Like proud mothers since the beginning of time, she introduced her son the doctor to all of her friends. For the most part, Kyle didn’t know the women she introduced and didn’t spend a lot of time anguishing over which name went with which face, since he hoped never to see any of them again after that night. Not that he had anything personally against any of them, but he knew that it was unlikely that he and they would have much in common and that they wouldn’t have much to talk about if they ever met again.
At one point his mother was especially eager for him to meet a young woman. He was a bit confused at first as to why his mother was spending so much time introducing him in this case, and then it dawned on him: Oh, shit! She’s trying to fix me up!
Kyle wanted nothing more than a hunky waiter to walk by so he could grab the man, bend him back, and lay a killer kiss on his lips. Alas, no waiter, especially not a hunky one. If he had wanted a short, heavyset Latina woman, he would have been all set, but that wouldn’t work—now or ever.
Regardless of the circumstance and the fact that he was seething inside at himself for not picking up on things sooner and at his mother for trying to do this in the first place, Kyle was a gentleman. He was polite while quiet.
Fortunately for everyone, the lights were flashed at that moment, indicating it was time for everyone to take their seats for dinner. Kyle escorted his mother to her seat and took the seat next to her, letting everyone else fend for themselves.
They were all able to focus on the hubbub that ensued with hotel staff trying to serve so many people food in one place at the same time. Kyle had seen the dance many times—too many times, actually—at medical conferences in and around the Harvard area during his time in medical school, so none of the activity surprised him. His mother and the other women, however, were new to the experience and were all studying the activity intently. Kyle was silently delighted that it gave him a few minutes to try to calm himself and refocus his energy on getting through the experience.
Another distraction came when their salads were delivered. The hotel had done a fairly decent job of jazzing up the simple ingredients. Everyone at the table admired the handiwork, and several asked one another if they knew what particular ingredients were.
The salad course seemed interminable, but Kyle did his best to sit quietly and listen to others babble about meaningless bullshit that meant nothing to him. He had no idea who they were talking about and couldn’t have cared less about who was knocked up or whose cow had won what blue ribbon at what showing.
Finally the salad plates were removed and dinner was served. As they finished eating, the lights of the ballroom dimmed, and everyone looked to the stage at the front of the room. Kyle had no idea who was going to talk or what they were going to talk about, and he intended to do his best to ignore the whole thing. He’d even go so far as to pretend he had an emergency at the hospital that at least required his leaving the room to take a call if that became necessary.
When the speaker took the stage after suitable gushing introductions, Kyle looked around the room to try to study the group, or at least their attention to the speaker. Not surprisingly, nearly everyone seemed to be paying rapt attention to the man on the stage. When Kyle looked up next after momentarily zoning out, he saw the speaker holding a microphone and strutting back and forth on the stage like some prize rooster at the county fair.
Kyle’s wandering attention was snapped back to the present when he heard the man on stage speak of “the sin of homosexuality.” To Kyle’s utter and absolute horror, the man proceeded to strut and rant and babble about one misconception after another about being gay. Kyle was simultaneously appalled and infuriated.
The more the man on stage talked, the angrier Kyle became, but he didn’t have a clue what to do. He didn’t want to embarrass his mother in front of her peers, her friends, but he was close to spitting with anger as the man continued to speak. As Kyle silently fumed, he ran through everything he would like to do to the man for the hatred he was spewing, for all the harm he was doing to innocent people, for all the lies he was spouting.
After about thirty minutes of haranguing the audience, the speaker concluded and ordered the lights in the room raised. He called attention to microphones around the room and invited the good Christian women in attendance to come up and ask him questions—all, it turned out, a part of his effort to promote some new book he had just published.
Kyle couldn’t take it anymore after the third woman spoke in praise of the man’s remarks. Without planning his move, Kyle found himself standing from the table and walking to the nearest microphone. When he was recognized, Kyle stared at the man, leaned down to adjust the microphone to his height, and spoke calmly to the man on the stage.
“I am a doctor here in New York. I want to take just a moment of your time tonight to tell you about one of the patients that came into my ER today. It was a young man. I learned later that he was just eighteen. He was so badly injured that we couldn’t save him—he died. He’d been beaten. Beaten to death, as it turned out. For one reason: he was gay. He’d been walking down the street holding another man’s hand when someone, some stranger, decided to make himself judge, jury, and executioner—just like you’ve been doing here tonight.”
Kyle proceeded to describe in detail all of the injuries the young man had suffered when his attackers had taken a baseball bat to his head, fracturing his skull, among other things. The room was so silent while Kyle spoke that it seemed as if time had simply stopped. All of the servers who had been moving through the room pouring water and removing dishes stopped what they were doing. All of the diners stopped. Every eye in the room was on Kyle. Everyone could tell that something big was happening, even if they couldn’t define what the “something” was.
Kyle didn’t rant. He didn’t rave. He didn’t shout. He didn’t wave his hands. Instead he calmly and methodically described what he had confronted when the young man had been wheeled into the ER. Several women gasped as Kyle described how the young man’s skull had been crushed from repeated blows with a baseball bat. Kyle was actually surprised that the man on the stage was silent. When he looked up at one point, he saw that the little weasel on the stage was nearly turning white with panic at how this whole thing was turning out.
