I don’t want the Malignant Orange Narcissist to be gay, even closeted. I really don’t.
I’ve known I was gay since 4th grade—fascinated by my PE coach’s hairy armpits, stubble, and the way his prominent nips showed through every shirt he wore (so that’s where it all came from, amirite?), but I didn’t have a name for it until high school. And along with the name, came the very real knowledge that society didn’t look kindly upon boys who liked boys, or girls who liked girls. So I shoved it down deep and plastered over it with the type of devotion to religion that adolescents often do.
But that didn’t make it go away.
Tom was my first real crush. And Tom was the boy who taught me that if you’re gay in 1973, you never confess your love to another boy—especially if you don’t know if it will be returned. It will end the friendship and leave you heartbroken.
Did that stop me from falling in love again? Of course not. I met Mike at church. My mom was obsessed that I had not yet been Confirmed in the Lutheran faith and sent me in for the ridiculous religious studies that would allow me to have a sip of wine and eat a dry cracker upon graduation. (Of course, with my mindset at the time it was all very necessary and I welcomed it with open arms.) Among the other teenagers in attendance for this training was Mike.
I was immediately smitten. He was a year younger; I was a Junior, he was a sophomore. There was a mutual spark there—although not that kind of spark (at least not from him; I wanted to jump his bones even if I wasn’t completely sure what do actually do in that situation), unfortunately—and we became friends. I have no memory of the circumstances that caused us to crash and burn, but I undoubtedly pushed the boundaries of our friendship in a way unacceptable to a straight teenage boy, and did something stupid.
By the time senior year rolled around—and while developing a great friendship that lasted until I went off to college with a girl named Jean the year before—I knew I was gay. Not bisexual. Not “questioning.” I was a full-on fag. I was sexually and romantically attracted to men. And then along came Daniel.
Daniel, Daniel, Daniel… I may have written about my senior year crush before so if any of this sounds familiar forgive me. I’m an old man and too lazy to go searching through all my previous posts to verify this one way or another.
In the summer of ’75, the company who built our house finally got around to finishing up the rest of the subdivision just to the west of us. At this point I had decided to go into architecture, so every afternoon after school I would head over there and wander through the homes under construction as they were going up.* Daniel’s family moved into one of those homes that fall.
I don’t remember the circumstances of our meeting, but it was only afterward we realized that we lived only a few doors down from each other and started hanging out. Daniel was a bad boy. He smoked, he enjoyed a beer or two when he could get them, and he unabashedly drove a pink ’69 Mustang. I mean any guy who drives a pink car has to be gay, right? Well, no. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I still wasn’t anywhere near ready to come out, and based upon past experience, after my heart started fluttering and I saw stars when we were together, I knew better than to outright confess my love to this boy lest it be a repeat of what happened with Tom. So I kept it bottled up until one afternoon my body said, “Fuck that!” and it became a little too obvious how I felt.
After school we’d often retreat to my bedroom to do homework or just lay on the bed and watch television. He would often get rowdy and initiate some harmless horseplay. He usually pinned me (okay, so I often let him), but one day I turned the tables and we found ourselves on the floor, with me on top. At this point I was fully hard and grinding my crotch into his until he realized what was going on and he pushed me off. That was the end of our little wrestling matches. It wasn’t enough to kill the friendship immediately, but there was a definite change. He slowly started drifting away (always “busy” when I suggested we do something) and when it came time for me to leave for Tucson in August to attend the University of Arizona, we were barely speaking.
Even after starting college, I still wasn’t out but I had a plan. And choosing UofA over the much closer ASU had been a part of it. I knew coming out while still living at home would be…problematic (this was years before I knew my dad was—at least—bisexual), and I figured if I were 100 miles away it would give me a chance to get to really know what being gay meant for me, far from my family.
The point of this long-winded story is to confess that as Mr. Romano pointed out in his video above, prior to coming out, I too was full of jealousy toward men who were out and it manifested in a lot of anger. While I never got physical with anyone (that just wasn’t me; I’m essentially a pacifist), I was quite vocal. And as Mr. Romano points out, it was all projection of my own insecurities.
Finally, a month or so after the start of the fall semester and I had settled into my dorm, a guy at the end of the hall—Andy—a tall, blond, out-and-proud flaming homosexual if there ever was one, sat me down one day and said, “Honey, I am sick of your constant bad-mouthing of gays. When are you going to admit it?” Of course I played dumb and asked, “Admit what?” He said, “Oh girl…that you’re as queer as I am.” While it was true, of course I immediately denied it and stormed off, quite offended that he could so easily see through my facade. I didn’t speak to him again for weeks afterward. But that brief conversation did end my hateful rhetoric and realized that coming out was going to be “now or never.”
The situation with my roommate—Karl—was deteriorating for a variety of unrelated reasons, so at the start of the spring semester I switched dorms. And it was that January that I finally got up the nerve to attend my first GSO (Gay Students Organization) meeting at the Student Union.
The first person I came out to—other than the folks in that meeting—was my new roommate, who—after I came out to him—offered up his own confession: he wasn’t gay, but he was Christine Jorgensen‘s nephew. “We don’t talk about Uncle George any more.”
Let me know if you’d like to hear the rest of this sad, sordid story. Before Ben and I moved to Denver I’d documented the entire thing in the old blog that I wiped out after realizing the link to it was in the signature of the emails I’d been sending out to recruiters—one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done (wiping the blog out, not necessarily failing to remove the link). I’ve been meaning to record the story for posterity again, so if I get enough interest it may actually be the impetus I need to do something other than spend my online time obsessing over the decline and fall of civilization.
*There’s an interesting story of what happened one afternoon in one of those houses.
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