The Wedding: A Family's Coming Out Story (7 page)

Things continued to get worse at home. I was
constantly butting heads with my siblings, and my parents both seemed
perpetually angry with me. My mother had suggested several times that I try to
go for therapy, and by the time I entered McGill University, I finally agreed.

The therapist I went to see was a psychology
professor at Concordia University, with his own private practice.  I think he
was recommended by my mother’s friend, Ida. A couple of my friends from high
school had seen him before, and I’d been warned about the way he’d chain-smoke
through sessions and blow the smoke out his nose, like a dragon. The
“presenting problem” or, in layman’s terms, the reason I gave for seeing him,
was that I wanted a girlfriend. With this therapist, I was able to verbalize
the unknowable, the unspeakable, at last. I shared experiences I’d had in camp,
fooling around with other guys. I knew it was the sort of thing a lot of
adolescent guys do, and it didn’t mean they all grew up to be gay. Next, I
confessed to fantasizing about men. He suggested that I could try to change this.
The way he put it was, “If that’s what you’d like to do, I can help you with
that.” I’m not sure if he came from the school that believed being gay was
something to
fix
, but he was absolutely willing to help me “change”. At
that point in time, homosexuality had already been removed from the third
edition of the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
(the official reference book for mental health professionals) and was deemed a
normal variation of sexual behavior. But it was also several years before news
spread about the damage that was being done to gays and lesbians in so- called reparative
therapy.

He asked me to fantasize about women when I
masturbated, with the hope that I would eventually find it arousing. He told me
to practice doing that. It never worked.

I expressed a lot of shame and guilt to him.
Still, I never said I was gay. It was still a concept I couldn’t grasp, because
it was a notion I didn’t like. I didn’t like my own instinctual drive. It
wasn’t
normal
. And yet my best friend was gay. How could I care so much
about him, never judge him negatively at all, and still be so deeply in denial?

After a few months of therapy, feeling
frustrated, defeated, and depressed, I quit. I had started smoking marijuana.
It helped anesthetize the pain, and for a while I could forget the battle that
was being waged inside of me.

It took me a long time to rebound from the
disappointment of this therapeutic experience. It’s not that he was so bad. To
a great extent, this therapist was just doing what I’d asked of him. I only
wish he’d known how futile it is to change the source of erotic desire, and had
helped guided me to self-acceptance, instead of certain self-defeat.

Not long after, I discovered the
book Being
Homosexual: Gay Men and Their Development
, by Richard Isay. Reading it was
a breakthrough in my life. I devoured it in a matter of hours, and when I was
done, I said,
This is me
. The book provided many case studies of
different people, many of whom I could identify with.  Dr. Isay confirmed some
generalities I’d believed by instinct, and shot down others I’d been less sure
of. One key cliché he debunked was the idea of the “distant father”. He
reframed it, and showed that sons aren’t gay because their fathers are distant,
but rather that fathers distance themselves from sons when they sense they
might be gay. The book touched on every aspect of homosexuality and dealt with
it from the position that it’s normal - not a pathology to be treated and
cured.

Now that I felt differently about homosexuality,
and myself, I sought a new therapist. At the time I worked at the Jewish
General Hospital as a research assistant. I went to the hospital’s outpatient
psychiatry clinic for an evaluation. “Brief therapy” was recommended. That’s
the kind of therapy you might recommend to someone who is struggling with a
stressful life event that might be treated successfully in a brief period.

I was assigned to begin treatment with the head
of the Brief Therapy program. That sounded good, until my first appointment.
His office was right across the street from where I was working, doing
neuropsychological testing and Alzheimer’s research. When I walked in, I waited
for a bit in his secretary’s office. There were separate doors for patients to
enter and exit, so we could all avoid seeing each other. It’s not an unheard of
practice, but I’ve never seen another therapist, before or since, who actually
used this method of maintaining client confidentiality. It offers privacy, but
perhaps there’s more to it. Maybe it’s appropriate for a doctor who sees human
nature as a cause for shame. Once I entered his private office, I found myself
surrounded by pictures of his wife and children.

I told him why I’d come.

“This is an illness,” he stated flatly. “I won’t
be able to support you in getting comfortable with it. If you want to deal with
issues related to relationships, such as with your parents, that’s fine.” But
the one thing I wanted to talk about was verboten.

“This is my bias. I think it’s abnormal. It’s a
sickness,” he reiterated.

I began regurgitating all I’d read in Richard
Isay’s book. I didn’t come up for air for five minutes, at least.

The doctor wasn’t impressed. He wasn’t any more
impressed during the rest of our eleven remaining brief therapy sessions
either.

You might ask, why did I bother? What made me
remain and argue until I was blue, for three months? Why didn’t I just say
Fuck
you and good-bye?
A curious thing happened. After twelve appointments, all
spent debating this virtual brick wall, I realized that in attempting to teach him,
I was the one actually being instructed. Thanks to those intense hours of standing
up for my convictions, I found I finally believed, not only in what I was
saying, but in myself.

