I started this essay when it really was just some thoughts that were rumbling through my head, and as I'm trying to do these days, I wrote them down. Well, I typed them out, if I'm to be accurate. They started about the same time the Supreme Court decided to hear DOMA and Prop 8. I've mentioned quite a few people, some by name, some not. There are many people I could have mentioned and didn't, and much more I could have said about the ones I did. But this isn't really about them. It's about my journey from learning about a group of people to learning that the group they belong to isn't nearly as important as the fact that they are people. JUST people.
My earliest thoughts about homosexuality didn't occur until I was in high school. Prior to my sophomore year I never had occasion to think about it. The only reason I even thought about it then was because I was involved in my school's production of Oklahoma and the guy that played Curly was getting beat up. A lot. I hadn't any idea why. He was a nice guy; good looking, talented, with nothing against him that I could actually see. At one point he was beaten badly enough to land in the hospital and was promptly transferred from our school to another. The talk around campus was rampant. Turns out, he was a FAGGOT. Honest to God, I had no idea what that meant. Sure I'd heard the word. What 15-year-old hadn't? But I didn't know what was so horrible about being one, and I certainly hadn't thought that it was horrible enough to beat the living Jesus out of somebody.
Over the course of what remained of the school year, I learned more of what high-schoolers of the pre-AIDS years believed about homosexuality. I learned that these men (the idea of girl faggots hadn't been introduced to me as of yet) liked to kiss and grope other men. OK, not so bad. Weird, but not awful. Then I learned that they have sex. Oh my God, did men have vaginas that I didn't know about? When I learned the truth about what faggot sex was all about, I was pretty grossed out. Why on EARTH would anybody do THAT? I recalled that when I was nine years old I had gotten so sick that the only way I could take medicine was via a suppository and it was one of the most horrible experiences I could remember at that age (of course I hadn't had children yet - it's all relative, believe me), so the idea of something bigger than a suppository going IN where stuff is so clearly supposed to just come OUT was unfathomable.
From there, the "knowledge" about faggots came fast and furious. Faggots wore pink. They talked with a lisp. They walked with a swish, wrists up, hands swinging. Faggots, or fags as I learned they were called, were easily identified and easily avoided. Man, teenagers are idiots.
All through high school I had a serious crush on a guy in my church's youth group. He was a year older than I was, quintessential California gorgeous, and super funny. I wrote this guy's name all over every notebook I ever had and every Vans Tennis Shoe I ever wore. When I was 14-years-old I started smoking to impress him; he was a bit of a bad boy and I thought smoking would admit me into his circle. The first gay jokes I had ever heard in my life came from him over a Thanksgiving weekend when he and my best friend and I occupied the back compartment of my friend's parents' motor home over Thanksgiving weekend in the mountains. I remember having more meaningful conversations about homosexuality that weekend and it was determined by the three of us that whatever people did in the privacy of their own home was their business, and that it shouldn't be a factor in whether or not a person was worth liking.
About six months later as it did every year, our church had a weekend long revival program. This particular year the program came with a bunch of pastors including a youth pastor. Now, being Episcopalian, praying wasn't a very big deal for me. We read prayers from a prayer book, but impromptu prayer was something I had never learned how to do. I admired people who prayed, but I never really understood how to go about it, so I just let other people do the honors. Well, this youth pastor from this revival program wasn't about to let me get away with that. During the opening or closing prayer he'd see me in the prayer circle, head bowed but eyes wide open, and for some reason this offended him to no end. In the middle of the prayer he'd say loudly, "Close your eyes." I'd close them for about ten seconds or so, then open them again. Again he'd tell me to close them, talking over the prayer that was being uttered. I completely hated this, and thought it very unfair and quite hypocritical. I mean, if his eyes were closed, how on earth could he know that mine weren't?
By the second night there were rumors that this guy was gay (I had evolved in my terminology since the previous school year). Not having a particular liking for him, I went along with it. He was kind of swishy and lispy, so it wasn't hard to imagine. As the night wore on, the tittering became cruel. I remember sitting on a desk in one of the classrooms at the church, laughing like there was no tomorrow at some really terrible thing that one of the guys had said about the youth pastor. I happened to look over at cute/funny guy. The look on his face as he watched the scene, as he watched ME, was easily readable: disgust. He said, "I thought it didn't matter to you if a guy was gay." Then he walked out of the room. I was so ashamed! My shame only increased a couple years later when I found out that cute/funny guy was gay.
Cut to a couple years later, safely graduated from high school, working as a receptionist at Saint Anselm of Canterbury Episcopal Church's Immigrant and Refugee Community Center. Working there at the age of 20 in 1986 made me feel like I was so enlightened. In conservative Garden Grove (strangely, it was also a renowned LGBT area, but I had no clue about that at the time), the fact that I worked with Vietnamese, Koreans, Mexicans, Romanians, etc., and did so with no anger or angst at the foreign-ness meant that I was definitely not prejudiced.
