by Dan Savage
But hearing about Milk’s election reinforced the message those two men waiting in line at Water Tower Place had unwittingly sent me a year and a half earlier. There was a place for me in this world. I had options other than staying in the closet or committing suicide.
“I know that you cannot live on hope alone,” Milk said, “but without it, life is not worth living. And you, and you, and you have got to give ’em hope.”
Hope can save lives—hope has saved lives—but we can do better than hope. By pushing back against the goddamn demeaning, degrading bullshit that is still being hurled at us, by defeating it once and for all, we can deliver change.
[The] closets are far from emptied. There are more in hiding than out of hiding. That has been my experience anyway.
I don’t think that’s the case today; not in the West, at any rate. Our closets aren’t empty, of course, but the closet is the exception now, no longer the rule. (And the closet cases—the Wests and Haggards and Craigs and Rekers—are ridiculous figures, not tragic ones.)
In 1971, when he was fifty and just coming out publicly, Miller was awed by the strength, self-possession, and impatience of gay men and lesbians who were coming out in their early twenties. Just over ten years later—in 1982—I would come out to my family when I was still in high school. I recently heard from the father of a thirteen-year-old boy. His son, a middle school student, had just come out and his father wanted advice on parenting a gay kid. He didn’t want to fail his son.
We’ve gone from a world where Merle Miller couldn’t come out until middle age—the world he describes in On Being Different—to a world where thirteen-year-old boys are coming out to their families and all their dads want to know is how they can best support their gay sons.
It has gotten better. Not perfect. Better.
But you can’t know how far you’ve come if you don’t know where you started. Adult gay men and lesbians don’t raise the next generation of gays and lesbians; our history isn’t passed from parent to child. That’s why it’s critically important for gay men and lesbians, for bisexual and transgender people, to learn their history.
Straight people with LGBT family members, friends, and coworkers should know the history of the LGBT rights movement too. All straight people should know the story of the gay liberation movement, because it is also the story of straight liberation. The LGBT rights movement liberated straight people from their prejudices and their fears; it helped straight people see through the goddamn, demeaning bullshit; the movement for LGBT equality helped straight people rebuild relationships with the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender family members and friends that their prejudices had estranged them from.
People like Merle Miller and, yes, those guys in line for Logan’s Run, came out because they were sick and tired of the goddamn demeaning, degrading bullshit that LGBT people were subjected to. And by coming out at a time when it was so much more dangerous, personally and professionally, Miller helped to remake the world. Miller and all the gay men and lesbians who came out in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s—men and women who came out in big ways (by writing cover stories for The New York Times Magazine) and small (by taking their lover’s hand in line at a movie theater)—made the world a better, safer place for all the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans men and women who would come after them. They made it a better, safer place for me. They made it possible for thirteen-year-old gay boys to come out to their fathers.
They made it better.
I’m roughly the same age now that Miller was when he wrote his groundbreaking essay. I’m creeping up on fifty. Like Miller, I have a mild case of writer’s block; I’ve worked as a writer and an editor, and like Miller, I’m “an infrequent visitor to gay bars and was never comfortable in them.” (I feel about gay bars the way many American Jews feel about Israel: happy to have a homeland, don’t want to live there.)
Writing in 1971—when homosexuality was still a crime in forty-eight states—Miller observed, “I think social attitudes will change, are changing, quickly too.”
When I finally came out in 1982, telling my Catholic parents I was gay didn’t just mean telling them I was like those guys at the movies my mother wanted to protect me from. It meant I would never marry and I would never have children. I would certainly never be trusted alone with someone else’s child.
But there I was, just four short decades after Miller wrote On Being Different, just three short decades after I sat down with my mother and forced the words “I’m gay” out of my mouth. There I was, sitting on a beach next to my husband, while our teenage son dove through waves with his friends, two boys who were entrusted to our care by their straight parents.
“In the battle between reality and fundamentalism of all varieties, reality always wins—if it is given the freedom to breathe and we show the courage necessary to accept it,” author and political commentator Andrew Sullivan writes in response to reading Miller’s essay. “Even then it takes time. But when a truth has been suppressed by a massive lie for centuries, its eventual emergence is almost a miracle.”
That day on the beach, reading Miller’s essay and recalling what coming out meant when Miller did it and what it meant when I did it, it did feel like a miracle.
Thank you, Mr. Miller, for telling your story; thank you for your anger; thank you for fighting back against the demeaning, degrading bullshit. We couldn’t have made it to that beach without you.
13. Extended Stay
I would need the room for a week. That’s what I told the receptionist at the Extended Residence Stay America Comfort Suites Inn Whatever when I checked in that Sunday night in March.
At least a week, I said, maybe longer.
My mother had already been in the hospital across the street for a week when I got to Tucson. She had been no stranger to hospitals over the last five years. She’d wake up one morning to find that her breathing was more difficult, or that some new infection was exploiting her weakened immune system, or that some new debilitating side effect from the powerful drugs that were keeping her alive had emerged. Her husband would rush her to a hospital and she would come home a few days later having accepted some previously feared development—being hooked up to an oxygen tank, having to use a walker—as her new normal.
