The Truth Will Set You Free - But First It Will Make You Miserable

What follows is a guest post from a lifetime friend of mine who recently found the strength to reveal his long hidden sexual

preference to his family and friends.

It is an intensely personal story many people will benefit from reading - not only people struggling with the same issue - but also those who should reach out and show their acceptance and support for people whose only sin is being human.

Crossroad

At our stage of life the days pass by like autumn leaves flying past the window.  When most of our days are behind than ahead, we come to hope that we did more with our lives than just take up space and consume things.  We want to know that they had meaning.  We assess how well we used our time.  We think about the events that shaped what we’ve become.  Most people get a satisfaction from the families they began.  They can be proud of commitments to spouses and to the kids who wouldn’t be here without them.  As a single man I have no spouse or kids, so my satisfaction must come from one other thing that most people wish to have, which is to say integrity.  I try to live a life guided by that moral compass.  Most of you would, I imagine, say that I’ve done okay by you, which is to say that I’ve been a good brother.  I hope you’d say that never I knowingly harmed anyone.  I believe in our family and have enjoyed the times I’ve spent with one or another of you over the years.  But my moral compass tells me that I’ve failed miserably.  Miserably!    

I keep people at arms-length.  I’m afraid of everyone I meet and every encounter I have.  I’ve lived with an anxiety that rises and falls throughout the day, one that has plagued me from my teens until now.  It shriveled my sensitivity and empathy.  It robbed me of any peace whatever and kept me from developing close, caring relationships with anyone.  It is the reason why I scowl more than smile.  I suffer these things because I’ve been living a fiction.    

One cannot live a fiction with integrity.  If I were to die like this, my life would be an empty shell with less than no meaning.  You’d have known a fictional character who called himself Rod, and I would have lived an entire life without the integrity that means more to me than anything else.  Confronted by this awful fact I know that I must correct the error.  However many years remain to me, when I face death I want it to be as an honest man.  So here it is:  I’m gay.  I’m attracted toward members of my sex with the same strength of feeling that you have for the opposite sex.  I’m indifferent to the opposite sex the way you are indifferent to members of your own.  No one ‘did’ anything to make me gay.  I wasn’t abused as a child.  I did not ‘catch’ it from somebody else.  It simply was. 

Looking back, I can trace my feelings to when I was a kid in early grade school.  Of course, I did not know then what the feelings meant or that they weren’t the same as those of any other kid.  I didn’t pay much attention to them until I was an adolescent in high school, when it gradually became clear how different my feelings were.  Even then I didn’t know that there was such a thing as homosexuality until I was almost out of high school.  I still remember the time and place when I put all the pieces together and I realized to my dismay that I was gay.  I say ‘dismay’, because I knew that anyone known to be gay was treated like a leper.  A wall goes up that separates gay people from the sympathy that people usually extend to each another. 

It was a nightmare that I could not wake up from.  I hated being gay.  Mainly, I hated it because everybody else did.  Most people I knew were revolted by the idea of anyone being attracted to members of their own sex.  All of their references to gays were infused with a note of disgust that came through in their voices, their jokes, their facial expressions and their gestures.  ‘Queer’, ‘faggot’, ‘queen’, and ‘pervert’ were never far from their lips.  It brought out their dark side.  Given half a chance, guys would beat the hell out of anyone they thought was gay. 

I bought into the idea that to be gay was to be a pervert.  There was an unspoken assumption that people who are gay somehow brought it on themselves through their own wickedness.  Why should such people merit respect or consideration?  Why shouldn’t they be objects of righteous contempt and get slapped around for their loathsome behavior?    

I never imagined I was wicked, but I did think that there was something wrong with me.  All I wanted was to be like everybody else.  I needed outside help, but there was none.  I was completely by myself, alone, with no one to help me figure out what was the matter with me.  While still in college I saw a psychiatrist for nearly two years.  I tried dating a number of women during college and later while working at TACOM.  None of it worked, of course.  I couldn’t change my feelings of physical attraction. 

