The Letter Q

by Sarah Moon

  I remember.

  It’s a lovely dream: to have a fairy-tale romance. But dreaming that dream has a consequence too. The consequence is yearning. It hurts, doesn’t it? But it feels good too. The hollow center inside you, the wanting of someone to love you. The ache makes your heart race as if you really were in love.

  But you’re not. Not yet.

  Sophomore year, when that boy Steve drove you to school every morning in his Bronco II, you were so willfully ignorant of what that might mean. It wasn’t until you got those tickets to Romeo and Juliet at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival — Romeo and Juliet! — and asked him if he wanted to go, and when he picked you up he was drenched in cologne — then you knew.

  I remember.

  It was June: a warm and dry summer evening. Later, the sun would set over the Rocky Mountains in a typically extravagant display of orange and pink against a violet sky. A perfect night.

  He got out of the car and rang the doorbell. He met your dad, who shook his hand. He smelled like a date. One of those boy-arrives-with-flowers, takes-you-to-a-romantic-play kind of dates. It was the weirdest, most awkward moment of your life. Sure, you’d had a crush on him in fifth grade, but this was five years later, and presented with the option of romance, you completely froze. Terrified, you talked all night about your friend Brian, who, I should note, will turn out to be gay. (I know you won’t believe me.)

  But Steve didn’t know that. You could practically see him shrinking away bit by bit as you gushed about Brian, until the foot and a half between you two in his Bronco at the end of the night could have been a mile. It’s not surprising that he ended up dating your friend Nicole instead of you. (Nicole is a whole other story that I won’t get into right now, but suffice it to say, she’s not exactly straight either. I know, you’re like: What does that mean? Wait for it.)

  I know that you feel like you completely messed up that night. You had this chance in the palm of your hand, and you not only threw it away, you threw it away in the face of the person who offered. It wasn’t your finest moment. But I know why you did it. Because the possibility of love terrifies you. It’s something that you yearn for while running from it.

  I will tell you something that those fairy tales don’t. You’re right to be terrified. Love, in the fullness of its power, will turn you inside out. And maybe, right now, you’re not ready for it yet.

  I know that you desperately want someone to love you, to see you for who you are and to not only appreciate that but to buoy you up, floating. I promise you it will happen. A day will come when your fear will crumble in the face of a need to leap into the unknown that is love. Wait for it.

  One last thing: Yes, your dreams will come true, but you’re not going to marry a prince.

  Love,

  Malinda, Age 36

  Dear Mike,

  You are about to turn fourteen and begin one of the hardest years of your life. The reason is not that you will discover you are a homosexual — you’ve known that for a couple of years now, since you burrowed into the stacks of the main library in downtown Sacramento and found the books that described and gave a name to your feelings about other boys. Those books, which you continue to read secretly, never taking them far from the shelves, do not give you much hope about your “condition.” Most of them are texts on abnormal psychology that describe homosexuals as sort of hysterical half-women who live in the shadows and prey on the unsuspecting, more like vampires than human beings. You do not recognize yourself in these descriptions and you do not want to believe that this is what you will become when you grow up. You want to be a lawyer and to help people, and you cannot understand how someone with that ambition could become one of the shadowy, sad creatures described in these texts.

  Still, because books have been your door out of your family’s difficult life, you trust the information they provide to you. All of this has left you confused. What will now happen, Mike, is that you will fall in love for the first time with a boy in your class. You have known him for a couple of years and consider him a casual friend. But when school begins in September, you will look at this boy and see him in a way you never have before. You will notice that his eyes are not just brown, but complicated with faults of yellow and black, and that the texture of his skin is unusually smooth. You will notice the slightly hoarse tone of his voice and a dozen other things about his physical presence that will make it seem to you, when you are with him, as if there is no one else in the world but the two of you. You will feel a yearning toward him that will keep you awake at night and a happiness when you are together that you have never felt with anyone.

  In the course of the next year, you will also suffer greatly because this sweet, amiable boy will have no idea of the depth of your feelings for him and no ability to return them. There will be no one in whom you confide the reason for your unhappiness, and your pain will seem unbearable to you. Harder yet, you will wonder if it will always be this way — if you will be condemned to love people who can’t love you back. You will think if that is to be the case, maybe it would be easier not to go on living because you cannot imagine there will ever be a place for you in this small central California city you call home.

  There is nothing I can tell you that can change these events. What I can tell you, though, is that there are lessons in this experience, as hard as it will be, that will ultimately give you the courage to make a better and happier life.

  You will learn that the books that pretend to describe homosexuals are wrong because to be a homosexual is not to want to sexually prey on others, but to love another and to be loved. Your fantasies with that boy are not sexual fantasies but romantic ones — to hold hands as you walk with him between classes, to kiss him, to hold him. They are no different than the fantasies of the boys and girls around you who are beginning to pair off into couples. You believe now that in their world, in the world at large, there is no place for someone with your longings. But soon you will have to make a decision — to hide who you are and be who the world wants you to be, or to trust yourself and to be yourself even though you do not know how you will do that.

