by Sarah Moon
How many of your stormy ruminations stem from your deepening awareness that you are different? And do you recognize where that sense of difference originates?
Later that night, you sit in a dark theater in Coney Island, not far from the misfits and carnival games on the boardwalk. You can feel the gentle summer heat rising from either side of you, from the suntanned skin of your father, a gentle giant who reminds you of John Wayne, and from your mother, whose cool hand tightly clasps yours. There, cuddled together and apart from your parents, you dream of being James Bond rescuing damsels in distress, and whisper to yourself: I like women.
Still, you do not connect that soul-shrinking clench of being different with these revelations. You just feel that awful sense of otherness and peer out at those around you as if from the far side of a riverbank. It’s as if you — strolling along the promenade by the Verrazano Bridge — could somehow sense that the place you will really find yourself and build your own family is out there, on the fogged-in banks of New Jersey, where one day, astonishingly, you will live with your wife and children.
You should know that the sense of being an outsider will change with time. There are gifts being born in this very moment of isolation that will eventually become your greatest strengths. You are discovering a clarity of sight, an ability to listen and hear the undercurrents of conversation, to read the space between words. You are learning the art of empathy, how your heart can unfold to let in the small and large suffering of people who cannot give voice to their pain. In your distance from the people you encounter every day, you are unconsciously calculating ways to construct bridges for you to reach them, for them to discover you. Because, although you have not yet stumbled onto this awareness, what you crave most is connection. Love.
At the same time, knowing all this would not release you from the grip of the dark emotions that caused you once to step over the outside rails of your tenth-floor apartment terrace and speculate, what would it be like to let go? These moments of despair you guard fiercely. You are the good child, the good student, the quiet one who does what is expected and what is right and never asks for anything from anyone. Your mother dubs you “The Rock,” which in midnight hours causes you to weep silently into your pillow.
The Rock is impenetrable. Unknowable. In your heart, you fear that if you were revealed, if you were really seen, your loneliness would explode your world.
At the local pizzeria across the corner from Lincoln High School, where you could get two slices and a soda for a dollar, teenagers gather in tight clutches of gossip, and chatter about their crushes. You shrink away to avoid their inquiries.
Watching television with your parents, strolling with shoulders hunched through the local park, you spin daydreams of a loving future, but they never include you. The only way to imagine happiness is by creating stories in which a man and woman fall into love, and somehow, vaguely, confusingly, you are always able to create the romancing male with so much more vividness than you do the pursued female.
How shocked you would be to hear that you will one day exchange vows with a woman, in front of a rabbi, beneath a rainbow chuppah, with your proud parents, family, friends, and work colleagues rejoicing at your pronouncement of love. That this commitment ceremony would be followed by the births of your son and daughter would strike you as a prospect less likely than the world ending with Charlton Heston howling over the buried remnants of the Statue of Liberty.
From this future that I inhabit, which your fantasies could never have envisioned, I tell you this: You will be happy. Those simple words, that proclamation, would have left you breathless.
Your path will not be easy. But oddly, with every challenge, you will discover new strengths, new confidence, and deeper joy. You will also discover that some hurdles are your own creations, and they will evaporate as soon as you have the guts to test them.
The opening comes one day with a friend who lives in your apartment building. She sports short curly hair, with sprinkles of gray amidst the black despite her teen years, and her eyes have a sparkle you’ve never seen before. She is as light and as surprising as a fern growing out of crevices of a cracked brownstone. She laughs so easily, it seems to you for the first time that perhaps you could find another way of being. You begin testing her, to see if knowing you, really knowing you, would cause her to retreat.
Sitting in her darkened bedroom on one of your many sleepovers, with shadows flickering on the wall from the television in the living room where her parents have fallen asleep watching Johnny Carson, you expose the blackest of your thoughts. In the pale light, you catch her eye and are taken aback when she listens and does not retreat. Eventually, you will risk letting her know that you suspect you are a lesbian. And the friendship will remain unmovable. But you tread carefully nonetheless, terrified that if you focus too much on this way of being different, you would lose this anchor in your life. You focus instead on ways to hold on to this lifeline.
