It was a year or so after I’d left the seminary for a public high school. My mom was standing under the orange light of her favorite stained-glass lamp. It hung over the desk in the kitchen, where she talked for hours into a beige telephone to sisters and friends while I finished my homework at the other end of the suburban ranch house where we lived.
When she took in my news that night, the light’s glow seemed particularly warm and radiant. My brain has imposed an annoying foreshadowing technique to the edges of this scene, freezing my mother in her tracks, her nightgown blowing ominously in the winter chill, making her more fragile and helpless than it’s possible for my mother to be. I don’t even know if it was actually winter when I told her. This is what always happens in these coming out scenes, which is why I have avoided writing mine for so long.
Anyway, she said she’d already guessed. She hugged me and said she’d love me no matter what. There was something too easy and awkward about her hug. She’d promised to “keep it a secret” from my father till we’d had a chance to discuss it some more.
Then she went right to my father and told him everything. He freaked. She freaked. I considered her a traitor. She said later that she hadn’t known what else to do. She’d been on heavy medication for Polymyositis, a rare muscle fatigue virus. Dr. F was trying to drown it out with Cortisone or some such poison.
It took us a couple weeks of screaming to get somewhere. They took my records, movies, and books away. I went straight to school and came straight home every day till they figured out what to do. My mom’s virus was knocked into submission, but my homosexuality wasn’t.
A couple of weeks later, she said our family doctor had come up with the name of a psychologist. Since he wasn’t a psychiatrist, he was “really just someone to talk to,” not a doctor with a prescription book. Was it my mom who explained that to me, or did I look it up in a book somewhere? In any case, I was sure he was going to apply shock treatment, so I clammed up.
But he wasn’t as stupid as the shrink I’d seen about my suicide poem. He sensed my fear and pulled me out of it. “Your mom says you told her you’re gay.”
“I shouldn’t have said anything. If I had known she was going to bring me here I never would have. It’s probably just a phase or whatever.”
“You must be scared. You just tried to tell your mom what you were feeling, and she brought you to talk to someone you don’t know. She told me she wants to be sure that you understand whatever you’re going through. If you talk to me, I promise I won’t hurt you, though I can imagine that mustn’t be easy to believe after your parents’ initial reaction. They were scared too.”
“Well, what exactly do you want to do?” How could I escape if he broke out the drugs and wires? Would I be able to escape at all? Would he destroy my mind? Was he gay or straight? That he had a sexuality at all was terrifying because it meant he placed himself on the Kinsey scale—he’d surely read the Kinsey report, right?—and that couldn’t help but take away some of his objectivity.
“I want to help you to adjust to the person you are, whomever that may be…”
He was so calm, reassuring—hell, almost apologetic—about the fear he was inspiring in me, and all without the slightest sign of erotic interest, that I decided he had to be a true professional, situated comfortably among the logical, informed thinkers who studied the profound subject of human sexuality with the proper degree of objectivity and science. And once I sensed that he had no hostile intentions concerning my development, I dumped everything out, spread it over his desk and let him interpret the genetic and/or socially conditioned phenomena that were manifesting themselves in my body’s chemical mechanism.
In short, I remember thinking with a gasp of innocent relief, “He’s going to help me.” I couldn’t imagine then that trusting in the university knowledge of a licensed psychologist—even one with only the best of intentions—was about as safe as Russian roulette. Would he take my desires for the cerebral gurglings they were and find a reassuring language with which to explain them to my mom? As it turns out, he did. I was damn lucky.
I have absolutely no recollection of my exact words at our meetings, much less the psychologist’s. I know he had a beard. After one or two sessions, he considered me totally “together.” I was a very mature young homosexual adolescent who had analyzed himself at an almost impossibly ripe age. “The first thing to do was to see if you were doing okay,” he said, “and now that we know that, it’s your parents we’ll have to work with.”
I passed my mother in the doorway of the doctor’s office. They closed the door and it was my turn to wait outside with the Family Circles. Had he told me everything? Would he really try to help? Would my mom accept what he told her?
The doctor came out after one of those immeasurable periods of time, and I was invited to join them. My mother said, “As long as I know you’re not just going through a phase or whatever and that you’re sure of who you are, I’ll support you like that. I’ll love you no matter what. I just wanted to be sure you weren’t making a big mistake because of something you read in a book somewhere.” Years later, I asked her what they’d said during their time alone. “Well, he said he could show you slides to try and change you, and I cut him off right away and said I didn’t want to do that, I just wanted to be sure that you knew what you were doing. I asked him if you seemed to have it all together and he answered right away, ‘I’ve rarely seen a person of his age who was more together.’ I said that it was all settled then. He seemed really relieved, as if I’d made the right choice.”
He could have been different. He could have been an evil closet case who repressed his desires through the delicate, slow torture of delicious adolescent boys. Or a right wing zealot (if the two creatures are not one and the same) who acted out his interpretation of God’s Word through electro-shock treatments. Yes, when I look back on that scene, I get chills to think of what could have happened. I think of the boy I was, alone against the chaotic forces of a frantic social structure, and I think of the kind of odds working against that insignificant speck’s survival. My frightened mother, desperately trying to understand what was happening to the tender mind of her young son, looked to a complete stranger for the right answers. And me, too inexperienced and brazen to really grasp what the doctor could have done if he’d been a madman, if he hadn’t read his Kinsey report with the conviction I’d trusted five minutes into our conversation he possessed…
Here, I could insert a scene with an evil bible-basher doc. Electrodes on my downy, adolescent balls and verses from Revelation. It has happened to plenty of little boys and girls before me, and its happening today, however slowly and discretely their fragile young bodies are twisted on the racks of science, culture, and religion. Maybe I was just lucky, or maybe it was my mother’s love that saved me. Or maybe the doctor had simply read his textbook chapter on homosexuality during med school and that had been enough. Maybe he was a fag. Maybe he was so sure he wasn’t that he could accept someone who was.
And after rethinking, rewriting, reliving that scene, I find myself entirely unsure of what actually happened, these thirteen or so years ago. To write down a moment of your life is to accept that you’ve lost it. You can’t go on pretending, “If I could just take a minute to really think it over, it’ll all come streaming back.” Your memory is approximate at best. You don’t even have the slightest fucking idea of the details of what you’ve already done.
I go back to the orange light in the kitchen, and I trace the source of its electricity, down into the wires through the ground and up into the power plant which moves the whole town, city, state, country, and world… Switch it all off with a few clean snips of a nice shiny pair of scissors. The lamp goes out. My childhood home is nothing but a factory-issue box run-through with useless tubes stopping up its hollow walls. When the water quits running through the pipes, and the heat stops seeping through the vents, there’s nothing left but a brittle husk cluttered with stuff. It sits there under an empty sky, waiting for the elements to rot it into the ground. A couple snips of the scissors—snip, snip—and down it goes. I told my mother I was gay—snip, snip—and the light stopped lighting things the way it used to. The orange light got all pukey like it might go out any second. I wasn’t telling her I was gay, I was telling her that none of that stuff she’d told me to believe in meant anything anymore. “I’m not going to let those radioactive television waves wash over me anymore. I’m not going to buy a $15,000 car to roll around in and a $100,000 box to lock myself and my possessions in.”
I didn’t know that’s what I was telling her. I only knew I was supposed to be true to God’s voice in my heart—like a good Catholic boy. What felt “right” wasn’t what TV, school or church were telling me about, so I looked for another language to talk about what Jesus was sending into my heart. And it was this search for language that led me to telling her. It led me to pulling down the world around us. I had no intention of doing that. It just happened.