The Wedding: A Family's Coming Out Story (8 page)

“Excuse me, but you’re making me sick.” As he
said it, he glared ahead at the television.

Well, at least he was to the point.

I backed off, but it was too late. After I’d had
dinner with his family, I heard the hum of my father’s station-wagon as he
pulled into their driveway.

Peering through the shutters in Mark’s room, I
saw my father step onto the pavement. I turned away. I was wounded, flushed
with disgrace, unable to conceive that Mark might have betrayed me. ‘My face
burned, I went lightheaded, my fingers tingled. Consumed by a desperate need to
disappear, I suddenly felt enormous, a gigantic object of contempt and scorn.
My father stowed my bicycle in the back, and we drove home silently, never to
speak about why he’d been called on to pluck me out of Mark’s house and cart me
off, like a criminal.

After high school I was enrolled in U.S.C.’s revamped
acting conservatory. Despite the achievement of being admitted to the
competitive program, news of my decision was greeted by my family with a
resounding cry of foul. This had become, it seemed, my greatest transgression,
a slap in the face of the family’s reverence for higher education. Never mind
that I considered the mastery of the acting craft a worthwhile goal. I wasn’t
so naïve as to expect my parents to weep with joy. But neither did I see my
choice as tantamount to family treason.

A rotten carrot was dangled in front of me: If I
chose to study law or accounting, my grandmother would foot the bill. If acting
was to be my choice, I was on my own. The bitterness I hear in my own
description is only a trace residual; it doesn’t weigh on me, or my feelings
for my family, any longer. But for at least ten years after college, I felt
keenly their abandonment, imagining them as the rabid fans of an opposing team,
salivating at the prospect of my failure.

In the end, I received enough scholarships and
school loans (this was pre-Reagan education slashing) that I was able to wait
tables and scrape by for the four years. But the injustice I felt had been done
to me has left a peculiar mark. Reading the morning paper will always be an
exercise in frustration, because any social injustice rankles me to the core of
my being. Every story of a little guy who gets the short end of the stick makes
me seethe.

The wrongs and betrayals I perceived caused me
to feel something akin to an orphan. And my parents had moved to Florida soon
after I graduated high school. For much of the next ten years I rarely saw
them. While I was in college, my sister had given birth to her daughter,
Michelle. I spent a good deal of time at their house, occasionally babysitting.
However, the friends I made at U.S.C. became, to an extent, my family, and an
emotional safety net. If I crashed, they were there.

In our junior year, a few new faces joined our
small program. One belonged to a bright-eyed, charismatic, curly haired,
swaggering good-old boy from Alabama. For a sturdy six-footer, Charlie had a
child-like charm, tinged with a taste of black-Irish wickedness. We were
instantly inseparable.

Since I’d moved to college, the background noise
of my desires had increased steadily until it became nearly impossible to hear
above it. Yet I continued to try to ignore reality. I still attached myself to
heterosexual guys, hoping that their companionship would suffice. After five
weeks with Charlie, this promised to be more of the same - the latest in a long
string of straight-boy crushes.

We spent weeks together, staying up late, eating
at all-night downtown dives, hanging out between classes, catty gossiping, and
laughing over my pathetic attempts to cheat at gin rummy. I’d already slept
over at his studio apartment a half-dozen times. He was the first friend I’d
made who lived alone, without a roommate to navigate around. In two full years
of college, I couldn’t claim a single sexual experience, a dubious distinction
that hardly any of my classmates could match.

As far as I could tell, Charlie was straight as
an arrow. I imagined our attraction was because we were two people who shared
much in common. I had already had several other intimate bonding experiences
with other young men and women in our class, and none of them involved sex, so
why should this one?

We’d been up till one playing gin, and drinking.
I made a move to grab my backpack, but Charlie gave me orders.

“Put that down. You’re stayin’.” I smiled,
dropped the bag like it was poison, and walked over to the pull out couch I
usually used.

“Forget about it, I don’t feel like makin’ it.”
As he walked through from the kitchen to the bathroom, he turned down the corner
of the bed, which I took as a signal to hop in. It looked big enough to
comfortably hold the two of us. It still looked like any other night.

