Swish (26 page)

Everybody at the conference seemed to take as a given that homosexuality is spiritually and physically harmful both to those who practice it and to those around them. “If I go back just once, I could get AIDS,” Vito had said.

What about a CONDOM?
I had wanted to shriek.
What about SAFE SEX? What about THE FACT THAT STRAIGHT PEOPLE CAN GET HIV?
When I got back from the conference I figured I might as well check my facts. International data on transmission mechanisms turned out to be appallingly sparse, but in every report I could find the majority of HIV infections were linked to something other than gay sex. If AIDS is a punishment, I wanted to ask—very few people came out and said this but it was implied in every discussion of HIV—then why are you here instead of starting a conference to help black women in southern Africa turn white and move to Newark?

Another assumption at the conference, voiced more frequently than the AIDS-as-punishment idea but never examined closely, was that gay couples are incapable of monogamy. I researched this too when I got back to New York, and though different studies gave numbers all over the place, the ones that seemed most methodologically sound suggested that about a third of gay couples choose to have open relationships, a third pledge monogamy but one partner or the other cheats, and a third pledge monogamy and stick to it. This means that, of gay couples claiming to be monogamous (two-thirds of all gay couples), half of them actually are.

Which, surprise surprise, is the same figure suggested by studies of straight married couples.

“But aren’t all gay couples non-monogamous?” Louis asked me at one point. “That’s what I’ve heard.”

“No,” I said, exasperated. “A lot of couples I know aren’t monogamous, but a lot of them are.” It was obvious he didn’t believe me. “Look,” I said crossly, “I’ll make a list.” I pulled out my notebook to make a table of gay couples I knew and whether they were monogamous or not. Since I write musicals and everyone I know is gay, this should have been easy, but under pressure I was unable to think of more than five homosexuals personally known to me. In the end I just made up couples and monogamy statuses. My fake list looked like this:

“See?” I said, showing Louis the list. “Out of eleven couples, seven say they’re monogamous, which means that statistically three or four of them are.” I do not know a Keith & Jim or a Michael & Toby or, in fact, most of the couples on this list. When in the quiet of my room I calmed down enough to remember gay couples I knew and with whom I had talked about monogamy, I found that my numbers had been pretty much on the mark.

“I’m sad to leave,” said Rob as I peppered my chicken fingers during lunch on the last day of the conference. I was relieved to be eating, as I had just attended a workshop at which a woman in her sixties had suggested to a roomful of men that when we felt the urge to masturbate we could keep ourselves from doing so by singing “There’s Power in the Blood,” which I happened to know was a particularly gruesome Baptist hymn. “It’s impossible to abuse yourself,” she had said, “when you’re singing about the power of Jesus.” My mind had filled instantly with a picture of gay men all over America jacking off while singing “There’s Power in the Blood,” and since then I had felt somewhat light-headed.

“This isn’t the real world,” Rob continued. “A lot of guys don’t have people at home who know they’re struggling, and this is the one place they can be honest about who they are. A lot of guys get rejected by their churches if they’re truthful. People who say they’re Christians can really be hypocrites. They go to church just like they’re supposed to and put on a mask, but then the rest of the week they go and do everything everybody else does who isn’t Christian.”

I was so horrified by the idea that this was as open as the ex-gays got that I couldn’t say anything for a moment. Then Louis came over and asked if he could join us; I wanted to throw my chocolate milk in his face—how could Rob fall in love with me if he never got to spend any time alone with me?—but instead I nodded and said sure.

The conference had been wonderful, said Louis sadly, and he didn’t want to go home the next day. “I feel like I’m just at the beginning of my pain. That means I’m also at the beginning of showing God my pain, but that doesn’t make it easy.” His ex-wife had turned his church against him, he said, and the next church he joined had expelled him for getting divorced. Now he went to yet another church, where a few people knew he was struggling.

“I just have so little confidence in myself,” said Louis.

Rob assured him that we all have problems with self-confidence. “I feel like less of a man,” he said, “around guys who talk about changing engines or hunting or the ball game. When I was little I was just like that guy in Monty Python who says, I just want to sing! I just wanted to dance. I took three years of lessons. Jazz, tap, ballet. But I stopped because my dad said dancing was for sissies. Now I wish I’d kept it up.”

“Show us some moves!” I said.

He smiled. “That was a long time ago.”

Louis was gazing at Rob, haunted, his eyes hollow, his cheeks sunken. He couldn’t be devoid of hope; otherwise he wouldn’t be here. But I had never seen anybody who seemed to believe less that his life would get any better. I wanted to cry. “Are you ever attracted to women?” he asked Rob suddenly.

