A few weeks passed with Jason and I as boyfriend and boyfriend. We exchanged texts that read “I think I love you.” But the honeymoon was short-lived. I didn’t admire Jason’s post-high-school ambition of working as a mechanic; he grimaced during Monday Night Football when I laughed at the announcers with bated breath: “He’s coming up the back! Look at him fill that hole!” Everything finally collapsed when I tried kissing Jason goodbye in the parking lot. He recoiled and shot out a protective palm: “What the fuck are you doing” he angrily whispered. “Someone will see us.” The next day Jason informed me he was having a hard time picturing “a future together.”
The sad thing about gay high schoolers attempting to date in highly conservative areas is that both parties, even if their parents are fantastic liberals, are paranoid and uneasy of themselves. Particularly in adolescence, gay men have the dubious honor of being attracted to the very traits they want to hide.
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I’m constantly amazed at how thoroughly homophobia runs through queer people. It’s not just on social apps with lines like “masc4masc” or “no femmes no fats no azians” [sic]. It’s how homophobia infiltrates our daily mind, how even now, as I near 30, I need to be on high alert of any flecks of homophobia that would sink into my blood.
The writer Ryan Van Meter captured this constant vigilance in an essay “To Bear, to Carry: Notes on ‘Faggot.’” He dives into the etymology of the word, its personal imprinting on him, and its connotation as an object called forth to be destroyed. He concludes with the uncomfortable reality that even reacting to faggot is to flame its harmful power: “When I wince at its sting,” he writes “I share its intention -- if only for a second.”
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I have an early memory of visiting Hollywood with my dad and his brother. The sky was taut blue. We pressed iced water bottles against our foreheads to keep cool. We were climbing the steps to a famous theater. Three men in pastel polos were laughing loudly, descending the stairs in a breezy gallop. I had never seen men wear such short shorts.
“Get a look at that,” my dad said with a cheery tone laced – I sensed even at seven – with ridicule.
One of the guys caught our look, then quickly glanced back to his friends, trying to ignore what we all now were thinking: men who dressed like that were worthy of ridicule.
My uncle just smiled and changed the subject.
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Shards of homophobia are constituent to my sinews. I saw this most clearly a year after Jason Ferris broke up with me, back when I was 17 and hated Dominic and counted my lucky stars that both Jason and Dominic had left high school early for technical school or to work at Cinnabon. I look back and shake my head at the pressure I placed on myself to be an exemplar of a gay teenager. Now, I see that I was oppressively ambitious for my future, overwhelmingly dissatisfied with my present, crazed to prove to everyone I was perfectly okay with being gay.
I was a pressure cooker driving in my mother’s Jeep to school when someone ran a stop sign. I slammed the brakes. All of my frustration – relative poverty, academic disappointment, romantic failure – condensed into a noxious blackhole that pulsated with a singular message: Fuck You. I couldn’t get a break. Even when there was a fucking stop sign in front of them, people didn’t give me a break (it was, of course, my own judgments that never ceased). This latest aggression was all too much. My throat screamed with raw barbarity. The sonic cascades shook the jeep. More so did the word that flew from me, the content I realized only after I had banged on the steering wheel and stopped screaming.
FAGGOT!!
I see this scream now as a remarkably clear example of self-hatred. What’s so odd is that in my high school, I was president of Gay-Straight Alliance and had an annotated copy of The New Gay Teenager. I was my school’s embodiment of “the gay kid(s) were all right.” But here, I was screaming the most harmful thing I could muster at an anonymous spectacle that happened to be passing me by.
This rattling angst was, I think, always percolating in high school, perhaps even during GSA meetings, shopping for Five Star notebooks at Walmart, or waiting in a long line for coffee. Everywhere, even after I came out, I couldn’t be myself. I couldn’t have honest relationships. I couldn’t resign the privilege of us using faggot – giving that slur up meant I would become its target. Dominic was too visible a reminder of who I was and how different I was from most people. So long as homophobia worked its way through me, Dominic – even if he had been less of an asshole and more of a saint – would have to be my enemy.
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Writers became my way out of this self-hatred. It started with Patrick from The Perks of Being a Wallflower, the first gay teen I ever saw who wasn’t always thinking of suicide. Then Brokeback Mountain, the first time I saw gay love as possibly valid. Senior year of high school, a teacher gave me The Hours by Michael Cunningham, which enabled the flood: Michael Chabon, David Sedaris, James Baldwin, Truman Capote, Richard Rodriguez, Oscar Wilde, Gore Vidal, Alan Hollinghurst, Dan Savage, Rakesh Satyal, Reinaldo Arenas, Edmund White, Marcel Proust, Yukio Mishma, André Gide, Manuel Puig.
To unwind the homophobia I grew up with, I made statements to carve out my identity rather than have someone carve me. It was a push against a world that preferred me in the shadows (a sentiment I often, unwittingly, agreed with). I pierced my right ear – the gay one – with a ruby stud. I read up on queer theory, and a history of the supreme court and LGBTQ issues. I learned about the “inverse diaspora,” coined by the demographer Gary Gates, that queer people tend to migrate to urban centers where they are more readily accepted, which is indeed the opposite flow of traffic in your standard diaspora.
Through college in Massachusetts, I started to wear my sexuality with a little less anxiety. But I didn’t feel at home in my body and how it was seen until I was 22 and living in New York. My friend Gilles introduced me to his friends, lovers named Andrew and Juan. Andrew was 20 years older, pale, tall. Juan was more like Dominic: wrists flashing, loud chiffon clothes. I was surprised to find I was perfectly comfortable with their gayness, their lisps, their penchant to cradle a chin in the palm of one loose hand. (I’d like to say it was like accepting Dominic, but the major difference between them all was that Dominic was a true arsehole).
As organically as homophobia twined its way up my psyche, so imperceptibly yet persistent is its unravelling. When I think of Dominic now, it’s with tenderness. I remember him as a jerk, but that may be due to the fact he was going through the same dizzying restrictions and vulnerabilities as me. If I thought he was setting gay men back, it’s because I was still believing the horse shit that gay men couldn’t be thought of as people until they acted like Andrew Sullivan: clean-cut, polite, beyond reproach. But now my concepts of sexuality are far more generous. Anything that doesn’t obviate people, I support.
When I think about it, I have seen or touched or loved thousands of men like Dominic. I no longer fear their visible displays of femininity, even as it submits them to calls of faggot. In fact, I embrace those flamboyant signs that homophobia aims to denigrate. I’ve grown to love them and realize I always have. I can’t hate that particular Dominic who beat me to Jason Ferris any more than I can hate myself.
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