Once we were in bed, and the lights were out, I
turned over, away from Charlie, toward the barred windows. I could hear him
snoring lightly. Soon after, I dropped off. I haven’t any idea how much later
it was, but I woke to find his thigh bearing down on mine. In a flash, both his
powerful legs had pinned me. Now his entire body was smack on top of mine, and
he was mumbling incoherently into my ear as he pressed against me. For an
instant, I thought I must have been imagining all of this in some feverish dream.
But by the time it was all over, perhaps a quarter of an hour later, there was
no question that in most respects this was as real - no, more real -than
anything I’d ever experienced. The verdict was in. This was what I’d been
looking for.

There was one extremely disturbing thing,
however… Throughout our encounter, Charlie maintained a sporadic rambling
stream-of-consciousness, which he whispered and grunted in my ear. Not only did
it never approach real communication, it even seemed to imply that he was
talking
in his sleep
.

When I tried to talk back, there was never a
true response, only more semi-coherent gibberish. Sexy gibberish, but nonsense
nonetheless.

When we were done, he rolled over and went right
back to sleep.

Or was he ever awake at all?

That was the bizarre, self-deceiving question I
came to ask myself. It was an impression Charlie was eager to foster. When we
woke the next morning, I asked him, haltingly, over coffee, if he’d had any
interesting dreams that night.

He looked perplexed. “Why? Did I bother you or
somethin’?”

My head spun. Perhaps it wasn’t real for him.
Maybe he
was
dreaming.

If I said this went on for two years, you’d say
I was a fool to continue to question his awareness of our encounters. All I can
add in my defense is that three months into this deluded dance, I made a
desperate gambit to force us both to discuss, and thereby face, reality.

Charlie was set to return home to Alabama for
Christmas break. Money was tight, so he was booked on a train home to
Montgomery, scheduled for five o’clock, Wednesday afternoon. Tuesday I decided
I had to stop the farce. It was just twenty-four hours before he was to leave,
and I sat him down in his kitchen, across the table, and fought to find the
words. I knew I worked best with a script, yet I entered this conversation
without so much as a moment of mental rehearsal.

Now that Charlie looked back at me expectantly
and asked... “Yeah, what?” I realized how absurd I would sound.

What could I say? “Oh, by the way, Charlie, did
you know we’ve been having sex for the last three months?” If he knew it was
true, he obviously wanted desperately to suppress discussion of it. If this
were to come as a shock to him, it would, as far as I could imagine, end our
relationship.

Yes. That was, sad as it may be, my ultimate
priority. For me, clinging to this mute, muzzled affair was of paramount
importance. More important even than the truth.

Suddenly, I decided the only way out was to make
him
say it. Somehow, I convinced myself that if the revelation came from
his own lips, if I could corner him into confessing it, he couldn’t blame me,
and perhaps our relationship could continue.

“There’s something we have to talk about.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s really difficult, because I’m afraid.”

“What’s to be afraid of?”

“What do you think’s been going on between us?”

“Well, we have our fights and stuff, like
anybody. But I like bein’ with you. You know that. We have a good time.”

“No. Really,” I said. “Why do I stay over all
the time?”

“I don’t know, why do you?”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“Then what do you mean?” Again, he turned my
question back on me.

We played this volley-return, volley-return game
until, after several minutes, he got up to start packing, and asked me to help
him. This kept us off the topic for a few minutes, until I asked him if we
could go for a drive. We talked about anything else, it seemed. We stopped for
dinner at an all- night diner, then got back on the road, and drove late into
the night, just marking time on the freeways of L.A.

For the next eight hours, I made several vain
attempts to steer our conversation back to the point. We must have traveled all
the circles of each highway cloverleaf in a dozen zip codes, before it seemed,
finally, that Charlie was going to crack.

I started talking about a guy in the acting
class one year ahead of us. He was notoriously gay, and had flirted with each
of us, Charlie in particular. Until now, we had always made a joke of his
attentions, but I tried to suggest that perhaps Charlie enjoyed it.

“Do
you
?” Again he shrewdly turned my
question against me.

“Yeah, I guess. How about you?”