I also worked with a Neecy. Neecy was the first lesbian that I knew was a lesbian. The way I knew she was a lesbian was because she told me she was about a week after she started working there. She showed me a picture of her girlfriend whose name was Merry, like Merry Christmas. She said that they had been together for a couple years, but they had just broken up. I was so confused by this; this woman had just shown me a picture of another woman, but they had been "together" and had "broken up", which made them sound like they were a couple.... Ooooohhhhhh! Oh, OK! Neecy stood at my desk watching the look on my face change as the wheels turned. She kind of cocked her head at me and said, "Are you for real?"
It was through Neecy that I learned about the difference between butch lesbians and lipstick lesbians. I also learned about gaydar (though I don't think I heard that exact word until Will & Grace was on the air), transvestites, gay bars, and blue light districts. She also taught me what it's like to be gay in America; the discrimination, the ignorance, the fear, the hatred, and the violence. Of course, I'd heard about the violence from my high school days when Curly got beaten up so badly, but I'd let myself believe that it was an isolated incident. I was floored to learn that the violence extended to gay women, and was often worse as it frequently included rape.
There was another woman in our office named Daniela who was from Romania. She had come over to the United States as a refugee escaping the horrifying Ceausescu regime and was working as an intake case worker. Neecy and I would frequently sit at her desk at lunch and the three of us would eat and "shoot the shit" as Neecy taught Daniela to say until she found out that "shit" was a bad word. Daniela was fun that way. It took about three months for Daniela to accept that Neecy was a lesbian and about another month to be OK with it. She said that there were no homosexuals in Romania. "That can't be true," I said. Neecy looked at me like all her teaching had been a waste of time and said, "It's not true. We're everywhere." But Daniela was insistent. Finally I asked her what would happen if it were found out that there was a homosexual in Romania. Without hesitation she said that they would be executed. Then she got a weird look on her face and sat back in her chair and said simply, "Oh." We were quiet for minute, then I turned to Neecy and asked, indicating Daniela, "Is she for real?"
He had to go.
In a conversation with this young man, he mentioned that he lived in an area of Long Beach that had been called "Boys' Town". He lived on 3rd Street, he said, and something clicked in my head.... My Uncle Robin lived on 3rd Street in Long Beach! Huh. My bachelor uncle lived in Boys Town.....
My Uncle Robin was as much brother as he was uncle. Periodically, as I was growing up, he would come to live with us. Sometimes for a few weeks, sometimes for a year or more. He was equal parts protector, advocate, treasured friend, and pain in my butt. Robin loved baseball, wrestling, I Love Lucy, game shows, soap operas, candy, board games, and football. Not necessarily in that order. He was the youngest kid in his family, but in mine, he was the oldest, and depending on how he was acting, I'd regard that fact with either gratitude or frustration. Gratitude because he often served as a buffer between my abusive father and myself. Frustration because I always seemed to forget the buffer thing when he always had control of our one TV or our one radio.
The coolest thing about my Uncle Robin, though, was that he was never, and I mean NEVER, less than 100% about ANYTHING! If his baseball team, the Houston Astros, lost a game, everybody knew about it. On the anniversary of the break-up of the Beatles, he played the only Beatles record I had, all day long. To this day, in my mind and heart, Hey Jude will always be about him. One night, he and my dad played a marathon game of Monopoly that went into the wee hours of the morning. My dad won even though Robin had all the properties except the big two: Park Place and Broadway. The power of those two properties with hotels on them sent my uncle into a whining, screaming fit the likes of which were never seen before or since in our home.
I called Uncle Robin not knowing, but suspecting he lived in Boys Town and suspecting there was a reason for that. That's when he told me he was gay. I asked who else knew and he said only his sister, my Aunt Marge. Then the thought occurred to me that I should ask if my Aunt Marge was also gay. There was a pause, but he simply told me that it wasn't for him to say. He came over for a visit that weekend. That's when I found out he was also HIV positive. He died of AIDS about four years later in August of 1995.
Since that time I've had many close gay friends walk in and out of my life. Through the magic of Facebook, I get to keep in touch with many of them, though most are far flung all over the country. Some are married or at least in civil unions. Others are engaged to be married, waiting for legality in their state. Some were tightly in the closet when I knew them once upon a time, and only since reconnecting on Facebook have I learned of their sexuality. Others still have remained in the closet for one reason or another. In retrospect, I am quite proud of the fact that most of the gay people I've known in my life felt very comfortable telling me they were gay before it became general knowledge. As ignorant as I have been about the subject, the community embraced me, and it's never been a question in my mind whether or not I would embrace them back.
It's said that we hate what we fear and we fear what we don't know or understand. If there's one thing I've learned in the past forty-something years it's that understanding isn't required to love a person. We love because we choose to love in spite of what we understand or agree with about a person. Loving a person because they are everything you want them to be is swell and all, but it's easy; no more than what's expect of us. But loving a person who is so different from what you are or what you think they ought to be.... that is where grace lies. Do it enough and you'll realize that you haven't any right to think a person "ought to be" anything but happy in their own perfect-as-it-is skin.
I was so happy to learn that my Aunt Marge is getting married next year. I've never met her wife-to-be, but I hear she's amazing, which is no less than Marge deserves. I know some in our family aren't very happy about this. But those are voices that kept her in the closet for almost sixty years and I'm so very glad she isn't listening to them anymore. I do wish Uncle Robin could be there to see it, though.
