From Boys to Men

by Ted Gideonse, Robert Williams

Genres: General Fiction; LGBT Gay

Synopsis

Acclaimed authors reflect on what it’s like to be gay and young, to be different, and to be aware of that difference from an early age. More than an anthology of coming out stories, From Boys to Men is a stunning collection of essays about what it is like to be gay and young, to be different and be aware of that difference from the earliest of ages. In these memoirs, coming out is less important than coming of age and coming to the realization that young gay people experience the world in ways quite unlike straight boys. Whether it is a fascination with soap opera, an intense sensitivity to their own difference, or an obsession with a certain part of the male anatomy, gay kids—or kids who would eventually identify as gay—have an indefinable but unmistakable gay sensibility. Sometimes the result is funny, sometimes it is harrowing, and often it is deeply moving. Essays by lauded writers like Alexander Chee ( Edinburgh), Aaron Hamburger ( Faith for Beginners), K. M. Soehnlein ( The World of Normal Boys), Trebor Healey ( Through It Came Bright Colors), Tom Dolby ( The Trouble Boy), David Bahr, and Austin Bunn, are collected along with work from Michael McAllister, Jason Tougaw, Viet Dinh, and the popular blogger, Joe Jervis.

Release date: March 17, 2009

Publisher: Da Capo Press

Print pages: 274

Sample

When we were asked to edit an anthology of essays about growing up gay, we knew what we didn’t want the book to be: a collection of coming-out stories. Those narratives are important, and they need to be told and read, but American gay literature has come to a point of maturity when our stories are not just about fighting to be heard and having our existences validated. Our literature now is often concerned about the complexities of our actual lives, the yearning for love, the ambiguity of our identities, and our odd and wonderful gay sensibilities. And our childhoods are different not just because we are singled out by bullies or feel disassociated from our families—as many kids are—but because we experience the world through, to twist and abuse a cliche, pink-colored glasses. The essays in this collection are about growing up and coming of age with that nearly inexplicable sensibility. To the gay reader, these memoirs will reverberate like the clearest of bells. To the straight reader, we hope you will understand that whom we love is not our only difference: so are the ways that we see the world.

The eyes through which these stories are told belong to a stellar new generation of gay writers. Not only are we giving you original essays by writers whose novels or collections you already (or should) have read—writers like Alex Chee, Vestal McIntyre, and Aaron Hamburger. But we are also introducing you to writers whose work will soon be famous and lauded—people like Viet Dinh, Michael McAllister, and Jason Tougaw. And we have included three writers—Joe Jervis, Francis Strand, and Todd Pozycki—known best for their blogs, arguably the most important thing to happen to gay storytelling since the invention of the paperback.

After we chose the essays, we noticed certain themes in common. Many of the essays dealt with what most of us consider our most pressing concern and largest source of anxiety as gay kids: our families. David Bahr, in “No Matter What Happens,” remembers not one, but the two women who shaped his life as he bounced back and forth between his mother and foster mother. Sometimes, as Joe Jervis explains in “Terrence,” the forging of other, or alternative families (as he does with the title character, a melodramatic fellow collegian with asymmetrical bangs and a Gucci briefcase), helps us to better understand the family we are born into.

In “Sleeping Eros,” which is part of Michael McAllister’s memoir, it is 1981, and ten-year-old Michael’s divorce is only half of the story: “I was going to have to be more than I was now. I’d be called upon somehow, in some way, and demanded new displays of courage.” The title almost says it all in “The Competitive Lives of Gay Twins,” as Michael Gardner discovers “it’s impossible to be just another face in the crowd when there is another face in the crowd that looks exactly like you”—and it’s doubly difficult when both are struggling with sexuality. What should have ensured a bond between two brothers actually drove them apart, as the author tries to distance himself from his more flamboyant and essentially more honest twin brother. And recalling his grandfather’s funeral, Lee Houck describes not only the precise hem of his great-aunt’s dress but also his realization of where his grandfather’s animosity had stemmed from: “I was sure that he saw who I was—gay, creative, my entire personality slightly off-center—before anyone else.”