Though I had finally come out to myself, it
would be months until I would say the words outside of therapy. First, I told
Lorne. We were in the car. (Inside the car again... I must like a captive
audience.) I understood why he was so stunned. He had gone through so much on
his own, and I could have been there with him. But how could I, when I didn’t
accept that I was gay? When I looked at Lorne, and considered the five years
that he’d been dealing openly with his sexuality, I couldn’t imagine what I’d
been thinking all that time, how I could have existed on the cusp of awareness,
but remained in such deep denial.

SHELDON   
I don’t believe I was in
denial over Andrew’s sexuality once he’d told me directly. Yet I still harbored
a lot of guilt feelings. After I had a few days to think about it, and I looked
back on our parenting, I didn’t feel either Roslyn or I were “responsible” for
Andrew being gay, but this had come as such a surprise, it was going to take
time for me to adjust.

This was also harder for me than Roslyn because
she and I came into this situation with very different professional
backgrounds. The different positions that Roslyn has worked in over the years
have always related to people and their behavioral patterns. First, she was a
teacher, so she was always dealing with children and their disparate
personalities, and then she continued on in the social field, eventually
getting her Master’s degree in Social Work. All along, she’s been examining
people’s psyches, their emotions, their motivations, their interpersonal
relationships. It’s a world made up largely of gray area, and she spends her
day navigating the space between what’s on the surface, and what’s lying
underneath.

In my world, I deal with something far more
concrete, and while my job involves some interpretation, it’s of a very
different kind. I’m a notary, which is something altogether different in
Canada, where we live, from the guy in the U.S. who signs your personal documents
at the bank for a few dollars. In Quebec, the term
notary
translates to
the equivalent of a real estate lawyer in the States. When I transfer a
property, while it’s not exactly a matter of science, it still has to be
precise. It’s not as if you’re dealing with issues that are open to widely
differing interpretations, at least, not if you do your job right. You’re
dealing with legal documents. Of course you’re working with people, sizing up
their needs, their agendas, but there isn’t the same level of subjective
judgment and analysis that Roslyn’s job requires. In addition, the “product”
that Roslyn comes out with will change every day, shifting with every client.
At the end of every day I’ll come up with pretty much the same thing that I
came up with the day before.

With her background, Roslyn was busy scrutinizing,
analyzing what was happening with Andrew, trying to figure out how we should
cope with it.

I just looked at it as a reality. That’s the way
it is, now let’s get on with our lives. Move ahead.

And if you’d asked me then, I’d have told you
we’d taken all the sexuality-based trauma that could be dished out to one
family.

I would have been wrong.

DOUG

1960-1991

DOUG   
My own memories of coming out
are, alternately, excruciating and mystifying... agonizing in the piecemeal
pace of my growing self-awareness and mystifying in the lengths to which I’d go
to willfully ignore the truth. No doubt there were many pivotal moments that
shaped my experience of coming out that I don’t remember at all, and perhaps
the experiences that I do remember aren’t recalled with pinpoint accuracy. But
as with Andrew’s coming out story, maybe it’s the way I’ve filtered the key
moments, rather than any definitive fact, that has shaped who I am.

For me, the clues started arriving early. In
fact, my first attraction to men dates back nearly as far as my memory itself.
At four years old, I remember watching westerns and perking up whenever the
shirtless Indians were onscreen; then curling up on the couch with
“Professional” wrestling (yes, wrestling was on TV thirty years ago, and even
this four year old could have told you it was every bit as phony back then).
Several years later, I remember greeting a nine year old friend who had come by
our house on his way back from a football game. The smell of sweat, grass and
something else indefinable, all wafted through my screen door on that sticky
summer afternoon, stirring an irrepressible craving in my gut. Like most gay
kids, though, I couldn’t fathom quite what I was supposed to
do
about
any of it.

No doubt, I was “different” in a dozen ways.
Admittedly, I was a cliché gay child. Listening to cast recordings of too many
Broadway shows, shying away from most sports, afraid of the ball. I wrote
poetry, played piano... You get the picture.

There are countless kids who grow up gay without
any of these giveaways, boys who make the football team and conform to all of
society’s expectations. And childhood may be a whole lot easier for them - on
the surface, anyway. I’ll never forget a story told by an old roommate. He had
been a languid, light-footed teen, growing up in Memphis, when a girl came up
to him at recess in front of a big group of kids, and announced, real loud,
“Honey, it sure
shows
on you!”

Well, you could say my entire adolescent
experience was like a visceral version of that encounter. Someone was always
letting me know, with a kick, a taunt, a jeer, it
showed
on me. And,
like chicks establishing order, I was getting pecked mercilessly, relentlessly,
nearly to death. Hardly a day went by during my three years of junior high that
I didn’t pray for the courage to kill myself. What is it they say about
unanswered prayers?

