THE NAKED ANIMAL

yet more notes for an autobiographical strip search

I learned in therapy recently that when a family concentrates all of its attention on one member’s perceived problem to the avoidance of all others, then that person is what is known in psychotherapeutic parlance as the "designated patient." When I was seven or eight, my father’s chronic paranoia about my sexuality went critical, resulting in an incedent that is seared into my memory like a brand is on a piece of cattle’s hindquarters. It is one of the standouts in my gruesome repertoire of childhood horror stories.

It was second grade, and aside from making the sturdiest clover chains on campus, I was also king of the monkey bars. I could twirl around the parallel bar non-stop for what seemed minutes, and skip two, sometimes three, at a time on the traveling bars. The tidy sandbox that housed the spare array of juvenile gymnastic equipment was occupied mainly by girls, but there were two other boys there all the time, one Chinese and the other Mexican. Sometimes we would sit on the rotting wood frame of the sandbox and talk. I don’t remember what we said to each other, but the three of us were somber and soft spoken. I fantasize that we talked about what it was like to be such outsiders, but I’m sure we weren’t that psychologically advanced. One day, the Chinese guy brought one of his grandfather’s newspapers for us to see, and we sat for our entire lunch hour marveling at the distinct personalities of the various pictographs.

My monkey bar days came to an abrupt end over dinner one day, when my dad told me he had heard I was playing with the girls on the jungle gym and I had better start playing with the boys. I knew immediately that Mrs. Ashbeck, my second grade teacher, had deceived me, or maybe it had been the principal or one of the other teachers, or the concerned mother of another kid who had talked about me at home. Suddenly I felt like everyone was talking about me, all the time, no matter which way I turned. You’d better play with the boys tomorrow, my dad warned, and I’m going to send your mom down there just to make sure you do. I scoffed at that, though I could see that my mother was as afraid of my dad–the dinner table terrorist–as I was. My little sister gazed intently at her plate as if she were reading messages from beyond in the swirls in her mashed potatoes. I asked to be excused, and was allowed to go, but not before my father grabbed my arm and told me to think about what he’d said.

How could I think about anything else? My dad’s words ran laps around my head while I vainly tried to read a particularly gory excerpt from the unexpurgated Brothers Grimm. I was shocked and delighted by the fact that, in the Grimm version of Cinderella, the stepsisters cut off toes and slice heels to fit into the glass slipper, but to no avail. I can see the fragile shoe filled and spattered with almost-blue blood, and sense the stepmother’s desperate disregard for her daughters’ well-being in the face of a possible royal marriage. But even this circus of craven carnage, absent from all other versions of the story, couldn’t capture my racing mind that night. Quietly, I played both records of Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, which my grandmother had bought me against my mother’s wishes. I huddled next to my junior executive stereo turntable with my knees pulled up to my chin, rocking back and forth to the beat.

The next day at school, I played with the boys at lunch recess just in case someone actually was spying on me. Soccer was just coming into vogue across America, and all the WASP jocks of the first three grades were engaged in a ferocious game. A few other kids jogged on the track that encircled the playing field. I sheepishly followed in the wake of one of the teams, cheering and pumping my fist when "we" made a goal. As I loped along, I saw them: my mother, in a smart dress and Jackie-O sunglasses, holding the doughy hand of my little sister, whom she had just picked up from her morning shift at kindergarten. These surreptitious sentinels stood like statues on the other side of the chain link, and though I couldn’t see my mother’s eyes over the distance or through the dark glasses, I was sure she looked straight into mine when I spotted her. My stomach leapt up to join my ferociously beating heart, and I started sweating uncontrollably. I couldn’t believe she had actually followed through with it. Absolutely sinister.

Why was I so surprised, when I knew my mother was only subconsciously on my side? Her behavior and remarks had always proven otherwise, so this was nothing out of the blue. For some reason, the collusion of my entire family made this incident far worse. Otherwise, it had been things like this: I get out of the shower, one of my first alone, and wrap a towel around my waist, then one around my head, turban style. My mother gets a queasy look on her face and says with some urgency, "Boys don’t do that." Of course, I ask why, and she is flummoxed. "They just don’t," she says; and then, apparently referring to an instinctive tropical dancehall swaying of my hips that I was entirely unaware of: "And don’t treat that towel like a skirt." She helps me dry in a hurry and rushes me into my undeniably boy-style pajamas.

Something like that–that’s forgivable. She can’t help being horrified because that’s how she’s been programmed by this psychotic, bigotry-fueled society. But this spying on me at school signified a deeper hatred of who I was and who I was going to turn out to be. At dinner, the coup de grace: "Your mother tells me you were just running behind a team acting excited at all the right times," says my dad, already red in the face. My mother can’t look at me; she strangely focuses all her attention on my father’s left ear. Of course, I denied it and after a while the embarrassing topic lost its hot status and passed away quietly like an unloved great uncle. But I was angry about that one for a long time.

Twenty-five years later, I confronted my mother about it in a drunken rage. She pooh-poohed it–it was all in my head–and I smashed up her kitchen with a wooden spoon. It was a messy and cathartic release of long-brewing fury; one of the...no, perhaps the only one I’ve ever allowed myself. My sister, who was there to support both of us but stayed out of the action with brilliantly finessed detachment, tore up her room, slashing posters and smashing furniture, when she was a young teenager, just to let off steam. I remember that afterwards, her face was flushed with triumph. I had always been too good on the outside to do things like that–such a big, good, smart little boy!–though I writhed and seethed inside.

Around 1995, I interviewed Harry Hay for the now-long-defunct Los Angeles Reader. He had just published a book of his collected writings, so the lasting crusades of his life of activism were fresh again in his mind, and his anger–even deep into old age–was palpable. After talking in earnest to me for over an hour about his theories regarding gay people as a third sexuality, in touch with the other side because of their very otherness and historically regarded as the shamans and healers of various civilizations, he got into the stickiness of actually claiming that place in society today, when gay people are almost globally feared and hated, or, conversely, objectified and glamorized into cultural submission. He also pointed out that, on our side, we’re clamoring for inclusion in the straight, middle-class lexicon and lifestyle, which further hampered his vision of gay people carving out a unique and useful societal role.

At the end of our interview, he turned to me and said, listen, I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time, and I really don’t have the steam to go forward with it, but you might be the person to do it: I think that all gay people should start a mass class action lawsuit against their parents for the entire childhoods of habitual, ritualized abuse they received, making them unable as adults to express who they are, or, indeed, to even know they are. I argued that this was like the approach of Western medicine–attacking the symptom instead of rooting out the cause. But he insisted that it would be a major step forward.

Decidedly not my style: I’m not a blockbuster activist. I prefer to make my inroads quietly, like this; what I’m doing now. Besides, all voiced ideas somehow make it into the realm of everyday reality eventually. Case in point: While rummaging around the Web to see if anyone else had taken Harry up on his lawsuit suggestion, I found this: a reported law on the Staten Island books stating that "It is illegal for a father to call his son a 'faggot' or 'queer' in an effort to curb 'girlie behavior.'" Mind you, all I've found is a listing on "dumb law" sites or "joke law" sites, so it's clear that people don't take this kind of thing seriously, and I'm not sure if it's even true or not, but if it is, I'm sure Harry's chuckling with appreciation somewhere. And so am I. Because name-calling is just dumb. Big, strong, smart boys simply don't do that!

Categories: backstory, bakersfield, glbt