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. . .I talk about my life anyway because if, on the one hand,
hardly anything could be less important, on the other hand,
hardly anything could be more important. My story is important
not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it
anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in
many ways it is also yours. Maybe nothing is more important
than that we keep track, you and I, of these stories of who we
are and where we have come from and the people we have met
along the way because it is precisely through these stories in
all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said,
that God makes himself known to each of us most powerfully
and personally.
-Frederick Buechner
I'm going to make a sweeping, general, condemnation.
Most people writing about growing up gay are not telling it
anything like right.
Yes, that's unfair. I say it ironically because I wanted to
open with that Buechner quote as an apology for why I'm
writing some of my personal stories. When I think of the
reasons why I really want to write about my life, however, it is
because I don't recognize myself in the, admittedly limited,
memoirs by other gay men that I've read. That's not entirely
true, of course. I recall reading a bit in Bruce Bawer's A Place
at the Table wherein he describes the mental gymnastics of one
who is gay and trying to convince oneself one is not, and
indeed could not be, gay. I laughed out loud in recognition.
Nonetheless, my story is different from Bawer's. It's different
enough to make me say, yes, but. Yes, but I didn't go through
that experience until I was at least 20. Yes, but my life took
place in a distinctly rural, distinctly German, Lutheran setting,
which adds it's own flavor, it's own peculiarity. Yes, but I want
to tell it the way it happened to me.
That last line is probably the most true. E.B. White wrote
in his foreword to a collection of his essays: "Only a person
who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the
stamina to write essays." Writers of memoirs are whatever is
more serious than "congenitally."
So, I'm sitting here in the middle of the night capturing a
snatch of inspiration to explain myself and the best I can do is
this. Yes, Frederick, if I tell it anything like right, you'll
recognize that my story is also yours, but even more, if I do it
anything like right, I will awaken in you a story you haven't
thought about in some time, some clouded memory that is
stored away in a closet behind that box with the zip codes of all
the places you've lived before and will never live again. I want
to help you pull out that little box of memory and place it before
the zip codes (really, why are those so accessible in our
memory closets?) and shine some light on it. Your memory is
what makes you You. As difficult as it is to understand who we
are, I'm hoping that by sorting through my own boxes and
maybe coming to a better understanding of who I am, you might
also come to a better understanding of who you are.
Caveat: This won't be painless, it won't be all warm
fuzzies and angelic choirs. But it might be revelation all the
same.
So much for apologies. Over the next, oh, year or so, I
hope to publish in Whosoever some of my memories and what
they mean to me as I slide ever so gracefully into middle age.
I'm going over these memories because, truth be told, I'm not
sure I was completely present for them the first time. I want to
be clear on two things for this writing exercise. First, I had a
pretty darn happy childhood. Really, I'm not just saying that. I
grew up on a farm and ranch with about 300 acres of
playground and animals. It was an incredibly safe childhood,
far away from random crime and mean people. My parents
were your basic good, German, Lutheran farm folk with an
incredible amount of smarts, especially when I think about how
little schooling they had, and however else my six older siblings
remember this time and place (and I suspect some had different
perspectives since I know at least a couple couldn't wait to get
away from the farm) I look back on it as just about the best
anyone could hope for. The second thing, however, is that I
spent the first 20-some-odd years of my life in numbness, had a
brief 3 or 4 years of excruciating feeling, and then spent
another 6 or so enjoying the numbness again. That is to say, I
lived very much afraid of my own sexuality and in pursuit of
recognition for being a good boy. This desire to be "good"
meant that I had to cultivate that numbness very nearly to a
fine art because the feelings I felt were not those of a "good
boy." It's only in my thirties that I have come to accept and
embrace my sexuality and actually allow myself to feel that part
of me unashamedly and that feeling has opened all kinds of
other feelings. So looking back at my childhood is a little like
experiencing it one more time, with feeling.
