Crumpled Origami Swans

Its 1999 and I’m in Union Square with three gay friends. A car full of college boys yell "faggots" as they whiz by. Faggots. I think of a friend who once told me that when he came out to his mother her response was, "I would have loved you just the same if you had Down’s Syndrome." So now we’re retarded. I think of another friend whose mother asked in seriousness if he would now start wearing a dress. And women. Retarded women. A third friend told me how his mother’s main concern was that he would live a "sad, lonely life." Lonely, retarded women. I think of the irony in the word "gay" – it so seldom means the happiness it implies. And "positive" -- possibly the most frightening word in the gay lexicon. Gay and positive – two riddles, unsolved.
Now, in 2007, when I hear the word "faggot" I feel so much. There’s so much beauty in life, in being gay, in just living. But when I hear "faggot" it’s like somebody has unfolded a fragile and intricate origami swan and discarded it in the incinerator. To hear "faggot" is an undoing of sorts. It’s a constant battle between the unravel and the rebuilding – that is if you’re strong enough. It’s not weakness if you’re not. Who wouldn’t succumb? It’s the degrees in which we can succumb that’s frightening. When I hear the word "faggot" I think of mothers, dresses, nurses in HIV clinics, Down’s Syndrome, disease, isolation and how all the stupid boys in cars yelling "faggots" can do little to hurt us now.
In 1999 when that car of boys rode by my friends and I did the thing that made sense. Without consulting one another we extended our arms and raised our middle fingers, "Fuck You." We riotously laughed at the absurdity of it all – we’ve come far. These are the boys who taunted us in school, some of the same types we’re trying to be, trying to sleep with – the same types we’re trying to exist with and as. It’s complicated. But somehow it feels like a victory, like recovery.

Homophobia Inward

I’m in class and we’re talking cultural competency. An Orthodox Jewish woman raises her hand and states that although her religion sees homosexuality as an abomination, she’s confident she could work with gay people despite her belief. An abomination? I’m an abomination? Prior to this I thought she had a bad fashion sense, with the long dresses and hats, but now I think she’s a fool, ignorant, stupid. The class sits in silence. Why is religious intolerance tolerated even when it so righteously mocks our profession’s code of ethics? Jesus Christ we’re afraid of offending God. Fuck God. At least her version of him. I take the train home and think some more. I still think she’s a fool. Then doubt creeps in. I’ve heard these comments before -- in school hallways, from construction workers, from a car load of frat boys, from school kids selling candy in Union Square, from the TV news, from religious leaders, from my family, politicians and now students in Social Work school. It makes me shake with anger and rage. By the time I reach the door of my apartment I think to myself, "Maybe she’s right." ‘Maybe she’s right?" I’m succumbing again – surrendering to my own doubts and the ridicule of others. I catch myself. This is internalized homophobia. When will it stop?

My Body The AIDS Factory

It’s 1985, I’m 12 and convinced I’m manufacturing AIDS in my own body. It has been twelve years since the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality as a mental illness from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. But it will be years, maybe decades, before I believe there’s nothing wrong with me. With AIDS, I wonder if I’ll ever have a sense of being "okay." That summer I simulated sexual intercourse with Phillip Doherty, a sinewy neighbor and classmate whom I admired for the way his electrical cord veins wrapped around his muscled limbs as much as for his willingness to escape to his family’s basement to experiment with our burgeoning adolescent sexuality. I was sure that our recent sexual activity yielded disastrous results – the long dormant virus was activated by our crude simulations and desires. It had come to claims its hosts. Betrayed by a faulty immune system and overloaded by my deviant ways, I’m sure my body is turning against me. Just like the withering men with AIDS on TV and in the papers, I’ve engaged in "homosexual acts." I’m "promiscuous" -- as quick a path to death as any imaginable. I begin a full fledged war against myself between -- "I’m good, I’m okay, I think" and what the world was telling me, "No you’re a faggot and you’re going to die." I couldn't bear it. I didn't want any of those labels; although I wasn't so sure I had a choice. Being gay and AIDS was becoming inextricably linked, as was sex and death, and there was no one to help make these distinctions and separations. I traversed the landscape of stigma and shame that would become a second home. It wasn't enough that I spent much of my time denying my burgeoning sexual interests in boys, I was also negotiating pathology and death. Sick people get sick – it made sense. I spent much of the next few years worried that I, along with my neighbor, was responsible for creating a disease that would ultimately kill us. In 1985, when the world watched Rock Hudson whither away, I figured I was next.

