Rainbow in Monochrome (Sketch Four)

Alright, I’ll be honest.

Instantly you’re on edge. “Oh, he’s being honest now? Why does he have to qualify this entire post with his recent honesty? Has he lied to me before?” No, I haven’t lied to you before. Every post you’ve read has been completely 100% true. But I haven’t really spoken about this issue in my life as eloquently as I’d like to have done, nor as frequently. With this post that ends.

This post is going to deal primarily with my coming out and living my life as an openly gay man in Texas.

Growing up wasn’t easy. We all have the pains and stings of adolescence, but imagine the desire towards sex accruing that because your attraction isn’t something that you see as “normal”. I would spend hours poring over my Bible, trying to find a passage that wouldn’t condemn me to Hell, trying to feel some semblance of love from anyone I came into contact with about gay people, receiving none.

In the summer before my sophomore year in high school, I came out to my sister at midnight on July 12. Before I told her, she told me to give her a moment to let her guess what I was about to say. She gave me the go-ahead, I told her, and she exclaimed that she was right. Following that instantly, of course, with a speech about how she still accepted me and loved me for who I was. I thanked her, but I knew my parents would be another story, and I wouldn’t be telling them anytime soon. But I did have a backup plan: a bag, packed with some clothes and left open for my toiletries, in case I had to disappear in the middle of the night, run to Dallas, and become a prostitute to support myself financially. It was my only option if they found out. But they wouldn’t, I assured myself. They won’t know for awhile.

Or so I thought. A week later, my parents walked in the room where I was watching TV, sat down, and very matter-of-factly asked me if I had been having any questions about my sexual orientation. After a few moments of stunned silence, I took a deep breath like I was drowning and released the three words that would come to define my existence in the eyes of myself and my peers: “I am gay.”

The second that “y” glossed off my lips, my dad asked me if I remembered all those times during my childhood when he told me he’d love me no matter what. I nodded numbly, anticipating the next words out of his mouth to be “Well, this is an exception.”

Instead he said, “Well I meant it.” He hugged me tightly, and it was a long time before either of us let go. I was floored; out of all the reactions I’d thought up, this was not one of them. I distinctly recall crying myself to sleep that night, unbelieving that my parents were accepting of me and loved me no less.

The next day, I unpacked the bag in my closet.

In late September of my sophomore year of high school I got my first boyfriend; I was in Waco and he was in Washington, D.C. (pickings are slim in Waco, and I wasn’t about to out myself to my classmates and friends just yet), but for five months Facebook and I made it work. February of 2008 things went south. I was happy with it – the breakup was amicable and left me with no regrets.

My second relationship was a completely different story. It was and is the longest relationship I’ve ever been in, and it was by far the most emotionally taxing. He emotionally and verbally abused me, constantly calling me “loser” and “ugly” and saying that I was lucky to be with him. I bought it because I was happy to have a boyfriend at all. Things didn’t end well – he told me a lot of things that a sane person wouldn’t have believed but since he had a psychological foothold in my psyche, I fell for it hook line and sinker. I was in a deep and dark depression for a few months.

Not helping that fact was the other end of the rope burning – the cat was out of the bag. My family knew, my friends knew, and now everybody knew. I only include this out of deference to what has made me stronger – I hate painting myself as a victim, though I know that’s how people will take this – but people aren’t very accepting in the heart of Texas. Every day of school was a living hell.

Faggot

            The locker slams against my face with no regard for the lacerations that appear in my mouth from my teeth.

            look at that fuckin’ queer

I begin to carry washrags in my backpack to wipe the spit from my face or the milk from my hair when someone decides to pour it on me at lunch. Occasionally I find them useful to dab blood from around my nose or mouth.

 god I hope he gets AIDS

            I make it a habit not to read the notes that start piling up in my locker like vultures on a carcass. I know I’ll just be terrified of sleeping that night, jumping at every small noise outside my window, thinking that they’re finally going to make good on their promises.

            YOU WILL BURN IN HELL FOREVER YOU SODOMITE WHORE

            I can’t count the number of times I cry myself to sleep at night, coupled with the hope beyond hope that one of my many week-long rebounds will make me feel better. They never did.

            I didn’t tell my parents. How could I? That sort of strain on a family whose patriarch is already hemorrhaging money in the auto industry, whose maternal figure is working 9 hours a day, whose daughter is working her fingers to the bone? They didn’t deserve my problems. So I convinced myself they were better off not knowing. They still are.

            My religious life also faded in an instant. I was treated like an exhibit in a museum, which I much preferred over being treated like an animal. But the second a friend of my parents stopped me from entering the church because he didn’t want me molesting his children, I was done.

            Throughout all of this, I don’t remain single for longer than a few days. I can’t seem to find the off-switch in my body that makes me not depend on the initial blush of romance, of being wanted by someone, by anyone at all. I was so frantic; at times I didn’t really care what their gender was. I just wanted to feel like I wasn’t entirely worthless.

            Once I graduated high school, things got better at an alarming rate. I still imposed some boundaries on myself though. Every person I told about my sexuality, I added a please don’t hate me in my mind before the sentence ended. In fact, the first couple of times, I remember visibly – involuntarily – flinching.

