Queer Greer

by A J Walkley

  “Dammit, Cam, we could have at least stayed and watched the others. It might have inspired you or something!”

  “Greer, stop pressuring me!” he yelled, breathing heavily.

  I was silent for a moment.

  “Fine, Cameron. But, this is the last time I try, okay? Don’t blame me when you look back at this and wish you had at least tried.” For emphasis, I tossed his guitar to the ground – not hard enough to do any damage, but enough to make him spring out of his seat.

  “Fuck, Greer! Why the hell would you do that?”

  It was beginning to rain as we stared each other down.

  “What does it matter? You’re never going to use it anyway.”

  Just because you see the best in people doesn’t mean you’re seeing the truth. Potential remains just that if it’s never tapped into. Such was Cameron’s fate, and evidently I was not the one to persuade him otherwise.

  I turned on my heel and started walking back to The Hatch.

  “Where are you fucking going?” he screamed after me.

  “Don’t worry about it, I’ve got a ride.”

  ***

  Becca arrived fifteen minutes later.

  “Thanks for coming,” I said, smiling as she sat next to me at my table.

  “No prob, babe. Happy to oblige.” She grabbed my hand from its resting place in front of me and kissed my knuckles. “I’m gonna get tea. Need a refill?” she asked.

  Without waiting for an answer, she took my cup, winked and headed to the café bar. I watched her walk away, her perfect butt accentuated by the tightness of her jeans (oh how I love those skinny jeans of hers!).

  Suddenly, I realized where I was and I looked around, scanning the room for anyone I knew. I let out my breath when I didn’t recognize a single person from school. Still, when Becs returned and tried to hold my hand again, I shied away.

  “What?” she asked bluntly.

  “I just… let’s watch this guitarist,” I suggested, lamely attempting to change the subject.

  Becca’s brow was still furrowed in frustration when she turned her gaze back to the stage.

  ***

  “Why do you like me?” Cameron asked out of the blue. We had been doing our homework silently in study hall, for once.

  “Huh?” I responded, not expecting the question.

  “Why do you like me? You know, like, why are you with me?”

  I laughed. “What kind of a question is that?” I thought it was strange for him to be asking me that, though I was unsure of the answer myself.

  “Can’t you just answer me?”

  “Well, you’re handsome for one,” I said, waggling my eyebrows, making him smile. “You’re athletic and, even if you don’t think so, a really talented guitar player.”

  “Pssh!” he scoffed. “Greer, come on. Playing, like, one or two songs doesn’t mean I’m talented. I’m, like, less than a beginner.”

  “Whatever, Cam. You asked and I’m answering.”

  “Okay, okay. Go on.”

  “What makes you think there’s anything else?” I winked. “You’re funny, too.”

  “Is that it?”

  “Uh, I don’t know, I guess. Why? Why do you like me?” I figured it was fair game to ask him back.

  “You’re beautiful, smart, athletic and super sweet,” he said, his eyes softening with each adjective. “You’re not afraid to be yourself. And being with you, well, it makes me feel so proud.”

  “Really?” I was incredulous. “Proud?”

  “Sure. You’re amazing, babe. I can’t understand why you can’t see it. Sometimes I wonder why you’re with me.”

  “Ha!” escaped from my throat. “I wonder the same thing… not why I’d be with you, but why’d you be with me. I mean, you could have anyone.”

  “Well,” he leaned over the table, “lucky for you, I don’t want anyone. I want you.” He kissed me, his tongue glancing off my top lip.

  “Hey!” Busted by the study hall teacher for the umpteenth time. “Not in school, you two.”

  We both nodded in acknowledgment.

  “You’re lucky I like you, because that was a line right out of ‘Dawson’s Creek’ or ‘One Tree Hill’ or something,” I said, patting him on the cheek in a mock slap. “Hey, speaking of your musical skills, what do you think of trying another open mike night?”

  Cameron groaned. “Greer, I really just don’t think it’s gonna happen.”