And for the purpose of this initial series, I'm sticking to
my childhood, roughly between the the time I was born in 1963
through the summer of 1978, when my youngest sibling
graduated from high school, left home, and left me to be the
only child on the farm. That's fifteen years through which to
ramble non-chronologically, loosely thematically.
Let me jump in right away with some of my earliest
memories.
I own a memory that makes so much more sense to me
now that I accept my sexuality and it affirms for me that
sexuality is set at an early age. Back when I was trying to be
straight, I had a real hard time explaining this one away.
We were watching some television program at home. I
don't know what age I was, but I'm pretty sure I was under
school age. Four? Five? Anyway, it was a variety show,
probably Lawrence Welk from what I recall of the time of day
(late afternoon/early evening -- too early for Carol Burnett or
some of the other variety shows we watched regularly) and it
had about 10 dancers in this musical number, equal number
men and women. The women were dressed in hoop skirts, all
frills and bonnets and parasols, and the men were dressed in
tux pants and I think maybe vests with tux shirts. I really don't
recall their upper bodies so much, so they may have had on
jackets.
I don't think they wore jackets, however, because that
would have obscured what I do clearly remember, which would
be their butts. Specifically, I very clearly recall a moment in this
number where all the women were posed upstage right, in a
line, looking coquettish and shy, and the men were in a
diagonal line from the women to downstage left, down on one
knee, backs partially to the audience as they struck a pose as if
they were doing a mass marriage proposal. Their downstage
knee was up, the upstage knee on the stage.
I have this very distinct memory of those little, male,
dancer butts in those little, tight, black pants, loved by the
camera. Even more, I have this distinct memory of turning to
one of my sisters, who must have been home for the day
because my sisters were all moved out by the time I was old
enough to have memories of them, and commenting on the
pose. I struggled for the words to express how I felt about
those butts and the best I could do was, "I think that looks good
when the men are like that," and I demonstrated the pose. It
seems like she wasn't really paying attention to the television
and even less to me. I have no idea what she said in reply,
although I remember she made a reply. I wonder that she didn't
look at the screen, look at me, and mutter, "fag."
Now, in a world wherein people are allowed to think
about sexuality from their earliest powers of such thought,
would I have named that moment as the moment when I knew I
was gay? Maybe not and that's the mystery of memory to me. I
now look back on that moment and recognize the homo-erotic
content, but at the time, I just knew that I liked what I saw. It
could just as well have been the moment when I realized I
wanted to be a dancer, a realization I made about the same
time I accepted my sexuality. Fortunately, you can come out at
30. Unfortunately, you can't run off and audition for Mark Morris
at 30.
Numbness. It has a cost. But I digress.
A couple of years ago, I asked my late friend, Bill
Williams, about his earliest memories of finding girls attractive.
He grinned. We had both heard the sarcastic comment made,
"When did you realize you were heterosexual?" but I was the
first person to ask him and really mean for him to think about it.
It's even more difficult because, culturally, we assume boys
have only one thought about girls until around the age of 13:
"Ew, yuck. Girl germs!" But Bill, good friend that he was,
thought about it and finally said, "You know, there was this girl
when I was maybe in kindergarten. I remember looking at her
and thinking she was the prettiest thing I'd ever seen."
Now, Bill obviously wasn't chasing skirts that early and I
suspect that he didn't really get going on this girl thing until the
hormones of adolescence kicked in, but he seemed pleased
that I fished this memory out of his memory closet. It helped
him not only understand how early his sexuality was set, it
helped him understand that my story about the dancers' butts
didn't make me a leering man-chaser by the time I started first
grade. I no more knew why I liked the guys' behinds in that
musical number than Bill knew why he found that girl so pretty.
Furthermore, neither of us had any idea of how to act on or
even name those feelings. But they were there and our adult
experience could be placed on those feelings and we could
finally name them and own them in a new way.