In time, she teaches you to laugh. You aren’t really sure how this happens. Over the years, you watch her sing off-key songs with her brother without an ounce of self-consciousness, or joke with her father over the bag he brought home from the deli, or discover humor in the way two people bumped in the hallway. You won’t understand how profoundly this lesson will impact you. Laughter offered you planks with which you could begin to build bridges, to find connections, to show others: I am different, and yet through humor, you and I can find what it is that we have in common.
In high school, you fall in love for the first time. Your bubble of isolation now grows large enough to include someone else as invested in hiding as you are. Your friend’s father goes in for heart surgery and you, good friend that you are, stay with her for weeks, alone in her apartment, playing house and closing out the world.
The two of you will be teased mercilessly by others who suspect that your relationship is more than just friendship. They sing Charlie Rich’s “When You Get Behind Closed Doors” as you pass in the halls. At your thirtieth high school reunion, many of those same unrelenting girls will reveal that they later came out themselves, after failed marriages and hard journeys of their own.
She will break your heart one day, leaving you in one of the most stereotypical scenarios. An affair with the gym teacher. You cannot talk with anyone about how much you ache, how devastated you feel by her betrayal. But from my wonderful vantage point, I would urge you to turn around and shift your perspective back to the glimpse of bliss you discovered with her, behind closed doors. If only you could have recognized that this first relationship was a hint, a promise of what was to come. Here is what is to come. Here is what I wish you could have seen when you looked over the railing in Brooklyn, when you sat alone on your boulder in Sea Gate.
You will come out to your mother, who will be singularly unimpressed and remind you that you can nonetheless have children. Your uncle will tell you that he was not surprised since only another woman could truly appreciate an intelligent woman. You will cease using indefinite nouns at work to refer to your partners, which amazingly none of your colleagues ever questioned or confronted. You will publish a series of lesbian mysteries, and when the first one is printed and displayed at A Different Light, your John Wayne–sized father, who looked like he could have been cutting down logs or fishing with rednecks, would shout out in the front of the store, “That’s my daughter’s book!” At work, you will come out and advocate for benefits for gay couples, and become a role model for young gay professionals. You will build an astonishing chosen family of gay friends. You will find more connections than you have time to manage.
And you will spend decades with the woman you never dared dream of, raising wonderful children you weren’t capable of imagining in a century-old home in New Jersey, which in itself would have made you laugh. And you didn’t have to become James Bond to achieve anything of these wonderful moments. You just had to be yourself.
Love,
Jaye
Letter at
Fifty to the Self Who at Twenty-Five Wrote a Letter to His Thirteen-Year-Old Self Assuring Him that Everything Would Be OK
Dear Self,
Everything you hope for — companionship, stability, a house, a dog — will come true.
Everything you fear — loss, confusion, panic, emptiness — will come true.
It will dawn on you that what you hope for and what you fear are inextricable.
You will be astonished to discover that you have lived with the same person for twenty years.
You will be more astonished to discover that you can now marry this person but only if you move to another state.
You will be even more astonished to discover that you and this person share the view that you would not get married even if you did move to another state, that you would rather live together in sin like the hippie couples you knew when you were growing up.
What repulses you at twenty-five — gay men referring to each other as “she” — you will practice (but with a sense of irony).
What enthralls you at twenty-five but repulsed you at thirteen — anonymous, animalistic sex — you will look back on with nostalgia.
Success will cease to be your primary goal.
You will give up on hoping that the world will get better.
The world will get better.
The world will get worse.
You will find it impossible to believe that you have lived this long.
You would not want to be twenty-five again, or thirteen again, for anything in the world.
