There’s no telling how late my mom had stayed up in order to sneak those gifts out to the car without us knowing, or how she’d managed to even carry them all without our help. But to be clear, these weren’t “mom gifts”: these were gifts we’d asked Santa for, because we knew they were far too expensive for our mom. So either she was trying to one-up Santa, or at only six years old, the jig was already up, and Santa was dead.
Without a word between us, Marcus and I understood that we had to pretend we’d never seen these gifts and hope they didn’t turn up addressed to us from Santa Claus come Christmas morning.
This pressure atop the months of mounting responsibilities and confusion finally broke my scrawny six-year-old body. Within twenty-four hours, I was in the hospital with a blinding fever, unable to breathe. Any of my mom’s personal worries instantly turned to my care. I can only imagine how this late-night emergency-room visit with her seriously ill child echoed her own childhood experiences and deeply frightened her. The doctors took X-rays of my chest and diagnosed me with a dangerous case of pneumonia. They loaded me up with antibiotics, and after what felt like days, they finally released me with instructions to rest.
My mom slept beside me on a makeshift bed on the floor of Aunt Martha’s spare bedroom, each night counting down to Christmas with her drawn-out version of “A Visit from St. Nicholas.”
“ ’Twas the night before…the night before…the night before…the night before Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse…” She stroked my eyebrows to distract me from the pain and encouraged me to dream of a brighter future. It would be years before I understood how many nights she had dared to dream of untouchable, bright futures in brutal hospital wards in order to survive her own childhood, but without anyone there to stroke her brow.
On my second night back in the house, my sweet aunt Martha joined her in the recitation, and then Aunt Josie joined them both, then another relative, and another. My memories of those nights are mostly blurred by fevers, but I can clearly recall that by Christmas Eve, I was surrounded by strong Southern women willing me to recover with their soft drawls and warm eyes.
By Christmas morning my fever had dipped below one hundred degrees, and I could open my burning eyes again. I was awake before anyone else, so I slipped my cowboy boots on at 5:30 a.m. and snuck to the window to take a peek outside. We’d been given a rule: we weren’t to wake any of the adults until the sky was blue. As I opened the curtains, Marcus snuck up behind me. He’d been awake since 5:00 a.m., waiting. Now, as quietly as we could, we watched the sky turn from pitch-black to a deep plum. But well before it became blue, Aunt Martha poked her head into the room carrying a steaming mug of coffee—a strictly forbidden beverage in our own Mormon home. We looked to our mom, who was slowly sitting up in bed. I wondered if she was worried that her sister was clearly going to hell for drinking the devil’s caffeinated brew, but I let that go. Marcus and I had more existential St. Nick concerns on our minds.
Over the next hour, the entire family slowly rose, gathered around Martha’s tree, and opened presents, starting with the wrapped gifts from Santa that had magically appeared overnight.
Todd went first, and got…a stuffed animal, not the puzzle from the trunk as we’d feared. So far, so good. Marcus followed. I could hardly watch as he pulled back the wrapping paper and opened his box…revealing two Star Wars action figures, not the trunk’s Lego kit. Santa might pull through, I thought. But then my mom wagged her index finger, pointing out another gift hiding deeper under the tree. Marcus retrieved it. He read the tag: “To Marcus, from Santa.” And he pulled back the paper, exposing the Lego kit. Our mom beamed, my heart sank, and Marcus and I dared not make eye contact. Our Santa had just stepped on his last rattler.
I’m well aware that most everyone has their “Santa’s not real” moment, but I was quite young, and this was particularly tough timing. With the loss of Santa came that of another paternal figure and confirmation that parents are myth-feeders if not liars. And if Santa was a lie, well, what about God? Which of the untouchable ideas we’d been fed so far were lies? We’d already been worried that we were standing on quicksand; now we knew for certain that we were.
