Gregory Lightyear (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} lightyear) wrote,@ 2003-03-24 09:53:00 |
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A Landslide Brought Me Down
The door to my closet remained firmly locked for the majority of my youth. Like many Midwesterners growing up in towns and cities like Milwaukee, where the suburbs were in many ways untouched by the ravages of time that has changed our culture, I grew up in a world void of people of color, of any apparent sexual persuasion other than heterosexuality, and of poor people.
I won't get into warm, fuzzy memories of hot lunch tokens and government cheese. There's no point. We were poor - and like a lot of poor people, we had a pretty tough life. Looking back, I wonder how I survived. At the time, it didn't seem nearly as hard to live through as it does now to look back at. Perhaps that's just youth; perhaps children are more oblivious to the circumstances of their lives than I have the ability to pen into words. I don't know. I have my memories; some good, some bad, and most bring up painful moments in my life. That past shaped me to be who I am today, and I don't know who I would have become had I not lived through those years. I don't often think about who that person might be, or what he might be like.
Anyways, I digress. Like most Midwesterners at the time in the area I lived in, and the areas I knew of (I'm trying to avoid saying it was like that everywhere - but I'd be lying if I didn't say it felt true) I believed being gay to be a relatively filthy, dirty thing. My level of contempt and disgust of homosexuality was fed to me by a culture that gave us the wonders of monster trucks, truck pulls, and WWF sundays. And so the slow and painful realization that I was gay wasn't easy to accept, and I accepted that I was gay long before the image of being gay was positive.
I remember spending a lot of time crying in my room. I used to curl up in bed, in my black bedroom (which, evidently, remains black to this day - my father seems not to have repainted it, even though he moved into the room) with the curtains drawn, listening to music, letting the words evoke tears from within the folds of the blankets. I remember how good it felt, how it felt like anything I could ever want to say had already been said and sung, and all I needed to do was to find the right music, have those words spoken in song, and I would, for a moment, be free from the pain of silence.
It took many years to become comfortable with the idea that being a gay man wasn't something perverse, or disgusting, or wrong, or dirty. It took a lot of tears, and a lot of help, and often that help simply wasn't there.
The big turning point, where I first realized I had a problem, was when I was walking home from somewhere; I was living on 6th Street, near enough to the bad areas of Milwaukee that people didn't spend a lot of time walking around chatting to neighbors. I was walking home when the white pickup truck drove past me, a couple of guys in the front and one in the back; as they drove past, they shouted 'faggot' and jeered, and I turned on one heel, raised my fist into the air, mouth open, lungs full of anger.
And said nothing. I stood there, frozen, and suddenly realized that I was, indeed, and I'd better get used to the idea. The name, that label, had so much negative connotation, so much venom, and yet there I was, a gay man - one who had never told his friends, nor so much as looked cross-eyed at another gay man. I'd never had sex with another man, never kissed another man, never dated or so much as touched another man in that way, and yet I knew, and I had a problem. The problem was, I had identified myself as gay without ever removing my hatred of being gay.
I don't know if it is like that for everyone; maybe it is. It seemed especially hard to undo what had been a lifetime of associations with homosexuality; parents who hated them, a brother who used the words as slurs and the ideas as invective, a whole family of farm-bred rednecks who essentially despised homosexuals and who had ingrained into me the idea that there was something wrong with them - now something wrong with me.
I remember that moment was the turning point, a moment of clear realization when one becomes aware of the immensity of the problem. A moment where one suddenly stands back from the minutiae and details of moment-to-moment life and saw, for the first time, myself - standing in the middle of the sidewalk, watching a now distant white van, tears streaming down my face and arm hanging weakly in the air, afraid of who I was becoming/had become, and feeling desperately alone.
University gave me the chance of going to the local gay/lesbian/bisexual community; I remember seeing a poster for the GLBC, and wandered the halls looking for it, afraid to ask anyone where it was or where I was going. I found a small room in the furthest corner of the community offices in the student union, a cubbyhole; the door was locked, and there was a board with some times on it stating when it would be open. I returned twice and walked straight past it before being able to stop and go in. I was terrified; the memory of that terror is still palpable, and I know now that I must have looked ashen and meek, nervous and afraid. I was welcomed in, asked my name; someone got me a cup of coffee, and I just sat around listening to people as they filtered in and out, chatted with the staff, had ordinary conversations about ordinary things.
They accepted me long before I accepted myself. The memory of that fact is strong, yet the memory that always rises to the surface, like an oil slick on water, is always that one moment of recognition where I saw myself for the first time, ran home, went to my room, put on a CD, and cried myself to sleep.