Vestal McIntyre’s “Mom-Voice” introduces us to the author’s endearingly eccentric family, who find endless ways to amuse and entertain themselves—doing imitations of their parents, acting out scenarios from nighttime soaps. The games and scenarios, he posits, are as much about fun and amusement as they are about keeping the connections and bond between each other as we mature and, eventually, grow apart. Trebor Healey also details the ever-evolving family dynamics of gay kids in his essay, “Upshot,” describing nightly gab-fests while washing dishes with his mother, the alternating attraction to, competition with, and growing resentment toward his older brother, and a father who is mostly out of the loop.

Our first crushes, first infatuations, and first broken hearts are among the most profound moments of our adolescence, because they are often frustratingly silent and solitary experiences. The shy Tom Dolby of “Preppies Are My Weakness” goes to boarding school, where he develops a crush on the charismatic mop-topped soccer player with “lovely dark eyelashes” and comes to understand that “we are imprinted from an early age, that the boys or girls we are captivated by at fifteen, sixteen, or seventeen years old are the types we will pursue for the rest of our lives.” Austin Bunn’s “Guide” is a family friend, and he recalls with fondness his ill-fated near affair with the slightly older man, discovering that “we’re all guides, at some point, for each other.” The introduction of television to Hor-chound Stillpoint’s late-1950s household coincides with a disastrous crush on an older, more popular boy from grade school in “The Boy with the Questions and the Kid with the Answers.” Aaron Hamburger revisits the boys of his youth in “What Ever Happened To ...,” aching to be with them but also longing to be considered like them—popular, athletic, accepted. The night that college student Ray-monde C. Green finally admits to himself that he’s gay stirs troubling memories of the “signs” he refused to see of his sexually confused childhood.

Teenagers are often obsessed with and confused about their bodies, but many gay kids develop especially ingenious ways to come to terms with and celebrate their anatomy. In “The Lives and Deaths of Buffalo Butt,” Todd Pozycki’s wild imagination is the only distraction from his struggles with weight and body issues—and eventually he seeks advice from the lusty leader of an ex-gay ministry. For Alex Chee in “Dick,” the male body is not a symbol of confusion or repulsion, but curiosity and allure, and he “began to do whatever I could to see a penis.” By age twelve, he states, “I had mastered my surveillance.”

For many of us, lost in a world that we don’t quite fit into, we first tried to escape through our pop-culture fixations. In Viet Dinh’s hilarious, ingenious “A Brief History of Industrial Music,” the self-professed high school nerd escapes his feelings of invisibility by embracing late-’80s industrial music. “I could be Asian and still rock out to Meat Beat Manifesto. I could be gay and still stamp like a fool to Nitzer Ebb.” K. M. Soehnlein’s “The Story I Told Myself considers how his obsession with soap operas not only informed his early years but served as a precursor to his later creative endeavors: “Sure, April was miserable when Raven meddled in her marriage, but wasn’t such heightened emotion preferable to the flatlined routine I was living?” So much so that he creates his own fantasy soap opera, which includes the gay blond beauty, Kyle Johanneson. D. Travers Scott explains his childhood fascination with the blood and gore of the horror-film genre in “Growing Up In Horror,” where he finds parallels with his own burgeoning queerness and how “much of horror is about rebellion of the body, whether through sickness, invasion, or science out of control.”

Finally, a few of the essays begin even earlier, when we were first realizing that something about us, something very important, was different. Francis Strand’s “Five Stories about Francis” is a wise and witty mini bio of Francis from infancy to age seventeen, from precocious tot (with a strangely patrician accent) to rebellious teen—told with a Quentin Crisp-like confidence. Eric Karl Anderson (“Barbie Girls”) knew he was different when he “began helping my sister’s Barbie dolls commit suicide,” and goes on to divulge his painfully funny attempts in junior high to secure a social position by dating girls. Mike McGinty describes, in “Peristalsis,” how from the age of five to seventeen and a half he played baseball (or tried to), swam at the beach, had a girlfriend, and dreamt of male movie stars and being a cheerleader (unheard of for a male in 1976 Appalachia). And though his mother takes him to see a rerelease of The Sound of Music (for which he thanks her fourteen thousand times), she still wonders why her son is “so sensitive.” And finally, Jason Tougaw’s (“Aplysia californica”) Southern California upbringing included living on a school bus with his mother, brother, and his mother’s new husband. After an impromptu surf lesson teaches him more about desire than catching the perfect wave, the tan and sensitive Jason finds a new mission and sense of purpose exploring the sandy beach.

