that you were pushing the limits of what would be seen by others as acceptable. And I know you felt that worry, and that it became YOUR worry. I would have stepped right in there, put an arm around your shoulders, and reassured you. I would have said, “It is totally fine for almost all your friends to be girls. You will grow up and work in a field that is 98 percent female. The pleasure you get from talking to girls will make your work life (not to mention the rest of your life) a thousand times happier. The fact that you ‘like girls’ will be a problem for exactly thirteen seconds in the relative time frame of your life. Also: Go ahead and play the Scarlet Witch during superhero fantasy games if you think her powers are cooler and her costume more fun.” Then I would have taken you to A&S Department Store or Gimbels and bought you a Barbie doll. And then driven us to Carvel’s afterward.
Of course I didn’t get to say those things to you when you were little, and no one else did. So you learned to hide those sissy impulses, as if they were a bright pink parka stuffed in the back of your closet behind the carefully chosen blue and brown clothing, only peeking out occasionally, and quickly stuffed back again.
It turns out to be the things you couldn’t hide so easily that bring you the most trouble. In junior high there are some kids who find out you are a Jew and pitch pennies at you in the hall to see if you’ll pick them up. Other kids will try to humiliate you by shouting, “BRAIN!” (a multi-syllable word in their nasal, Long Island accents) as if you should be embarrassed to have known the answers to the questions the teacher was asking in the last period. And of course you ARE embarrassed, despite “knowing better.”
When the football players steal your street clothes during the high school variety show rehearsal and throw them in the garbage, where you find them hours later, it isn’t because you’re gay (your girlfriend is rehearsing with you when this happens), but because you’re Jewish and smart AND maybe-a-hint-of-something-gay. … It’s their vague sense that you’re different and vulnerable and threatening.
But the scars from this are tiny and faint. Much more important, these experiences give you a small sense of what it’s like to be bullied. And it gives you a lifelong identification with the underdog. With books in particular, you are drawn to stories where a person has hidden talents, unappreciated skills, a great destiny perhaps. Remember the name Harry Potter.
In the meantime, I know that you never REALLY think it’s a bad thing to be smart, or to be a Jew. You know in your heart that “they” were wrong. And this will help you with the gay thing eventually — just to know that other people could be very certain about how awful something about you was, and still be way off the mark.
But here are some things that I know you need assurance about right now:
Your parents: Oh, honey, coming out to your parents will be hard. In fact, it won’t be you who initiates it, it’ll be them. In your freshman year of college they will start dropping hints. You will have this exchange with your mother over the telephone (repeatedly):
Mom: You know, Arthur, if you ever feel the need to TALK to someone … if something is BOTHERING you, we will gladly pay for you to see a psychologist.
You: Thanks, Mom, I’m fine. Do YOU want to see a psychologist? You know YOU can see a psychologist if you’re worried about something.
This will happen so often that you will retreat to the safety of the library in the Sarah Doyle Women’s Center at your school, where they have a special shelf of books about coming out to your family. (Yes, the women’s center — you still like playing with girls.) You will read every book twelve times as if you are preparing for a test that you desperately want to ace.
But then one night, at the beginning of summer vacation, you will come home and retreat to your room to write in your journal. There will be a knock on your door. And a request: “Arthur, we want you to come to the living room.” (You will know this is bad: Yours is not the kind of family that has formal talks in the living room.)
And it is bad, though it also plays out almost exactly as the books said it would. Your parents run through clichés of what parents say to children who are coming out: “How can you know if you haven’t slept with a girl?” (You will reply, “I don’t know, Mom, how do you know you’re straight if you haven’t slept with a girl?”)
“Why are you doing this to us?”
“What did we do to YOU that has made you this way?”
And worst of all, toward the end of the multi-hour conversation:
“You can change if you want to. We’ll pay for a psychologist to help you.”
Ah, the psychologist again.
Because you have studied, and because you are prepared, and because of all the self-confidence and strength, ironically, that your parents have given you, you will manage to tell them, “I can’t change this part of me. And I don’t want to. I will agree to see a psychologist, but only as part of family therapy — that is, only if you agree to see one too. This is not MY problem, it’s YOUR problem, and we need help getting over it.”
Those are strong words, but you are not in a position of strength. You are dependent on your parents, and so they choose the psychologist, a friend of the rabbi who heads your Jewish Center.
You endure two or three sessions with him where he tries to convince you that you can become heterosexual if you try very, very hard, and he probes your psyche for weaknesses, for a lever to turn you to his way of thinking.
Finally he says: “Why is it that you admit you are nervous about coming out to your friends and that you’re afraid that they won’t accept you … and yet you seem to think your parents will accept you?”
You say: “Because my friends don’t HAVE to be my friends. My parents have no choice but to be my parents, and so I have to believe that they will accept me for who I am, eventually.”
He says: “I think you are being totally unrealistic.”
You say: “Then we have nothing further to talk about.”
He says: “OK … well, let’s put our next session on the calendar. What day shall we meet?”
And you say: “Never.”
Arthur, you will in fact never have to see that
idiot quack snake-charm salesman again. And the most important thing I can tell you is that although that guy certainly didn’t help your parents (and probably set the process back a few years) he was totally and utterly wrong about them.
It will take a good long decade after that first terrible coming out conversation. (Hang on, Arthur, I swear.) There will be years where the tension between you and your folks will be nearly unbearable. But very, very gradually, it will begin to ease.
When you are twenty-eight you will start dating a guy who is not only handsome and smart and hysterically funny, but who is also a doctor (and can therefore talk to your father about the one thing your father can talk about).
A giant breakthrough will occur three years later (1993) when the two of you decide to get married. At the ceremony, on a beautiful lawn overlooking the Hudson River, your parents will watch you, surrounded by friends you’ve known all your life. (Did I mention that you were wrong to worry about your friends? You don’t lose a single one when you come out. Not even the big straight soccer boy you are madly in love with. You only get closer.) They see these friends, and your work colleagues of all ages, and your extended family, and everyone is beaming, and everyone is happy, especially you. And it turns out that this is really all they truly wanted: to see you happy. They just didn’t realize you could be gay AND happy.
The choke-knots of tension slip open, never to be retied. They are present at your first, and fifth, and tenth, and twentieth anniversaries. They are overjoyed at the birth of your son.
Things work out with your parents, Arthur. You find love. And you get to play with girls just as often as you want.
Love, Arthur
Dear Malinda, Age 16:
Do you remember, when you were six years old, how Dad used to wake you up in the morning? He would play the record of Disney’s Cinderella, your favorite movie. (It’s OK to admit it. You were six.) The strains of “A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes” would tremble down the hallway of the house on Doric Drive, and you would wake up imagining ballrooms and billowing gowns and Prince Charming.