The door to my closet remained firmly locked for the majority of my youth. Like many Midwesterners growing up in towns and cities like Milwaukee, where the suburbs were in many ways untouched by the ravages of time that has changed our culture, I grew up in a world void of people of color, of any apparent sexual persuasion other than heterosexuality, and of poor people.
I won't get into warm, fuzzy memories of hot lunch tokens and government cheese. There's no point. We were poor - and like a lot of poor people, we had a pretty tough life. Looking back, I wonder how I survived. At the time, it didn't seem nearly as hard to live through as it does now to look back at. Perhaps that's just youth; perhaps children are more oblivious to the circumstances of their lives than I have the ability to pen into words. I don't know. I have my memories; some good, some bad, and most bring up painful moments in my life. That past shaped me to be who I am today, and I don't know who I would have become had I not lived through those years. I don't often think about who that person might be, or what he might be like.
Anyways, I digress. Like most Midwesterners at the time in the area I lived in, and the areas I knew of (I'm trying to avoid saying it was like that everywhere - but I'd be lying if I didn't say it felt true) I believed being gay to be a relatively filthy, dirty thing. My level of contempt and disgust of homosexuality was fed to me by a culture that gave us the wonders of monster trucks, truck pulls, and WWF sundays. And so the slow and painful realization that I was gay wasn't easy to accept, and I accepted that I was gay long before the image of being gay was positive.
I remember spending a lot of time crying in my room. I used to curl up in bed, in my black bedroom (which, evidently, remains black to this day - my father seems not to have repainted it, even though he moved into the room) with the curtains drawn, listening to music, letting the words evoke tears from within the folds of the blankets. I remember how good it felt, how it felt like anything I could ever want to say had already been said and sung, and all I needed to do was to find the right music, have those words spoken in song, and I would, for a moment, be free from the pain of silence.
It took many years to become comfortable with the idea that being a gay man wasn't something perverse, or disgusting, or wrong, or dirty. It took a lot of tears, and a lot of help, and often that help simply wasn't there.
The big turning point, where I first realized I had a problem, was when I was walking home from somewhere; I was living on 6th Street, near enough to the bad areas of Milwaukee that people didn't spend a lot of time walking around chatting to neighbors. I was walking home when the white pickup truck drove past me, a couple of guys in the front and one in the back; as they drove past, they shouted 'faggot' and jeered, and I turned on one heel, raised my fist into the air, mouth open, lungs full of anger.
And said nothing. I stood there, frozen, and suddenly realized that I was, indeed, and I'd better get used to the idea. The name, that label, had so much negative connotation, so much venom, and yet there I was, a gay man - one who had never told his friends, nor so much as looked cross-eyed at another gay man. I'd never had sex with another man, never kissed another man, never dated or so much as touched another man in that way, and yet I knew, and I had a problem. The problem was, I had identified myself as gay without ever removing my hatred of being gay.
I don't know if it is like that for everyone; maybe it is. It seemed especially hard to undo what had been a lifetime of associations with homosexuality; parents who hated them, a brother who used the words as slurs and the ideas as invective, a whole family of farm-bred rednecks who essentially despised homosexuals and who had ingrained into me the idea that there was something wrong with them - now something wrong with me.
I remember that moment was the turning point, a moment of clear realization when one becomes aware of the immensity of the problem. A moment where one suddenly stands back from the minutiae and details of moment-to-moment life and saw, for the first time, myself - standing in the middle of the sidewalk, watching a now distant white van, tears streaming down my face and arm hanging weakly in the air, afraid of who I was becoming/had become, and feeling desperately alone.
University gave me the chance of going to the local gay/lesbian/bisexual community; I remember seeing a poster for the GLBC, and wandered the halls looking for it, afraid to ask anyone where it was or where I was going. I found a small room in the furthest corner of the community offices in the student union, a cubbyhole; the door was locked, and there was a board with some times on it stating when it would be open. I returned twice and walked straight past it before being able to stop and go in. I was terrified; the memory of that terror is still palpable, and I know now that I must have looked ashen and meek, nervous and afraid. I was welcomed in, asked my name; someone got me a cup of coffee, and I just sat around listening to people as they filtered in and out, chatted with the staff, had ordinary conversations about ordinary things.
They accepted me long before I accepted myself. The memory of that fact is strong, yet the memory that always rises to the surface, like an oil slick on water, is always that one moment of recognition where I saw myself for the first time, ran home, went to my room, put on a CD, and cried myself to sleep.
