Starf*cker: a Meme-oir (13 page)

“You know they use aborted fetuses in shampoo and beauty products?” I told her, outraged. “Anything that says it has collagen in it comes from dead babies.” I couldn’t think of anything she could say to defend such a thing.

Sue, half twisted around with her beautiful head resting on her elegant arms and her elegant arms resting on my desk rolled her eyes. “Matt, that’s bull! That’s completely made up. How can you even believe that?”

Yeah, how could I? As soon as I said it out loud and she swatted it down, I knew it had to be completely made up. And it was. Around the same time, 1985, Ann Landers wrote a famous piece debunking that urban legend. I was supposed to be anti-religion anyway, but it made me mad as hell to think that religious leaders had probably cooked that up on purpose, and angrier still that I’d bought it. I was supposed to be smart, but I wasn’t acting that way.

Years later, when a female classmate and confidante of mine underwent an abortion, I was crushed to find out only after pestering her for more information on a mysterious twisted ankle she’d had. When she finally told me she’d had an abortion—she hadn’t even confided in me that she’d lost her virginity, to one of our buddies—she admitted she hadn’t told me because she was aware of all those arguments I’d had in class, that she thought I would be judgmental. It was a real-life situation, not some abstract argument for eggheads anymore. I felt like an idiot, and any last vestiges of conservatism I’d had were swept away.

Though I did think Ayn Rand was awesome because her philosophy mirrored my own selfish cocooning as a pre-emptive response to being gay. Once I connected the dots and realized Rand was as right wing as you can get, I got over the idea that I needed to be better-than just in order to feel equal-to.

Sue and I, in spite of our debates, were inseparable in late high school. We would write mystery short stories and trade them back and forth for criticism and offered each other support as we tried to transition from brainiacs into normal people with social lives. As part of that trajectory, we did stuff like double dating at the Homecoming Dance (her date was secretly gay, just like her girlfriend’s date—that would be me—was) and going to our senior prom together. Sue and I were so simpatico that everyone razzed us as the obvious ideal couple who wouldn’t admit it. It was a foregone conclusion that we were either secretly dating or would obviously wind up getting married some day.

I laughed it all off, knowing the truth, but once Sue and I starting hanging out outside of school, it suddenly felt like we were quasi-dating, and I really could not handle the idea of making out with her and making her into a fool the same way my church had done to me with its abortion propaganda.

In October 1986, our high school paid the princely sum of $68.75 for each of us to attend a writer’s conference at Oakland College. All we had to do was get ourselves there, and it was considered extra credit and would look good on college admissions forms. We had a blast in my Little Gray Chevette (with apologies to Prince) on the way there, but I was sweating bullets because I had decided the time had come to make Sue the first person on earth I would come out to. If she was down with women killing babies, she should at least be okay with guys having butt-sex, right?

At the dreary conference, packed with frustrated adults looking for tips on how to write something like the best selling
Who Killed the Robins Family?
, one bit of advice jumped out to me as potentially applicable to my coming-out process.

“Use a hook to begin anything you write—you have to get their attention before you tell them what you want them to know.”

In context of writing, it was more along the lines of, “It was a pleasure to burn,” the opening of
Fahrenheit 451
that guaranteed any reader would keep going, something I would do a few years later with my novel
Boy Culture
: “Why are gay guys obsessed with storytelling?” (Why, indeed?) I wasn’t trying to say I was comparable to Ray Bradbury there, so please don’t burn my books.

But it got me to thinking that since it was so very hard to say the words that I wanted people to hear, it would be a good idea for me to say something else first that would make it impossible for me to back out, something that would grab their full focus and that would grease the way for me to say, “I’m gay.”

No wonder people like Elton John led with bisexuality; it seemed so much easier.

In the car on the way back, the mood was somber because I was lost in thought. I finally spit out my hook, which was something like, “Sue, you know you’re my best friend, so there’s something I need to tell you.”

Though I am the kind of jokester who often found myself having to tell people over and over I was being serious when I was, in fact, being serious, she knew right away I wasn’t bluffing. I can’t recall for sure, but I think she was worried there was something wrong with my health.

“You can tell me anything,” she urged, though I think I made her push me for a while before, while we were driving down the expressway, I said it.

“I’m gay.”

She laughed in my face nervously, though her moist, startled eyes broadcast that she understood the importance of what I was saying. Being gay should not be a big deal, but it was then and in many cases still is. It meant she and I really were
not
a couple, and it also probably meant a lot of tough life decisions for me coming up. It was 1986, so saying you were gay was also often heard as, “I’m getting ready to contract AIDS.”

But Sue came through, telling me she loved and supported me. It was a little teary, and then it was over—we were still fast friends, she could now join me in my amusement as people told us flatly that we were faking not being in love, and she could be my support system as I told everyone else the truth about me over time.

I think my first coming-out was better than one a few years later—on a trip home from college, I ran into my 16-year-old sister’s room and blurted out, “You know I’m gay, right?” She burst into tears at the enormity of the news. She later confessed she’d been snooping through my letters to my mom (I’d come out to her and she’d been very accepting; she would’ve been accepting if I’d confessed I was into crushing small animals) and thought we were tricking her by planting fake ones because of the gay content.