But Marcus and I had little choice but to get to work treading sand, because our kid brains feared that if our mom knew we knew, it might bury her. She couldn’t take another heartbreak now. So I opened my long-desired candy-apple-red Mustang next, and I put on a spectacular show of gratitude…for Santa. It wasn’t entirely an act. I knew my mom couldn’t afford it, so I appreciated it in a whole different way. Besides, by now I had already guessed that my childhood was toast. In my mind, I’d been the man of the house for months, so in a way, I was now off the childhood hook. I no longer had to suspend any disbelief. I could get on with the necessary grown-up business of survival.
Later that night, drugged out of my mind on decongestants, sipping from a mug of hot lemon water, I received the real gift of Christmas 1980: an epiphany.
Sitting at Martha’s breakfast bar, I watched my mom and her sisters make my grandmother’s fruit salad together. They laughed and cried and told the story of Grandma Cokie and her burgundy bowl. And in that moment, I began to understand that there was another foundation just below the ones that were quickly crumbling beneath me. There was a history that I was a part of. I might not have understood it fully then, but I could feel it—that the real gift of this Christmas had come during the previous nights of blinding fevers as my aunts circled around me. I had thought our family was on its death march. Little did I know that my mom’s entire extended family was lying in wait—sisters who’d been forged Southern-strong by the fires of poverty, tragedy, and ingenuity. They seemed inseparable, unbreakable, and invulnerable. And I was left with a growing sense of what “family comes first” really looked like and meant for us—it wasn’t just the stuff of greeting cards and church testimonies; it was a promise that spoke to responsibility, endurance, and survival.
You see, in the corner of the world my mom grew up in, there weren’t many folks with rainy-day bank accounts or good insurance policies. If something went haywire, lenders didn’t leap to help her kind out. Why would they? Few among them had any credit. So all wrapped up into one, “family” was our brood’s good credit, our rainy-day fund, and our most trusted insurance policy.
Sure, we fought among ourselves. My mom might call her siblings sinners for drinking Jack Daniel’s and espresso, and they might call her brainwashed for her floor-length dresses and Mormon undergarments, but the moment anything threatened any one of us, we’d lock arms. Because husbands might come and go, and Santa might drop dead, but here in my mom’s neck of the woods, I now understood that the family I’d been born into, the one she had fought through surgeries and comas to keep, could be counted on. They were my foundation now too.
That’s why you don’t mess with the institution called “family” where we come from. It’s just too powerful and necessary to tinker with. I would have fervently argued the same that night. With a gun or worse, I would have chased anyone who tried to mess with its definition. And now I feel sure that if I had been able to tell my six-year-old self that thirty years later I would be called on to confront this foundational institution’s definitions and do battle with its most devoted defenders and proponents, I would have called me crazy. Such a battle was unimaginable, incomprehensible, and far too dangerous. But that battle would come, and, not surprisingly, it would indeed turn my life on its head.
CHAPTER 6
Grand Theft Auto
I
By the time we got back from Christmas in Forth Worth, the bank had jabbed a “For Sale” sign in our front lawn. We’d been living in San Antonio for less than a year at that point. So with no family nearby and few friends, we dedicated any time away from school and Mom’s fruitless job search to church. Our congregation wasn’t just our fait
h anymore: it was our community, our second family, and our hope.
I was still quite small at six years old, easily mistaken for five or younger. Still, I’ll never forget the details of that special Sunday when the LDS Church pushed the limits of technology to broadcast Spencer W. Kimball—the prophet, seer, revelator, and unquestioned head of the modern Mormon Church—live from Salt Lake City to every church that could install a satellite dish. The buildup was legendary. As if our prophet might see us all in return, everyone bought a new suit or dress for the occasion. The pews were jammed. Our ward even set up overflow rooms with television sets for the sudden revival of Latter Day Saints religious fervor. And come the blessed hour, projected onto a massive screen in the main chapel, Spencer W. Kimball’s image was beamed in, clear, colossal, and exalted.
