Tango (5 page)

So I told her it was nothing, but now I was thinking about it even more. The subject had been brought up twice since I had come home. It seemed like my guilt was a rope that was getting
tighter and tighter around my neck. Was God watching me? What should I do? I kept thinking about what I'd learned in Sunday school, and even though I'd asked for forgiveness from God I still hadn't come up with a proper answer as to whom I'd sinned against. Finally I thought, “Well my parents wouldn't want me to do that, so I probably sinned against them.” I resolved that I was going to tell my mother what had happened.

 

 

ONE SUNDAY MORNING WHEN MY MOM WAS GETTING ready for church, I told her I needed to talk with her about something. In my mind I imagined I would tell her what happened, and she would say it was okay but that I should never do it again. Then she would hug me, and that would be that. I never expected she would react the way that she did.

We were in the dining room, on a sunny June morning. I'd resolved to tell my mother because I needed her to tell me it was okay, that she forgave me, that I wasn't a bad person, and that I wasn't going to hell.

In the past, I had gotten in trouble for getting naked with other kids in the neighborhood and with my cousin Pam, who was the same age as me. When Pam and I got caught in my grandmother's milk house, she was playing a hoochie-coochie dancer doing a striptease and I was cheering her on. My mother came down the path, caught us, and brought us inside, telling us how terrible it was and that we had ruined Sunday dinner. She insisted my father spank me, which he did. My mom was fuming, so angry that she confronted my aunt and seemed completely shocked and appalled that Aunt Sandra refused to spank my cousin. “I'm not going to spank her for that,” my aunt said. I could tell that my aunt thought it was funny, which confused me even more.

It wasn't common for me to tell my mother I needed to talk with her about something. My mother could be very funny and had a great ability to make people laugh; at times she could be terrific company. But she had a very conservative streak when it came to sex, and was extremely judgmental of others in general, so I learned very early on to keep my life as compartmentalized
as possible in order to avoid her criticism. But I thought that because this was important, and because it was a Sunday morning, she would be kind. Instead, she responded in such a way and with such force that I feel reverberations of her hysteria to this day.

I told her that I got the boys to put on a show for me, that they asked me to play with their penises, and that I had. But I told her that I had asked God to forgive me and that I didn't know what to do now. She became hysterical. It was as if I had completely disappeared. She went into a frenzy and it became all about her. Suddenly, it was as if I was in the middle of a tornado and I became very small. She got on the phone and called both the boys' parents and insisted they come over to the house with their children immediately. The Hunters showed up with Bobby. Mr. Stottlemyer and Johnny arrived not long after. It was like my mother was holding some sort of tribunal.

I sat on the couch curled up in a ball with a pillow in my lap, absolutely mortified. I was frozen, numb. I wanted to disappear. I was forced to tell
the story to the boys' parents. My mother spent most of the time arguing with Bobby Hunter, who stood up for himself, saying truthfully that I had initiated everything, which I admitted. But my mother was adamant that because they were older it was their fault. It seemed the main thing for her was that the boys were the guilty parties and that all blame had to be shifted from me onto them. If I was not responsible for what happened—her logic seemed to imply—if it was their fault, it was also the fault of their parents. They had raised reprobates for sons who had taken advantage of my youth, vulnerability, and naïveté. None of this was true, of course, but in her eyes it made them the guilty parties.

I came to realize later that what we were there for really was to put her mind at ease that she was, in fact, a good mother, and that none of this was her fault. She had a hard time having a son like me because I was fun, amusing, good company, doted on her, went shopping with her, helped her pick out shoes, paid attention to her, thought she was beautiful, and yet she knew, and I knew she knew, that inside me there was something
different, and she was ambivalent about what she should do about it. She had always been the pretty one in her family. She had married well. She had a beautiful home, a boy and a girl, and everything almost looked just as she wanted it to. Almost, but not quite. The only wild card was me. I was her Achilles' heel. With just a look or a wisecrack her brothers and sisters could let her know that something was wrong with me. She needed to find a way to change me. I was a sissy, and as I got older it became more and more obvious that changing me wasn't going to be easy. In our culture, then and now, everyone blames the mother. I think she took that on. So this ad hoc tribunal brought out into the open a simmering conflict that had been growing for years, and she fought like hell to make sure that both she and I were off the hook.

