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| Brantingham Lake from the air |
Summer remains my favorite time of the year and, in part, I attribute it to the summer of my closeted youth. The following is a reprint of my June, 2015, column in
VEER Magazine:
Summer is my favorite part of the year for
reasons that will be described in part below.
It is also the time of year that the majority of LGBT "pride events"
take place when LBGT individuals take pride in who they are and celebrate the
advances that have been won over the years.
In fact, in America, June is "Pride Month" and President Obama
has issued a proclamation in recognition of this reality. The proclamation reads in part as follows:
"we
are not truly equal until every person is afforded the same rights and
opportunities -- that when one of us experiences discrimination, it affects all
of us -- and that our journey is not complete until our lesbian, gay, bisexual,
and transgender (LGBT) brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under
the law.
During
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month, we celebrate the proud
legacy LGBT individuals have woven into the fabric of our Nation, we honor
those who have fought to perfect our Union, and we continue our work to build a
society where every child grows up knowing that their country supports them, is
proud of them, and has a place for them exactly as they are.
"NOW,
THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by
virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the
United States, do hereby proclaim June 2015 as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and
Transgender Pride Month."
Encouraging and welcome
words. Here locally, Hampton Roads Pride
will sponsor PrideFest 2015 at Town Point Part on Saturday June, 27, 2015,
commencing at 12:00 o'clock noon.
However, the local Pride celebration is growing with each passing year
and more events are taking place in the lead up - Pride Week, if you will - to
the main event on June 27th. This year
The Hampton History Museum will be presenting an event entitled "Our Story, Our Time Growing Up . . . Gay in Hampton Roads." The event is free to the public and starts at
5:30 on June 24, 2015, at the Crown Plaza Marina, 700 Settlers Landing Road in
downtown Hampton. Part of what the event
focuses upon is the reality that LGBT individuals have always been part of our
local history even if in times past they felt the need to remain invisible. The
Hampton History Museum event will include a panel the members of which will
describe what it was like to grow up "different" in Hampton
Roads. Panelists include Dick Fore, the
owner of Foremost Florists, Barry
Menser, owner of Barry's for Hair, Corey
Mason, an actor, theater director and college student, Anthony Cudrup of the
Hampton Finance Department, Bobbi Mitchell, and Art Institute student and Gavin
Grimm, a transgender high school student. For Peninsula readers, the event might
prove eye opening.
I myself did not grow
up in Hampton Roads. Rather I grew up
through high school in Central New York State near the city of Syracuse. But like each of the panelist and with
countless gays across America, the day came when I realized - in my case, much
to my extreme horror, given my Catholic upbringing and the relative
conservatism of Central New York at the time - that I was
"different." What I realized was that that my principal
attractions were to other boys. Not all
other boys, but toward boys of a certain look and temperament. One of the big myths of opponents of gay
equality is that gays are either predators or seek to "recruit"
others with very little discernment. We
are no different that straight people who each have their "type,"
preferred hair color, etc. And I assure
you, no one ever recruited me.
At the time this unwanted realization hit me,
I did not know what the term "gay" was but I did know that what I was
feeling and experiencing had to remain a total secret. And for the next thirty seven years, I did
everything that I could to deny and suppress this reality and to "pray
away the gay" through daily mass attendance, and a rigid effort to never,
ever let anyone know "my secret."
Life for me became that of playing the role of an actor on a stage. All these years later, it is hard to
comprehend how I could convince myself that I was "straight" even as
I knew in my heart what the real truth was.
I guess the only answer is that one will engage in all kinds of mental
gymnastics rather than accept an unwanted reality. Spurring me on in the effort were, of course,
several factors: being gay was deem a clinical form of mental illness until my
last year in college at the University of Virginia, (ii) my church's
pronouncements that I was going straight to Hell, and (iii) family and societal
expectations.
For many of us, our
teen years are years of finding ourselves and lack of confidence. Carrying the burden of "my secret,"
my teen years were likely worse than most.
Making matters worse for me was the fact that I did not excel at any of
the popular sports at our small high school (750 students in grades 7 through
12), such as football, basket ball and baseball. Gym class was always a nightmare for me. Adding to my problem of fitting in, I was one
of the "smart kids" and went on to eventually win a New York State
Regents Scholarship. Trying desperately
to pass as straight and not be deemed a dork, I did a season of football, a
season on the tennis team and then finally I joined the cross country team for
two seasons where I actual received a varsity letter. The closeted gay boy a varsity athlete! Imagine that! Despite this triumph of sorts, however, like
many LGBT youth, I thought of suicide often since my efforts to "pray away
the gay" were getting me nowhere. Like
so many others, these thoughts of suicide plagued me for years and latter while
coming out, I acted on them twice in a serious manner, obviously without
success.
If the school year was
a nightmare, summers were what likely saved me and helped me survive my teen
years. Through my mother's family, we had a summer home on Brantingham
Lake in the western Adirondack Mountains in northern New York State. As my siblings and I got older, we spent
large parts of the summer at the "camp" as such summer homes are
called in local parlance. And this
allowed me an opportunity to reinvent myself, if you will. While I truly sucked at school team sports, I
excelled at slalom water skiing, sailing, canoeing and swimming. I could compete and hold my own. In addition, at camp, we had a whole
different circle of friends, most of whom were from other parts of New York or
surrounding states and were far more sophisticated than my school year friends. Yes, I still struggled to "pray away
the gay" and convince myself that I wasn't really attracted to some of my male
friends. And , yes, the mental
gymnastics to deny the truth about my sexual orientation continued at Olympic
proportions. But these summers allowed
me to finally feel somewhat good about myself.
As one friend from those years with whom I have reconnected through the
magic of Facebook wrote in a post "the memories of the lake, the times in
the boats at night, skiing in the mornings at 6am so as to be the only boat on
the lake..... these are the memories that never leave me and are the ones I use
to help me get to sleep at night." They were the summer time experiences that
helped me survive growing up gay.
The
good news is that things have changed remarkably since my teen years - in ways
that I could never have dreamed of. I
hope readers will make an effort to attend both the Hampton History Museum
event and PrideFest on June 27th. I am
also so very thankful that things are so much better for the younger
generations that hopefully will never have to know the loneliness, isolation
and self-hate that many of my generations faced. There is still much work to be done, but
growing up gay no longer needs to be such a rigorous ordeal. And that is a very good thing.
