Tag: coming out

Oh Very Young

Friday morning and I slept late and I don’t care. I also did little to nothing yesterday and I don’t feel in the least bit guilty about it, either. Ordinarily, I’d be chastising myself and feeling like I wasted an entire day, but so what if I did? Am I never allowed to actually have a day off where I don’t do much of anything? I did get the laundry finally done, but I’m not going to kill myself this weekend, either. There are definitely things I need to do today–laundry, errands, gym, writing–but I am going to get to things when I get to them and if I don’t, there’s always another day.

And if there isn’t, oh well, no need to worry about any of it, is there?

Yesterday was lovely, as non-active days inevitably are. I wrote some posts and worked on the laundry yesterday morning, but once Paul got up, I turned the television onto Wimbledon for him and I kept sitting here at my desk, finishing that blog post, which was very cool–the television usually is a distraction, and it wasn’t yesterday. I did eventually move into the living room to watch television with him, and we got caught up on The Boys (which is going so hard on the right this season that sometimes I laugh out loud; one of the most horrible supes this week quote that trash from Georgia MTG, and then I realized the entire character was her, and laughed and laughed and laughed), then watched the entire new season of That 90’s Show (the best character is Ozzie the young gay). We also finished the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders documentary on Netflix, which again was really just a better produced and edited together season of their old reality show, but a lot more serious and it also went in on some of the girls more. I said, while watching, “It really does take a certain kind of person to want to be one of these girls, doesn’t it? It’s like they create this big sorority.” That was what it reminded me the most of–a big sorority–with little to no drama between the girls…which I suspect would NOT be tolerated should it ever happen. Usually watching anything documentary style, or non-fictional, usually gives me several ideas of how this little “bubble” they live in could lead to crime; and I realized yesterday in all our years watching Making the Team and now this, that’s never happened once. Even sitting here this morning with my coffee and a cat in my inbox (Sparky is watching Cat TV out the window), I cannot think of why anyone would want to kill any of those girls or even their coaching staff. Kellie, the primary coach, reminds me a lot of that woman from Navarro from the Cheer series.

Besides, I was just thinking the other day that if and when I write another young adult novel, I am not going to write about cheerleaders and football players. That was my primary experience in high school, but there are so many other kids that are neither of those things and I kind of would like to write from a different perspective rather than the usual, high school stereotype kids. (Which, now that I’ve said that, is precisely who The Grimoire of Broken Dreams is about; so it will be the last of those…but The Summer of Lost Boys will be about a high school outsider; it’s the only way the story works in the first place.)

I do have some picking up to do today, and I certainly need to get the dishes done–which always makes such a difference when it comes to how the kitchen looks–and I’d like to get some more filing work done…at least alphabetizing so the files are easily found. I have one more file drawer to get through–there’s a lot of sorting that needs to be done on it–and then that is finished. I’d like to get started moving boxes off the tops of the cabinets this weekend, too. Some of it is just paper that can go in the trash; others are books that also need to be gone through. I hope the library sale is open tomorrow so I can drop these books off to them, which will also make the living room look less cluttered. I also have a long term scanning project to work on, too–all my old articles and reviews and so forth that I have stored neatly in a box; I’d like to get that all scanned so I can give these old queer magazines and newspapers to the local queer archive. I hate throwing it all in the trash; someone might someday want to see these old issues of Lambda Book Report that I edited, and I doubt they are electronically available; it wouldn’t surprise me if even Lambda didn’t have copies of its issues going back to the 1980s.

There’s a part of me–the packrat part–that wants to keep all of this and archive it and all my papers and put them somewhere, like at Tulane (who wanted them at one point) or the Historic New Orleans Collection; but that seems a lot like hubris to me, you know? “Oh I am so important my papers need to be collected for future scholars and historians” isn’t something that rolls easily off my keyboard, you know? After a lifetime of not being taken seriously to the point that I rarely take myself seriously, it’s hard for me to imagine that my writing and my life would be of interest to anyone in the future, you know? Someone told me that I was the only writer who documented what life was like here for a gay man before Katrina, and sadly, all I can do is think of all the things I haven’t documented here, like the wars over Southern Decadence against homophobic pedophile Grant Storms (it’s always projection with them, isn’t it?)–I wanted to write a book about that, and Storms himself along with psychotic Louisiana Republican politician Woody Jenkins1 inspired Bourbon Street Blues–and various other battles here in the state. Cancer Alley, the poisoning of poor black communities by petrochemical plants and oil refineries, the loss of the coastline and the wetlands are all things that should be written about, and I really wish there was some John D. Macdonald here in Louisiana who could write about the environmental disaster the state already is, and how we are making it worse by the day every day.