The Earlier Letter (excerpted from the novel Equal Affections)
Danny’s fantasy: He is twelve years old, riding his bicycle to the shopping mall to read soap opera magazines. A sunny Saturday afternoon, the shopping mall quiet, full of women in tennis dresses and plump teenage girls, their stomachs bulging out of stiff jeans, who’ve come here in gangs to smoke. Danny is wearing shorts, a T-shirt emblazoned with the name of the university where his father teaches, tube socks, tennis shoes. His legs are brown from the sun, the hairs on them bleached white. He is locking his bicycle to a lamppost, unscrambling the combination with dirty fingers, when he feels the proximity of another body, feels warm breath against his hair. He turns around, still crouched, and a man is standing over him, a tall man in a gray leather jacket and jeans, a man who is at once a stranger and oddly, intimately familiar to him — but where from? A student of his father’s? A cousin he doesn’t remember? “Excuse me,” the man says, “I’m sorry to bother you, I —” He puts his hands in his pockets, looks away. “Danny,” he says. “Danny.”
Danny’s eyes suddenly fill with tears. His cheeks flush. He looks at the ground.
“I’m you,” the stranger says. “I’m who you’re going to become. And I’ve come to tell you — to reassure you — you’re going to be fine, just fine.”
The boy stands. Of course he sees it now, all of it — that face so familiar because it is his own, but also so strange, because he’s never seen his own face before, not really, except in a mirror, and now he understands how mirrors distort, and where his legs will stretch to, and the awkward unpuzzling of his own face. Tears are welling in his eyes, and in his grown self’s eyes as well, as the man bends down, leans over him, puts a hand on his shoulder. “All the things you’re worried about,” he says, “all the things that make you suffer — they’re nothing. They’re smoke. I know. And I’ve come so you’ll know, so you won’t have to suffer anymore. For you’re going to be fine. You’re going to leave California and head East, just like you hope. And you’ll have love, Danny. I know you can’t believe it now, I know everything you feel. You don’t imagine anyone will ever love you, you can’t conceive how anyone could love you. But someone will. You’ll see.”
The hand on his shoulder — larger, thickly veined, bristled with short brown hairs — is his own hand. Young Danny, crouching still by his bicycle, runs his own fingers over those long fingers, feels the warmth of the skin. One after the other he traces them, until his hand comes to rest on the slender silver ring. Slowly he strokes the ring’s rounded outer edge; slowly he rotates it around the finger on which it’s lodged. Under the ring is a perfect white band where the skin has not been touched by the sun.
Letter Home
July 2011—July 1984
Dear David,
Let’s get a few things out of the way. Yes, you have a boyfriend. No, he isn’t a professional tennis player. Yes, you own a car. No, it isn’t a black Rabbit convertible. Yes, you got into college. No, it wasn’t Princeton — but that wouldn’t have been the right place for you. Yes, everyone knows you’re gay. No, people didn’t freak out. Most people already knew anyway.
The other day I was on my yoga mat — I know, yoga; I didn’t see that one coming either — when I thought of you in that long hot summer of 1984 when you never felt more alone. A few things came to mind: your corduroy Op shorts growing loose on your waist because you were too anxious to eat; the round tortoiseshell glasses always smudged with fingerprints; and the red Schwinn bicycle you rode all over Pasadena just to escape your life. It’s been a while since I thought of you behind your bedroom door moaning with the Smiths (“How Soon Is Now?”) and the Thompson Twins (“Hold Me Now”). I was trying to figure out what you might want to hear from me in the future — what I could possibly say that Morrissey wasn’t already teaching you. After all, what is more trenchant, and true, than I am human and I need to be loved, just like everybody else does.
There’s this slogan going around these days — It Gets Better. While that’s mostly true — being gay gets better, or at least easier — I realized those words wouldn’t completely resonate with you. You’ve never been one for pick-me-ups or complex feelings boiled down to catchphrases. Your skepticism of the trendy is admirable (if a bit trendy itself). Anyway, here’s what I want you to know, and I hope you take this the right way: Stop waiting for the future because the person you are today is in many ways the person you will be.
And that’s the good news!