Try to imagine why anyone in their right mind would choose to be gay.  Just for a moment imagine what being hated by nearly everyone would feel like.  Ask yourself why anybody would want to be rejected or to risk physical harm.  Now imagine that the only way to escape the hatred was by changing your sexual orientation.  I can tell you from first-hand experience that it can’t be done.  Sexual orientation is not a choice.  It is a fact of life. 

However, acting on homosexual impulses is a choice.  I could decide how to play the hand I was dealt.  Only two possibilities came to mind:  The first one was that I could announce to the world that I was gay, knowing that I’d be marked for life.  From that point forward, whenever people met me or talked about me or thought about me, the first word that would come to their minds would be GAY.  For some people I’d never be anything else.  No other description would come in a close second.  Nothing else I did or said would matter.  [You’ll see this soon enough for yourself.]  To admit to being gay is to be ready to endure an abiding ill-will, an unending rain of poison from nearly every person who knew about it.  I rejected this possibility because I just couldn’t face the thought of all that animosity. 

The other possibility was to live as if I were ‘normal’.  If I acted ‘normally’, then I’d be sheltered by the uncertainty of family and friends.  I could avoid the poisonous rain.  And it turns out that all the people I cared about were perfectly okay with that.  As long as no one knew for sure then I’d get the benefit of a doubt and the fiction could continue.  Acting ‘normally’ meant that I couldn’t draw undue attention to myself.  I could never let my guard down.  I had to watch everything I said.  I had to laugh at the jokes, and nod at the nasty comments, and pretend that they didn’t hurt.  I couldn’t share confidences.  I had to submerge feelings of physical attraction all the time.  I had to deny myself close human contact with anyone.  I could not allow any but the feeblest of warmth or intimacy.  I gave up feeling anything at all.  Only by doing all this could I stay in the shelter and avoid the thousands and thousands of poisonous little droplets.    

Despite my best efforts the fictional life hasn’t worked very well.  Having bottled up my feelings in so many ways, I suffered two nervous breakdowns and had recurring bouts of black depression.  I never had special feelings for someone else, nor anyone for me; and at my age I don’t expect I ever will.  I’ve lived in an emotional desert that most people would do anything to avoid.  The act didn’t fool friends who had long known without my telling them that I am gay.  None of them have ever raised the subject because they sensed rightly that I don’t want to talk about it.  But the thing is that my friendships lack the depth that can exist only when friends share their vulnerabilities in trust. 

I don’t know who among the family members my real friends are.  It is impossible for me to ever be at ease with the very people who mean the most to me.  Likewise, it’s impossible for anyone else to be truly at ease with me.  My failure to be honest about my sexuality rightly makes me the object of mistrust among everyone who suspects I’m gay.  I’ve had to endure jokes and remarks intended to make me squirm.  I lived like a coward, without dignity, cringing in fear that one day I’d be exposed.  So I gained very little by the fiction.  My silence has affected you as well, though you probably haven’t noticed it.  It allowed you to inflict harm every time you show contempt for gay people.  It allowed you to nurture prejudices that my honest life might have softened.             

You may find what I’ve said hard to accept.  Some of you have long been told that people choose to be gay.  You may think it self-evident that homosexuality is a deliberate rebellion against God.  Maybe you think that gays are possessed by the devil.  Or maybe the gays you’ve seen on TV and at the movies makes wickedness the only explanation that fits.  I’m talking about the guys dressed up like chorus girls, the fairies, and the flamboyant marchers in gay pride parades.  Surely, you may think, they choose to live as they do.  I can’t answer for them or explain them to you because I don’t know much more about them than you do.  I don’t know what motivates them.  I don’t know anyone who behaves as they do.  However, I do know what it is like to have an entire life instantly judged on the strength of a single word.  While I don’t understand their effeminate ways, I can imagine that the crap they endure must dwarf anything that I will ever experience.        