Marcus was doodling in a pad hidden in his hymnbook, but I paid careful attention to President Kimball’s every word. I’ve always been curious about words. How they work together. Where they come from. Their many shades and connotations. Our prophet often used words I had never heard before. That was always exciting. And on this special Sunday, he used one in particular that caught my full attention. It was a spectacular new word, spoken slowly, gently, and with ample pauses. He used it like this: “Next to the sin of murder…comes the sin…of physical impurity…ho-mo-sex-u-ality.”
I was well versed in our Mormon history. I loved the big, brave, muscled warrior characters dripping with gold and clutching spears. I loved the idea that a mere boy named Joseph Smith had walked into New York’s woods in 1820 and been visited by God and Jesus, who shared all the secrets of heaven with him. Each time I wandered into the woods by the lake near our home, I slowed in the hope that God might choose me as the recipient of His next set of revelations.
But of course, I’d never heard of any tribe called “homosexuality.” I wondered if they had been neighbors with what the Book of Mormon taught were “good, light-skinned Nephites” or “evil, dark-skinned Lamanites.” Not that I knew the details at the time, but until a “revelation” in 1978, skin color actually determined one’s closeness to God in the LDS faith. Black people couldn’t even receive the priesthood. No joke. But at six years old, already vaguely aware that our stories were made up of tribes of relative sinfulness, I wondered if this “homosexuality” tribe had been around when Jesus came to visit the Americas after rising up from his crucifixion unpleasantness in the Middle East. And if these “homosexuals” were around then, why hadn’t Jesus saved them? Why were they akin to murderers? And how lucky was I to finally learn their name! With all of its syllables and its valuable x, I was sure to win a great many points with it in the next of our beloved Scrabble games back home.
My curiosity lasted for about a week—until the word slipped out of my mouth in earshot of a gaggle of my mom’s pals from the Relief Society, the women’s group in the LDS Church. I was quickly surrounded by women with long floral dresses and mouths pursed like cats’ asses. They brought over a well-worn priesthood holder with droopy eyes and salt-and-pepper hair, and before I knew it, he began telling me the story of this mysterious tribe. No, not all of the details I was most curious about, but enough to get it.
There was something I recognized in this new idea of boys who “lay down on” boys or girls who “lay down on” girls. Thanks to my father, I had already learned that cousins “laying down on” cousins led to no good. I wondered if every form of “laying down on” someone was “akin to murder” the way our prophet said homosexuality was.
The salt-and-pepper-haired priesthood holder assured me, “No. Homosexuality is the worst kind. Anyone who ‘lays down’ with someone of the same gender will be barred from the Celestial Kingdom.”
I already knew that the Celestial Kingdom was the highest and most glorified level in our church’s stratified levels of heaven, so this meant one thing: anyone in the homosexuality tribe who was from a good Mormon family would be separated from their parents for all eternity. The idea of losing my mom forever scared the living daylights out of me. Then the priesthood holder added that anyone who darkened their door with such sin would also bring shame raining down on their family in this life. This was a threat worse than death. Death might bring salvation, and according to our beliefs, even my own planet. Losing my family to shame in this life meant isolation and starvation. So that was that: I wouldn’t let this new word cross my lips again, or use it in any Scrabble game, regardless of its point value—at least not for many years to come. But that didn’t mean this worrisome word wouldn’t follow me, ever so quietly waiting until just the right moment to rear its head again, no matter how uninvited or unwelcome.
II
Many months later, as my seventh birthday approached, I was still only three feet four inches tall, a full two inches shorter than the average boy in my Sunday school class, and far smaller than Marcus’s ten-year-old pal who lived five houses down, the boy who would come around after school, dump out my hard-collected bucket of roly-poly bugs, and mercilessly murder them one by one. Sometimes he simply pinned me to the ground and thumped on my chest until he was bored by my tears. As luck would have it, he also admired Santa’s candy-apple-red Mustang as much as I did, and so, like most of the things I cared for in childhood, it soon vanished.