  “Even if I beg?” I widened my eyes, hoping to convince him with my most vulnerable expression.

  “Even then,” he said, going back to his Biology homework and ending the conversation for the last time.

  ***

  “Why are people so stubborn?” I asked Nick. Home from school, I called him before his evening hockey practice.

  “A lot of reasons. Look at you, G. I mean, has anyone been more stubborn than you when your father was away and your mom wanted to take you out to dinner for your, what? Eleventh birthday? And you refused to go without him?”

  “Oooh, yeah…” I admitted, mentally kicking myself. “Well, but that was understandable. I missed him and it was my birthday of all things. This is different.”

  “What is?”

  I told him about Cameron and how he refused to play music in public.

  “You can’t force someone to do something if they don’t want to, Greer. You obviously know that,” he said. I could hear the sound of hockey tape being ripped off on the other end of the line. Nick was probably re-taping his stick.

  “Yeah, but he’s good. He’s just being stupid because he thinks his meathead friends will make fun of him. So lame.” I was pacing my room, organizing the knick-knacks on my dresser and desk aimlessly as I talked.

  “Maybe it is lame, but still, it’s his decision, you know? Haven’t you ever done or not done something because of other people?”

  Sometimes my best friend frustrated the hell out of me with these kinds of questions. I groaned into the receiver.

  “I don’t know, maybe.”

  “You definitely have, dude. Talk about following someone off a bridge, you always did what I did, even if you didn’t want to at first. We played dodge ball almost every day in kindergarten because I wanted to, even though you really wanted to go on the tire swing.”

  “Yeah, but -” I tried to interrupt.

  “And when we were in fourth grade and we were partners for that project on one of the fifty states? You wanted to do Hawaii so badly, but I convinced you to do Tennessee because I was on that Elvis kick?”

  “That’s true, but -”

  “My point is, you haven’t followed through with things you wanted to do because of peer pressure – sorry about that by the way - so why should anyone else?”

  “Shit, Nicky.” I plopped onto my bed.

  “I know, I’m always right. That’s why you called me, isn’t it?”

  “Ha. I suppose so.”

  ***

  In class the Tuesday after our papers were due, the first thing Mr. Riley did was pass out what he called, “an essay we should all use as a model for the rest of the year.”

  “This student not only thoroughly understood the assignment, but put the time and research into it that it deserved, and, for that matter, that I asked for!” He drove his point home by hitting Brian lightly on the head to my left with the remaining handouts. Everyone laughed.

  When he gave me a handful to pass down my row, he smiled and winked at me. I looked down to realize that it was my essay he was distributing. ‘Shit,’ I thought. It was a great paper, one of my best to be sure, but I hadn’t thought everyone was going to read it! At least Mr. Riley had taken my name off of it.

  “I want you all to take the next seven minutes or so to read this over and then we’ll discuss what makes it an ‘A’ paper when you’re done.”

  Any thrill from the ‘A’ I was obviously receiving for this assignment floated away to be replaced with anxiety. ‘What would everyone take from this? What would th
ey read into it? Would they be able to tell it was mine?’ I started reading my own words through again, trying to put myself in someone like Brian’s mindset, analyzing it with an outsider’s eyes:

  In many ways, yesterday’s Black movement has evolved into the fight for gay rights in America today. We don’t have the right to marry or adopt in the majority of the fifty states. We are the victims of hate crimes and discrimination. But, we’ve never been denied the right to vote. We’ve never been enslaved. We’ve never been segregated from heterosexuals. While the similarities are by no means a complete parallel, the gay community is fighting for our civil rights as well as our right to live in peace like our Black brothers and sisters before us.

  The gay movement includes not only homosexual men and women, but bisexuals, pansexuals, gender queers and transgenders as well. Although gay people may not be told to sit apart from straight people at school, those with ambiguous genders or whose outer appearance mismatches their inner identity feel that separation on a daily basis. Just as blacks and whites were separated 50 years ago, women and men are as well, in a much more complicated way. Now, more than ever before, we are realizing just how wide the spectrum of both sexuality and gender identity are in our society. As transgender people gain more and more rights, more and more establishments must evolve with the times. It is necessary for understanding of the GLBT community to be more widespread as these issues come out of the woodwork.