The plan: I would stay in Tucson for three or four days and help my stepfather and aunt look after my mother. Then my brother Billy would fly in from Chicago, take over the helping-out duties and the hotel room; I’d go home, and we’d figure out what to do next.
I had gone straight to the hospital from the airport when I arrived in Tucson that afternoon. My mother was weak but alert, sitting up in bed. She nodded hello. The oxygen mask she was wearing made it hard for her to speak. Every couple of seconds a whirring machine next to her bed forced pure oxygen into her battered lungs with a thump. Shouting to be heard over the oxygen machine, I played cards with my mother, something we had always enjoyed doing. I taught her a new game. Things seemed decidedly less grim than they were when my aunt called me in Seattle the previous day. My mother didn’t seem to be getting any worse, my aunt told me, but she wasn’t getting better either. My stepfather didn’t want to alarm us—or my mother—by asking her children to rush to Tucson. But my aunt didn’t want it on her conscience if my mother died without her children at her bedside. Get on an airplane, my aunt said. Get on an airplane now.
My mother had pulmonary fibrosis, a degenerative lung condition, and she knew—we all knew—that dramatic turns for the worse were a possibility. She knew that pulmonary fibrosis would eventually end her life, and she’d done some research into just what sort of an end she could expect. It wasn’t going to be pretty. Her lungs were gradually filling with scar tissue. She would, when her time came, slowly and painfully suffocate to death. But eight weeks before she wound up in a sprawling, dung-colored hospital in sprawling, dung-colored Tucson, my mother’s doctors had given her two to five years to live.
She’d recently marked the five-year anniv
ersary of her diagnosis, an anniversary very few pulmonary fibrosis sufferers live to see. She was scared, as her fifth anniversary approached, that she wouldn’t “beat five.” But her spirits lifted when her fifth anniversary came and went, and again when her doctors gave her those two, and maybe more, years to live. That’s when she decided to go on a trip with her husband, driving to California and New Mexico and Arizona, to visit her sisters. She was looking forward to attending her first grandson’s high school graduation in Montana, her grade school class’s fiftieth reunion in Chicago, the tour of a Broadway show that I got her tickets to for her birthday.
While my mother was on her way to Tucson in the spring of 2008, a debate was raging in Washington State. Medical rights activists in Washington had gathered enough signatures to put a physician-assisted-suicide law on the ballot. The proposed law, modeled on a law approved by Oregon voters in 1994, would allow physicians to prescribe lethal doses of medication to terminally ill patients. Two physicians would have to verify the patient had less than six months to live, wasn’t being coerced, and was mentally sound. And the doctors could only prescribe the drugs. The patient would have to take them—the patient would have to administer them herself.
The fiercest critic of the proposed law was Joel Connelly, a columnist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Connelly, a liberal Catholic, wrote column after column blasting Washington’s Death with Dignity Act, the ballot measure’s official title. The purpose of a “democratic society,” Connelly argued, was to “safeguard and enhance life, especially among the youngest, the weakest, and the suffering.” He urged voters not to “transform a crime into a ‘medical treatment.’”
Early one morning, a few weeks after I got back from Tucson, I was lying in bed listening to the radio. I had been up most of the night. I found it difficult to sleep after coming back home from Arizona, and so, at the urging of a friend, I began taking Ambien, a prescription sleeping pill. It wasn’t until I tried to stop taking Ambien that I learned that insomnia is one of the drug’s possible side effects. That’s why I was awake, at five that morning, when a report came on about the impending vote on Washington’s Death with Dignity Act. Two women who had both recently lost their husbands were interviewed about the proposed new law. One of the widows planned to vote for it and the other planned to vote against it.
The woman planning to vote for the initiative—the woman whose husband died of brain cancer—came away from the experience convinced that terminally ill people should have a choice at the end of their lives. The terminally ill should have the freedom to end their suffering, she said, and hasten their inevitable, rapidly approaching deaths. And the woman planning to vote against the initiative wanted—well, she wanted what we all want. She wanted a good death, “a natural death,” a death like the one her late husband “enjoyed.” Asked to imagine her own death, she said she hoped for a painless death and that at the end she would be “enveloped in the love of a good caregiver.”
We should all be so lucky. It’d be ideal if each of us passed from existence to nonexistence enveloped in the love of good caregivers and under the care of competent “pain management” professionals. But not everyone is so lucky. Even with the most loving caregivers and competent pain managers standing by, some of us are fated to endure deaths that are as gruesome and protracted as they are painful. Some deaths cannot be “managed.” Sometimes loving caregivers can’t “envelop”; they can only stand helplessly by and bear witness.
The widow who planned to vote for the Death with Dignity Act was given the last word: “You don’t know how you’re going to feel at the end of your life,” she said. “I want to have choices available to me.”
Exactly.
