Waiting for the Punch

by Marc Maron

  I would go to sleep at my best friend’s house. She had seven older brothers and sisters that no longer lived at home, and I would insist on sleeping in her bed. There were like nine other bedrooms! I just was really committed to sleeping in her bed, but I just thought that’s how best friends were.

  I think I had sexual feelings, but I don’t think I knew what sexual feelings were. I think I was very confused. I would have dreams about women. A lot of gay women that I know had a similar experience to this.

  I don’t know if you have ever heard what it’s like to be a teen girl, but you’re all about, like, his blow job. No one’s trying to figure out whether or not you’re, like, “Hey, what are you jerking off to?” Nobody gives a shit. You’re not supposed to be touching yourself. Women are not really taught to find what they like. Of course they’re not. It’s all about finding out what he likes so you can turn him on. “Oh, you made him cum, isn’t that great? You did a great job.”

  TODD GLASS

  I was afraid if people knew that, they’d be afraid like, to drink out of my cup, because they think gay people might have AIDS or something. I thought, “Should I understand that? Would I feel that way?” I wasn’t educated either.

  I was hoping I married someone with cancer. A girl, and she’d die. I thought, “That’s what I’ll tell people. I never got married again, because I never got over my wife who had cancer.” I had a plan. Date a girl with cancer, then she would die. You might think, “Come on, Todd. How much are you serious here?” I’m totally serious. That went through my head. Even back then I got the ridiculousness of it, but I did think that would work.

  CAMERON ESPOSITO

  My boyfriend would go home after we’d be hanging out, making out in my parents’ basement or something. It felt nice, because kissing feels nice, but I also felt gross. I had weird rules, like he couldn’t touch my shoulders and stuff like that.

  He would go home, and I just remember that I would need to stay up for like, a bunch of hours. If he left at ten or whatever, I would have to stay up ’til, like, four in the morning, and I would eat cereal, just do these really comforting things. Eat cereal, watch TV. Whatever had been happening, I just couldn’t deal with it. It was so uncomfortable.

  But I liked him! I couldn’t understand why I would feel so uncomfortable hanging out.

  I think probably it would have been misery if I had had any idea that I was supposed to feel differently than that. If you’ve never seen the sun, you’re going to be like, “Darkness is decent! It’s decent to good.”

  TODD GLASS

  Early in my life, I made pacts. I had a friend early on that knew. There was one point in my life where I knew one person like me, and we made a pact we would never tell anybody. I was probably twenty-one. I stopped being friends with him, because I got uncomfortable and nervous. It was a horrible feeling. Like he was too gay. Obviously I want to be very clear that it was a horrible thing to do. I was nervous and scared for myself, so that’s why I did a horrible thing, out of fear.

  CAMERON ESPOSITO

  I kissed this woman. I was dating two guys at the time, and I went to three parties that night. The night that I kissed her, I went to a party with one of the dudes that I was dating, a party with other dudes, just on-campus parties. I kissed those two dudes at the parties. Then I kissed her.

  I kissed her, and it was life changing; I mean, completely. She had come with me to these parties, so we just went back to my room. We were hanging out there, finishing some wine, and then, I don’t remember what she said, probably something about poverty, but I kissed her. It was my first sexual experience, it really was. I knew immediately that something was very different, and it was like watching a movie that you never understood, with the director’s commentary. You never understood the movie, and then suddenly the director’s explaining it and you’re like, “Oh shit! That’s why I never wore a top to my bikini bottoms when I was a little child, because I had some gender stuff going on,” and “Oh, that’s why I wanted to sleep in my best friend’s bed when there were all those available beds.” It all happened at once. Like a Rubik’s Cube, just solved in one move.

  The next morning, I woke up and I had ringworm. I had contracted ringworm in Jamaica, which is a fungus and it grows in a circle, so I had got it on my face, and it had not shown up until the morning after I kissed this girl for the first time. Which, as a Catholic person who thinks that she might be going to hell because she just discovered that she has same-sex attraction is, like, probably one of the craziest things that can happen to you. Especially if you’ve seen the movie The Exorcist. Satan’s in you, it’s trying to get out.

  I was so ashamed of myself, and I did end up dating that girl; she was my first girlfriend, but I didn’t stop dating those other guys. For years, while I dated the guys, I was totally having sex with her.

  We were both finding out at the same time. There was no teacher or student. We were both very much learning how to do it, which is really cool. I wish I hadn’t been as ashamed of myself and I wish I hadn’t had to hide, but I’ll tell you, some of the best sex you’re going to have in your life is secret gay sex. Secret gay sex that you’re hiding from your boyfriends.

  I was so upset. I was disgusted with myself. I was disgusted with what was happening. I still have these dudes around in case I can get married, in case I can have babies, they’re still around. I told my folks, because I got home for the summer and I was just a wreck. I wasn’t sleeping or eating. I thought my life was over. I didn’t know any gay adults. I thought, I won’t be able to have normal friends, and I won’t be able to have a job. I just didn’t think that anything was going to be okay.