Worried Well

My first boyfriend is diagnosed with HIV in early 2000. I sit with him as he cries and shakes his head in disbelief. He thinks about killing himself all the time. But he doesn’t. I flashback to a friend at a party the previous week -- he had a biohazard tattoo etched into his skin after his diagnosis. A warning. I get scared for my boyfriend. For myself. The next day, I make an appointment with a local HIV testing center where I’ll be tended to by trained professionals. A week later a nurse swabs my arm with alcohol and tells me I have good veins. I puff with pride. "My husband doesn’t like gay people, but I don’t mind them," she says as the syringe fills to near overflow. With each draw of blood, I deflate a little more. Moments before, I had told her I was gay. "You’re talking about me, bitch" I wanted to say, but I don’t. Instead, I smile weakly and wonder if I’ll return for my test result the next week.
A month later, I sit in another doctor’s office, this time on 14th street, waiting for another test result. Although I’ve done nothing to compromise my negative status, I’m thinking about HIV all the time and I’m scared. My boyfriend and I have been doing everything with condoms. Oral sex, grinding, and definately no penetration. I broke out in a rash after we fooled around and thought I had AIDS. I know this is not how to get infected, but my mind plays tricks. An irrationality takes over. It’s like someone’s sending me an envelope of anthrax everyday. Some mental health care workers would call me "the worried well". I beg to differ. When sex and death are so intimately entwined, "the worried well" seems like an insult on the grandest of scale. I’m worried for a reason and I’m not well – since I was a boy I’ve seen my gay brothers diagnosed and die. I’m worried sick -- I don’t want to die. As I wait, I see an older man who wears the years of survival in the wasting grooves of his face. The miracle drugs are working, with the minor inconveniences of reconfiguring the skin on his face. Dark hollows for the gallows. It’s heartbreaking. I think "That could be me." The man nods, as if to welcome me -- a sad introduction into a club I’m hoping I’ll never be a member of.

I Heart Heart Part 1

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I've been listening to Ann Wilson's first ever solo cd. It makes me a little excited in the pants. I love Ann Wilson. Ann Wilson of Heart, with the 23 top 40 hits, over 30 million records sold and a voice that melts kryptonite. I love Ann Wilson because she looks like every woman in my family, especially my mom and my Aunt Karen. I love Nancy Wilson too, but like Gene Simmons of Kiss once said of the two sisters, "Nancy is easy, but Ann, she's the Queen of flesh." The Queen of Flesh. There's a compliment there, I'm sure of it.
Nancy, the thinner of the two, has also spoken about Ann in the press. "She's the white Aretha." Which again, I guess is a compliment? Considering that Aretha no longer sings like she used to and looks like she's smuggling two black dwarfs in her bra and an entire supermarket aisle of Christmas hams in her panties, I'm having a difficult time searching for the compliment in that particular accolade.
My dad also loved Heart. His compliments of Ann Wilson were far less obtuse. It was predicated on three things 1) Ann Wilson's voice, 2) Ann Wilson's face, 3) Ann Wilson's tits. He first became aware of the band in the summer of 1985, when the Wilson sisters mounted a comeback and had a number one album called Heart. My family was on a drive to Lake George, NY when he heard What About Love playing on the radio, (Hitting #10, the song was the band's first top ten single since "Tell It Like It Is hit #8 in 1981.) My father was instantly smitten.
"Who the hell is that singing? Now she's got some voice."
"Better than Barbra Streisand?" That's me.
"Nobody sings better than Streisand, but she's close."
I was momentarily crushed but thanked God he qualified it. According to my Dad, Ann Wilson was almost as good a singer as thee Barbra Streisand. Who he predicted would be an instant star after attending an Off-Broadway show she was performing in the late 1960's. Had my father not been hell bent on prefecting Irish/Italian rage, me might have become a talent scout instead of a civil servant.
"I saw Streisand take to the stage (translation your mother dragged me to...) and that's when I knew that girl was gonna be a star. Hit every branch of the ugly tree, but what a set of pipes."
Barbra Streisand was the bar and most singers fell way below it. That Ann Wilson and her rock and roll howl of a voice came close is saying something.
My mom, on the other hand, would have nothing to do with Ann Wilson. The deeper I became enamoured with Heart the less tolerant my mother became of me and Ann. Posters went up, the scrap books got laminated and I became a fan club member, eagerly awaiting my monthly copy of "Heartbeat", the official newsletter edited by Ann's good friend Allan Muller who succumbed to AIDS in the 90's. I'd blare Crazy on You (#35 in 1975) from my stereo and my mother would say, "You really think she has a good voice? She's no Karen Carpenter."
"Karen Carpenter is anorexic and dead," I'd say annoyed, as I flipped Heart's Greatest Hits Live lp to crank up Led Zepplin's Rock and Roll, which I knew gave her an angina attack.
Although it took me years to realize it, my mother's disdain for Heart had little to do with the band -- one time I caught her singing along to Alone and she looked as blissed out as I'd ever seen her (#1 for three weeks in 1987, written by Tom Kelly and Billy Steinberg, who also wrote Like A Virgin and True Colors). My mother's disdain for the band was cleverly masked resentment for my father, who gave her many reasons to dislike him and very few ways to show it. Outward resentment of Ann Wilson was her only retaliation. He'd turn them up, she's turn them off and plunk in a Barry Manilow collection. As she got older, she became better at displaying her hostility, read: she scrubbed the toilet with his toothbrush when he told her he was leaving (#1, 2000-2004 when the divorce was finalized). But that was in the new century, In 1985 all my mom had in her arsenal were off handed passive aggressive comments about my favorite band and a sore index finger from ejecting the tape from the car stereo.