Washington’s Death with Dignity Act was about choices. If voters approved the law, the widow who opposed physician-assisted suicide would not be compelled to end her life with the assistance of a physician. She could still choose to die a “natural death,” surrounded by good caregivers and pumped full of the strongest pain medications available. (I fail to see what’s so “natural” about pain medication—God didn’t exactly give us a gland that secretes morphine when we need it.) But if voters rejected Washington’s Death with Dignity Act, the widow who supported the law—the widow who wanted a choice—would not have the same freedom. She would not be able to choose to end her life, and end her suffering, if her pain was too much for her to bear.
Legalizing physician-assisted suicide doesn’t force lethal drug cocktails on those who reject physician-assisted suicide for religious reasons, just as legalizing abortion or gay marriage doesn’t impose anything on those who disapprove of abortion and gay marriage. Even where these practices are legal, those who oppose abortion, gay marriage, and physician-assisted suicide are not required to have abortions, marry same-sex partners, or ask their doctors for a lethal dose of drugs.
And there’s nothing about physician-assisted suicide—or, as it should be called, end-of-life pain management—that precludes the presence of loving caregivers. You can be surrounded by love, have access to the best medical care available and the morphine that God was so cruel as to hide in poppies (where it lay undiscovered until 1804), and still reasonably and rationally conclude that you would rather not spend the last few moments of your life in blinding pain or gasping for breath or pumped full of just enough morphine to deaden the pain without quite deadening you.
Moments after I got back to my mother’s hospital room from the Extended Suites Whatever on Monday morning, a doctor pulled my stepfather and me into the hallway. It wasn’t good news. It wasn’t pneumonia, as they had hoped, and my mother wasn’t suffering from a virus. It wasn’t some rare desert fungus. Her lungs were failing. Nothing more could be done. One of her battered lungs had a large and widening hole; the other was starting to come apart. We stared at the doctor dumbly, uncomprehendingly, until one of us—I don’t know if it was my stepfather or me—finally said, “This is it?”
The doctor nodded. This was it.
My stepfather stepped out of the intensive care unit to find my sister and my aunt, who were sitting with my nephew, Cody, who was too young to come into the ICU. He would break the bad news to them, he said, and confer about how we should break the bad news to my mother. I slipped back into my mother’s hospital room to sit with her. I took her hand. This was it, but I couldn’t show it. She smiled at me weakly. I didn’t tell her what I knew; it wasn’t my place. We would wait together for her husband of twenty years to return.
Suddenly, the doctor was at the door to my mother’s room again. He waved me out into the hall. He needed a medical directive. Immediately. My mother’s vital signs were tanking. If they were going to put a tube in her, and put her on machines that could breathe for her, it had to be done now. I asked if I could go get my stepfather and the doctor said no. He needed a decision from my mother. Now.
So it fell to me to tell her she was going to die and quickly lay out her rather limited options. She could be put under and put on machines and live for a day or two in a coma, long enough for her other two children to get down to Tucson and say their good-byes, good-byes that she wouldn’t be able to hear. Or she could live for maybe another six hours if she continued to wear an oxygen mask that pushed air into her lungs with so much force it made her whole body convulse. Or she could take the mask off and suffocate to death. Now.
It was her choice.
“No pain,” she said, “no pain.”
A nurse was in the room with us and she promised to give my mother enough morphine to deaden any pain. And then my mother made her choice: She would take off the mask and go. Now. I told the doctor and then ran into the waiting room to get my stepfather, my sister, and my aunt. Things were worse than they were five minutes ago. Get in here, I sobbed, get in here.
Now.
When we were all back at her bedside, my mother looked up at us, oxygen mask still on. Then she arched an eyebrow, shook her head, and said, “Shit.”
My mother used profa
nity sparingly, and only in quotation marks and italics. When she said “shit,” we understood what she meant. And what she meant was this: “The kind of person who casually uses profanity might be inclined to say ‘shit’ at a moment like this, but I am not the kind of person who uses profanity. I am a good and decent Catholic grandmother. And I certainly wouldn’t use a word like that at a moment like this. But if I were the kind of person who used profanity, ‘shit’ would be the word I would use right about now. But I’m not that kind of person.”
She was making a joke. She was trying to cheer us up.
A haggard looking priest arrived to perform last rites, and it helped my mother brace for what she feared would be an extremely painful final few minutes. The priest led us in prayer. I could see it helped. I could see the comfort the sacrament gave her. It gave me comfort. Together we said prayers my mother and I both learned at St. Ignatius when we were children. Our prayers filled a terrible silence, solemnizing an awful moment.
After the priest left, my mother told us she would be with us always, looking down on us, and that we would see her again.
We said our good-byes.
It sounds so dignified. “We said our good-byes.” But the mask was still on and my mother’s body was convulsing. Our good-byes reduced my always affable, always good-humored stepfather to wracking sobs; our good-byes sent my sister and me falling to the floor beside our mother’s deathbed. My aunt held a phone up to my mother’s ear so she could hear one of my brothers shout his good-byes over the whir and thump of the oxygen machine, while my clearly shattered stepfather tried desperately to get my other brother on his cell phone. Our good-byes were all chaos and hurry and pain.