What about your story? How did you see the world differently when you were a child? We hope that these moving, funny, and enlightening essays will inspire you to visit this book’s Web site, www.fromboystomen.com, and tell your own tales of growing up gay.

Robert Williams and Ted Gideonse March 2006 La Jolla, California

IN JANUARY WE had visitors. Steve and Sharon, another married couple, had become friends with my parents in Milwaukee, where Steve and my father had worked together at an advertising firm. He and his wife slept that weekend on the pullout couch in the television room. Saturday morning I finished my bowl of cereal, parked in my usual spot on the floor in front of the television, watching cartoons. Steve, the husband, came in from the shower with a thin green towel wrapped around his waist.

“Hey, champ,” he said. I glanced up, and everything in me paused. With green eyes and perfect teeth he reminded me of pictures I’d seen: a man in a Newport cigarette ad, tan, strong, clad in swim trunks. Or the Sears underwear models in the Sunday paper who stood around in their briefs, footballs tucked under their arms, chatting casually about topics I could hardly imagine: fishing? The Minnesota Vikings? But unlike those men, Steve was here, in the flesh, in this room. I gazed at his chest hair, which was still curled damply in places.

“Hey,” I whispered.

“What’s that, Bugs Bunny?” he asked, crossing to the suitcase propped open beside the television. I managed a bare nod. He carried with him the scent of Dial soap and Old Spice, and I heard the Road Runner beep across a great distance. Steve bent over the suitcase, his back to me, and pulled out a pair of white socks rolled tight in a ball, and before I had time to take another breath a thought came: look under the towel.

I knew what was under there; I was in Advanced Beginner swimming with a bunch of other nine-year-olds on Sunday mornings, and had changed with them in the school locker room. But I’d never wondered before about what was under anyone’s towel. The thought was new and strange, prompted by something within me, particular, singular, focused on Steve. I bent forward until my head was near the floor, but could only see the shadow of the towel’s hem, which grazed the hard muscles of his calves. He turned around and I sat up quick, slipping on a mask of innocence. Just watching cartoons! It worked; Steve left the room whistling, clothes in hand. Wile E. Coyote ran off the edge of a cliff. He hovered over the dusty canyon, turned to me with wide eyes, and plunged out of sight.

Later that afternoon we all piled into my parents’ Cutlass and spent a couple of hours sightseeing. I was squeezed up front between my parents. Mark, my younger brother, sat in the back with Steve and his wife, Sharon. She was blonde, fair-skinned, thin and rather plain, and reminded me, in her delicacy and quiet charm, of the teacher I’d had in kindergarten. My father drove, pointing out the state fairgrounds and the red brick buildings of the U of M’s Saint Paul campus, where my father worked as an editor. We’d arrived last winter, when I was eight, our new backyard hidden under a record snowfall, the branches of the maple tree stark against the milk of the sky. We wore moon boots when shoveling and the shingles of our house were the color of French’s mustard. Our last move together, the fourth state in eight years. Running up the Midwestern corridor from Oklahoma to Missouri to Wisconsin to our last stop, Falcon Heights, a suburb of the Twin Cities.

An hour into my father’s guided tour my brother, who was four, whined that he had never in his whole entire life been so bored, so we drove to the Rosedale Mall and wandered together through the post-Christmas sales. Mark and I trailed behind the grown-ups. Steve had his arm around his wife’s shoulder, and every so often he’d pull her close, kiss her forehead, and sort of rub his chin against the top of her head. My parents walked beside them, not touching. My mother threw my father tiny glances every few steps, and I knew from experience that she was upset about something.