Before I Knew What Gay Was I Learned This Lesson

It’s 1979 and Paul Quinn and I are jumping on his bed in our underwear. We’re both excited and we both tentatively touch each other -- our first attempts at exploring a body other than our own. We’re lost in childhood desire, curiosity and innocence. All this stops when Mrs. Quinn throws open the door. "What are you two doing?" she yells. The look on her face is of a deep disgust – a repulsion usually reserved for the murders or pedophiles I see on TV. Paul gets spanked "I’ll give you something to take your pants off for", I hear her say as and I slip past her and out the door for home. I wish she hit me too; the sting of those rapid fire smacks would surely be less painful than the looks of disdain that burned a permanent scar in my head and heart. I don’t know what I did wrong. Whatever it is, I know it’s disgusting. I feel hate. I feel dirty. I’m powerless to do anything about it. What we were doing felt so good, why was it bad? Although I don’t know it then, this is my introduction to the paradox of being gay.
Not soon after my incident with Paul, I get caught again, this time with a girl named Beth Ann. My mother finds me. Here’s when I learn the price of the currency on childhood sexuality. While childhood sexual curiosity may be perplexing and frightening for parents, it’s less frightening when it’s a sanctioned sexual orientation. My mother’s concern is far different from the look of disgust on Mrs. Quinn’s face. I feel my mother’s sense of relief; MY SON IS NORMAL, he's interested in girls. I share in her relief. What I did with Paul is too shameful to name, what I was doing with Beth Ann is normal. My mother sternly warns to, "Never do that again." And while I never do, I never forget her momentary relief that I wasn't messing with boys. She knew what I'd done with Paul -- Mrs. Quinn made sure of that. And I knew she disapproved. No disapproval or expression of disgust or disdain, and certainly not my mother's relief or even my own could sway me from what I knew -- that I preferred boys. I was acutely aware that I liked boys more than girls. They’re smaller versions of my father, and my father looms large in my world. They are a desire, a mystery, a cone I want explained. This attraction and longing confuses me. And although it confuses me, there's a burgeoning liberal in me that simply don’t understand the fuss. I remember thinking "so what if I like boys" but also wincing, as if I was anticipating a smack. Verbalizing that I was gay, the casual "so what", laissez faire shoulder shrug of it all, won't come for years, if ever. Even still, at age six, I can’t understand why liking girls over boys is an expression preferred over the other. Loving boys feels so natural. Later, I find my mother’s Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care open to the chapter on children and homosexuality. My mother has been studying my mystery too. The Doctor assures worried parents that a child’s flirtation with homosexuality is just a passing phase. I wait through my teens for that phase to pass, remembering my childhood example of normal as well as its polar opposite. When this phase never passes, melancholia sets in. Loving the sameness of boys was a taboo that loving differentness of girls wasn’t.