  TODD GLASS

  If you want to use the word “gay” and you use it without meaning any harm, you didn’t do anything wrong. But once someone makes you privy to what it does, if you still want to use it, that’s the problem. Not that you used it in the past, “Oh, that movie’s gay,” or, “That’s gay,” or, “This is gay.” You did nothing wrong. Until someone tells you what it does when there’s a twelve-year-old around, or a fifteen-year-old who’s gay. It crushes their soul. What does “gay” mean in that context? It means “bad.” It means “stupid.” Like gay people. They’re weird. They’re stupid.

  CAMERON ESPOSITO

  I told my folks; my dad cried for five years. Like, every time I would talk to them.

  I had been a good kid. My older sister was the wild one that would, like, sneak out the window, and my dad had to remove the door from the hinges to find out she wasn’t in there. She was like, the Ferris Bueller’s Day Off kid, and I was like the Cameron. Which is funny. I just realized that that’s true. I am Cameron.

  My parents wanted me to go to therapy. We went to therapy as a family. The three of us. I’ve since realized that they were probably really confused; that they just didn’t have a better plan, but at the time I thought that they were trying to get reparative therapy going.

  One of the most damaging things I think a gay person can hear when they’re coming out is that thing where their parents are so worried for them. Because I was so worried for me, so to have that echoed back was pretty awful.

  I am very aware of the fact that as much as I didn’t have any knowledge, they had also no knowledge, and then they also weren’t experiencing this, so I didn’t know anything about being gay, but I was gay, so I knew that this felt strong and weird and real. For them, I think you just remove all those emotions and it just looks like a choice and it looks like I’m ruining my life.

  They also have apologized for that. I mean, they look back on it and they realize that it was a tough time for them too, and that they’re sorry that they weren’t able to trust me.

  I do forgive them. I do. I get it. I get why that’s what happened. It also helped me in some ways, because we had such a close relationship and I was so worried about letting them down in this way that I would never be able to change. That was kind of a gift, because now I can be a stand-up co
mic. I’ve already caused the largest possible schism. There’s no other way I could have been that I think would have disappointed them more in the short term, so we already went through that. Now they just kind of have to trust me a little more.

  DAN SAVAGE

  My dad was a Chicago cop. Busted heads at the ’68 Democratic National Convention. Then he became a homicide detective for about ten years, which was weird for me when I came out to him, when I told him that I was a big faggot. He was a homicide cop in Area 6 Chicago, which was the gay neighborhood at the time. This was the 1960s and 1970s, when a gay neighborhood was not a nice place. They were kind of marginal places. They were not like coffee shops and bookstores, and they were not lovely.

  Gay bars and shit were dominated by the mob then, so gay neighborhoods were kind of rough places where gay people kind of dove in, had a little anonymous sex, and then went back to the wife, or the rectory. That is where the nightclubs were, that is where the bathhouses were. It was just at the cusp where people started creating gay-borhoods, and gay communities, and coming together in the North Side of Chicago.

  Clark and Diversey was the intersection in the middle of my dad’s beat, and the cops called it “Clark and Perversity.”

  He was not a cop anymore when I came out, and he reacted fine. He was the last person I told.

  When I was fifteen, he divorced my mother. He left. I was ready to come out when I was fifteen—which was really weird, kids did not come out at fifteen in 1980 when I was fifteen. They came out after college.

  After my dad left, I did not have to come out to him—he was not around. He was really homophobic when I was a kid. I want to slam him for it, but I want to exonerate him at the same time, because this is what good parents thought they had to do then. They thought gay was something that grew in your child—like an inclination, or a cancer—and you could nudge them and they would not go gay. He would say shitty things about gay people because he cared about me.

  When I was thirteen years old I begged my parents—all I wanted for my birthday were tickets to the national tour of A Chorus Line. These motherfuckers were shocked when I came out. That is like seeing your thirteen-year-old son give a blow job, and you are shocked when he comes out. “I want tickets to A Chorus Line for my birthday! That is all I want!”

  This was thirty years ago. This was when being gay was the worst thing you could think of someone, so you did not think that about your own child—no matter how much evidence was staring you in the face.

  It used to be that parents would think, “That lifestyle is going to be a horrendous struggle, so I am going to do everything I can to prevent my child from becoming gay.” Which from my father meant, saying shitty things about gay people to try to convince me not to choose to be gay. Now parents know, I think, that you cannot prevent your child from being gay. The problem is not that your child is gay; the problem is the way some people are going to treat your child because your child is gay. The focus has shifted from making the gay children the problem, to making assholes like Rick Santorum and Tony Perkins the problem.

  I have this really distinct memory of my dad praising Anita Bryant. This is ancient history, right? She was this antigay crusader, the very first really high-profile one, saying that gay people were a threat to civilization. A threat to the family, to the economy. That was my dad’s argument too. We were a threat to the economy, because gay people did not settle down. They did not have families, so they did not buy cars and houses and washing machines, and so GE would run out of money, and the economy would collapse. That was his theory. Of course, we did not get married or have families because you would not let us, as opposed to we did not want to. We wanted to, but we could not. Ironically, of his four children, I am the one, I think, who has bought a new washing machine in his lifetime. We shop. Gay men without children shop.