But I’ve decided2 to just throw it all away, really. I don’t have the time or the interest to catalogue and organize a lifetime of writing, let alone the logistics of getting it all somewhere, and every draft I’ve written is electronic, except for the files that are so old no program will recognize them anymore, and there’s also this blog. It’s never been the whole story, and it’s always been relatively carefully curated, but when I do write things here I don’t censor myself. The only blog topics that have always been off-limits are Paul, my family, and deeply personal stuff. I also try very hard not to invade the privacy of my friends, which I wasn’t so good about in the early days back at livejournal almost twenty years ago.

I also think that’s why I want to keep doing the Greg’s Gay Life or Pride Posts throughout the rest of the year. I’d like to document more of my past, the things that I clung to (like the tiny queer rep in film, movies and books when I was a gayby), and sharing what it was like to live through things. I have no desire to write a memoir of any kind, but I kind of do at the same time, but my fear is always the faulty memory and the memories of the other people who were there will inevitably be different. I’ve already noticed how the kids I went to high school with clearly had no idea how miserable I was; the mask I wore of the class clown who makes sure everyone is having fun was more successful than I ever thought it was…although I have become convinced everyone knew somehow I was gay. That delusion was hard to let go of, but it’s also true. No one I ever came out to was surprised, you know.

Maybe my memoir could be called Deluded.

And on that note, I am getting some more coffee and going to work on the sink. Have a lovely Friday, whether you are off like me or have to work. I’ll most likely be back later.

  1. Jenkins was too extreme for Louisiana back then, but he’s to the left of our current governor. Jenkins was also the first Republican that I can recall who claimed the election was stolen from him and wanted an FBI investigation. This behavior killed his career in state politics; he couldn’t even get elected to represent the racist part of Baton Rouge that recently seceded from the capital. And yes, Louisiana will go at least 60% for another crybaby sore loser this November. Funny how that works. ↩︎
  2. Don’t @ me about this; my mind is made up. ↩︎

See You in The Funny Papers

Do the few newspapers that still do print editions even have comics pages anymore? For many years, that was the only part of the newspaper I would read. I’d page through the rest of the paper and read things that were interesting, but I stopped taking a physical newspaper back when the Times-Picayune ceased publishing daily, and only had an on-line subscription, which I cancelled when they published an article by editorial staff that was vile, disgusting, unAmerican, and nothing I could support anymore. I cancelled the New York Times because of their Trump coverage and the legion of crimes they’ve committed against the queer community for decades. The Washington Post also was cancelled because of bad reportage on queer issues (there’s nothing like having your life “both-sidesed”; because yes, the homophobic trash who think I shouldn’t exist have a right to be heard). I would never go anywhere near the Wall Street Journal or Forbes; actually, the best reporting in the country on politics and queer life comes from Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair, of all places.

Go figure.

Obviously, the last place I ever expected to run into queer representation on the comics page (Doonesbury added a gay character in the 1970s, and addressed AIDS with his death in the 1980ssssssss) was in a family comic strip.

On March 26, 1993, Lynn Johnston’s For Better or Worse began a short running story (I think it ran for two weeks; I could be wrong) in which oldest son Mike’s best friend Lawrence comes out to him, which starts a bit of an upheaval in both families, and spread out over several days in the paper.

Johnson wrote about Lawrence’s story here.

Whenever someone talks about how representation matters, I think about two things: this comic strip, and Ryan Phillippe playing gay teen Billy Douglas on One Life to Live around this same time.

