It's New Years' Eve 2001. Earlier in the day I had determined that I wasn't going out tonight and would be enjoying a quiet evening at home. But then I got home and realized that I really did have a hankering to go out and be with friends and do some serious dancing and booty shaking. So I shaved and did a mud pack, showered and got all dressed up and walked in here to the living room and realized that all I really wanted to do after all, was stay home. Who knows what will happen in a couple of hours? I may find myself yet in a club in Laguna dancing.
But for now I'm writing and sipping on a glass of really awful white wine. How is it that I find myself home alone on New Year's Eve with not a drop of red wine in the house? I've always felt like white wine was for sissies - or at best something you drink at lunch when you're trying hard not to look like the wino that you are. Oh well, a couple more glasses and it won't matter anyway.
Part of me would like to be all somber and contemplative here this evening - writing about all of the amazing experiences and adventures of the past year. And there's another part of me that would really like to pull out all the stops and just talk about my life, such as it is and such as it's been. The difficulty I often face as a fearless observer of my own life, is that I worry too much about who my audience is: "Oh god, I can't write that because what if my mom reads it?" Then I remind myself that I almost never send anything I write on to my mom because even what I've written here so far would scandalize her right into a coronary infarction.
And then I find myself concerned with writing too much about all of my homo stuff for fear of alienating or shocking my straight friends who still think I'm kind of not really all that gay because I don't waltz around waving my hands in the air and shouting fabulous every third word. Who I am kidding though? A couple of my straight friends told me the other night that I do sound kind of gay on the phone and I was so excited I almost started crying. That alone was just about the queerest moment of my life so far.
But it can't hold a candle to an epiphanal experience I had while on my way to Palm Springs a few weeks ago. I had just bought my new little Miata - the quintessential gay car of the new century - and I had also just bought the new Andrea Boccelli album "Cieli di Toscana." So here I am, flying down the freeway on my way to the desert in my new little red convertible with Boccelli singing his heart out about some Italian opera composer named Mascagni and all of a sudden, big ol rivers of tears start gushing from my eyes and my chest starts heaving and before you know it, I'm just crying like a baby - feeling if only for a moment, that everything is right with the world. And then I started laughing when I realized that it really doesn't get anymore queer than this.
I wanna see just one straight man in the world driving a Miata on his way to Palm Springs, crying and listening to Boccelli, dressed from head to toe in Abercrombie & Fitch and wearing DKNY sunglasses.
After all of the amazing and wonderful experiences I've had this past year, you'd think I'd be going on about something a little more serious than cars and crying and sunglasses. Like Auri getting married and having a baby for example. But there you have it - the one thing that's really got my attention in this moment is that I've finally found my gay self after 48 years. Sheesh - it's taken me long enough. So indulge me here for a few minutes while I share with you what it's like.
It's great!
When I was a kid, I loved to crochet. I still do. My grandma taught me how when I stayed at her house as a young boy. She told me that she'd also taught my father and uncle to crochet when they were kids and home sick because there wasn't any TV for them to watch and this was something to keep them busy while they were lying there in bed. Somehow I don't recall every seeing my father pick up a hook and a skein of mohair though. Guess he's forgotten all about that part of his childhood. Be that as it may, I've crotched baby blankets, afghans, scarves, rugs and just about anything else a hook and yarn can make.
About the same time as I was learning to crochet, I also distinctly remember trying to play softball out in grandma & grandpa's pasture with my brothers, cousins and uncles. Problem is, I kept closing my eyes when the ball was thrown to me and after getting hit in the head with the ball for about the thirteenth time, I realized that I liked crocheting better. Do you think anybody was scratching their heads at this point and going, "Hmmm, Tommy is certainly a different little boy, now isn't he."
Aside from playing the piano once we moved to Rome in the early sixties, I also clearly remember prancing around for hours in the living room of our villa, twirling a baton and making up all sorts of creative routines to Sousa marches and Chopin Polonaises. The Military Polonaise was especially rhythmic and inspirational for those high leg kicks where the baton passed under my leg from one hand to the other. When I wasn't breaking vases with my baton in the living room, I was seriously involved in dressing my little sister up in all sorts of exotic costumes scrounged from bits and pieces of fabric and castaway relics from my moms drawers. One memorable costume that I created and that I have pictures of as proof of it, was particularly ingenious as it was a belly dancer's outfit crafted from nothing more than old nylons, stretched scandalously around my sister's naked little body, leaving basically nothing to the imagination.
You'd have thought my mom would have wanted to discourage such outrageous behavior - but instead she pulls out the camera and allows me to choreograph my very first fashion layout. Looking back, this was just a little more than writing on the wall - it was the whole damn marching band on Main Street for the Fourth of July Parade with little Tommy in a tiara on a float that had Queen written in big glittery letters on each side of it.
And then there was the ballet. Oh my god. The ballet. My mom took me to see Nureyev and Fontaine doing Sleeping Beauty at a theatre in downtown Rome and it became a pivotal experience in my life. I just remember thinking how amazing those guys looked in those tights. There's only one true litmus test of a man's sexuality by the way - and that's how he responds to seeing another man in a pair of tights with that excruciatingly conspicuous bulge that you just can't stop looking at. If you can stop looking at it, you're not gay. And that's all I have to say about that.
It would take many long years before I finally got up the nerve to pull up a pair of tights around my ass and head on into a ballet class in college. But what I realized finally, after the mortification of seeing myself played back on a video in front of everybody, was that I wasn't really all that good at ballet. I just loved getting into a dancer's belt and a pair of tights. So when it became painfully obvious that I was no Nureyev, I moved on over to modern dance where I could still show off my bugle in a pair of tights but flail around like a pig on ice and still have everybody thinking I was doing something very creative and avante guarde.