            All of this to say, I’m happy for the experiences this has brought me. I’ve come out (no pun intended) on the other side, a stronger person, a better person. I can’t imagine living my life any less openly, or being untrue to myself. I came of age, and I lost my innocence due to the people around me, but I never stopped believing in the inherent goodness and decency of people. Now that college is only reaffirming that conviction, I hope I long I pray for the day when I can tell people I have a husband, tell people that I have a son, a daughter, that I can say “I am gay and I am proud” without fear of being ostracized. But for right now, I’m happy where I am.

            Progress is always relative.

To Kill A Mockingbird - Reflection

“To Kill A Mockingbird” is one of those novels that history dictates should have been thrown aside and collecting dust about 10 years after it was written. The author was a former librarian, it was the only book she’d ever written, and the subject matter had been discussed time and time again.

I knew all of these things, opening the book for the first time since my junior year in high school. I was thoroughly convinced I couldn’t learn anything new from Harper Lee, Jem, Scout, or Atticus.

I was wrong.

Not only did my junior year consist of SparkNotes for this book and regurgitating the condensed versions I’d seen about five minutes before on my smartphone for any given test, I’d never really gotten a chance to get invested in the characters. Heck, we watched the movie and about five minutes into it the bell rang for our next class. So I didn’t get to see anything I’d missed, either. I was upset for all of 5 seconds, back then. I’m more upset now.

Rereading the novel, I could see how well it was written. There are phrases I encounter, every now and again, that make me envious of Harper Lee. I fume for a couple seconds, the goosebumps covering my arms like silk opera gloves, and wonder why I didn’t think of that sentence, that wording, that order.

What comes to mind more than anything while reading this classic, though, is the reverence now given to works that don’t deserve the word.

Two examples come to mind: Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” series and Donald Barthelme’s “Snow White” retelling. Stephenie Meyer is up there for obvious reasons; the writing is clearly evident of a flagrant abuse of Microsoft Word’s thesaurus function, the characters are flat and uninteresting, and the romance story’s ultimate physical intimacy is told with all of the passion of an IKEA manual. Barthelme’s book is on the other extreme; it’s well-written as a postmodernist satire using the seven dwarves as psychological entities, but ending the entire book with a series of capitalized bolded Arial lines that include “The victimization of Snow White’s arse/ The apotheosis of Snow White” reeks of pretentiousness. I find it to be an anathematization of simplicity and straightforward storytelling.

TKAM had none of this. The story was told with the sincerity and directness of a child, fitting perfectly with the narrative voice. Racism wasn’t something Scout understood, but nor was it something to which she was blind. She and Jem’s friendship with Boo Radley is an unusual one but it might be one of the most endearing in all of literature.

Knowing that your only tenuous grasp on the entirety of the outside world rests in the hands of a pair of children must be difficult for any normal person, and that’s why this book works: Boo isn’t normal – he understands the loyalty of kids and their dedication to purity.

Jem and Scout constantly seek for justice, even more than the adults do in the novel. The trial of Tom only highlights the idea that children seemingly know more than adults in some issues but at the same time are constantly learning. There’s a definite dichotomy between innocence and experience (a la William Blake), between clean and dirty, life and death as a metaphor for good and evil, and between – you guessed it – black and white. The racial tension in the book is the most obvious symbol, the most prevalent. But it never takes away from the coming-of-age story of Scout and Jem, growing up in Maycomb, Alabama.

Fantastic book, can’t wait to see what other characters in other works gain from experience.

Fourth Meeting with Pedro

Pedro came in hesitantly; I didn’t really blame him this time. We both had completely missed each other the last time we said we’d meet up, and I’d spent 20 minutes lazily going up and down the escalators looking for him. Apparently he was always just out of my eyesight. I felt like a dick about it – who wouldn’t, really? – but that was behind us now. I sat at the table and shook his hand, warm as ever.

The conversation moved slowly, clanging and clattering along like a jalopy in summer. We began, as we tend to do, by talking about the weather. What it was like, how it was clearing up, how it was just gorgeous compared to last week, when the skies were cloudy and everyone seemed depressed, angry, or just apathetic.

Gradually, our dialogue shifted to the people around us. It was a busy coffee shop atmosphere; girls were studying and talking on the phone at the same time, guys with ponytails were ordering sentence-long drink orders, and the green-aproned arbiters behind the counter were doing their best not to suffocate from all the pretentiousness.

Pedro looked surreptitiously at the posterior of a girl who walked past our table and raised his eyebrows subtly. “How about that, huh?” he whistled softly. “Nice, eh?”

            “Yeah…” I said. OK, so I hadn’t told him that wasn’t my fare. But then again, it wasn’t anything I wasn’t used to. I knew cultural attitudes in Brazil, as well as the rest of Latin America, were shifting towards gay rights and equality. However, something about Pedro made me not want to divulge that information to him. Maybe it was his small-town upbringing; maybe it was me just being cautious about the only real representative he knew of American culture being gay that I didn’t want to put him on edge. Maybe it was none of those things. I wasn’t sure.