It turned out that this bully of a neighbor was also a terrible painter. When he paraded his new black Mustang around the block, I could easily see the red peeking through his haphazardly applied spray paint. Marcus was no help. He was busy with his new family of leather-clad punks who valued ferocity, the Dead Milkmen’s punk, and Megadeth’s heavy metal over any sort of justice or kindness.
I convinced myself I couldn’t tell my mom because her heart was still too fragile for a grand-theft-auto news flash. But truth be told, my hesitation to strike back wasn’t because of my mom’s heart, or because I was some sort of pacifist, or even because Marcus’s friend was so much bigger than me. Yes, I was quiet, but I had picked fights with Marcus many a time and nearly won. Nevertheless, I merely watched as this car thief walked away with my prize, all the while wondering why I was standing so very still. And then it struck me—I didn’t want to cause this boy any pain at all, no matter how justified…because that vise squeezing my heart wasn’t anger; it was heartache. Yes, he was a bully. Yes, he had thumped my chest until I’d peed my pants a week earlier. But he was the bully with dark hair and light green eyes who I looked forward to being attacked by each afternoon. Sure, his chest thumps hurt, but my heart raced knowing that a boy with such startling eyes even noticed I was alive.
A wave of chemicals and feelings hit me like blue-hot lightning, and for the first time in my life, and for a few magical moments, I felt butterflies of love dancing in my stomach. Then all of the hair on my arms stood up as I suddenly realized that my heart wasn’t breaking because I’d just been robbed; it was breaking because I’d just been robbed by my very first crush.
But for a kid like me on a hot sidewalk in Texas in 1981, that first blush of love lasted only seconds, because I already had a word for this kind of love. The Mormon prophet and his priesthood holder had defined it in no uncertain terms. In that moment, I understood that I was a member of a damned tribe called Homosexuality. And unlike the other kids my age experiencing their first crushes, I couldn’t go on to dream of first kisses, dates, or future families. No, sir. My butterflies died then and there, and a deep and abiding terror took their place.
As a Mormon boy in a Texas military town, I had already heard a handful of other words for my new tribe: “faggot,” “homo,” “pansy,” “cocksucker,” “queer bait,” and more. My freakishly crinkled, far-too-sensitive ears could hear those words rattling around inside my head, and in a whole new way. They were my words now, and none monikers the wise would wish for. I knew that if anyone found out, I’d bring great shame to my family and myself. I knew I was down there with all the murderers and rapists, that I could rightfully be beaten,
bloodied, or worse. And these weren’t overblown childhood fears. Where I lived, I was in real danger, and I knew it. The dark secret this crush had just revealed would most certainly kill my mom, prove my father’s rejection justified, alienate me from my brothers, from my aunts and uncles—and that’s if I survived the physical blows that were sure to land.
Standing there on that hundred-degree sidewalk, watching my first crush disappear into his house with my toy car, I understood with absolute clarity just how close I was to losing what little I had left in this world. My foundation. Sure, I was still my mom’s man of the house—for now, for as long as I could hide this terrible secret—but I was also a dead man walking, a son with a fatal flaw who might take my whole family down with me if I couldn’t hide my truth. That was the burden a prophet, a place, and a time put on my far-too-small shoulders. A brutal weight that would take many a toll, and one I’d have to shoulder for a damned long time in silence and shame.
Fag. Faggot. Homo. Pervert. Sodomite. Pansy. Queer. Mama’s boy.
CHAPTER 7
Can’t Walk, Can’t Talk
I
My grandma Cokie’s words about finishing college haunted my mom as she searched for work. Any work. It was my cousin Debbie who eventually suggested she look into military civil service jobs. San Antonio was jammed with bases: Randolph Air Force Base, Kelly Air Force Base, and Fort Sam Houston. The last option appealed the most. Fort Sam Houston was home to one of the army’s best hospitals. Anne had dreamed of working in medicine before the promise of a family turned her wheels. So she applied for a job there. Any job. After all, beggars can’t be choosers, and with the bank selling our home out from under us, she wasn’t too proud to beg.
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