There is this ironic twist in my pre-school days. I had
lots of girlfriends, it seems. At least they let me call them that
and they called me their boyfriend. I must have seemed like
some little 5 year old, chubby Don Juan with these teen-aged
girls as my girlfriends. I don't even remember who they all
were. I recall one distinctly, a neighbor girl (and in my
community, a neighbor was anyone within a five mile radius)
and probably her older sister at some point. We made crayon
and construction paper cards for each other. It seems like I had
named a cousin or two my girlfriend, too. In fact there was one
cousin who was actually about my age, so my girlfriends had a
range from about 5 to 18. It was all very innocent and silly, but
it seemed to make them pleased and I was nothing if not a little
pleaser as a child. Just to add an extra ironic twist to it, I recall
one time when I was at this neighbor girl's house and we were
all excited because an Elvis Presley movie was going to be on
television that night. As I think on that night, I was just as
excited to see Elvis as she was.
Even my heterosexual pretend games had a homo-erotic
aspect to it.
First, I'm going differentiate between God and the
church. The church was, indeed, a given in my life. We
weren't every Sunday sort of church-goers, but we were
regular, making it at least a couple of times each month.
Sunday school wasn't pressed upon us, but that seemed to be
more important as we were sure to at least make it to Sunday
school most Sundays. I'll talk about me and church and
Sunday school later and in greater depth, because it was,
indeed a force in my life. God will also play a more in-depth
role as I go along, too, but I want to relate this story first.
I had my first mystical experience in the backyard. I may
have been in school by this point, but just barely, no more than
first grade. I was laying on my back and thinking about
something they'd said in Sunday shool or church or
somewhere. It was said that God wasn't some old man with a
grey beard sitting up in heaven, but that God was a spirit who
was everywhere. Even though we couldn't see God, God was
there.
This now seems like a pretty abstract thought to be
pushing on a kid so young, but I was apparently up to the
challenge. Lying in the grass on a warm, sunny day, watching
patches of clouds go by, I contemplated this God who was not a
person but a spirit and I recall getting this most particular
feeling. I suddenly Knew, not just thought but Knew that God
was up there in the sky, among those few clouds, stretching
across the blueness in between and God was in the grass
beside me, on both sides and even under me and above me.
Not above me like way up in the clouds above me, but directly
above me, on me. God was in the branches of the pecan tree
just to the east of me and in the shade of the elm tree just to the
west of me. When I read St. Paul write about not knowing how
long he was caught up into heaven, I recognize this moment
because I don't know how long it lasted or how it stopped. I
don't know when I got up and went back to being a little boy
drawing pictures and playing in dirt. What I do know is that for
a moment, God became imminently real, invisible but tangible
because God had touched me.
I had been touched by God.
I don't think I told anyone about that experience. I was
well into my twenties before I had a name for it -- mystical
experience. (Lutherans didn't use such words back then and
still are a little skittish about them.) I don't generally think of
myself as having a Conversion Experience because it feels like
I've always believed and I've really come to think of my lifea as
onle long conversion experience because I still feel like I'm
becoming a Christian, that I'm not quite one yet. If a conversion
is the time when you believe on your own, not just because the
church, your parents or the Bible told you so, then that was it,
but really it was just the beginning.
I start this series with these two stories because they are
early memories, although not the absolute earliest, and they
deal with two items that are central to my life and identity and
are the two angels with whom I have wrestled most fiercely:
Sexuality and God.
If I told the stories anything like right, they not only
revealed my experience, but illuminated yours. I hope they
spark some early memory for you, some moment when God
touched you, even if you didn't recognize it for what it was until
just now. Maybe some point in your history when you clearly
felt attraction to the gender to which you are now attracted,
even if you didn't (couldn't) recognize it as sexual attraction at
the time.
Not every story I tell will be so centered on sexuality or
God, but these are the centers, one of which I did my best to be
numb to, the other that I actively followed and pursued my
whole life. For the purpose of this series, everything, at least
indirectly, revolves around these twin suns.
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Bruce Bawer
Bruce Bawer
Other Articles By Neil Ellis Orts:
Reflections of a Recalcitrant Grudge-Keeper
Labels and Definitions and Who I Am
Also In This Issue:
What I Learned From Ms. Celie's Blues
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