            Some guy – some asshole, I muttered in my conscious – started playing his guitar in the middle of the bookstore. My (and Pedro’s, I found out) ears are attuned to music; we hear it playing more often than we hear conversation. Both of us winced and started grumbling about the idiot that would play “Wonderwall” and sing it while “Black Velvet” was already on the radio.

            Both of us were stressed, and it showed. We were each about to take important tests. I had the first test in my hardest English class the day after, about great works of poetry and literature in the Roaring Twenties. He had the SATs in a few months. I remembered reading an article about the SAT being biased towards native English speakers, and he said he was just taking the Portuguese equivalent. What, essentially, would allow him to come to TCU as a student next year. He was begging for it, I could tell. He wanted it badly.

            I wanted this grade badly, too (I found out later I got the fourth-highest grade in the class). We talked about how we were at taking tests. Do you get nervous when you’re put on the spot? Why? Why not? Are there certain subjects you like writing about or testing yourself over?

            I was fascinated by the tenacity with which he was pursuing this test. It was in June, and he was already taking practice exams and synthesizing information. But then again, he reminded me that in Portugal most of the schools are more advanced than American ones. I nodded, and silently was reminded of why I wanted to teach.

            We walked out of the bookstore, sun dappling our shoulders and birds whispering to each other over the leaves’ lecture. I shook his hand in a firm farewell, and watched him board the bus. It wasn’t long before I had a road trip to look forward to. Not just in Spring Break, but over the rest of my life. I knew then, as I know now, that I will never be satisfied with living in Texas. I will spend my dying breath grateful that I got out of the state, or cursing the circumstances that left me in it.

            I can only hope one day I will be as brave as Pedro, to just get on the bus and leave for where he wanted to go. I can do nothing but admire that, every time we meet. His courage astounds me.

Ten Indians - Reflection

“Ten Indians” by Ernest Hemingway was a strange little story, one with which I firmly believe just about everyone can relate. I first opened it eagerly, my brain unwittingly but continuously drawing up images of Agatha Christie’s “And Then There Were None,” knowing that the book was originally subtitled “Ten Little Indians.”

I’m not sure I could have ever been more wrong, except for that one time when my one and only girlfriend came to a party that I was attending with my boyfriend. When I stiffened, he asked who she was and I instantly was vacillating between the two conversational options of “Who, her?” or “I have to pee,” and what came out was “I have to pee on her.” The relationship ended soon after that, and looking back I’m not surprised.

In this same vein is Hemingway’s story. A boy, suffering the blow of heartbreak in the initial blush of romance, struck down by a girl that didn’t feel anything for him. It was interesting to read through the lens of my own failed relationships – what were the red flags? Would I have seen the signs? Looking back they seem so obvious, but then again it’s also obvious that – no matter how many times I said I was – what I was feeling wasn’t love.

The reader knows that Nick isn’t in love, he just thinks he is; his mind is overcrowded by hormonal emotions and teenage angst. Everything is cause for the most extreme end of the spectrum; if the girl he “loves” hangs out with some other boy and she’s happy, clearly she’s being unfaithful and his heart is forever broken. Adolescent apathy and doubt rule Nick’s psychology, something the mature reader is all too familiar with.

            The last scene in particular stuck with me. As Nick wakes up there is a long moment when he looks out at the weather and the scenery, and it takes him a few minutes before he realizes he’s brokenhearted. True heartbreak permeates all aspects of your life. You try burning a plastic cereal receptor because it reminds you of the other person. You go to sleep crying, wake up refreshed and then the reality of your situation hits you all over again and you’re bawling into your pillow like a soap opera actress chewing the scenery.

            It really can be argued that the narrator isn’t Nick, but rather Nick’s objectivity – all Nick’s energy is focused on feeling. It’s necessary to feel as much as one feels as a teenager; it allows you to view emotions and events through a broader psychological lens. The thing is, however, Hemingway’s story is juxtaposed against the racism felt towards Native Americans at the time of publication.

            I could instantly find something to relate to with the parallel of interracial relationships with same-sex relationships. It was an almost inevitable fact that if I were in a relationship, someone would take issue – either with my existence or the fact that I was happy, if only for a brief moment. I was always a target, always the scapegoat. Nick’s parents are attempting to understand, and so too did my parents try to understand what I was going through, but it’s one thing to view from a window and another to be behind the glass.

            That brings me to my final point: Nick’s father was aloof in his description of the tryst. This brings up doubt in the mind of the reader – was he telling the truth, or was he lying because he didn’t approve of the relationship? I knew my parents would never do such a thing but I knew my parents weren’t everybody. Other parents of gay kids have sent them to Escuela Caribe or some other hellhole. I knew it was a distinct possibility that Nick’s father just didn’t want him and Prudie to be together. The thought chilled me to the bone.

            Reading “Ten Indians” opened my eyes to the possibility of what could be as well as viewing what once was with a more discerning eye. I have been wondering for a long time now how I will bring up my child – because I will have a child, mind you, one way or the other. I can only hope that I will show the tact, the sensitivity, and the grace my parents showed me, and recognize the molehills while treating them like the mountains they are in my child’s psyche.