But I'm getting ahead of myself here. Back to my childhood for a moment. I wrote poetry and staged fantastical drama productions with my girlfriend Rosarita and spent hours and hours in my bedroom listening to piano concertos while my twin brother Steve was teaching his buddies how to make knives and go karts. I made hand stitched doll clothes and wove hot pads from a little kit that I got for Christmas. And I spent hours in front of the mirror worrying about how my hair looked while dressed in a tight pair of lederhosen shorts. And still, no one said a word about anything. It was as if I was the most normal little kid in the world somehow - at least that's how it felt to me then. My creativity was not only tolerated but enthusiastically encouraged.
Sometimes, just for fun, I imagine having a go at my mom and reminding her of all the ways in which she encouraged my budding gayness as a young boy. Who knows - someday when she's old and bedridden and begging me to pull the plug, I'll just remind her of some of these stories and there'll be one quick gasp and that'll be the end of that. No muss, no fuss. Just a couple of stories and it'll be all over with and no one will have to pull anything out of the wall. I like to think of it as creative euthanasia.
So in a nutshell, somewhere back in Idaho, it suddenly became not so OK to be doing all of these creative, fun things I'd always been doing. But not for the life of me could I stop doing them. Once in Jr, High School, I asked my mom if she would make me a shirt and when she declined, I said, "Fine - show me how to use the sewing machine and I'll make it myself. And I did. When it came time to go to my Jr. Prom, I made myself a red velvet corduroy jacket that was written about in the school newspaper the following week. Part of me didn't care what anybody thought. I had this creative vision that didn't have a name then. Who knew that I was being compelled by that strange invisible gene we now call gay? I was just doing what I loved doing. Aside from my fascination with men in tights, I didn't have a clue that my creativity would someday be tied to my sexual desires and inclinations. Everything was all kind of neat and tidy and simple back then.
I remember the first time the word homosexual passed through my consciousness. I didn't even really know what it meant at that point. But I knew that it applied to me somehow. And it was like stepping off the edge of a cliff into the abyss. I also remember the first time I kissed another guy when I was 21. I pulled back from his lips and went, "Wow! Where have I been all of my life that only now am I getting to this?" It was like my whole life changed with that one kiss and I've been trying to make some sense of it ever since. It doesn't help when my friends keep telling me that I sure don't act gay so how could I possibly be gay?
And dozens of women are insistent that I'm only just confused and this is just a phase or that I just haven't met the right woman yet. You know how I've always wanted to answer that last one? "Yeh, well, I did meet the right woman love, but she didn't have a dick and you know, I just have this thing for dicks. You know how that is, dontchya sweetie? When it's a dick you want, nothing else will really do." Instead, I always stand there like a dummy wondering if getting the word fag tattooed across my forehead would help any. Probably not. But still I wonder...
So here I am, still a good shot from midnight on New Year's Eve 2001, all dressed up in my best fabulous clothes, sipping white wine from an obscenely tall crystal goblet, with so many candles lit that my smoke alarms keep going off and contemplating my oh so gay childhood and writing about men in tights, yet still wondering how anybody could ever think I'm anything but who I've always been. Maybe it's just me that finally needed convincing.
I was talking to a friend of mine a few months ago on my way to go roller skating, explaining to him how I really wanted a Miata and he was giving me all of these reasons why a Miata might not be a very good choice. And feeling a little defensive, I said, "I know that everybody thinks a Miata is just a fag car and that everybody thinks roller skating is just something that fags do. Well guess what? I am a fag. So what's so weird about acting like one?" He laughed so hard he couldn't talk for five minutes. And he's still laughing about it today. And I guess I am too.
Somewhere between my idyllic, creative childhood and who I am today, an awareness crept into my consciousness that not everybody in this world is OK with those of us who are homosexual. And that's been a real tough row to hoe. I've never been able to figure out what anybody could possibly find wrong with this loving heart of mine. I mean, if you could only feel for a moment what I feel most of the time inside of me, you'd never have to wonder if my capacity for love comes from a good place. It does. And it always has. As I wrote many months ago, "Why then are we so concerned with who another loves, when there is war raging in the hearts of man?" When all is said and done, the one thing nobody will ever be able to take away from me, is the knowing that my capacity for loving, regardless of who the object of that loving is, is from the divine.
To those who might still have some lingering reticence about my being so open about my homosexuality, all I can say is, "Get over it." I've never let anybody's heterosexuality stand in the way of my loving and enjoying them. Take your cue from me and learn to love and enjoy people outside of those tidy little comfort zones. Go find some homo to love this year. (I'm excluded because I'm assuming I'm already loved by each and every reader of this letter.) Consider it a civic duty. Somewhere tonight is a lonely homosexual, all dressed up with nowhere to go, wishing that the world were a little friendlier place so that it wouldn't be such a big deal to step outside that front door and just go have fun somewhere. Anywhere.
As I pondered where I might spend my New Year's Eve tonight, the thought occurred to me that the only place I wanted to be was somewhere where I could be completely free to be who I am in all of my silly fabulousness - no punches held, no wittiness tempered and no worries about circumspection in the face of inebriation. And that narrowed the possibilities down in a hurry. Someone told me the other night that one of the things that makes this planet such a coveted place to be, is the enormous diversity that exists here. I offer you my diversity as a means of furthering your growth and evolution. And if you don't like it, I'll hit you in the head and make you crazy.
Bottoms up folks - it's midnight and I'm about to lay me down to sleep. Happy New Year!
Growing Up Gay
Copyright 2002 by Tom Clark
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