No Apologies

I woke up today without a weight that I didn't know I carried. I opened the blinds for the first time in days. Temperatures will reach the 60's on this final day of January - unheard of for Kansas. I feel myself - only lighter - for the first time in weeks. And I may have relocated the balls that have sustained me for so many years.

Those who have stuck with me through this public catharsis will get it. While I am sorry for my grandfather that his dreams of me mounting the pastoral pinnacle in his church were dashed, I am not sorry that I discovered who I am and have lived it without shame or apology. While I am sorry that my father was not the man he is today when I needed him most, I don't bear the responsibility or the guilt for how those years played out. I don't have any reconciling to do. I am reconciled to myself. The truth of my life is not fulfilling of grandpa's prophecies and dreams nor my father's unfounded expectations of what sons are. But it's who I am. And I like it.

Being gay isn't just an asterisk to my existence. It's a blessing that is inconceivable to those who don't receive it. And not just being gay, but living in it, revelling in it. The freedom to don a feather boa should the urge hit, to wear a Speedo past the age of 30, to be young and free past the age when your hetero counterparts have coupled, parented and grandparented, to have as your birthright the blessing of freedom from convention....these are things for which I do not apologize. Quite the contrary: I give thanks.

I am thankful to the queens who stood up at Stonewall on my 5th birthday (no, really). While I had my sights set on kindergarten, they were creating a future for me that I might not have had the courage to build for myself. I am thankful to the Castro Clones and the Village Queens and the campy, bitchy, witty, bitter things who held court on bar stools in clandestine corners of society. I am thankful for having inherited a culture that values honesty, integrity, self-exploration, and the range of personas from butch to femme, leather to haute couture, drag to dyke, cowboy to opera queen. I am thrilled to be a part of a people. I feel honored to know the semi-secret vocabulary that I learned at 22 on the passenger side of a Grand Am.

I am pleased to not be in the dark about tricks, bath houses, tea rooms, tea bagging and tea dances. I remember being inexplicably overcome with emotion the first time I crossed the Bay Bridge and entered San Francisco. I recall so clearly the feeling that I had returned to a motherland, of sorts, where so many people had done so much for people they would never know. I remember touching the plaque in the sidewalk where Harvey Milk's camera shop once operated. I walked Folsom street and breathed in the sleaze and the filth and the history and the erotic inheritance that was mine. For all of this that has been passed down to me and will be passed on again and again, I do not apologize.

If the history of my people and the truth of my life has posed a surprising or disappointing dilemma for those who wanted different from me, I wish you reconciliation. But I am reconciled. I can stand up and say that I look back with clarity, I look around with honesty, and I look forward with hope that come hell, high water, or big man with a big gun, I am OK. Marlo Thomas would shit herself I am so OK. And she's OK, too.

AIDS has not killed me. My grandfather's dashed hopes will not limit me. My father's understandable failures do not hinder me. I can love those men and honor them as flawed people who did what they knew to do. Now I can carry on their tradition - do what I know to do - and merge it with the knowledge of who I am. It is not news to me that I am gay. But it seems to be news that I don't have to silently apologize for it by seeking relationships with men who would punish me with silence, distance, lies, broken promises and humiliation. Maybe that's the answer I was looking for.

So what? That's what I asked yesterday. I think the answer is that I can stop beating myself over the head with men who don't and can't care for me. I don't have to prostrate myself at the feet of men who are incapable of love. I can identify, today, that those Bad Boys are not men who love themselves. So there's no way they could love me. No matter what I do or who I am, they are married to their own myth. I choose to divorce myself from that myth.

I am, without arrogance, worth more. Intelligence, humor, wit, and the newly acquired willingness to be brutally open and honest about my deepest longings....these make me worth more. If the next 10 years don't bring Mr. Right along, I'll at least know that there are a handful of red flags that I used to ignore that I can't ignore any longer. If this disease takes me before I have that experience of partnership, it will take me with my integrity intact. And I'll be OK.

Thank you Sam. Thank you Jerry (you prick). Thanks to Dad and Grandpa and "Uncle Joe". Thanks to Harvey Milk, who died before I knew that I should know him. Thanks to the drag queens who showed me that outrageous is good and expectations can be upended in a beautiful spectacle. Thanks to The Boys who grinned and nodded while I dug at my core with a dull spoon trying to figure out why I was so unhappy. Thanks to Marlo who told me when I was 8 that I was OK, even though I didn't buy it until I was 41. I know that I don't get it all. But I've gotten enough that I'm not miserable today. And that makes today a good day.
A day with no apologies.