Later the adults scouted for dinner in the food court while my brother and I saved a table nearby. Mark rolled his Matchbox taxicab across the table and gave a blow-by-blow conversation of its imaginary driver and passenger. “You drive like shit” he squealed. My brother had a mouth like a sailor.

“Fuck off.”

   “Fuck shit! Stop the fucking car!”

   “Hold on, shithead!”

None of us knew where he got it from. My parents were polite folks from Indiana and Kansas. They had master’s degrees and blushed at ribald humor. I was turning out like them, and while Mark and I had both inherited our father’s scrawniness, my brother had been stamped, as if by a rogue gene, with freckles and bright red hair. The cab, held in his little hand, roared off the table, its doomed passenger screaming in slow motion, “Asshoooooolllle!”

The grown-ups waited in line at Orange Julius, my parents standing just behind their friends. Steve, his arm draped over his wife’s shoulder, gazed up at the menu board, and I watched as he shifted his weight to one leg and leaned against Sharon slightly. I could see in his posture a certainty of himself and his place, here in the mall, surveying the menu’s choices as if everything on it and beyond were available to him. He was an account executive at the advertising firm where my father had worked in Milwaukee, and he stood with his arm wrapped around his blonde wife as though he were selling an image, one I couldn’t tear my eyes from. Sharon smiled up at him and tucked a blonde lock behind one ear, where a large gold hoop caught the neon light.

My mother and father, standing just behind them, were arguing quietly; my father, dark and thin in a corduroy blazer, nodded wearily as my mother whispered something to him, her eyes measuring his expression. My father said something in his soft voice, and I saw my mother’s lips form the words I can’t hear you. A flicker of irritation crossed my father’s face as he repeated himself, his eyebrows raised in effort. He’d been an editor at the advertising firm, and his own posture was stiff and his gestures constrained, moving as though his body were forever on loan. I couldn’t see then that he was handsome, only uncomfortable. My mother frowned, and glanced over the food court until she found us. I raised my hand but Sharon turned and asked her something. My mother’s expression changed, lightened, to hide her irritation at my father. She nodded, ran a hand through her loose brown curls, considering her words. She looked frumpy beside Sharon, dressed in an ankle-length down coat of powder gray, which might have looked elegant on another woman. But the pockets of her coat were stained with blue ink by the cheap ballpoints she carried, and its hem was smudged with dirt from where she tended to get it caught in the car door. Her eyes scanned Sharon’s face, and with nearly imperceptible movements she straightened her posture, and her smile grew in slight degrees until it matched Sharon’s radiance. Somehow she had made herself more refined than the moment before, and I measured her transformation with a strange satisfaction.

Later we drove home from the mall in the dark, our headlights reflecting off patches of smooth ice. Beside me in the front seat my mother turned around to say something to her friends, but then stopped herself. A moment passed in silence. Then she whispered, near my ear, “Aww.” On the other side of me, my father glanced in the rearview mirror. I twisted around, pulled myself up to my knees, and peered over the seat. Steve was sleeping, his head resting against his wife’s left shoulder, his lips slightly parted. “He looks like an angel,” my mother said. Mark, pressed against the door, glanced over briefly before turning back to the window. I looked down at Steve as his chest rose and fell. Something about his soft eyelashes, coupled with the strong, stubbled jaw, relaxed in sleep, stunned me. For the second time that day I stopped breathing at the sight of him, and though I felt Sharon’s eyes on me, I couldn’t look away from her husband. Through the windows, patches of streetlight slid across his face, and with them something moved through me. I wanted to watch him like this; I wanted everyone else to fade away, so that I could watch him undisturbed. I wanted to run my fingertips over the rough shadow of his beard, and feel his Adam’s apple bobbing at his throat. I wanted to curl against him, lay my head on his chest, and inhale the warm, clean scent he’d carried with him that morning, wrapped in that towel, a scent worn and deepened by now. And the things I wanted tangled and intertwined with another feeling, envy; I heard my mother’s voice again in my ear (looks like an angel), and I wanted to be like him, to resemble him, to have Steve’s angelic face for mine; my face softening the people who glimpsed it, compelling them to look at me, admire me, and guard me from danger.

