I never really knew how to live. Not enough information, no instruction manual. Always knew I was different but attributed it to being slightly crazy, really stupid, very weird, and an eternal misfit. I knew what I was feeling but my people called it “funny”. They’d say, “Isn’t Johnny Mathis a brilliant singer? It’s too bad he’s “funny”. And I knew that wasn’t a good thing.
Everybody else seemed to know what to do with life. When it came time for boys and pairing up I was sitting on the sidelines trying to find something to do, looking down at the ground, learning about ant colonies from the new World Book Encyclopedia we’d just gotten at home. I wasn’t the least bit interested in boys except to play football or shoot marbles until they told me to stop doing that. They said when it was time to start dating the boys wouldn’t ask me because they’d think I was one of them. I didn’t quite understand that, and I didn’t see it as a bad thing but I played along and pretended I understood.
I didn’t understand.
In college I got a LOT more information, and I understood what to call it, had words for what I was feeling about girls. But I was still an outcast, a misfit, a tongue-tied nitwit because I couldn’t reconcile what I had been taught with what I knew was possible. I knew my people would be so disappointed that I was “funny”, so I tried really hard not to be anything.
Until the queens showed up. They showed me how to live, apologizing to no one, how to be proud, how to know that I was OK. Cleveland, and Yul, and David, and Jeffrey. They tinkled when they walked and they did not suffer fools gladly. They were talented and gallant and funny, in a good way. David had no family because they had thrown him out for being gay. Cleveland and Yul were the first Black gay men I knew, and they were fabulously devoid of worry, even when the jocks taunted them. They were amazingly well adjusted for all they had been through, the bullying, the beatings, the shunning . They adopted me, and showed me how to not give a shit about the hate, how to walk like the world belonged to me, how to make glitter a fucking sacrament.
And then there was dear, sweet Jeffrey – a tiny, perfect man child with clear blue eyes and the face of an angel. Tinker Bell in the flesh, still open hearted in spite of the hate thrown at him daily. He loved me into being who I was, and I don’t think I would have survived college without him. They were all my tribe, my prime time players, my family. There were no limits during that charmed time, when every day was Mardi Gras and Tara burned every night.
We graduated and tossed our tassels in 1982, just as what would come to be known as AIDS was spreading across Europe and making its way across the ocean to Fire Island New York. It was still a mystery, but healthy gay men were being cut down in their prime and nobody could explain it. Tongues wagged, the clerics bowed and prayed, the old ones shook their heads and muttered about sex. We had no idea what was in store. None of us did.
Years later, life got away from me. I got away from me, and I lost touch with those guys. We all went back to our little corners of the country, and tried to get on with life. For my part, I tried to drink myself into some new reality but failed miserably. When I got sober it was 1988, and the AIDS crisis was in full swing. I had another troupe of queens sashay their way into my life in sobriety, Louis and Rick and others who befriended me and gave me the space to find myself, and be myself, like the others had done. They loved me until I could love myself, and I loved them. I came to the conclusion that everyone should have queens in their life, if for nothing else than how to pull off a perfect Z-snap and how to make a full length ball gown (with bustier) out of construction tape.
At some point in my early sobriety, we started to lose them. I saw Jeffrey’s obituary in a gay rag, and Yul’s. I never found out what happened to Cleveland or David, but I’m pretty sure they’re no longer with us. The AA Fellowship rallied around Louis and Rick, and we said goodbye as best we could, shaking our fists at the sky in anger and pride as we realized they died sober. And life went on, albeit with a dearth of joy and merriment and, of course, glitter.
We were angry, angry at the politics, angry at the prejudice, angry at God. So many had died before they stopped calling it GRID (Gay Related Immune Deficiency) and coined the more correct term Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. But they were still dying, no matter what you called it. They were dying of weird things like Kaposi’s Sarcoma and toxoplasmosis, and insurance companies were playing games with the lifetime maximum benefits they could claim. Once policy holders started filling prescriptions for anti-retrovirals, the insurance lifetime maximum bottomed out to ludicrously low totals. Early AIDS medications were ridiculously expensive, and could exhaust those finite limits in 90 days or less, squeezing the life out of these beautifully creative and talented young men who had done nothing wrong except try to live in a world that was too afraid to accept them.
When it was revealed that Rock Hudson had died of AIDS, there was some change in the judgment and stigma, but for the average gay man without a multimillion-dollar estate, not much was different. America damned its gay men to die on the streets in many cases, without a hand to hold or a kind word as they took their last breaths. Land of the free, home of the brave but only if you put your penis on the right side of glory.
Those were dark days for so many of us. The CDC warned there would be a second wave to the virus, and it would more than likely descend on heterosexual women. The ill-informed denied that, and refused to take precautions, but it happened exactly as predicted. And then it went giddily wild all over the world, because men in particular were careless and didn’t care where they deposited their see. Suggesting safer sex to men of color might result in a beating, or worse, and so it spread rampantly.
Gay men taught me how to live my life as an unapologetic lesbian. Without them I probably wouldn’t be here, and that’s a debt I may never be able to repay. My old college friends, who prided themselves on maximum flamboyance at every turn, would be distressed that drag story hours are the target of so much hostility. They would be delighted to see the concept take shape, and would be amazed to see the hesitating acceptance of transgender people. Some of them would smirk at how many letters have been added to the gay-lesbian moniker, but they’d be so welcoming of the inclusivity. And believe me they would be stars.
The Sound Hole 