As a result, when I hear today’s debate about
discussing homosexuality in school, the fear that it will teach students that
gays and lesbians are regular people, it rouses mighty, righteous indignation
left from some ancient scars that will never heal. When you grow up facing fear
and loathing on a daily basis, broad societal issues have a way of becoming
inextricably linked with individual trauma. This is how, for me, the political
has become forever personal.

One day, I carried home another wrecked piece of
clothing. This one, a jacket, was written on by a particularly opportunistic
bully, a boy who sat behind me in history. He threatened me day in, day out,
until I let him cheat on tests. To repay my spinelessness, he regularly drooled
onto small strips of notebook paper and surreptitiously placed them on my head
until I felt the nauseating drip of his spit on my scalp. This time, he’d done
something relatively minor, but it
showed
... A mere slash of a pen on my
jacket. Unfortunately, it happened to be my only jacket.

On a cloudy, winter weekend afternoon, as I
walked with my parents, I asked my mother if I could have a new one. My father
was a few feet ahead, and my mother asked “What’s wrong with this jacket?” I
decided it was necessary to show her
what
, although I’d never tell
how
.
I slowed slightly, and turned my back to her as we continued down the street.
Once my mother saw the mark that ran down my back, she turned forward again,
and her head dropped, her eyes turned down, glued now to the sidewalk, and her
voice fell close to a whisper.

“Don’t tell Dad. He thinks the kids pick on
you.” Well, what could I say to that?
He’s right? They do?

And that’s how the cycle of shame begins. I’m
humiliated, and I don’t want my parents to know what happened. My mother knows
anyway, and she’s afraid my father will find out, and he’ll be ashamed of me
too. And she’s right, he will be. So no one talks.

This pattern of noncommunication was hardly
unique to my ever-more-obvious sexual orientation. When I was born my mother
experienced severe depression. I believe that today it would be classified as
post-partum depression, though at the time, it carried a tremendous stigma,
much more than it might bear today. Whatever my family’s life was like before,
my birth turned everything upside-down. Not only was my mother now ill, my
father and mother were both, for their time, extremely old to be welcoming a
baby into their family. The year was 1960, and my father was forty-six, my
mother forty-three. My sister and brother were already sixteen and thirteen
years old, respectively.

My parents sent me away to live with relatives.
Clearly, no parent gives up a child, even temporarily, without a serious
reason. My father and mother sent me off with the best intentions, hoping to
give me a more stable beginning than could be offered at home. This difficult
decision was made under even more difficult circumstances. I believe they did
the most any parent can: they did the best they could with what they had. They
sent me to Toledo, Ohio, to live with an aunt and uncle. My parents had almost
no family on the West Coast, so my aunt and uncle were the closest relatives
even though they lived two thousand miles away. My parents had left New York
during the Depression, in the late thirties, leaving behind enormous families,
and settled in Los Angeles during the early forties. Our family never recovered
from this geographic separation, and perhaps the added strain of my mother’s
condition made it even harder, after I was born, for us to retain contact with
relations spread out across the eastern seaboard. In fact, until I was out of
college, I’d met only a handful of my enormous family, and only on one or two
occasions at most.

When I returned home from Ohio, aged seven, our
family appeared happy. This was my true home, yet somehow, I felt as much an
outsider as I had when I was sent to live in Toledo. Now that I was back, both
my parents doted on me, and I felt loved, but still, never quite at home. Not
that they didn’t try. My father all but made himself my private tutor,
constantly quizzing me with vocabulary flash cards, setting up math and
spelling games on magnetized boards all over the house, testing me on arcane
trivia. And my mother tended to me with embarrassing care.

Before long, though, my mother struggled with
depression again, and the family fell under a shroud of secrecy and shame
that’s never fully lifted. It’s ironic that this shroud fell over my nuclear
family long before my sexuality was suspect. This pervasive clandestine aura
was best summed up by my sister’s ex-husband, Bob, when he observed that our
family operates “on a need-to-know basis.” If information isn’t absolutely
vital, (and even, sometimes, if it is) keep it to yourself. And, of course,
once something has been rendered unspeakable, it’s also been imbued with
terrible power. In this back-handed way, secrets came to rule our house.
And
everything in our house, it seemed, was secret.

The summer I turned twelve, my parents and I
were on a self-styled camping trip, which consisted of driving to a recreation
area in our station-wagon, which my father had outfitted with thick foam
padding in the back. It was an ingenious method of stretching the budget for a
quick weekend getaway, but even the thinnest family would have a tough time
squeezing into the back of that car. I don’t recall which order we three
sardines wedged in, but there was hardly room for a deep breath. We’d done this
once before, the previous summer, and since then I’d grown an inch or two in
every direction.