I had seen queer representation before, of course; Billy Crystal as Jody on Soap, the eternally confused Steven Carrington on Dynasty, a show where no one even considered the possibility of bisexuality (which could have been an even more compelling story), and films like Longtime Companion and La Cage aux Folles and Victor/Victoria. But unlike those previous characters, most of whom were already adults. Billy on One Life to Live and Lawrence on For Better or Worse were teenagers–which definitely awakened ire in the homophobes and christians. Some papers refused to run this strip, which was incredibly moving and touching, as Lawrence and Mike come to terms with their friendship (nothing changed between them, just as Joey and Billy on OLTL remained friends), but he also had to deal with his parents’ reaction, the reaction of Mike’s family, and so forth. It all eventually worked out for the best–also like OLTL–and as I tore open the paper every day for those days this story ran to see what happened next.

I also kept thinking how much of a difference this would have made in my life when I was a teenager–both the show and the comic strip–which is why these kinds of things are important. No one on the homophobic “side” ever thinks about what it feels like to be a queer kid, constantly getting told (bombarded, really) that they aren’t normal, they are different, and therefore suspect. That’s why queer kids commit suicide at higher rates than their straight counterparts.

I can only imagine how much hate–and how many death threats–Johnston got for writing this series of strips. I always liked the comic–I also liked that the characters aged, grew, and changed–and someday I’d love to sit down with a collection of the entire strip, to catch up with the characters and see how they are doing now.

I also don’t think this comic strip gets enough credit for doing this, either.

Regret

I rebooted my life when I was thirty-three years old.

I had already started the process of merging my two lives into one, but I had thought that process would make me happier than I had been since I wasn’t pretending to be someone I wasn’t anymore, and badly, for that matter. I thought all of my problems, you see, had to do with being closeted and living two separate lives, and merging them and being myself for the first time would make me happy and once unleashed from my prison, all of my dreams would come true. That didn’t happen, and I was just as at sea in the queer world as I had been in the straight one. I didn’t really know how to be out. Part of the hard reboot was the decision to never look back at my past, to stay in the present and look to the future. The past was painful, I wasn’t proud of it, and I wasn’t that person anymore.

And truth be told, I didn’t like that person very much.

But since Mom died last year, I’ve been on a voyage of self-discovery and reflection which also entailed looking back at my life and its various stages. Looking back and relitigating my childhood and my early adulthood is a waster of energy, but I’ve found that the passage of time has softened the edges some and put a cheesecloth over the lens in my brain.

Queer kids don’t get to have the same kind of childhood, puberty and high school experience the majority of kids do, and as such our development of our sense of self often gets stunted. (I think this is still true, even though more people are coming out earlier and earlier every year.) We don’t learn how to date and fall in love and all the practice kids get with relationships in high school. I did date, but as The Only Gay Boy in Kansas (which is what I believed) I dated girls, which was unfair to both them and me; something I’ve been a bit ashamed of all these years–the girls deserved better than that, but not dating, not going steady with a girl, would have marked me as an even bigger outcast and weirdo…and all I wanted in high school was to be “normal”… or like everyone else. I realized that my normal was different than most people’s, and now…now I am not as bitter or get as angry about how I was treated, shamed, humiliated, and embarrassed by ignorant kids who clued into my difference and used it as a weapon against me. Sure, they were monsters, and learning that there were literally no straight people I could ever trust is something that I have carried for the rest of my life: straight people can’t be entirely trusted, even the ones who say they like you–and most of them will always let you down eventually.

Not all of them, of course, but I am never surprised when it happens. I never let people completely in, to this day. Paul was the first, and there have been some others over the years, too. The teen years, and my twenties, were very scarring. I turned 21 in 1982, and was trying to figure out how I was going to live the rest of my life. I think had it not been for HIV/AIDS, it wouldn’t have taken me so long to reconcile my warring selves. HIV/AIDS made it even harder for me to come out. I heard all my straight friends making gay jokes and hateful AIDS jokes and knew I couldn’t trust them; being myself would have meant losing my life as I knew it then–and for some reason, despite being miserable in trying to fit again into a square hole as a round peg, I thought I would be even more miserable if I came out. My “secret” friends were all dying, and I would go from a hospital ward back to the fraternity house where I got to listen to my “brothers” make AIDS jokes, and make jokes about my own sexuality, which drove me even deeper into the closet.