  Constantly forgotten about by the general public and the youthful GLBT community as well, the aging gay population is not getting the treatment they deserve either. On top of not being able to enjoy the rights and privileges of aging heterosexual couples, they are being discriminated against in such places as assisted living homes - places where senior citizens should be surrounded by comfort and friendly faces. On October 10, 2007, The New York Times article “Aging and Gay, and Facing Prejudice in Twilight” reported that when the gay elderly come out to others in nursing homes, many times they become social pariahs, cast out of their social circles to stew in depression, sometimes even driven to suicide.

  To be sure, we’ve come a lot further in hiding our racism than our homophobia as a country at this point. In fact, it seems as though the segregation of blacks from whites that our parents and grandparents experienced in their youth is still present today in the form of straight-gay segregation. An elderly woman by the name of Gloria Donadello interviewed for the Times article ended up moving to a living center that caters almost solely to gay and lesbian clients after the harassment she endured at her first home became unbearable. Have we not learned from our prior mistakes?

  Segregation based on race was outlawed decades ago. Unfortunately, another form is taking its place. “In Boston, New York, Chicago, Atlanta and other urban centers, so-called L.G.B.T. Aging Projects are springing up, to train long-term care providers. At the same time, there is a move to separate care, with the comfort of the familiar” (NYT). What’s next, separate schools? Oh, wait, that has happened already - The Harvey Milk School in NYC for GLBT youth, for example. Has it come to the point where segregation based on sexual orientation needs to be taken to the courts to be outlawed too?

  That’s fairly unlikely considering the other rights GLBTs have yet to obtain from the federal government. But what’s another solution? “The most common reaction, in a generation accustomed to being in the closet, is a retreat back to the invisibility that was necessary for most of their lives, when homosexuality was considered both a crime and a mental illness. A partner is identified as a brother. No pictures or gay-themed books are left around” (NYT). This is a grave tragedy if this is our only option.

  “We” was in there five times, “our” four times and “us” once. Most of these were in the first paragraph, I realized. I let out a sigh of relief, believing nobody else would pick up on these; even if they did, they couldn’t possibly know it was me who had written this.

  “Everyone done?” Mr. Riley asked, smacking his hand on Brian’s desk to wake him from his nap. “So, does anyone want to make the first comment?”

  “This is bullshit!” I flipped my head around at the outburst from behind me. It was Rich Sylvester, one of the handful of Black kids in our school. “How can anyone think gays are like brothas, man? I’m personally offended!” He slapped hands with his friend sitting next to him, some squirrelly Puerto Rican kid who thought his skin was darker than it was.

  “Why are you offended, Richard? And, please, lay off the profanity this time.”

  “Get this, like, she starts off right, saying gays weren’t slaves and shit – sorry, stuff. But, like, gay people have no idea what it’s like to just be walking around at night and have a cop drive-by, suspectin’ you of somethin’ just ‘cus your skin’s the wrong color, you know?”

  He had a point. Unless you were a flamboyant drag queen-type, being gay wasn’t necessarily a visual trait like race. But, he wasn’t considering the Matthew Shepards and Gwen Araujos who were not only given a hard time being gay or transgender, they were killed as well.

  “That has been known to happen, yes, but this paper also brings up the question of gay hate crimes. Andrea, you mentioned some of these in your paper. Could you explain one for Mr. Sylvester’s benefit?”

  Andrea Dema sat behind me. She was one of those girls who were always really quiet until they came out with one gem of a thought every other class. I turned to look at her.

  “Well, yeah, I mean just look at Reverend Fred Phelps from Kansas. Not only has he and his so-called church been protesting at the funerals of gay people for the last couple of decades, but now he’s protesting at Iraq War veterans’ funerals.”

