Date: 03/12/2010

Category: · Writing » Essay · Writing  » Topic  » lgbt

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Writing on a local real estate blog, I noted the repair of some holes in a hillside sidewalk-staircases, and compared the city's filling-in of crumbling concrete steps to a time that I had repaired a partially-disintegrated cake by stuffing it with bread and slopping on layer upon layer of desperate icing.

I was pretty pleased with that analogy until it was published, at which point commenters let me know exactly how much umbrage they took at this digression, this distraction from the issue at hand, this utter outrage upon the craft of masonry.

About a dozen anonymous comments appeared, demanding that my editor "reign in my stupidity," predicting a decline in site readership, and calling me a child for having had the gall to compare a staircase to a cake.

When you hear someone speak a lousy metaphor out loud -- and mine could reasonably be considered lousy, twee, and unhelpful -- you roll your eyes and forget about it. When you read about it on the Internet, you immediately compose and emphatic rejoinder.

But that's the way it has to be, isn't it? Swimming as we do in every opinion in the world, our more measured online responses vanish, while our overreactions become appropriate, even necessary.

The staircase incident was almost exactly fifteen years to the day from when I'd met Jeff, an alphabetically-adjacent seventh grade classmate. All 13-year-olds are ridiculous pupae, and his particular affliction was that he looked perpetually sullen and pouty, perhaps because his face was comprised primarily of cheeks. My own affliction was that I pulled my socks up too high and talked like a tiny Carl Sagan.

Jeff disliked everything, and I was disliked by almost everyone. Although our lives intersected importantly during our remaining time in the public school system, today I have only a few surviving memories of him.

The first memory is from early October, at which point we had been refusing to acknowledge each other for about five weeks.  One morning, we both found ourselves observing the same cactus -- our homeroom was a biology classroom -- and we both began to babble at one another. He told me a story, obviously imagined, about his criminal enterprises, stammering about substances that he could only identify as "real drugs" as we both maintained unbroken eye contact with his index finger tracing shaky circles on the countertop between us.

When he was done, I responded by describing, breathlessly, the plot of the Star Trek movie with the whales, and so began a mutual understanding.

This interaction stays with me, I think, despite my later attempts to erase all memory of Jeff, because at the time it seemed so unnecessarily furtive and heart-pounding. I was used to being socially unhappy; I was, after all, president of the computer club, an organization that under my stewardship became rapidly dedicated to the strenuous avoidance of human contact. As far as I was concerned, overwhelming terror was simply to be expected as a normal part of any conversation. But I felt a new alarm at our exchange: we were like two rabbits who had just sensed the rumble of a tractor over their den.

Well, actually, we were like two dumb kids babbling over a cactus. So, why did we blush?
The explanation became clearer over the next four years. By the time we were adrift in high school, we had discovered cause for mutual disgust. Jeff's main circle of friends had very specific ideas about the gays, and that meant that they had very specific ideas about me. They might have been surprised to learn that I disliked myself nearly as much as they did. Here was the one point upon which we could have found ourselves in complete agreement as they expressed their contempt for my fey affectation. They reminded me of myself, only freed of the misfortune of actually having to be me.

It's possible that I, in turn, reminded Jeff of himself in some way.

I don't think I experienced any more self-loathing than any other teenager. Is there any experience more destructive to the human psyche than being crammed together by the thousands at what is the more hormonally eruptive point in your life and, due to the fluorescent lighting, also the most unflatteringly lit?

There's nothing quite like having a dedicated group of abusers, especially when you're already capable of feeling inadequite without their help. And the only thing more dispiriting than being informed by a football team that they don't care for your faggoty mincing is being informed by way of their fists.

This is why, today, I regard even the cruelest of online commenters as strictly amateur-hour. Oh, did you just type something mean about me and click a little button? How very effective. How utterly devastating.

My adolescent coming-out was non what you would call nonchalant. While Jeff fell in with his athletic crowd, I overreacted to the closet by cultivating a voracious appetite for fruitcakery. When he wore his football uniform to school, I would shake my head and think, "what on Earth could posess a person," and then go rollerblading in a yellow plaid shirt with zebra-stripe suspenders and paisley pants. I called girls "honey," I memorized "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert," I played Jesus in Godspell (with a lisp), and I wore so many rainbows I looked like I'd been vomited upon by a prism.

Looking back at my mortifying behavior, I find myself wishing I'd listened to the homophobes and maybe toned it down just a bit. I am, of course, chagrinned to find myself defer to the wisdom of teenagers whose primary modes of communication involve grunts, chest-thumps, and in all likelihood urine-marking.

When my friends and I formed a Gay-Straight Alliance, Jeff and his friends taped posters around the school with Bible quotes about men laying with other men. These posters proved counterproductive, as they represented what was the most practical sex education we had so far received. The passages only served to inspire and excite the gay students as to the possibilities presented by our orientation. "How soon can we start?" we wondered.

The posters also provided an opportunity for the GSA to open a serious conversation about the relationship between religion and gays, not to mention overlooked passages about stoning non-virgins and the proper method for selling one's daughter into slavery. It was a conversation that, for many of us, proved indispensible.

But my detractors were right about some things. Namely, that I couldn't expect to be taken seriously if I was always waltzing down the street -- literally, I'm afraid -- and that outlandishness isn't the same as honesty.

There were useful kernels in the comments on my staircase post, too. The readers had come to the site for research, and their irritation at me was legitimate. Their means of expressing it involved perhaps more noise than signal, but it is not the reader's responsibility to communicate clearly. It is mine.

This is not to say, of course, that there is value to every comment. Years ago, I wrote an article for a local website about the ushers at a gay film festival, and the close proximity of the words "usher" and "gay" sparked a chain-reaction in volatile search-engine algorithms that soon overwhelmed the post with anonymous semi-literate comments about the sexuality of a pop singer. "Please," wrote one commenter, "get Usher to email me. Sincerely, Tim."

A few years ago, I got an email from back East that Jeff, never having left the town where we grew apart, crashed his car into a telephone pole. He was speeding, and witnesses described a body thrown from the crash amidst beer cans. News articles mentioned an elevated blood alcohol level in the coroner's report.

Scrutiny, even the most snarling and carnivorous, is a rare opportunity to correct your course. It is necessary, appropriate, and to be savored. To have been wrong is painful, but to maintain a disastrous trajectory radiates a pain that will never subside, even as you careen stubbornly, fearlessly, fatally forward.

This essay was included in 2009's Litquake. You can watch a video of me reading it if you like.