Language matters. And crude, coarse jokes based in identities are damaging to the people who hear them, especially when it comes from people you thought were your friends. But by all mean, yes, I get how using slurs and other language to convey contempt of other people is something you should be able to use and not made to feel about it (eye roll to infinity). I mean, free speech, amirite? It’s always funny how people think that means freedom from consequence.

How do I feel about it? Let’s just say almost everyone who was a shit to me back then has died horribly in one of my books or in a short story…and I definitely smiled while writing their death scene. I used to obsess over my past, reliving the slights, hurts, and other indignities inflicted upon me over the course of my life by homophobic garbage. But looing back was always painful, with so much regret…and then I decided I was going to live the rest of my life without regret, and I would no longer regret anything about my past. My new rational was, everything that happened to me my entire life shaped me into the person I am, so if I am pleased with my life I shouldn’t have regrets about anything, right?

This was the hard reboot at thirty-three, when I decided I wasn’t happy with how my life was going and so I wanted to change things, shake it up a bit. I no longer wanted my life to be something that happened to me, but rather something I made happen. I essentially let go of all the pain and regret and misery that came before and closed it all off in my mind, only reaching back in there for memories to use in my writing. Writing about some of these situations also gave me a better understanding and more perspective on what happened and why, and also opened my eyes a little bit to the people who inflicted damage on me. I didn’t grow up overnight, of course, but these realizations about my past, my life and my identity rebooted my life from the slow-moving train-wreck it seemed to be for so long, one where I felt I was just a sideline observer to my life, letting it happen rather than trying to make things happen for myself, I was waiting for life to simply drop opportunity into my life for no other reason than I was me and deserved it. I used to think that good fortune and good luck didn’t come my way because I didn’t deserve it, while having all of my dreams mocked and belittled or told they were unrealistic or unattainable for someone like me, whatever the hell that was supposed to mean. I grew up thinking I was a weirdo, an outsider, and destined for failure–and you hear things like that enough, you start believing them, you know?

I decided to prove everyone wrong and close the door, once and for all, on my past; that Greg no longer existed and there was a new Greg in town. Part of that included refusing to look back and feel regret; my thought was that having regrets negated your current happiness, or your opportunity to actually be happy and feel settled; because had you not had the experiences, or responded to them the way you had, your life would be on a different path and while it could certainly have turned out better than it had, it also could have turned out worse. There’s nothing wrong, I believed (still do), in being content with your lot while still striving and feeling ambition for more, nor did I believe that either invalidated the other. I’ve been pretty happy for quite some time, overall; so how can I wish something hadn’t happened the way it had, or something turned out differently? That would change the course of my life, and not necessarily for the better.

And I am learning more about myself, and I think I see myself more clearly now than I ever have before. I love my life. I love Paul, New Orleans, my day job and my writing career (not necessarily in that order, but Paul is always first). I’m finding that there’s a lot of things in my past that I can also mine for my work, which is very cool; certainly a lot more than I thought. I am feeling ambitious about my writing again, which is something I’ve not felt in a very long time, so I am actually excited about writing for the rest of the year and all the things I should be able to get done.

I’ve certainly come a long way since I was that kid in Kansas with big dreams.

Why Am I Like This?

So, Heartstopper, season two.

First, some preliminary discussion. Since the enormously popular first season dropped last year and turned the cast literally into worldwide stars, the almost constant speculation (and hounding he received) about the sexuality of adorable young Kit Connor, who plays Nick Nelson, forced him to come out publicly as bisexual earlier this year (He came out on Twitter, deleted his account, and hasn’t come back). Shortly after the second season dropped, Joe Locke, who plays Charlie Spring, the other lead and Nick’s love interest, voluntarily came out publicly; he’d been out to family and friends since he was twelve, but finally decided to go public with it. If we take away the sheer adorability factor of a young bisexual man playing a young bisexual male discovering his own sexuality, while playing against an openly gay man playing an openly gay male teenager discovering his own self-worth and value, this kind of visibility–as well as the visibility of the show, and its enormous popularity–is sorely needed and is probably changing lives as I type this. I didn’t know what to expect when I went into season one, and I have to admit the show turned me into an adoring, gushing teenaged girl….so obsessed that I also went ahead and bought the original ebooks of the story and read them all in one afternoon. So, as we go into my thoughts on Season Two and some thoughts about the show’s importance–as well as some of it’s failures (much as I love the show and the characters, I can also see why people would criticize it; I love the show but nothing is above critique.)–bear in mind there are spoilers for both the season and the books contained within.