  “Why? What’s that gotta do with gays?” Rich asked, actually sounding interested.

  “He says they’re protecting a country that harbors gay people or something like that. Basically, he’s nuts. How could he not be with websites like godhatesamerica.com and godhatesfags.com? Sorry, Mr. Riley, but that’s what it’s called.”

  “It’s okay, Andrea. Thank you for that. The point is the gay community does experience hate and discrimination from the rest of the population. It is a documented fact. This does not take away from the plight of Black Americans, but it does bring up an interesting contrast. Does it matter if crimes are committed, or slurs are used against someone whose minority status you can see, versus one you cannot?” Mr. Riley paced across the front of the classroom, looking for willing participants. He landed on Brian instead.

  “Brian, what are your thoughts on the matter?”

  My Jew Fro of a friend perked up instantly, intending to grace us with a stunner of an opinion, no doubt. I, at least, knew that he wouldn’t have been able to read this and know it was my paper; he may have been a Cam’s best friend, but he was not the sharpest crayon in the box.

  “Well, Mr. Riley, I don’t think all gay people are invisible. I mean, look at that Carson dude on that queer show, right? You could tell he’s gay from a state away!” Brian got the laughs he was shooting for on that one. “And, like, that Ellen chick with the talk show? Her hair screams ‘lesbo!’”

  I wove my fingers through my own hair at that moment.

  “We say lesbian in this class, okay? So, Brian is saying that not all gay people blend in with the rest of the population, like their Black minority counterparts, is that right?” he asked him. Brian nodded before resting his head on his arms once more, eyes closing as his class participation time ended.

  “But, Mr. Riley?” I raised my hand. I could hear and feel the blood pumping in my ears. If I had been sitting anywhere else in the room, I probably wouldn’t have said anything, letting my words speak for themselves. At the front of the class, though, I could direct myself at my teacher, blocking out my peers behind me.

  He nodded my way and I stated my position. “Most of the gay community does blend in, like Richard said. That doesn’t mean that we – they aren’t harassed in other ways. Everyone hears people say, ‘That’s so gay’ to describe nega
tive things every day. To the gay person in the closet, that’s not only offensive, but it’s a discrimination that they cannot defend themselves against. Many people in the community won’t tell someone not to say something derogatory if they aren’t out for fear of being labeled and ridiculed even more.”

  I stopped there. I felt like I was on fire, but it was probably just adrenaline. I had never spoken about this topic out loud before, not to mention in front of so many of my peers. I thought I had made a valid point that nobody could refute until I heard –

  “Dyke!” resounded from that same bigot who had graced our ears with the male version of the slur just over a week prior. This time, instead of sending him silently out of the room, Mr. Riley took a stand.

  “Mitchell. Not only was that inappropriate, immature and rude, but you’ve just blatantly proven Greer’s point. And that’s not a good thing,” he added when Mitch smirked. Mr. Riley gently shoved Mitchell towards the door. “You know where to go.”

  I was sitting there, stupefied, my hands shaking on my desk. Mr. Riley apologized with his eyes.

  “I’m sorry for the interruption, everyone. But let’s take something from this. Each and every one of us has a trait or two that other people either wouldn’t understand, or at least would not identify with personally. Say someone sticks to their ethnic group when it comes to friends, so when he comes across someone who is purple or green, anyone different from him, he yells, ‘Hey Purp!’ or ‘Hey Greenie!’ in a mean-spirited way. All of us are liable to be the butt of a joke at some point in our lives. Maybe the next time you do, you’ll think a little harder when you have the opportunity to bash on another person -”

  The bell rang, cutting Mr. Riley off mid-sentence. Everyone started stuffing their belongings in their backpacks and hurrying to go home. I lingered.

  “Mr. Riley?” I asked, walking to his desk.

  Looking up with a grin, he said, “Hey Greer. Sorry if that took you off-guard, using your essay as an example and all. It was meant to be a compliment.”