  My dad had encountered a lot of gay murderers and murder victims by the time he was really seeing it in me, seeing that I was gay.

  When I came out, he apologized for anything he might have said or done that made me feel uncomfortable. He was the last one I came out to in the entire family, which was easy because he had moved away; he had moved to California.

  My mom has six siblings, my dad has eight. I have three siblings. There are eight million cousins. Everybody lived pretty close to home base at Rogers Park in Chicago, or nearby. There were a lot of people to tell when I started coming out.

  I did that shitty thing that some people do when you come out: I told my mother, and told her not to tell my father. Then my mom and dad came to see me act in a play, because I was doing plays then. There was a wedding scene for my character in this play. It was a comedy, and my mother is bawling her eyes out because she thinks, “Danny is never going to get married. This is the saddest thing I have ever seen.” My father is like, “What is wrong?” and she cannot tell him. I really did not come out to my mother—I dragged my mother into the closet with me. I did that for about a year and then she was like, “We cannot keep doing this, and you have got to start telling more people.”

  I came out to my siblings. Then my mother basically told all of my aunts and uncles, and there were problems. I had one uncle say that he would never speak to me again, or be in the same room with me again. He is great now, and he loves me. That was the importance of actually having a big family. Maybe for five minutes it turned into two warring tribes, like “on my side” and “against me.” The “on my side” tribe utterly defeated the “against me” side. My mother went to everybody and said, “If you have a problem with Danny, you have a much bigger problem with me. Got it?” My mom was tough that way.

  When you come out to your family, all of a sudden they have to picture you with a dick in your ass. I hate to be crude, but that is it. When you are straight, people do not see you having sex. Coming out to my mom and dad meant burdening them with a mental image; I could see it on their faces. You tell them you are gay and they are picturing a dick going into your mouth. When my sister had a boyfriend, they do not picture her giving blow jobs. “She is straight, she has a boyfriend. There is probably something going on, but I do not have to think about it, because their relationship could be about dating and marriage and family and a future. It is about so much more than the blow job.”

  If you are a gay kid in the 1980s, your relationship is not about marriage, it is not about family, it is not about the future—it is about a blow job. It is about sex only.

  MELISSA ETHERIDGE—MUSICIAN

  When I see kids now who are openly gay, like eighteen, nineteen. Oh God, to not go through those horrible years in the closet.

  SIR IAN MCKELLEN—ACTOR, ACTIVIST

  The British government was passing a particularly nasty antigay law, which I took very personally. In debating this particular law, I got angry and I kicked the door open and announced on a BBC radio program I was gay.

  It was Section 28 of the Local Government Act and it said because gay people have only pretended family relationships, it will be illegal to talk positively about homosexuality in any school. On the grounds that if you were to do that you would be promoting homosexuality. You would be encouraging kids to become gay, as if such a thing were possible any more than it’s possible, in my view, to encourage gay kids to become straight. It was a horrible law. It is insane and cruel and unfair and ridiculous and antisocial in every possible way. In debating that with someone who approved of this new law, it was only too easy for me to say, “Will you stop talking about ‘them.’ You’re talking about me.” That shut him up. Of course I haven’t shut up ever since.

  It was hugely important to me because it was a great relief. I didn’t understand that I had been censoring myself. I assumed that that’s the way it was. You’re gay. You may not show your affections in public. You may not hold hands with the person you’re sleeping with. You can’t put your arms on them, you can’t kiss them, you can’t do any of the normal things like that. You can’t talk about it. You’re different. Of course,
when I started out being sexually active it was actually against the law to have sex. I have friends who were put in prison. Scars you for life, knowing that’s a possibility. Then you restrict yourself and you see other people doing the same thing and you think this is the way that life is. You buy into the lie that homosexuality is unnatural.

  It’s living in a closet. It’s living in a place that’s dark and dusty, with old things that aren’t used anymore. You certainly don’t like yourself, nor do you like society that makes you like that. Once you stop all that, the relief. The joy. Proud to be gay? No, proud to SAY I’m gay. Glad to be gay. Wonderful word, “gay.” Before that it was “queer,” you know? Some clever activist said, “It’s not working, this calling ourselves queer. Let’s choose our own word. What about blue? No, that’s not right. Yellow. Gold. Gay! ‘Gay’ is a nice word.” There we go.

  Everything in your life becomes better. All your relationships are improved. Better actor, I would say. A different actor. Acting became no longer a release for emotions that I wasn’t allowed to have elsewhere in my life.

  Marc

  Do you think that maybe some of your desire to act was around that shame?

  Ian

  I do. I can now cry onstage. I could never cry before. It was fake. My acting was fake. My acting was disguise. Now my acting is about revelation, truth. Everything’s better. I can’t stop talking and telling people, “Come out. Join the human race.”