I didn’t come out to anyone else after Susan until just after graduation in June of 1987—I was worried about my parents flipping out and not getting to go to college (which was based more on worst-case scenario thinking than anything my parents had really said or done)—but I give myself credit that the next person I came out to was Andrew, the boy I was crazy about. Might as well go big or go home.

Andrew and I were hanging out together a lot by then, at the Barkeys, at our friends’ open houses, and in each other’s homes. We would dissect what was happening with our friends, and argue about pop music, mostly, though I remember dropping lots of hints to him about why I was so eager to be his best friend. The week I had resolved to tell him I was gay, I even told him I wanted to talk to him about something specific. This had him interested.

I picked him up at his house. He came out of the shower shirtless in cut-off jeans and combed the hair that I’d written thousands of words about in my diaries, stuff to make Harold Robbins roll his eyes. When we were en route to lunch at a fast food joint on Pierson Road, he asked me gently, “Well, what did you want to talk about?” I told him it wasn’t the kind of thing to discuss over Halo Burger.

I was still a relative newcomer to his circle of friends, but a couple of the cool girls had expressed interest in me. I told Andrew I hoped they didn’t really like me because I was not secure about my newly thin bod and the sudden attention was unnerving.

“Well, you’re a new person in this group, and as they all find out just who you are, they become attracted to you,” he replied absently. Then he smiled and teased, “You’ve just blossomed with this new macho sexuality.”

Back at my place, I confessed to him I was stalling on talking to him because I was “nervous I’m chickening out.”

He was worried I was about to have an emotional why-can’t-we-be-closer? talk, the likes of which he’d just endured from another of his close friends (who, sidebar, was also closeted and also wanted to get into Andrew’s pants), but I told him it wasn’t that.

He tried teaching me euchre for 30 minutes (not the best time to attempt to learn it, as I recall nothing of the game) before egging me on to spit it out. Finally, he said, “Matt…are you a homosexual?” He said the word loosely, not in a whisper like white people use when saying someone is “black,” but almost as if he didn’t really want to embrace the word too firmly with his mouth. It was a clinical word, but coming from a place of caution.

“Yes,” I said.

He sank back on the couch, smiling. He looked a bit rattled but immediately told me, “It doesn’t bother me,” before asking when I’d “decided” this and then recanting all the gay jokes on our recent senior trip on behalf of all the boys who’d said them—total diplomatic student council president. We also ran down a list of my friends he thought could and could not handle this knowledge (hilariously, one I thought was too “judgmental” would be sucking my cock in a month or so), which is when I told him only he and Susan knew the truth.

“I’m honored,” he told me.

Then we went to the Barkey house and watched
Funny Girl
.

In the fifth grade, I became best friends with one of the most popular boys in our class. It was a coup for me, having just transferred to Springview the year before and being such a wallflower. My new buddy was a jock, an accomplished hockey player. Despite being short (like my Elms sidekick had been), his humor and his innate coolness rendered him an opinion-maker, to the extent that those exist in fifth grade. What am I talking about? They
are
fifth grade.

Plus, he was known to have made out with girls
several
times.

While we were friends, which lasted about two solid years, we did some...
weird
...things. We got a hold of these circular plastic spools and would race them, naming the most victorious ones. (I did something similar with my fourth-grade pal Stephanie, with whom I named and gave personalities to every crayon in the biggest box of Crayolas, including a French-accented magenta named “Fifi,” who later “died” and was buried in a shallow, burnt sienna grave.)

The spools always had to be raced downhill, of course, which is where our friendship went once we hit junior high.

But before that, I would often spend the night at his large house, becoming a fixture among his outgoing family. Once, around Christmas, a huge birthday cake was cooling in the kitchen, freshly frosted. His offbeat sister was inspecting her work as we sped by. I wondered if it might be a surprise for me—a Christmas baby, my name means “God’s gift,” so things are often potentially about me—so I nonchalantly asked whose birthday it was.

She looked at me like a robot for whom something did not compute. “Baby Jesus’s!”

I thought she was joking. She was not.

As cool as my buddy was, he was also shy and curious. I remember, lying beside him in his bed one night during one of our many sleepovers, him asking me as we talked ourselves to sleep if I’d ever actually kissed a girl and then saying, “I thought so,” when I replied that I hadn’t. He’d asked me out of nowhere; I’d had no time to come up with a convincing lie, nor could my defense mechanism of humor help on such short notice. All I could do was trust my friend with the embarrassing truth. If I’d known then, in fifth grade, that I would not receive my first kiss until I had graduated high school and that I’d never kiss a girl at all, I wonder how much despair the knowledge would’ve caused.

I
think
that my being a square spelling bee champ gave him the kind of isolated friendship (we would never, ever hang out with any of his other, cooler, buddies) that let him be himself. I
know he gave me the chance to figure out who
myself
even was.

When we had a sex ed unit at school, tensions were high. Most of the boys were giddy at the expectation that we’d get to see photographs of vaginas, but we saw no such thing. The boys and girls were separated, with the boys going into the art room with Mr. LaBelle, a jovial middle-aged man who was most famous in our town as the guy who would come around to your class in the lower grades with a dolphin puppet to teach citizenship and other valuable lessons. Now, the guy we could only picture with his hand up some fish was going to give us the birds and bees talk. It was hard to take him seriously—would he answer us in shrill dolphin chirps?—but he was our only lifeline.