“What?! What’s the problem?” he suddenly
hammered at me. “Are you trying to tell me you’re gay? ‘Cause that’s fine. You
know I’ve got gay friends. It’s no big deal. OK? Is that it?”

I turned away. Sunrise was slashing through the
cracks between the towers of downtown as we crossed the Harbor Freeway, but it
appeared we were destined to spend the rest of our relationship, however long
it might last, in the dark.

I had been in some very deep denial myself. Now
I was face to face with a new, stupefying level. After all this build-up, after
twelve hours of wrenching effort, this was as close as we were going to come to
honesty. He wasn’t going to talk openly, but he managed to send a message loud
and clear:

The concept that I might be gay is so scary,
even if I can have sex with you, that I can’t discuss it, or acknowledge it.
And don’t even THINK about suggesting that I’M gay. Communication will not be
tolerated.

Accept me in silence, or not at all.

An experience like that could send you hurtling
out of the closet, or shut you down even more profoundly. I retreated further
into my shell.

Finally, two years later, at the age of twenty
four, my soon-to-be best friend George (and, a dozen years later, my best man)
finally dragged me out.

From that time, until I met Andrew, seven years
later, I was openly gay to my friends and most of my coworkers. My relationship
with my parents remained rather distant, both figuratively and literally. When
I was twenty-six I moved to Boston, and a few years later to New York. By the
time I put down roots on the East Coast, my parents had moved from Miami, where
they had retired, back to Los Angeles. Once again, we were settled on separate
coasts. During these years, we saw each other only on Thanksgiving, when I made
an annual pilgrimage home. Given our minimal correspondence, and the still
tight-lipped atmosphere, pronouncement of my homosexuality would have seemed
like passing gas in synagogue - surprising, inappropriate and pointless. I
knew, given their liberal political and social views, that they would never
display disapproval. The news would merely be met with thunderous silence.
Perhaps a shrug, and weak smiles. After all, they had both known for years that
I was gay, and nothing - nothing - was discussed openly in our family anyway.

I
could never have imagined the strange turn events would take when my engagement
to Andrew pushed me to write my parents with the news, and finally, officially,
come out to them.

ANDREW,
DOUG, ROSLYN,
AND
SHELDON

July-August
1991

ANDREW   
We’d only been dating
for a month when I asked Doug if he’d like to drive up to Montreal together for
Labor Day weekend. I was looking forward to showing him around, and giving him
a better idea of where I came from, my background. And I wanted him to meet my
family.

DOUG   
Stepping into Andrew’s world
was unlike anything I could have imagined. This small sphere of Montreal’s
Jewish community was fascinating, and unnerving. Montreal is no backwater town.
It’s an enormous, lovely, and cosmopolitan world-class city. And yet when we strolled
around the neighborhood mall it seemed
everyone
knew Andrew by name.
Cars pulled over in the parking lot, rolling down windows. Shoppers stopped us
throughout the mall. “How’s school?” “Andrew, how’s your father?” “Give your
parents my best!” “How long you in for, Andrew?”

I always thought of Van Nuys, the L.A. suburb
where I grew up, as insular, but I could still walk the streets with a feeling
of relative anonymity. Montreal, or at least certain Jewish neighborhoods,
seemed a parochial village. Though this provincial familiarity was certainly
quaint, I couldn’t have possibly guessed at the time how, four years away, it
would make our eventual plans to wed infinitely more difficult.

It suddenly felt too soon to be making this
intrusion into Andrew’s territory. I didn’t feel we had connected nearly enough
for me to be brought into the heart of this tightly knit community.
Fortunately, Andrew’s parents were away for the weekend when we arrived, and
they weren’t returning until Sunday afternoon. At least their temporary absence
gave me a little breathing room.

ANDREW   
I didn’t introduce Doug
to many of the family friends and acquaintances who approached me that weekend.
When I did, I just said, this is my friend. What else was I to say? Apart from
the fact that I wouldn’t have been comfortable offering anything more personal
to these people, I sensed we were in a period of transition, from dating to
something deeper.