The car turned a corner, and shadows slid back over his face. Somehow I knew I couldn’t have those things, and that knowledge only sharpened my hunger until I had to look away. As I did, Sharon smiled up at me, and for a moment I hated her easy ownership of the sleeping man. Anxious that she’d read my thoughts, I turned back, settling against the seat, my shoulder pressed against my mother’s side.

Rays of orange streetlight moved over the hood of the car and up the windshield. The week before I had stayed up too late watching Donald Sutherland on television running from aliens, pod people bent on taking over the planet. They looked like everyone else but lacked emotions, and as we made our way home I imagined the streetlights were alien sentinels scanning cars and passengers for joy, anger, or laughter. If they sensed the things I wanted from the man sleeping behind me, they’d snatch me up and carry me off to their oozing nests, and lay a trembling pod beside me, an alien boy inside, his skin running like hot wax till his face matched mine.

My father tapped the turn signal. I exhaled, slowed my breath, and held my body still until my heartbeat matched the flashing arrow, my body still, my face drained of expression. My mother glanced out at the neighbors’ houses with her hands in her lap. She tucked her left thumb into her fist, and pushed against the bottom of her wedding ring so that it seemed to dance by itself. My father held his hands at two and ten o’clock on the steering wheel, his eyes returning, again and again, to the rearview mirror.

Several weeks later, in early February, our parents called my brother and me into the living room. Mark and I sat awkwardly on the love seat, and my parents ignored the couch and perched instead on the edge of the oak-veneer coffee table, inches away from us. This was not comforting. My father cleared his throat.

“You boys may have noticed that your mother and I haven’t exactly been getting along lately.”

“Fighting?” my mother added. It sounded like a question, and I wondered for a moment if she was asking for our confirmation, but then our father spoke again.

“We’ve decided to try separating,” he said.    “Just for a while. Just to see,” she said.

“I’m going to be moving down to the basement for a while,” he said. At this I looked up. The basement? Which room? Not the laundry room, with the boiler. Not the rec room, strewn with Lincoln Logs and Tinker Toys. Must be the other room, with the old couch and the mildewed, rainbow-colored shag carpet left by the former owners. We hid in that room for tornado warnings, when the sky through the window wells turned still and green. I tried to picture my father sleeping down there, as if it were some strange adventure, like camping out in the backyard. The idea thrilled me.

“Mike?” my mother said. She’d been talking. “Do you understand?”

Trick question. I nodded to prove I’d been listening, but she looked unsure.

“Do you boys have any questions?” my father asked.

They were sitting so close, nearly upon us, and I couldn’t meet their eyes. Mark rubbed his thumbnail against the love seat’s fabric, tracing the stripes of yellow and green. My father crossed his arms, and my mother’s thin, gold-plated watch slipped down her wrist. Outside I heard the heavy rumble of a snowplow passing the house. The silence extended uncomfortably. We sat there like a family of mannequins at JC Penney. As if someone could carve the living room from our house and set us all down at the Saint Paul Science Museum. My classmates at school would visit on field trips. They’d read aloud from the display case: Minnesota Family, 1981.

The furnace kicked in and heat poured through the floor vents. We stirred, and my parents glanced at each other and sighed, together, as if exhausted by what they’d just put into words. They told us that they loved us and that we were free to go.

For the next three months my father slept on the foldout couch in the damp basement, around the corner from the laundry room and the litter box. It didn’t quite change things. Like skittish animals, the four of us kept to our separate caves, emerging now and then to bristle at each other’s sight.