  You will choose to trust yourself. You will not pretend to like girls — that would be dishonest and you like your friends too much to use them that way. You will keep quiet and wait. You will wait in hope that the day will come when there will be someone for you with whom you can experience the love you felt for your friend, and who will return it.

  Mike, that day will come. Sooner than you think. And you, because you said no to what the world told you about being gay, will have helped bring that day to pass. You will take your pain and convert it into words — all the words you are unable to say now — and write the kind of books about being gay you wish you had found on the shelves of the Sacramento Central Library for others to find, to help lighten their loads. You will become a lawyer and work for your own equality and the equality of others like you. Best of all, you will find your friend, your companion, your partner. Keep going, Mike. I’ll meet you on the other side of fourteen.

  Love,

  Michael

  Hey, Kiddo.

  Greetings from the twenty-first century. This is a message to you, from you. Well, you’re going to be me: This is from you in your fifties.

  I know; at seventeen years old, fifty sounds ancient. But believe me, fifty will be here before you know it. The good news is, you’re going to age pretty darn well (when you get a moment, you should thank Mom for those cheekbones). And, you’re gonna have pecs. Actual pecs. Hard to imagine when you’re tipping the scales at one hundred twenty pounds and Bill Ware (who’d be kind of cute if he wasn’t such a huge jerk) recently described you as “kinda scrawny”; but the time will come when coworkers will call you “Muscles.” I swear. You’re probably rolling your eyes, or laughing, or both. But that’s okay. These abs don’t lie.

  Congratulations on surviving high school. I know it hasn’t been easy for you, a small, effeminate, artsy Black boy stuck in a rednecky M
ormon-y little town, in a high school without so much as an auditorium. But I have more good news: You’ll be able to take your memories of those four years of misery and hell, and turn them into a critically acclaimed novel; so try to remember everything. And take heart: Real Life is nothing like high school. Starting with college, very few people will care that you can’t throw a baseball. Soon, you’ll meet people who actually value your intelligence and talents, people who’ll understand your cultural references and get your jokes, people who have seen Stage Door and know who Bette Midler is. Remember the year-end choir concert, after your solo number (“And I Love You So,” which you learned from Helen Reddy’s I Am Woman album), when the audience applauded, and kept applauding, filling the multipurpose room with the sound of their approval, and you thought your heart might explode inside you? You’ll have a lot more moments like that one.

  Oh, you’ll have bad moments. Baby, you’re gonna have some bad years. After you come out to them, Mom will call you vicious, ugly things, and Dad will — well, let’s just say he’ll make your life difficult; and you’ll think you’ll never be able to forgive them. But you will forgive them — though that will take some time. And their attitudes will change — though, again, that will take some time. Years later, you’ll experience grief the likes of which you can’t even imagine now — you’ll watch your best friends die young, from a disease with no cure. But you’ll get through it, I promise. You’re stronger than you know; stronger than you’d ever dream. And don’t worry: You won’t be alone through this.

  Which brings me to Frank Pryor: enough listening to “I Honestly Love You” by Olivia Newton-John over and over, and crying. There’s just no percentage in falling in love with straight boys. There’s a Gay Students’ Union at UCLA: You’ll meet more than enough gay boys to develop crushes on. And in your sophomore year — no, I won’t spoil it for you. I’ll just say, not to worry: You’ll have dates, and trysts, and affairs. And you will find love. You’ll fall in love with someone, and he’ll fall in love right back. Matter of fact — no, I shouldn’t. Yeah, I will:

  Before you’re through, you’re going to get married to a man. I mean really, legally married. To a man.

  Oh yes: and the President of the United States is Black.

  Fine, don’t believe me. Just get through this summer as best you can. And remember: incline bench presses. Trust me.

  Love,

  Larry

  Dear Ali,

  Even if you did nothing but algebra homework for the next three months, there’s still no mathematical way you could catch up. So stop worrying. None of this will even matter a year from now. It’s fruitless to wish for earthquakes or fires to destroy the entire school just so you will be free from taking your algebra test tomorrow. You know who should waste their life doing algebra homework: happy, budding mathematicians — not people like you who, after they look at an equation, walk in a small circle like a decrepit, arthritic dog, and groan as they lie down to sleep.

  You are not a happy, budding mathematician, Ali. You are a depressed, closeted queer stuck in a town with no resources or allies. Plus, your wardrobe consists of maternity-style jumpers your mother sewed for you even though you’re not a pregnant teen.

  Don’t worry about your biology homework either. You’re not going to be a biologist even though you considered it for one second when you learned that cells could commit suicide. Apoptosis — cellular suicide. The cell offs itself before it divides because it knows it’s mutated and doesn’t want to pass on the mutation to its offspring. How considerate. You can appreciate the poetics of apoptosis and use it for online passwords or an impressive Scrabble move now and then but that doesn’t mean you’re a biologist either. Apoptosis works for cells but not people, okay, Ali? What do they say about suicide — it’s a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Suicides can look like a lot of things. Sometimes suicide just looks like only drinking Diet Cokes for all your meals or driving a car, drunk, straight into a tree. BLAM! That’s it. Someone’s going to die like this before you graduate, but it doesn’t have to be you.