Brendan's Diagnosis

It’s Easter 2000 and Meryl Streep is dying of cancer. William Hurt, her estranged husband, is giving an Oscar worthy speech about the virtues of their love. My boyfriend and I are in bed and we’re crying. Meryl withers and twists into the sheets of her hospital bed, her body a gnarled memory where there once was flesh.
My boyfriend whispers, "That’s not going to be me."
I whisper back, "It won’t, I know it."
But I can’t be sure. The virus is alive in his blood, exciting every nerve and casting a net of doom across his body, see-sawing between the threat of sickness and the hope of health.
"I’m a statistic, I never wanted to be a statistic," I remember him saying 2 months earlier, when his blood still tingled with the news of infection.
I didn’t know how to respond and so I mumbled, "Try to stay positive."
And he said, "That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to avoid."
In sickness and in health. These are the words I told myself when he was diagnosed, although there’d been no ceremonies or vows shared between us. I wasn’t going to flee, although the temptation almost always pulled at my feet and taunted me to safety.
Around the same time, my father did flee. He left my mother, their 32 year marriage and our family. My sister and I felt it coming, but that anticipation did not prepare us for the anger and absence that’s taken permanent residence in our souls. We saw the signs, even though my mother hadn’t. She’d grown blinded by the resentments that build between people who forget to infuse the architecture of their relationship with human hearts. All that stood now was an empty wooden structure where a marriage was once founded. I wasn’t going to let this happen to me and Brendan.
In sickness and in health, I said it again and again until I achieved dream like trances in my waking hours. When I slept the trances where full-fledged epics – symbols of my life and where I’d wound up. I’d dream that I was hovering above our bed, my troubled sleep in sharp contrast to the dreamless nights he’d begun to have. He stopped dreaming when he was diagnosed, a black sleep that offered no fantasy of hope or healing, but also of no doom.
My dreams where vivid. I was always flying - but with one caveat – my feet and hands were bound by twine or fabric and always threatened to unravel. If they did, I’d plummet to the earth. Despite this threat, I’d tempt the gods and soar higher, moving silently from our bed to the places I’d been in my life – my boyhood home, my ementary school, Lake George, New Hampshire, Maine, The Village, 8th Avenue, the cars I’ve fooled around in, other men’s beds, my own empty bed before I’d met Brendan. I’d fly past Mrs. Dubini, the neighborhood grump, who once took my bike and gave me the finger. I flew past Donna Pertrillo who threatened to beat me up in the second grade and whom I avoided by running through neighbors backyards and hiding in bushes because I didn't want to be exposed as a sissy when she finally caught up to me. I passed my elementary school where I was the designated faggot. Brendan has that story too. But where my story stopped with words, his stopped with rocks. I fly past him too, a skinny young boy being stoned by the class bullies who taunted him because he wore yellow pants to school –- sticks and stones break more than bones.
I hover over a hotel room in the Bahamas and see Brendan's mother, a retired nurse, telling me, "My son's a good boy so don't you cheat on him. You know what's out there." I wanted to respond, "It's already in here. And he's still a good boy." Brendan's one fear, other than dying, was his mother finding out his HIV status and retracting the love he'd worked so hard to obtain.
"You'd think I would have known better, my mother being a nurse," He'd say over and over again when he was first diagnosed.
In the beginning, "Yes," was my only response.
I hover over the clinic in Yonkers I’d sat in the week after Brendan’s diagnosis. The clinic was once the building where I attended Sunday School. I was a challace bearer. It comforted me being there - the ghost of a previous life saddling up to my current one. I see the nurse taking my blood and telling me, "My husband doesn’t like gay people, but I have no problem with them."
Them.
I wanted to say, "Hey, I’m one of "them" remember, bitch?" Instead, I said nothing.
Meryl Streep is still dying on TV. I wish I could press rewind and watch her regain health, watch her marriage unifiy instead of divide, see the bud of the flower before it blossomed. But that is just a fantasy.
In the beginning of my relationship with Brendan, I always wished for the rewind. I wished for restored health and unbroken unions and of flying with no boundaries -- no bindings to rub me raw. I wished for no fear of infection when touching can lead to so much more. Through sickness and health, and divorce, and the little deaths that reside in the darkest corners of the soul, I wished for it all to stop because we were so fucking scared. Every once in a while there was hope. You can't live on hope alone though, but I banked on that to sustain us. Sometimes just living felt like a losing hand and other days it was a jackpot of small victories and tiny explosions.
I reach for the remote and press pause – knowing that I can’t go back, but wishing for it to stop, if even for a moment. I lean over and place a kiss on B’s forehead, an offering of hope and health to the gods or angels, or whoever is watching over us.

Faggot

You're nine and the boys in elementary school begin to call you faggot. You know the word has a pejorative meaning that complements the sense of differentness you've felt since you were three or four. In response to these taunts, you say nothing. You feel threatened, like something unknowing and evil will happen to if you challenge their accusations. If you go to a teacher or a friend you worry that you’ll be admitting something about yourself that they will hate you for too. You decide you’ll be whatever the boys say you are, as long as they leave you alone. You go numb and lose yourself in world where there’s fairness and retribution – they’ll get theirs. When you get home, you stand in front of your bedroom mirror, open your mouth and pretend to scream -- arms flailing in desperate flight, as a look of horror contorts your face. You try to purge the sting and assault of the school day but no amount of silent screaming will fill that deepening void. You think of screaming for real, but what will you alert your parents to? A faggot of a son? Who will help you? Who can you tell? You are desperate. Years later when you study art, Edvard Munch’s "The Scream" becomes a favorite painting -- a silent scream framed on the wall. Finally, someone understood.