She won the argument and forced everyone else to admit that they were wrong. The battle she fought was for herself, though, not for me. She won her battle but, without knowing it, she started a war that I would be forced to fight for a long time to come.

After the neighbors had gone, I went to my bedroom and lay down exhausted, yet seemingly absolved of any guilt. My father came into my room and told me that curiosity was normal, and that even though I should never do it again, it was over and I shouldn't feel bad. I was shocked. My father and his reactions were always held up as some sort of veiled threat, that he would be even more unforgiving than my mother was. She would often say, “You better hope your father doesn't hear about this,” or “When your father gets home you will really get in trouble.” So it didn't occur to me to go to him first instead of to my mother. I was so far removed from him emotionally because he never really shared his thoughts or feelings, and I couldn't relate to that remoteness. He was a stranger to me. But on that June afternoon he told me that everything was going to be okay, and I believed him. But the damage was done.

From that day on I was branded a fag. Bobby Hunter took revenge by spreading the tale far and wide about how I gave him a blow job.

I FOUND OUT HE WAS ANGRY LATER THAT VERY afternoon when I was out for a bike ride. After the conversation I had with my father, I felt as if two tons of concrete had been lifted off of me. I had somehow weathered the tornado my mother had whipped up, and I believed all of this would now be behind me.

I decided to get out of the house to clear my head and enjoy the feeling of liberation. I wasn't going to go to hell after all. I was just a normal boy who had done something that lots of kids do. But when I turned the corner onto Monroe Avenue as I was riding past the Hunters' house, Bobby called me over to their yard, and I knew that it wasn't over yet. He threatened me and told me he was going to ruin my life. I can't say I blamed him. I would have done anything to take back what had happened that morning. I told him I was sorry, but there was nothing I could do after what my mother had said. He was enraged.

I had to ask myself, why did I tell her? It became obvious immediately that I should never have said anything. It was certainly obvious to Bobby Hunter. But in that regard, my mother was
right: he was older, and knew better. You don't tell your parents everything. I had just learned that lesson for the first time, and not in the best possible way. It took a while for the full scope of what had happened to really hit me.

 

 

DURING THE FIRST WEEK OF MIDDLE SCHOOL, which was the sixth grade, I was in the cafeteria looking for a seat when I heard a boy I didn't know say to another one, “I heard that kid sucked a guy's dick once.” I was mortified, not only because they were talking about me and I didn't know them, but because, as I said before, I didn't suck it, I just blew on it. I didn't think that was the right time to correct them, but I realized that if those boys knew about it, a lot of other people did too.

After that I never really knew who knew what where so it made me very paranoid. I could never know when I met anyone for the first time what they already knew about me. I was notorious from the age of eleven onward. That may sound very dramatic, but I'm afraid it's true. Early on
I had described what had happened to my best friend Lesley, because I had never really been able to talk about it with anyone else. I was surprised to hear that she already knew about it. She said that everyone did.

“Your parents know?”

“Yes, that's how I found out. They were talking about it at dinner one night.”

If Lesley's parents knew, it stood to reason that everyone's parents knew. A story like that is the kind everybody loves to tell. I was surprised that her parents still let me come over and play with her. My mother wouldn't have. Sometimes I would even spend the night. They weren't as judgmental about what had happened as my own mother had been, so I found a safe harbor there.

The Pearmans had moved into the neighborhood from Virginia the year before. They had Southern accents and seemed very down to earth. Lesley was older than me and I originally became friends with her brother Jed, who was my age, but quickly became friendlier with Lesley. She became my best friend and has remained so for life.