Turning his attention more to the women in the audience, Kyle continued. “I just simply wanted all of you to know that you may all rant and rave about the horrors of homosexuality—even though most of your facts are just dead wrong—but you all need to realize that you’re not talking about a concept. You’re talking about real people. You’re talking about some mother’s son. You’re talking about someone’s brother. You’re talking about someone’s sister. You’re talking about people that have names, lives, identities.
“Nearly every gay person is born into a straight family, born of straight parents, raised in a straight household. No one recruits anyone or leads anyone into a life of sin. As a wise woman has said, ‘I was born this way.’ Some people are born with blue eyes. Some people are born with black hair. Some people are born tall. And some people are born gay. It just is—so get over it.
“Words like I’ve heard here tonight do nothing except incite more incidents that hurt more innocent people. You all proclaim to follow Christ, a man of peace and love, but all I’ve heard here tonight is hatred and lies. If Christ were here tonight, he’d hang his head in shame at what’s being carried out in his name by those who profess to follow him. Thank you.”
As he stepped away from the microphone, Kyle intended to leave the room and walk around before returning to say good night to his mother. He assumed that his little speech had made him into persona non grata with his previous fellow diners. He was quite surprised to hear a scattering of applause from around the room. Many of the people present didn’t know whether they should applaud or boo. They couldn’t separate out the parts of the message into neat little boxes, which was the very point Kyle had tried to make.
The man on the stage
was trying to regain control of the audience but was interrupted by someone else approaching a microphone. “Excuse me! Excuse me!” she said. “I see that the last speaker is about to leave the room, and I just wanted to say something to him before he left. Young man, thank you for sharing your message. It moved me to tears. You’re right that Christ was the gentle shepherd, and he would indeed be embarrassed and ashamed of us. Thank you, whoever you are.”
The applause around the room returned a little stronger this time. Another person approached the microphone and started speaking without waiting to be recognized. Apparently Kyle wasn’t the only child dragged to the event tonight. The woman speaking didn’t identify herself. “I’m here tonight with my mother. I’ve been sitting here listening to you speak,” she said to the man on stage, “and I’ve been feeling so angry!”
“As you should!” the speaker tried to say.
“At you!” she yelled at the stage, raising her hand and pointing. “At you for spreading lies and spewing hatred. You’re telling people that it’s okay, that it’s proper, to hate others—to hate me! I’m one of those people. I’m a daughter. I have a mother, sitting right here in this room tonight. You all look real close. You see me? There are millions more just like me out there. Probably in your own families too. Every gay child has parents. We don’t just appear out of thin air by magic. And I think it’s about time we all start fighting back. I think that the days of you walking all over us, of beating us in the street, are over! Tonight we start to fight back!” Pointing at the man, she said, “And you. You want to talk hate, then you haul your skinny ass down here and we’ll have this conversation. Right here, right now! And honey, let me tell you—you don’t want to piss me off any more than you already have.”
The man on the stage knew that he’d lost his audience, even if the audience didn’t know what to do. Even though the current speaker absolutely did not need any assistance—no, she was doing a bang-up job all on her own—Kyle stopped his exit and walked over to the woman as she stood alone at the microphone. He reached out his hand and grabbed hers, raised his other hand into the air, and added his voice. “Tonight we fight back: We will not go quietly into the night, we will not vanish without a fight! We’re going to live on, we’re going to survive—today we celebrate our Independence Day!” Kyle was secretly delighted that he had found an occasion to use his favorite lines from Independence Day, a movie that Joseph had shown him just a few days earlier.
The audience applauded, for the emotion if nothing else. Not everyone knew what was going on. Some were appalled, especially the event organizers, who wanted nothing more than to drop Kyle and the woman beside him into a big hole and close it up afterward. But the two stood their ground, raised their angry fists into the air, and spurred on the applause. “For all the children who can’t speak!” she shouted.
“For all the sons and daughters! For all of your sons and daughters and sisters and brothers!” Kyle yelled.
And as quickly as it started, there was nothing more for them to say. Dozens of conversations started up around the room. Still riding on the emotion of the moment, Kyle gave the woman a hug and then said to her, “Hi, I’m Kyle.”
“Veronica. Pleased to meet you.”
“You’re good!”
“I wouldn’t have said anything if you hadn’t started it by saying what you did. We made a good tag team. Too bad you’re not a dyke or I’d be in love!”
“No, my boyfriend wouldn’t like it if I was a dyke.” They exchanged contact information and agreed to meet for coffee later in the week. The gathering was breaking up, and Kyle needed to say good night to his mother, not at all sure what her reaction was going to be.
He didn’t have to go searching for her, because she found him. “You spoke good, son. What’s made you start speaking up for the gays like that?”
“It’s not ‘the gays’, Mama. It’s me. I’m gay. I’ve been gay my whole life. I was born gay just like I was born tall. I have a wonderful boyfriend who loves me. We live together, and I plan to live the rest of my life with him. I love him dearly. It hurts me deeply, Mama, that you don’t know me at all. But I want to correct that, so I’m telling you a little about who I really am.”