DOUG   
As usual, I spent my first
twenty-four hours in Montreal with Andrew over-analyzing every aspect of the
experience. We went together with his friend, Lorne, to a bar in the gay
section Downtown. We perched at a table, where Andrew held my hand - under the
table. Was he shy about public display of affection? Or did he want to remain
looking unattached, in case something better came along? Did he include me
enough in conversations with his old friends throughout the weekend, or was I
being dragged around like an unavoidable inconvenience?

Sunday afternoon Andrew took me to the country
club where his parents hold a family membership. We sat out at the pool, and I
opened up to Andrew, allowing a new vulnerability, telling him my qualms and
fears about his feelings for me. I felt the need to explain my furrowed brow
and strained conversation, though I worried he would find my display of
insecurity annoying and off-putting. Instead he thanked me for my openness, and
revealed an even more concerned, caring and sympathetic side than I had witnessed
before, a side that drew me even closer.

We were only a few hours from his parents’
scheduled arrival, and now I had a slight boost to help me face our evening
together.

ANDREW   
Doug was the only
boyfriend I ever introduced to my parents. I wasn’t nervous about it, though.
It was a good feeling to know that they were about to meet someone with whom I
felt so close. And I knew they would like him, and approve of him.

ROSLYN   
Sheldon and I had left
town for the first part of Labor Day weekend, and we came home Sunday afternoon
to find Andrew in the kitchen with his new friend.

Until this moment, Andrew had never felt the
need to introduce us to anyone he was dating, male or female for that matter,
and when he said he was driving from New York with this new person, I
definitely became curious. I restrained the impulse to ask Andrew any
questions. This time I kept my motherly prying to a minimum, preferring to
allow things to unfold as naturally as possible.

Initially, I was really happy to hear that
Andrew had met someone who he really liked. As a parent, I was also proud that
Andrew felt he could trust us enough to introduce us to Doug. After all, many
parents never get to meet the significant person in their gay child’s life.

In spite of these warm, fuzzy thoughts, however,
the old fantasy resurfaced unintentionally:
Why couldn’t it be a girl?
Meeting the “boyfriend” would force us to face the reality that Andrew was in
fact gay. Since even the smallest denial of this reality would not be helpful
to anyone, I told myself repeatedly,
Think of how you would behave if Andrew
were about to introduce you to his female love. Now behave the same way
.
This thought process helped me focus on what was really important, and that was
being the best parent to Andrew that I knew how to be.

For all my preparation I was realistic enough to
admit that this would be a tense moment for all of us.

Our preliminary encounter in the kitchen went
well, but it was so brief, I couldn’t draw any conclusions. But one thing
seemed apparent:
With the last name Wythe, he’s not Jewish... Oh well, what
can you do?

SHELDON   
Somehow I knew - while
Roslyn didn’t - that Andrew had met Doug through a “service”. So I feared the
worst. “Service” sounded suspiciously like “escort service”. It seemed to me
that anybody who seeks companionship in that fashion is looking for one thing only.
Therefore the image in my mind was of something purely sexual. Of course, even
if that were true, I suppose it’s better than meeting somebody at a bar. Given
these impressions, I was pleasantly surprised when I met Doug. He seemed
normal, sophisticated, bright.

DOUG   
While Andrew and I got showered
and dressed to go to dinner, my nerves began to fray. I’d never met the parents
of anybody I’d dated.

“Do you think they liked me?”

“Oh, come on, of course.”

“You could tell?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know. Your father was kind of quiet.”

“That’s normal.”

“Normal for anybody... or normal for him?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, relax!”

ANDREW   
We drove together to one
of Montreal’s best Chinese Restaurants. It was quiet in the car. When we sat
down to dinner, everyone was extremely courteous. After we negotiated the order
my father loosened up, and started drilling Doug about television... Joan Rivers..,
the state of talk shows in general. Doug asked all about the city, the
different neighborhoods, the politics, revealing his tendency to seek a
perspective on his position in a new place, trying to find out where he is in
relation to everything else.

Dinner was going well. So far, so good.

ROSLYN   
Back in the car on the
way home, Andrew was in the back seat with Doug, Sheldon was driving. There’d
been a long silence, and a question came to my mind...

ANDREW   
She said it in such a
way, like she was trying to be very cosmopolitan, very ‘with-it’...

ROSLYN   
All I asked was, “Where
did you two meet?”