You, on the other hand, have a lifetime of memories that include me.  If you believe that being gay is evil, then you’ve been in the company of an evil person every time we’ve been together.  I was gay when you saw me sitting on our parents’ living room floor in front of the old black and white TV.  I was gay when we sat down in the basement to every breakfast, lunch and dinner.  I was gay when you saw me get confirmed.  I was gay in high school.  I was gay every Christmas and Easter.  I was gay at every family reunion, wedding, funeral, camping trip and card game, and at every celebration of joy and sorrow.  Do your memories of me support the idea that being gay the same thing as being evil?  That’s what all this comes down to.  How you answer the question will determine what you do next.  You can continue to believe that anyone who is gay is also wicked, or you can see from a brother’s example that maybe they are not.      

Maybe you’re wondering why I waited until now to tell you all this.  You might better ask why I waited so long.  There were, over the years, who-knows-how-many times when I could have told you, only to chicken out at the last minute.  It’s always been easier to let things slide.  Well the act is over.  I will live the rest of my life with the consequences, some of which I regret to say will also be yours. 

What now?  I haven’t a clue.  I dread this ordeal.  The thought of it is the main reason I haven’t said anything before now.  I expect it will be a humiliating experience, as in fact it already is.  Writing this is painful.  Dredging up these feelings is painful.  Pushing the ‘Send’ button.  Wondering how you will react.  You’ll have a share of pain too, and it may last a long time.  Some of you will feel anger and shame that someone in the family is gay.  Your feelings might harden into resentment and animosity.  The common knowledge that I am gay could cause a rift in the family.  You may all shun me. 

I think, though, that being honest is worth the risk.  I have to believe that you prefer an uncomfortable truth to agreeable lie.  All I want is for things to continue as before, except that now you’ll have a real brother instead of a fictional character.  We’ll see if that is possible.  What will happen will happen, no matter what I want or what you wish you didn’t know.  Understand that I’m not apologizing for what I am and cannot change but for acting like something that I am not.  To those of you who can’t accept what I’ve just told you, I guess this is goodbye.  You have to do what you believe to be right.  I can hope that circumstances will change.    

What will I do now?  Again, I haven’t a clue, except to say that however I live my life from this point forward will be my business, just as you rightly felt all these years that your business was entirely yours.  I’ve already exposed more vulnerability to you than any of you ever have or ever will to me.  There’s no more that I feel obligated to share.      

We’re at a crossroads here.  You may feel deeply hurt.  You may feel a loss, as if someone died.  That is how it feels to me.  Some of you may find it hard to contain your feelings and want to respond immediately, which would be a mistake.  It took me years of reflection and several months to write the four pages that you spent only 20 minutes to read.  I ask that you wait a week before contacting me.  There’s a lot to think about.  Take the time to talk to each other, to your spouses and your families.  Sort this out among yourselves before saying something that cannot be taken back. 

I’m deeply sorry for whatever pain this may cause you, but there is really no alternative.  It is a test of the love we say we have for one another.  Every test in life is always unwelcome, but it is only during such times that we find out what our bonds are really made of.  Please -- no prayers for a miraculous recovery.  Pray instead for the wisdom to get through this.  Pray for the strength of the family.

http://www.gaycenter.org/ 

Grandma Was Just That Way

Sometime in the late1920's, my grandmother and grandfather moved North from Tennessee looking for work. My grandfather found work at GM. He died before I was born. When I was a youngster in Detroit, I remember my grandmother working at Crowley's Department Store decorating cakes for a living. After she had a stroke on a downtown street after work one day, she was left paralyzed on her right side, so she moved to Arkansas and was attended to by a black woman who was every bit as old as she was.

My brother and I spent several summers on "vacations" with our parents visiting my grandmother in Elaine, Arkansas, in the early sixties. The film, The Help, reminded me of seeing the colored cafes and white-only drinking fountains in the small town.The one movie theater in Elaine had a separate entrance for blacks which led to the balcony. The white kids went through the front door and sat on the ground floor. These things do not exist anymore, but it wasn't that long ago when they did. I can bear witness to it.