It was near sunset; we’d come back from a drive
in the forest and parked the station wagon in its spot. The ruggedness of the
outing was grating on me, and I complained. I have no idea what I said, but my
delivery must have had some drama, a hair too much flair, or maybe even a
flounce. My father, walking around the car, carrying some extra pieces of
padding into the back, flinched visibly. I kept on with my kvetching, until he
cut me off, acidly. There were an infinite number of far harsher words that
were traded in our family, but his rueful remark, spoken with no great anger,
just a weary air of hopelessness and somber resignation may have cut the
deepest:

“I’d hate to say what you sound like.”

I knew he wasn’t referring to how I sounded. My
father was talking about - or, really, just barely avoiding the awful
declaration of -
what I was
. There was a subtext even a twelve year old
could decipher, at least subconsciously:
I know what you are, and it’s so
disgusting, I can’t even bring myself to say it.

When it came time to cram ourselves together
into the back of the wagon, I was especially bitter. It’s one thing to have to
sleep with the enemy, another altogether to be forced to spoon with him till
dawn on an inch of foam padding.

You might think I would have been accustomed to
derision by now. I’d been taunted so intensely at school, I could hardly think
above the din of ridicule. I guess I was stubborn. Because for every kid who
called me queer or faggot, I was that much more determined to ultimately prove
them wrong. The big problem was, though they were brutal and heartless, they
were right. With the transition from Junior High to High School, the
brutalization dwindled until all that remained for me was a vestigial fear.

The summer of the passage between schools was
marked by a relationship that became a passage in my self-awareness. A tall,
handsome, slightly wild and hyperactive boy, Mark, had taken a liking to me.
Although I could tell that he was only sexually attracted to girls, that didn’t
stop me from developing an all-consuming crush on him. He came as an
irresistible package, with parents much younger than mine, who had created an
atmosphere at home for which I’d yearned ever since my family had erected
barriers against all communication. We spent the entire summer together, and as
my feelings for him grew, it helped explain the attraction I’d felt toward men
since early childhood. I was jolted into the realization of what those desires
actually signified, and that this was the kind of relationship I really craved.

Perhaps it sounds odd that after years of public
humiliation at the hands of countless bullies, I still needed a shock to my
system to clarify my own nature. Those taunts, however, seemed to be aimed at
someone I didn’t know. Since the thugs were, in fact, addressing only a part of
me - my “queerness” - and ignoring the whole, it was possible for me to deny
the accuracy of their base observation. Labeling someone “queer” implies that’s
all they are. But I knew, in my heart, I wasn’t one of “them.” Until I
connected with Mark, I somehow convinced myself that, since the bullies were
wrong about me in whole, they were also mistaken about that one specific area,
my sexuality, as well. I’d managed to isolate my desires into a separate
compartment. If I ignored them, I thought, they wouldn’t exist.

I walked a fine line in my relationship with
Mark, aware of my consuming desire, yet fearing he didn’t want me the same way.
When I finally stumbled over that line, it yawned into a gaping rift that we
could never cross again. We were listening, funnily enough, to Queen, in his
bedroom. Santa Ana winds had kicked up on a November afternoon, heating the air
with the hint of electricity. Mark was lying on top of his bed, wearing only
his shorts.

“You won’t believe what Steven did on Saturday
night.” Steven was his next-door neighbor, and best friend from earliest
childhood.

“I was sleeping over on Saturday night, and I
was on this folding cot across the room. The lights were all out. I thought
he’d gone to sleep, and then I felt something land on my lap. When I reached to
feel it, I couldn’t believe....”

“What?” I tried not to sound too eager.

“His underwear! I looked over, and I could see
him in the little bit of light from the porch lamp that leaked through the
slats in his blinds. He was lying there totally naked, and I could completely
see his dick. Then he asks me to take mine off, and toss them to him!”

“Yeah?”  My own fantasy life seemed to be
spilling into somebody else’s hands, and I was anxious, excited and jealous
over what he might say next.

“Yeah, what?”

“What did you do?” I hissed, impatiently.

“What do you think! I said ‘What the hell are
you doing?’ He says ‘Do it, come on.’ So I get up, throw my clothes on real
fast, and come home. Is that bizarre or what?”

The story left me so conflicted - awkward,
confused, and exhilarated - that I didn’t respond. Then Mark sprang out of bed,
went across the room, turned on the television, and sat down on the floor, his
back against the side of his bed frame. As usual, I sat down next to him, and
settled in to watch TV. But this time I edged in a little closer than usual.
Perhaps I looked at the story, subconsciously, as some kind of repressed
foreplay, and as we watched
Happy Days
, I reached behind Mark and tentatively
brushed my hand across the back of his arm. No response. Moments later, I tried
it again, a hint more obviously.