I’m not saying you won’t evolve. I’m not saying your life won’t improve. I’m not saying that the sucky parts of being David E — the tortured shyness, the alone-ness, the back acne — won’t abate. What I’m saying is this: If you want to save yourself a lot of time and get on with the business of living happily, you might want to understand yourself a little better now. The best parts of who you are today will affect who you’ll become — can become, I should say. Yes, part of this is about being gay and coming to love yourself. That’s important — essential, in fact. But I’m actually talking about something larger. I’m talking about your core beliefs. The things and principles you most value in life. I know you roll your eyes at words like values and beliefs and principles. See, there they go turning behind your glasses. (Sidebar: In a few years you’ll give up the goggles for contact lenses.) The reason these words make you cynical is because you’ve heard them primarily from the mouths of cynical people whom you rightly distrust — the hateful preachers, lying politicians, anyone who says you are wrong or less because you keep crushing on boys. (Another sidebar: no need to waste your entire senior year hearting after Jeff. He isn’t gay, and tucking anonymous notes under his windshield wiper isn’t going to change that.) Those people say they are talking about values and principles and beliefs — but they aren’t. You already know this.
But what you don’t know, or at least haven’t yet articulated to yourself, is that you have strong — very strong — values and principles and beliefs yourself. These beliefs will guide you for the rest of your life, if you let them. If you don’t ignore them. If you refuse to let others diminish them. These beliefs already help define who you are. If you hang on to them and don’t let them get muddled up in ideas that aren’t important to you, they will guide you to the best version of yourself, which is just another way of saying leading a happy life.
Take for example your belief in words.
You love to read. Eudora Welty, with her cat’s-eye g
lasses and the hump atop her spine, is your hero. The Stranger terrified you, although you’re not sure why. You giggled along with Jane Austen, thinking you were the only one getting her irony. And Wuthering Heights revealed a storm in your heart that will never really go away. Guess what — this profound connection with books isn’t going to change. In fact, that’s going to be a core part of who you are. It will be a big part of how the world knows you. Through words and books. I know that seems unlikely for a boy from the smoggy suburbs of Los Angeles, but it’s true. It will only become true, however, once you ask yourself directly and sincerely what you truly believe in. For some reason, I didn’t ask that question of myself until I was in my mid-twenties, despite the powerful feelings books created in me. Had I asked it when I was your age I would have been able to answer it, because the answer was already there.
Look, I know this summer feels eternal. There’s a heat wave. And a smog alert. It’s too hot to be outside and yet every day your mom, before she leaves for work, tells you to go out and do something. But what? You don’t have any plans except the daily training for cross-country. You don’t have a job. You don’t have a driver’s license. And, let’s face it, you don’t have many friends. Yet as drifting as this summer feels, in fact it’s turning into a great project that will forever shape you. Don’t believe me? Ask yourself how you’ve spent your days. That’s right, reading. Devouring books like they were food.
When you were younger, whenever you complained about being bored your mom would say, “Read a book.” That’s what you’ve been doing this summer, almost a book a day. Except this is the summer you discovered that the Pasadena Public Library — yes, conservative old Pasadena — carries gay books. Books that are either about men who love men like A Boy’s Own Story, Maurice, Giovanni’s Room, or books like the plays of Tennessee Williams and Other Voices, Other Rooms that have a gay sensibility that you recognize. You’ve been inhaling these books for weeks, each one shoring up your own belief in yourself. You’ve fallen into a summer routine. You get up and ride to the Pasadena Public Library and find a book that has anything to do with gay and take it to a quiet corner and read all day. You don’t dare check it out because that would leave a record of your instincts. Most of the time you finish before you have to go home for dinner. When you don’t, you hide the book on a remote shelf so that you won’t have to encounter a librarian over re-shelving and reserving. The next day you return to keep reading. Again and again and again. This is how you discover Thomas Mann and Carson McCullers and Joe Orton. How you first read Armistead Maupin and Rita Mae Brown. How you met the words of a writer you’ll always revere, Edmund White.