Back to my grandmother: she lived in a rickety, clapboard house with wall paper, peeling from the humidity off the nearby Mississippi River. The house was across the street from the area's cotton gin and storage silos, where Uncle Ivo worked as the manager of the operation by day. Throughout the daylight hours, Miss Elizabeth, a black woman in her sixties, waited on my grandmother's beck and call. She was my grandmother's constant companion and attendant, until Uncle Ivo got home from the cotton gin later in the day.

"Just ask Miss Elizabeth for anything you want," my grandmother would say. "She'll make you a sandwich or a milk shake. Whatever you're partial to."

Miss Elizabeth didn't say much, but she smiled a lot. Between taking care of my grandma's personal hygiene needs, and feeding four extra people in the household, she sat quietly off to the side, or in the kitchen, gently rocking while cross stitching samplers or mending old clothes.

Having us there wasn't a bother for her. My mother cooked us dinners while we were there, and Miss Elizabeth could go home early on most days when we were there. She would grab her bag of stuff and trek almost a mile down the road to another house that looked more like a shack, with a houseful of family sitting around, and she was glad to be home. Her only day off was Sunday, which she spent at church with her family and friends.

"I don't know what I'd do without Miss Elizabeth," I remember Grandma saying. "I can't go to church anymore, so she reads the good book to me, and it soothes me."

Reading the Bible was the least of the services Miss Elizabeth performed for her in the course of a long day.

My mother couldn't help but ask. "How much do you pay her?"

"Forty dollars cash a month, under the table, and she's glad to get it."

"That's very reasonable considering everything she does for you, Mother."

"It's a good thing I'm a God fearing Christian woman. Who else would hire an old nigger woman like that?"

What ingratitude! I thought. Even as a kid, I was struck by her matter-of-fact, racist attitude.

But by the standards of her community, in her day, she believed she was being charitable. Sad but true. Well, those days are mostly over, thank goodness.

Not since the novel and the film, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, has this ugly reality been depicted with such humanity and humility than in The Help. I urge everyone to see this film while it's still in theaters. It has Oscar written all over it.

Father's Day Movie Pix - Smoke Signals

Rather than the ties and "collect calls" fathers usually get on their appointed day, why not think out of the box this year. Buy or rent the video, Smoke Signals, and spend some quality time with dad on Father's Day watching this movie.

Smoke Signals is a wonderful independent film, loosely based on characters found in Sherman Alexie's collection of short stories, "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven." It delves into some of the realities of single parenthood, alcohol abuse, family dysfunction, and child abandonment issues, but somehow, it manages to be an entertaining, optimistic comedy with a serious subtext.

Smoke Signals ends with a moving narration of "When do we forgive our fathers? In our time or in their time?" This question resonates deeply with adolescents and adults who live with family dysfunction daily. This movie takes a sympathetic look at a defeated man, haunted by the shadows of the past, unable to provide the emotional or practical support for his wife and son.

The visual and verbal imagery of Smoke Signals is masterful. This film has lots of heart and lots of laughs with wonderful characters. It will leave you saying, "Hey, Victor. Tell me about your dad," long after the movie is over.

Balboa Park's Old Globe Theatre

If you ever visit San Diego, do yourself a favor and book yourself some tickets to a play at the Old Globe Theatre Complex. Nestled comfortably in beautiful Balboa Park behind the Museum of Man, it is an attraction not to be missed.

For the last fifteen years, I have had the good fortune to be a volunteer usher for all three of their stages: the Old Globe, their main stage; the White, a theater in the round; and the Festival Stage, an outdoor amphitheater for summer repertory theater.

The Globe's production of August: Osage County, finishing its run on June 12th, is the most profound and disturbing family drama I've seen on the stage since Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolfe? The play reminds me that the family ties that bind, can also strangle.

Memorial Day Remembrance

Lt. Colonel Frank M. Joachim

March 20, 1928 - January 2, 2011

Rest in Peace.

Gentle Warrior,

Husband,

Father,

and

Friend.

Your family and friends miss you 

on your first Memorial Day 

away from us.

"A la familgia."