“I wish I were,” Rob said, “but I’m not. And I’m thirty-eight. Getting from where I am now to married with children seems like a really long journey.”

“But God will do it in His own time,” said Louis, “if you trust Him. He can do it in a day.” He went on to talk about how sex with a woman was beautiful. “But I wish I had hotter chemistry with women,” he said. “To get aroused with a woman I need her to rub my back, massage my shoulders, stuff like that. Although when I initiate things it’s easier for me to get aroused.”

Rob turned to me. “How’s sex with your boyfriend?”

I almost choked on my chocolate milk. “It’s actually really good,” I said once I had recovered my composure. “We fit together really well. I’m not sure if I should say this while we’re eating, but—oh, I’ll just go ahead. When we have sex I’m generally the receptive one, and he’s the penetrative one, and—”

“Is that, um, a top?”

I laughed. “Yes, that’s a top. Top and bottom.”

“I just learned those words two days ago,” Rob said proudly.

“I learned them a couple months ago, off the Internet,” said Louis.

“I don’t understand you,” Rob said to me, and went on, mercifully releasing me from the obligation to wax lyrical about the joys of coitus with Mike in between bites of chicken fingers. “What I can’t wrap my little limited mind around is: I came here last year, and I had wrestled for months and months and had all kinds of conversations with all kinds of people. It was a big deal for me to come. You, you’re Jewish, you haven’t thought about any of this before, you’re in the lifestyle, you’re staying in the lifestyle. I don’t get it. Why did you come here?”

I was standing on treacherous ground. I stammered, “I, I, I think that, uh, that some of the things you’re, um, talking about actually make it…um…easier for me rather than harder. I knew this was a Christian organization and that there would be a lot of stuff that just didn’t make sense for me. So that took the pressure off. Also, um, I’ve had a good experience with the gay lifestyle, so, uh, so I didn’t have the sense that what I was coming to
had
to work, or else.”

Rob could see as clearly as I could that this made no sense. “Yeah, but it’s expensive to come here. You could have just read an article.”

“I did,” I choked out, “but I wanted to see it for real, come and understand what this is about.”

“What
what
is about?” asked Rob, frustrated.

This was getting worse and worse. I changed the subject slightly, hoping he wouldn’t notice, and offered something about being dissatisfied with my own behavior and finding the testimonies really inspiring and—

“I feel like I can’t give a testimony,” said Louis. I could have kissed him for rescuing me. “I’ve made so little progress on the journey out of homosexuality.” Rob said he felt the same way, and Louis looked at him strangely. “But your testimony would bless so many people.”

“Why?”

“Because of the way you look,” said Louis, coming as close as he could to “because you’re totally hot.”

“But you’re here at an Exodus conference,” said Rob. “You’ve gotten somewhere. I haven’t had any huge victories either. But it’s the direction that’s important.”

The nap into which I fell immediately upon returning to my room proved afterward to be a mistake, since I always wake up from naps depressed. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and started watching the first episode of season two of
The West Wing
(which I had also brought with me, in case the eighties clothing in
The Twilight Zone
got to be too much) and when I saw that it was Josh who had been shot in the first season finale I burst into uncontrollable sobs. Who the fuck did I think I was? What gave me the right to stop asking questions and pretend to find my own answers? I had come to care about these people more than I had imagined possible, and what ruinous things had I said to them? How dared I?

I called Mike, barely intelligible through my tears. “I came here as a jo-o-oke,” I wailed. “And I’m doing it. I’m playing a joke with these people’s souls.” My breath heaved. “What kind of da-a-a-amage am I doing to them?”

“People are resilient,” Mike said. “You can’t do that much damage in four days.”

“I, I, I can’t?” Snot dripped from my nose.

“No,” he said. “And you also can’t save them in four days.”

“But I can try!”

“No.”

I sniffled and wished that what he’d just said weren’t true.

We kept talking and I gradually calmed down. “I was worried this would happen,” he said.

My eyes narrowed. “Did you
predict
this?”

“No,” he said. “I thought it would go the other way—that they would be really negative and you would feel alienated. But this is worse, because the negative energy is self-directed, and you’re empathizing with them.”

After we hung up I realized that I could have come to the Exodus conference and been completely honest with the people I met. “I’m gay,” I could have said, “and I’m here because I don’t see why anybody would want to change, or even think it’s possible, and I just want to understand more.” And they would have welcomed me with open arms.

I felt as if I were in a teen movie, the photographic negative of the kind in which the guy pretends to be gay to get close to the girl, and
does
get close to the girl, but then has to confess to her that he’s actually straight. In the movies, this confession always goes over very well, and they end up together.

In real life things might be a bit more complicated.