And while I know Locke is over eighteen, posting sexy-style photos of him just feels kind of wrong. He looks like such a child…but then the entire cast does, which is why the sweetness of the show hits so strong…which brings up another point about queer young adult fiction–or any medium about queer teenagers for that matter: having queer characters in juvenile and young adult fiction is already seen as dangerous by the homophobes (“grooming! grooming!”), so how do you show queer teens wrestling with their sexuality and their identity without triggering the hypocritical pearl-clutching homophobes who want us all gone? Heartstopper danced around this by focusing on identity rather than sexuality; when season one opens everyone already knows Charlie is gay because he was outed the previous year and bullied mercilessly. The bullying has died down–which isn’t often the truth in reality, but will allow it for the sake of the show–and now Charlie, in season one, develops a crush on the school rugby star, Nick Nelson–who sits next to him in form (the UK version of homeroom), and Nick is actually a super sweet, nice guy. They begin to develop a very sweet friendship–Charlie of course develops a bit of a crush, which he knows is hopeless and his very protective friends think is a bad idea…but what nobody knows is that Nick is finding himself attracted to Charlie and drawn to him, which is confusing for him. This first season was all about Nick coming to terms with his attraction and feelings for Charlie–a constant refrain from both of them is “Why am I like this?” And the entire show was incredibly sweet and lovely and very teenaged; the cast were age appropriate as well; sexuality it a topic of discussion but it’s never seen. The boys are incredibly chaste for teenaged boys. There was also a delightful lesbian couple, a wonderful trans girl named Elle, and of course Tao, Charlie’s super-protective friend. (My personal favorite character of the entire cast is Charlie’s Goth sister Tori. I fucking love her.) The season ends with Nick and Charlie becoming “boyfriends” and Nick settling into his own bisexuality, coming out to his mother (the divine Olivia Colman) in the end.

I ain’t gonna lie, I loved season one to the extent that I watched it twice and then bought the books and read them all over the course of a day–graphic novels don’t take as long to read as novels–and loved them, and the characters, all the more.

If the first season serves to introduce us to the primary couple and cast of the show, and is very sweet (other than the homophobic rugby players and Charlie’s wretched ex, Ben), the darker issues that were merely hinted at–you had to pay attention to catch them–come more to the forefront in season two; just as the graphic novels got a bit more serious as they went on. I’m not seeing the same outpouring of love for the second season that the first got, but I may not be paying enough attention and let’s face it, both Facebook and Twitter have circled the drain since the first season aired. So I don’t know if the more serious tone of the second season played well with the audience or not; it’s not all cotton candy sweetness in the second season as we get to know the characters and their personal lives a bit more. Darcy, one of the lesbians, has a homophobic borderline abusive mother; the bullying Charlie dealt with that followed his accidental outing caused some mental health damage that hasn’t been dealt with or handled until Nick begins to notice and suspect something is wrong with the boy he loves; Tao and Elle deal with their feelings of attraction to each other (and he finally cuts off that wretched curly bang thing he had going); and Nick also has to deal with a homophobic older brother and an absent father–and discovers that coming out is actually a never-ending process. The charm and queer joy is still there, of course, but as everyone who has ever had to come out has learned, the joy and relief is all too frequently followed by having to deal with all the problems your concern about coming out pushed to the back of your mind. Coming out is just the start; your world has changed irrevocably and now you have to relearn how to navigate that world as your actual self, and that is hard.

And for me, one of the more interesting aspects of how Alice Oseman chose to tell the story is that we originally see everything from Charlie’s point of view, with some of Nick’s; the point of view shifts to be more from Nick’s point of view than Charlie’s as it moves on. Heartstopper is really Nick’s story, from his first bisexual stirrings to falling in love to coming out to learning more about himself and resolving issues he is facing while being strong and supportive for Charlie.

Spoiler alert for fans of the show who haven’t read the books: the stories will continue getting darker, but that hopeful optimism that underlies both the show and the novels is always there.

And if nothing else, the show’s depiction of queer joy is worth a watch.