Swish (9 page)

For a while it looked like we in Barney Frank would emerge victorious from the Camp Camp Gay Gaymes. Unfortunately, when the Dildo Joust degenerated into hand-to-hand dildo combat, our champion David proved no match for the lipstick lesbian from the Bronx. After the judges declared at the end of the evening that Walt Whitman had won, Kerry, James, Steve, and I stared dejectedly at our feet, unsure of our course in life now that we were losers. Then Kerry proposed a panty raid on the women in Martina Navratilova.

We snuck up to the cabin like gay white ninjas, able by some miracle to keep from giggling, and then James leapt up and took two quick photographs through the window. The women in Martina screamed and we ran in, prancing around and shrieking, “Panty raid! Panty raid!” Cheryl said, “No, guys, for a panty raid you’re supposed to
take
panties, not
bring
them.” She and Sue, who had gotten engaged the night before, put on matching pairs of funny cardboard glasses and James took more pictures. Sue grabbed the camera and photographed us boys as we posed, smirking, behind the neon sign they had put up that said
GIRLS RULE
! James looked at the sign, curled his lip disdainfully, and said, “But we don’t really believe that.” I replied, “We totally do,” and we all dissolved into laughter.

It wasn’t that this repartee was incomparably witty. But our expansive mood made everything seem funnier and funnier, until we could barely breathe and I fell down. Michael from Oscar Wilde stopped by the cabin. “Okay,” he said, “Joel is crawling on the floor. That can’t be a good sign.” The girls invited us to have a sleepover. Eden explained their nightly rituals. “First we talk about our highs and lows of the day, and then we do guided masturbation.” I had not laughed this hard in years. Char added, “We begin by saying, take your left hand
or your right.
” We tried not to be noisy, since it was officially Quiet Time—a stricture imposed upon all of us because Ru-Paul had been keeping the surrounding cabins up till all hours of the night with its partying—but the giddiness bubbling up in us refused to be tamped down.

And the next morning a curious thing happened: at breakfast, my chest wasn’t tight. I still felt frightened and alone—these feelings are as much a part of me as my kidneys—but after the panty raid I felt that I belonged somewhere, so feeling frightened and alone was bearable. The people I was eating with had not been involved in the panty raid, yet I felt a kinship with them all the same; I felt connected to them because I felt connected to
someone.
When I saw some cool people sitting at a different table I did not have the impulse to leap up from my seat and attach myself to them, because I did not fear that my only other choice was the horror of being in the middle of a crowd alone with myself. I was content as I was, where I was. It was a strange sensation.

One evening near the end of Camp, Bill Cole announced that the next night would be movie night and that we had three candidates from among which to choose:
Queer Duck, Grease,
and
All About Eve. All About Eve
lost the vote, appallingly, to
Queer Duck;
outraged, three lesbians and I instantly began planning to subvert the stupid will of the stupid majority and steal
Queer Duck
from the office, leaving in its place a copy of
D.E.B.S.,
the 2004 comedy about two teenage lesbian archenemy spies in love.
Queer Duck
was not in the office, however. Apparently it belonged to an individual camper, Joey, so we broke into his cabin, kidnapped the DVD, and left him a note saying it would be returned safe and sound.

We were unable to keep completely silent about our exploit, so it didn’t take Michael long to find me the next day to report that Joey was really upset. Joey had been having a difficult time at Camp, said Michael, had felt both friendless and left out, and this violation of his space was the last straw; he had decided to leave Camp the next day.

I spent the afternoon in the art studio breaking sheets of stained glass. Had I really evolved so little since high school? Was I so desperate to be part of the social fabric of a community that I would tread on anybody whose position was more precarious than mine?

All right, we had intended our prank in the spirit of fun, and maybe Joey had reacted more extremely than necessary, but I had considered the possibility that we might hurt him and chosen to disregard it. If the same thing had happened to me my second day here, before the panty raid, how would I not have crumbled? I had entered a society in which I felt I had no place—Bill Cole’s speech notwithstanding—and if I had discovered I was being used in a game whose players could have made me happy by talking to me for five minutes, I don’t know that I would have decided to leave Camp, but I certainly would have had to work very hard not to cry.

I apologized to Joey and gave him back
Queer Duck,
and he stayed at Camp; Bill ended up screening
But I’m a Cheerleader,
a comedy about a girl whose parents send her to an ex-gay camp, where she becomes a lesbian. Joey wrote me a nice note that ended, “Next time, involve me in what you’re planning, and I’ll gladly go along.”

Next time, involve me in what you’re planning.
How had I gone so easily from feeling excluded to doing the excluding? Did I dislike the reminder that I hadn’t always been on the inside looking out? Was I so relieved to be there that I didn’t notice the people who still wanted desperately to be invited in? Had I learned that the only way to be part of a society was to shun its outcasts?