“Don’t say such things!” she scolded him.
“It’s the truth.”
“It’s that man you had me meet last night, isn’t it? He’s the one who’s filling your head with all these lies! Leading you into sin!”
“You didn’t hear a word I said tonight, did you?”
“I heard every word you said.”
“Well, you go think about what I said.” He leaned over, kissed his mother, and said, “Love you, Mama. Sleep well. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
Kyle was so wound up that when he got outside the hotel, he didn’t get into a cab but simply started walking home. Partway there he broke into a run, even though his dress shoes were absolutely not meant for running and they in fact hurt his feet.
WHEN he got to the apartment door, he was still breathing hard, and his face was flushed from the cool air in which he’d run. The sound of the key in the lock brought me up off the couch to greet him and to see how the evening had gone. I was surprised by the look on his face when he came into the apartment.
“You okay?” I asked in concern as I saw Kyle breathing hard.
“I’m better than okay. I am an awesome man!”
I wrapped my arms around him and gave him a big hug. “That’s my man! But I didn’t think you’d be in this mood when you got home tonight. What happened?”
“I came out to my mother.”
“You did? Holy crap!”
“Really.” After he pulled off his tie and toed off his shoes, he turned back to me and said, “You might want to watch out tomorrow for angry women with pitchforks—just to be safe.”
“Oh? Must have been quite a night!”
“Oh, it was great. I wish you’d been there.”
“So your mother could jab me with her pitchfork?”
“No, my new dyke friend would have stood in the way.”
“Oh? You go to a gathering of good Christian women and you come home with a new lesbian friend?”
“She prefers ‘dyke’, not ‘lesbian’. And her name is Veronica. She said if I was a dyke, she’d be in love.”
“Oh! Are you considering swinging to the other side, babe?”
“Hah! Not hardly,” he said, and he kissed me so intensely that I thought my toes were going to curl.
“Wow. You’re all butch and manly and take charge tonight. I like it!”
“You bet your sweet ass I’m all butch and manly and take charge. I just took on a room of good Christian women and one pissed off Bible-thumper preaching about ‘the sin of homosexuality’.”
“You’re kidding me! Really? Holy shit!”
“I couldn’t take it anymore so I got up and told all of them about a horrible gay-bashing case we had today. And I told them that if Jesus were there, he’d hang his head in shame at the hate they were preaching in his name.”
“Holy shit, babe! You’ve got some huge boulders between your legs tonight!”
Kyle pumped his fist into the air and said, “Bring ’em on! I’ll take ’em all on. Veronica and I stood there in front of all those women hand in hand and stopped the guy from preaching hate in the names of all the innocent sons and daughters out there. God, that felt so fucking good! We fought back for once!” Kyle chuckled delightedly. “You remember showing me Independence Day? I got to use the president’s lines from that movie. I told them that tonight we fight back.”
“Way to go, babe! I’m so fucking proud of you! You are the most awesome man I know!”
Kyle tried to imitate a bodybuilder hulk pose but couldn’t quite pull it off, which made me laugh. “You’re so adorable!”
“What happened to big and butch and manly with boulders between my legs?”
“Get your pants off and we’ll see.”
“I gotta pee. I
’ll be out in a minute.”
I stayed in the living room and waited for my boyfriend to finish peeing and to change clothes. About a minute later, I nearly fell off my chair when I looked up to see Kyle walk into the room—stark naked and strutting proudly.
“Take this, world!” he said, pointing at his naked body as he strode confidently into the kitchen. “And now I’m naked in the freaking kitchen! Hah!” He thrust his arms upward above his head in a triumphant cheer.
He walked into the dining room and said, “And now I’m naked in the goddamned dining room!” He walked to the living room window and pulled back the curtains and yelled, “Here, New York! I’m fucking naked! Aren’t I awesome?”
Standing behind him, I was laughing uproariously. “Babe! I love you so much! Get your beautiful naked ass over here now!”
“I’m not done flashing the world yet! Maybe I need to get a boner and jerk off a little for them first.”
“Don’t do that. You’ll give the old lady across the way a heart attack.”
“Oh, but she’d go with a smile on her face. I mean, I am freaking awesome!”
Standing behind Kyle, I put my arms around his body and hugged him. I dropped my hands to Kyle’s crotch and grabbed his testicles. “Yep, boulders.”
“Yeah! Who’s the man? I’m the man! I’m the awesome man!”
That night when we went to bed, we tried something I had wanted to try for a long time, something that felt so right that night (even though at the same time, it was really scary). With a lot of preparation, I had Kyle lie on his back while I knelt on top of his dick of death and slowly lowered myself onto it. I’d wanted to do this for some time but had been intimidated by the size of the beast Kyle sported between his legs when he was aroused. Sucking the thing was one thing, but getting it into my ass was something entirely different. But that night I wanted it so badly that nothing was going to stand in my way.
Little Squirrels Can Climb Tall Trees Page 12
