Quack, or Why Being Gay Matters to Me

From a very early age I was acutely aware that I was different.  That sense was a product of the steady stream of negative comments and humorous asides adults fling about so casually in the self-serving belief that children are not aware of what is being said about them. I was aware.  I did hear.  By the time I was five, it was clear to me that I was not going to calibrate to the center of the bell curve.  What I didn’t know at so early an age was how brutal the punishment, the social penalty, would be.

Golden Books were popular in the 1950s, sold in grocery stores where children could clamor for them from the child seat of the cart.  I remember being drawn to the rack of shimmering children’s books, mostly reconstituted fairy tales free of copyright and therefore an easy killing for any publisher who had distribution.  My mother would frequently bring one home from her weekly shopping and thus landed in my lap one day The Ugly Duckling. 

Most are familiar with the rudiments of the story—a misplaced egg, a youngster who doesn’t fit in, a trial of early rejection that leads to a safe blossoming later.  Except when it doesn’t.  Fairy tales are old—before the printing press old—teaching stories meant to be handed down from generation to generation for the purpose of conveying the broad rules of culture and society.  To one degree or another, they teach fitting in—that each individual must give up something in order to achieve balance within the whole.  The restoration of balance arrives after a trial—a test or banishment that reveals the cultural constructs of the village, clan, and tribe and therefore conforms the child to his or her adult role. 

My growing up coincided with the classic Disney years noted for bringing back the dark side of the collective unconscious through the unstinting portrayal of the terrifying side of fairy tales—the evil queen, the child-eating troll, the handsome prince who was a secret monster, the witch disguised as the sweet mother.  Though sanitized in their Golden Book versions, fairy tales historically had a deeper purpose—to expose and thus give warning about the animal nature of human beings and the dark side buried deep in our genes.  We are capable of murder, capable of devouring our own children.

The Ugly Duckling is a story about more than a misplaced child.  It is the story of a mother’s disintegration and collapse.  For if her child is different, the mother, too, pays a terrible social price for having produced a nonconforming threat to the stability of the tribe.  She either surrenders her child to the mob or is similarly ostracized.  Having a different child forces the issue of survival.

In the beginning, the mother of a nonconforming child will rise to her child’s defense—oh, she’ll grow out of that; oh, she’s a late bloomer; oh, it’s a phase.  But over time, the persistent hammering of the whole will batter down the one and the issue is forced—do you want to go down with your child or should you cut loose and save yourself?  It takes an exceptionally strong woman to hold on when those winds blow.  Like the harried mother who chased her ugly duckling from the barnyard out into the world to let come whatever may, my mother was unable to protect me.

While my childhood coincided with Disney in the Fifties, my teen years matched the welling Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.  By then, television had become the primary cultural teaching tool and fairy tales were sublimated in favor of the evening news.  Each evening I watched Negroes, the word used then, torn from buses, beaten off stools at lunch counters, attacked by police dogs, pushed, spat upon, and jeered by white attackers, washed away by fire hoses, rounded up by police and jailed, and outright murdered for asking to be equal.  Asking.  Demanding would come later.  And I was terrified.  If they did this to people just because of the color of their skin, I wondered, what would they do to me if they discovered I was queer, homo, fag, dyke, fairy, all the terms of the day and still the standard pejoratives?  I believed I would be beaten, hosed, have dogs set upon me, murdered.  Why wouldn’t I so believe for the evidence was constantly before me—this is what you get for nonconforming.

My mother by then had made her choice—I was going down alone.  But not without a daily lashing.  My growing sexuality had become difficult to contain and I struggled to hide who I was but it was impossible to conceal my glaring difference no matter how much she berated me for hair that was not straight or flipped perfectly, clothes that did not match Seventeen Magazine, my indifference to boys, the fact that the other mothers noticed and heckled her.  Each time she was accosted at bridge club or Altar Society, I received her vicious double down at home.  My deviation had placed her outside the circle of her peers and she would not forgive me for that.  She pushed me into the world alone and without a champion, without a way back.

And like the Ugly Duckling, I learned to survive every attack though each took its toll until I found my true family—the faggots, drag queens, dykes, lesbos, queers, butches, fems, fudgepackers, fluffs, poffs, butt pirates, ass wankers, village people, pussy eaters, homos, the list is endless.  They are the people who know me, who love me, who welcome me, who care about me, who come to my aid, who celebrate my accomplishments, who totally understand the achievement of living as an out queer in republican, right wing christian America.  I owe my life to them.  I hope never to fail them.  I will protect them as they have protected me.  For every child out there who hears republican candidates on television berate him, abuse him, demean him, offer him up to the mob as a blood payment for a vote, I promise you I will fight for you.