She was very smart and loved to read, and we spent most summer days in her bedroom. The Pearmans had central air-conditioning and kept their house very cold, so I spent most of the summer in shorts wrapped up in a gray alpaca blanket. Lesley's entire bedroom wall was covered with posters of Elton John. I think she liked him because he was bisexual. We were obsessed with Bernie Taupin's lyrics: “Goodbye, Norma Jean . . .” The opening lines of “Candle in the Wind” always made me cry thinking about poor Marilyn overdosing in Hollywood. How could someone that beautiful be so sad, I wondered. Elton John was flamboyantly covered in sequins, feathers, outrageous glasses, platform shoes, and had a hairy chest to boot! He terrified me. He was everything I was supposed to loathe in myself, and everything I was afraid I would become. I knew that I didn't want to be like him, and yet my best friend loved him, and we listened to his music nonstop.

Lesley would sit on her bed, reading the latest Stephen King novel, or any and all science fiction and fantasy novels she could get her hands
on. She lived in her world of fantasy and adventure and I lived in mine, reading books about movie stars, biographies of Lauren Bacall, Gloria Swanson, Vivien Leigh. I was obsessed with Tennessee Williams's
A Streetcar Named Desire
, and would often perform Blanche DuBois monologues for Lesley's amusement. I would sing for her too. One night, early into our friendship, I spent the night with her and her brother. My mother was scandalized that we had all slept in the same room, but she would have been even more scandalized if she'd known I'd performed Donny Osmond's hit song “Puppy Love” with my pj's swinging over my head and flying from the top bunk. Lesley loved it.

In those days we were reading a lot of books about autism and children with mental handicaps. I was convinced that if I didn't become a movie star, I would become a teacher of mentally disturbed children, or a therapist. There was no question that Lesley would become a famous writer. We both loved a book called
The Man Without a Face
, which was later made into a
Mel Gibson movie. Lesley was crazy about Mel Gibson because he played a disabled boy named Tim based on a character in one of her favorite books. We had no idea how much of a mental case he would turn out to be off screen.
Dibs in Search of Self
was another one of our favorite books.
Dibs
was the story of an autistic boy. We loved the book because it took us on this young boy's journey of self-discovery and understanding, something both of us lacked. We barely knew ourselves. The only place we could explore was in these books, in Lesley's room.

“Why do you want to spend all of your time in some girl's bedroom?” my mother would ask. “It's not normal. People see you go into that house, and you don't come out for eight hours. Do you spend the whole time in that room?”

I couldn't tell my mother that any place other than home felt safer to me. I wasn't attacked in Lesley's room. I wasn't criticized in Lesley's room. I wasn't a failure as a boy in Lesley's room. I was just myself, whatever that was.

ONCE I ENTERED MIDDLE SCHOOL EVERYTHING changed. I had gone in and out of being popular in elementary school, but I had become confident and comfortable being around the same kids for six years. Middle school was a new set of people altogether. Now I not only had to negotiate the fact that I didn't like boys, but I also knew they didn't like me either, and they had a scurrilous reason not to.

P
eople say that there is an unusually high percentage of queer people with ADD. My theory is that because we know from a very early age that we are different, and because we never really know who the enemy is or who might turn on us at any minute, we become hypervigilant about everything that is going on around us. Perhaps attention deficit disorder is a misnomer; maybe it should be called hyper-attention awareness. It's not that we can't pay attention to anything in specific, it's that we are trying very hard to pay attention to everything in general as a self-defense mechanism.

Around the time I was in sixth grade my cousin Jan, who I looked up to very much, started
attending a charismatic Pentecostal church downtown in what had formerly been an old movie theater. Across the street from the church was a coffeehouse for teens called the Fisherman's Net. I thought Jan was very beautiful and cool with her long straight red hair and bell-bottoms. She played guitar and often she took me with her to the Net where we would sing together. Even though I was one of the youngest people I felt very comfortable there.