Just a blink of an eye ago, I was that little kid in the picture, blowing out candles on the sports cake that was so not who I am. But that’s how they treated boys in the Seventies. We were all little athletes in training, ready to grow up into big manly sportsing men.
Boy, did I miss the mark.
Even then, I knew I was different, but I didn’t have the words for it. I was on the cusp of my teen years, but there was nothing in my little suburban world to prepare me to be a gay man.
Well, that’s not quite fair.
There was a TV show called Brothers with a vey nelly gay character (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
There was a TV movie about a guy who comes out in college – his father dies of a heart attack, and his mother puts him in therapy to make him not gay. But oh, that fade-to-black scene when he follows another guy out to his van. I dreamed about what might happen inside that van.
Oh, and there were the gay neighbors whom no one talked to. They weren’t hated. Not really. They just kept to themselves, and no one engaged with them. I wonder what I could have learned, if I had ever gone to knock on their door.
So I was being prepared for life as a queer… one where I would be shunned by my neighbors, become a limp-wristed fag, and kill my father and disappoint my mother.
I think my father had an inkling that I was different from him. He’s as much as told me so, that he thought putting me into a soccer program when I was sixteen would butch me up. It didn’t, but I adored the bright blue socks.
In fairness, he came around immediately when I came out to him. My mother took longer, but she got there eventually, and is now a rainbow-flag waving mother who adores Marco.
Flash forward to now.
I just celebrated my fifty-eighth birthday among a group of friends, who surprised me last night at a dinner party. Very rarely do I even think about the fact that I am gay anymore, nor I would guess do many of them. I am just me.
Instead of worrying about my sexuality, I ruminate (good writer word, that one) on the fact that I am now fifty-eight, and still have not accomplished all that I wanted to do as an author. And that writing time seems increasingly elusive, amidst the struggles to work had enough to keep a paycheck rolling in.
I wonder what that boy would think of me now.
“Oooh, you got so fat!”
“How come you’re not Isaac Asimov yet?”
and maybe…
“You got what I always wanted. Someone to hold you tight when you sleep at night.”
Every choice we make has a consequence. Every step takes us farther down a path we created with those choices.
Is this the right one? Who knows.
Are there better ones? certainly, just as there are far worse ones I could have walked.
But that’s not the real question:
Am I happy on this one?
I love the man who is at my side. I’m learning to be content with the choices I’ve made, that we’ve made, and to build a new, beautiful life together,
I’ve lived a bunch of them. With luck we’ll get a few more good ones together before the final curtain falls.