  Get a handful of good friends who don’t care about your maternity jumpers. You know what good friends do? They say, “Meet me on the baseball field tomorrow at midnight.” Instead of trying to catch up on any of your fifty-three missed algebra assignments, I encourage you to go to that visitor’s dugout and join them in a great school prank. You’ll climb over the chain-link fence and into the high school, and while the school is dark, armed with Krazy Glue and a backpack full of rolled pennies, together you will glue a penny over the keyhole of every classroom door, so the next day when the faculty arrives, under-caffeinated and stressed out, one by one, they’ll put a key into the impenetrable side of a copper penny. Haha! Can you see those groggy teacher faces now, calling out one by one to each other, “Hey, is there something wrong with your lock too?” A locksmith will have to be called. It will take hours for all the pennies to be pried off. School’s canceled! It’s not your fault you live in California and don’t get snow days. Sometimes a person has to make their own snow day! It’s the miracle you’d prayed for to save you from your algebra test!!! And, Ali, just between us, it’s the thing that teachers pray for too. A real win-win situation.

  Promise me this, Ali — no apoptosis attempts and pay attention in your typing class. One day, you’ll want to tell your story and it will help if you don’t have to hunt and peck.

  XOXOX,

  Ali

  P.S. Don’t try and jump that fence in that maternity jumper. Put on some sweatpants.

  Dear young Paul,

  You’ve known you were gay since approximately three seconds after you were born, because when the obstetrician slapped you, you said, “Stop that.” You’ve also always known that, after a perfectly respectable childhood, you would leave the New Jersey suburbs and move to New York City, not because you were gay, but because you were sane. Since all of that’s been taken care of, I’d like to let you in on a few more developments:

  1. All of the people in your high school whom you hope will turn out to be gay, meaning assorted jocks and the hunkier teachers, will all remain straight. You already know who the gay folks are: They’re the sadly ordinary, dweeby boys and girls just like you. But here’s a bonus: As adults, some of the dweebs will start working out and will begin to resemble those jockier fetish objects, without having to actually play team sports. Other gay guys, as adults, will begin to play and enjoy team sports, and they will become just a bit too proud of this. In addition, most of those heterosexual fetish objects will peak sometime around high school graduation, and their waistlines will expand as their hairlines contract, which is when you can hear God giggling.

  2. You will discover that all gay men are not stylish, witty, promiscuous, and viciously entertaining. No one said that equality was going to be fun.

  3. You will work in the theater, where you will meet many talented and delightful people. Be grateful, and always tell these people that they are geniuses, because this is how theater people say hello.

  4. People have been claiming, and writing, that they are post-gay since the beginning of time.

  5. Anyone who says that they don’t like the word gay, or that they hate labels, or that they’re not gay, they’re a person: That’s someone who still hasn’t come out to their parents.

  6. No matter which profession you pursue, someone will always warn you about the danger of being perceived as “too gay.” Take this advice very seriously, nod, and reply, “Darling, I hear you.”

  All the best,

  Old Paul

  Note to Self: May 1, 2011

  Remember to ask Mom about The Terrible Day.

  The Terrible Day so long ago is fixed in your memory. It haunts you, but some of the details have faded. That’s how you have dealt with it, forgotten some of the hurt away.

  January 20, 1968, The Terrible Day

  Dear Linda,

  Your family is on the road, your favorite possessions w
ith you in the car; the rest arriving in a big moving van a few days after you get to your new home. It’s a real house, not an apartment. And you can’t stop thinking about having your own room.

  The trip from Chicago to Denver is two days long, and you are counting the seconds. Dad drives fast and hates to stop. He does slow down when your little sister gets carsick and throws up out the window. You roll yours down halfway and let the air blow through your fingers. You do the “toot toot” sign to a passing semi; the driver blasts his horn and smiles. You win the license plate game and wonder if you’ll ever go to Maine or New York or Oregon. (You will.)

  You can hardly stand it as your car pulls onto Pierce Street. It looks so clean. Mom sticks her head out the window and points. “There it is!” Your new home looks huge at the end of the block, bigger than in the black-and-white photo Dad took the day he and Mom walked around the neighborhood and then signed the papers. You ask, “Do we have to share it with another family?” Mom shakes her head no. Your sister asks, “Are we rich?” Everybody laughs.

  Then you see it.

  In chalk, the letters jagged and angry, somebody has written Niggers Get Out on your garage door and on the pavement on your driveway. It is meant to scare you. You are other. You are not like us. We hate you. Go back where you belong. You are not welcome.

  Hard to imagine, but these days that word has lost much of its power. It’s in songs that play on the radio. People use it casually, as an endearment. They soften the hard “er” with an “a.” It’s mostly “nigga” or the playful “niggaz” in plural. A man might call his friend “my nigga.” A woman may say about her boyfriend, “that nigger is crazy.”