I wrote my high school valedictory speech at four in the morning on the day of my graduation, an event I almost missed because we couldn’t figure out how to get my mother’s wheelchair down our front steps. “Last night I went to the best party I’ve ever been to in my entire life,” my speech began, and it was true. Matthew Gibson had thrown another party and I had gone to this one and I still didn’t belong but since we were all about to escape we were united in the knowledge that, no matter where we belonged, it wasn’t
here.
My speech the next day was about how our class would make a difference in the world not because we were particularly smart or kind or wise but because we knew how to have fun. I quoted Hesse and
Auntie Mame;
I closed with the first Dorothy Parker poem I had ever encountered, at age eleven, written in my mother’s careful script on the frontispiece of her tattered high school copy of Castarède’s
Complete Treatise on the Conjugation of French Verbs.
I looked out at my fellow graduates as I read the opening lines of “Observation,” in praise of good behavior, and smiled as I continued reading, cataloguing the felicities of a life lived virtuously. “But I shall stay the way I am,” Dorothy and I finished, “Because I do not give a damn.”

This was not the speech that I, bookish and abstruse, had been expected to make. I heard later that the school priest had called it shameful, but his name was Chaplain Lent, so it was hard to take him seriously. In my farewell I did not play the role I had allowed myself to be assigned; I was no longer the outsider peering forlornly through the window. Instead, I turned my back on a community that had never known how to welcome me and left in search of one that would. And as I glanced over my shoulder, I felt for the first time that in fact my classmates were the ones behind the gate, and that I had the wide world before me. In my heart of hearts I knew also that, though the network of older gay men and women that had sustained me through high school—and, more importantly, introduced me to
The Women
—had probably saved my life, my true place was no more with them than it was with my classmates. It was somewhere Out There, and I was On My Way.

But that was fifteen years ago, and what I believe now is that no one really belongs anywhere. People aren’t tidy creations to be stacked neatly in the Tupperware or poured in pre-measured quantities from a box into the Cuisinart with no spills; everybody alive is a lost and disastrous mess. I may not have felt that I belonged among my classmates, but neither did Theo Moore and neither, I am astonished to find myself thinking, did Suzanne Hutchinson. The scattered moments of kinship we feel with others are, when reduced to their most basic elements, accidental discoveries of kinship with ourselves. And that, I suspect, is what happened that night in Martina Navratilova: my laughter grew and grew until it was finally loud enough for me to follow it to its source, which was the community that fills everybody everywhere.

On the final day of Camp, all two hundred of us gathered to spend an hour doing the Walk of Angels. It took me so long to bubble-wrap the fabulous purple-and-green stained-glass tulip window I had finally finished that I worried I would miss Camp’s last official activity, but I came running up to the group just as Bill started explaining the rules. We stood in two lines facing one another a few feet apart. As Campers from the heads of the lines walked slowly one by one down the middle, eyes shut, arms folded across the chest, the people standing on either side reached out to guide them, until they got to the end safely and rejoined the lines.

As the first person came down the line toward me, I touched her shoulder tentatively. Hunky David, next in line, touched her arm with one hand and cradled her head briefly with the other. I instantly began using this gesture for the next several Campers but then I worried that if David saw that I’d stolen his idea he would stop liking me so I went back to the tentative shoulder touching.

And they kept coming, men, women, timid, bold, tall, short, in between. Some people wept as they walked; others smiled almost beatifically; still others wore expressions that defied classification but that were clearly woven from a deep inner peace. And in the moment of contact I communed with every one of them, protecting them in concert with a host of others. When Joey passed me I gave his shoulder a little squeeze. His eyes were closed so he couldn’t see it was me but perhaps he knew anyway. Perhaps he didn’t feel the need to know.

Then it was my turn to take the walk. Just before I started, Char—the grandmother who stood before the head of the line—hugged me and whispered in my ear, “Safe journey, angel,” just as she had whispered, she told me later, to each Camper who passed. I closed my eyes and remembered her laughing during the panty raid and began the walk.

And with my eyes shut, it was impossible to tell whether any given person reaching for me was cool or a misfit, impossible to long for approval or for distance. All I could do was accept the grace flowing from each hand that touched me. I had planned to smile almost beatifically as I walked but I forgot, so I ended up with an expression that defied classification but that was clearly woven from a deep inner peace.

The strangest thing about the walk was that it seemed to go on forever. The two lines were each only a hundred people long, but as I walked farther and farther the hands I felt became the hands not just of the people around me but of everyone I had ever known, of Mark and Suzanne and Julie and Stacey and Kathy and Chaplain Lent and Luke and Chip and even people I had never met, Bianca who was hot sex in a bottle and her bunkmates Ashley and Jenny and Emily and Bill Cole’s father’s friend beaten to death with a baseball bat and Martina Navratilova and Barney Frank and Dorothy Parker and Castarède and Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman and Hesse and Auntie Mame; they were all reaching for me, and infinity was in the palms of their hands, and I thought I held eternity in that hour. And every time I thought I was coming to the end one of them grasped my arm or my head or my back and together we took another step forward.