DOUG   
There was a tiny pause as
Andrew and I shot each other a look in the back seat.

ANDREW   
Doug’s face said,
we’re
not telling her it was a dating service
. For some reason, he‘d been
tight-lipped about the origin of our relationship since we’d met, whereas I got
a kick out of people’s reaction to this news.

ROSLYN   
After a brief pause
without either of them offering me an answer, or even a hint, I decided to
follow up with what was, as far as I was concerned, a logical question...

“Was it in a gay bar?”

DOUG   
Sheldon, until this moment, had
been silent, and appeared to be concentrating on driving, but in a spontaneous
reaction, as if shielding a baby’s ears from some gruesome, fearful words, he
made a grab for the car stereo, which had been humming softly in the
background, and cranked the volume up...
waaaaay
up.

ANDREW   
Perhaps my mother had
unintentionally conjured up images for my father that he’d rather not associate
with his own son... sweaty men boogying to disco music, making out on the dance
floor... But whatever quickened that connection, those choice words made one
seriously snappy neural trip from my father’s ear to his fingertips.

DOUG   
Between the unintentional
tawdriness of the question, and Sheldon’s split-second knee-jerk reflex, Andrew
and I couldn’t help ourselves, and the burst of laughter that exploded from us
- in unison - cut right through the music blaring from the stereo.

ROSLYN
   
What’s
wrong with wondering if they got together in a bar? People meet in bars. It’s a
perfectly reasonable possibility, isn’t it?

Well, apparently Sheldon didn’t much like the
question either, because, with one determined turn of the volume control, he
literally
tuned us all out. (By the way, I never did get Andrew and Doug to answer to my
simple question until years later - when we were planning the wedding.)

When we got home, and headed upstairs, Andrew
and Doug said goodnight and slipped into the guest bedroom, on the opposite
side of the staircase from ours. As Sheldon and I opened the door into our
room, I asked him, ‘‘How do you feel about them sleeping together across the
hall? Do you have a problem with it?”

Without missing a beat he simply replied “No.”

And I said, “Good, neither do I.”

I was surprised that he was so accepting of the
arrangement. And though I like to believe that the response was sincere, I
question his motive since, as anyone who knows Sheldon will tell you, he does
not welcome confrontation at ten thirty in the evening.

DOUG   
As I got ready for bed, I
pondered over whether I’d given a good account of myself. Andrew said I was
fine, but I wasn’t convinced. One thing was certain - Sheldon and Roslyn had
been splendid, charming hosts.

ANDREW   
Some people might have
had great trepidation in this situation. Doug and I were about to cuddle up
together only twenty feet away from my parents’ room. I knew this to be a
liberal house, however. Since my mother had been a sex educator, books about
sexuality in all its forms were all over the place. I just didn’t look at this
like it was a big deal.

When I climbed into bed with Doug, I felt so
close to him. It was a new level of intimacy, an intensity I’d never
experienced. I lay my head down on his stomach, and looked up toward him.

Suddenly, I had to say it, regardless of the
minor risk of seeing him back away...

“I...”

But once the words started out of my mouth they
got caught somewhere between my brain and my tongue. It was too late, but
still, I worried...
How does he feel about me?
Each of my short
relationships flickered before my eyes in an instant. Every one of the times
when I felt more strongly about the other person than he felt toward me.

“... think I...”

...By now he knows what I’m about to say - Is he
thinking the same thing? I tried to read his expression in the moonlight.

“...think I’m falling in love with you.”

Regardless of my last moment fears, I was glad
I’d said it.

He hugged me very close.

DOUG   
It came as such a surprise, I
hadn’t ever played out the scene in my imagination, and somehow the words
Andrew had reason to expect from me in return didn’t come. Maybe our embrace
said enough, at least for that night. Even though I didn’t respond in kind, it
was, for me at least, an indelible moment. A moment put on hold by an unmistakable
call from the hallway.

ROSLYN
   
As we
went through the nightly ritual of ushering Cashew out of the bedroom, I took
advantage of Andrew’s being back at home, and called out across the hall to his
closed door “Andrew, could you put the dog outside?” Then I shut our door, and
sat down on the bed next to where Sheldon had already gotten under the covers.