There were some good moments. Some weekends my brother and I would play together in the rec room, building spaceships from Legos for hours. Nearly five years separated us: an awkward number, as I was neither his peer nor his mentor. Unlike me, he was not particularly reflective, hardly ever quiet, and though I knew how to ignite his temper without drawing attention to myself, whatever trouble Mark got into was quickly known. We had separate interests, separate friends, and for the most part I ignored him. But sometimes I’d show him tenderness, in spite of myself. We’d paw through the pile of Legos, and hand each other pieces the other needed. And when he’d finish a ship he’d hold it before me and I’d say, no matter what it looked like, “Cool.” We wanted to get along and, though I didn’t know it at the time, he looked up to me. But inevitably one of us would say the wrong word, and my tenderness would snap. One afternoon I smashed our ships against the wall, and shoved and taunted him till he came at me. His face was dark, and I knocked him back at the wall, where he collapsed, howling. His expression went beyond pain to something bigger: utter confusion, as if his last and only friend had betrayed him. Lying on the floor, he kicked at the pile of Legos. It hurt to see what I’d done, and I slinked from the room without another word, taking the stairs two at a time. My self-disgust grew and festered, but I couldn’t help myself. One day that spring we fought in the front yard. I pushed him around till he picked up an enormous stick and swung it at me. I caught it with my hand, and a piece of broken bark punctured the skin between my thumb and forefinger. My mother took me to the emergency room where they gave me three stitches. I didn’t tell her that it had been my fault. For years afterward, Mark would mention that afternoon, the story growing till it took the shape of family legend, his voice proud and slightly awestruck, as if his own powers astonished him: I fucking gave you stitches.

One night a noise woke me: my mother yelling at my father somewhere in the house. Drowsy, I looked over at the nightstand as the numbers of my digital clock swam up through the darkness. 3:00 A.M. A heavy set of footsteps pounded down the basement stairs, followed by a lighter, quicker pair. Before, they had always pounded upstairs, to my parents’ bedroom, as my mother followed my father through the house, and I remembered, sleepily, what had changed with us, and where my father was now living. Muffled voices drifted up through the floorboards. I turned on my side and pulled the blankets up to my chin. There was something comforting about burrowing into my bed’s warmth while the fight raged beneath me, as if I had woken to a thunderstorm.

Spring came, though clumps of snow lingered in the shadows under our house’s eaves into April. Then, on the first of May, a month after my tenth birthday, my father rented a small, “garden level” studio in a new, ugly building near his office. He moved out, taking the foldout couch with him, which my brother and I now slept on when we visited him on the weekends. He did not know how to cook, so he bought a Crock-Pot and made us soup and ham sandwiches every dinner. We ate sitting around a cramped table in the corner of the apartment near the kitchen sink. After dinner my father often fell into little trances, staring off into space, unblinking, his face taking on a hard, absent expression. Minutes passed as the silence was broken only by the quiet hum of the refrigerator. My brother and I would set our bowls in the sink and slip outside, where we’d explore the construction site of a new building next door. We’d scramble to the top of an enormous pile of dirt left by a bulldozer, beat our chests, and holler like Tarzan.

Every evening my mother drew a bath. She’d soak for an hour and call to me for a glass of wine. White was in the fridge, red stashed in the highest kitchen cabinet with a few liquor bottles. I’d climb onto the counter, fetch the bottle, and pour a healthy amount into a wineglass, like I was pouring myself a glass of orange juice. I’d carry it through the house and knock on the bathroom door as if I were room service, proud of my task. She’d drag the shower curtain shut and I’d step into the thick steam, walking to the end of the tub where her pale hand poked from behind the curtain, her fingers waiting to close around the glass’s cool stem.

As the summer progressed, she’d call out for a second glass. Sometimes she’d forget to hide herself, and when I’d open the door she’d start, grasping for the curtain, water smacking the sides of the tub. I’d catch sight of the dark shock of her pubic hair, and her plump, pale body lolling in the bath like some shiny aquatic creature.

One night, late, she cried upstairs in the bedroom she’d shared with my father. I listened, curled in my bed, wondering if Mark was doing the same, and the sound cracked open something within me, a gap between the present and the past. I’d be called upon now, to be the kind of boy who could comfort her, and new displays of courage would be demanded of me. But none of the words I whispered to myself in bed seemed right. After an hour she grew quiet, and then I fell asleep.

My father had been gone a . . .