So yes, Ryan had a detectible swish in his step, but he also drove a motorcycle that roared when it came and went. Like me, he was a freak and a likely “homosexual,” but unlike me, he was fearless—a wild-man rule breaker in a town where sticking out in any way could literally get you shot.
That warm afternoon, Ryan looked me up and down, and with an audience of North High’s most popular, commanded me to spread my legs.
“What?” I asked. He couldn’t possibly have just said what I thought I’d heard.
“Spread your legs.”
Holy crap, he had.
I was surprised, but I was also a military, Southern boy, and did as my elders instructed. I shuffled my feet apart. He waited a moment for maximum humiliation to settle in. It did. Then he swung the rolled-up poster in his hand upward like a nightstick, connecting hard with my family jewels. I tried like hell to act as if it didn’t hurt, but it was painfully apparent how much it did. Tony offered an arm around my shoulders to hold me up, but he was laughing like the rest. Throughout, Ryan maintained eye contact, his supremacy established.
Somewhere in the blur of the next few moments, I was invited to join Ryan’s crew that night at Denny’s, the only spot in Salinas open after sundown for kids our age. I debated not showing up, but I knew the value of an invite like this for a geek like me. So I changed clothes a dozen times (an impressive number given my collection of only four outfits). When I finally stepped out of our apartment’s door, a wet, cold fog had snuck in and began biting my cheeks. But I stuck to my short-sleeve choice. I was already late. By the time I had walked the fifteen minutes to Denny’s, I was shaking from both the cold and my nerves.
Right off, I saw Ryan and his friends, jammed into the big corner booth. Most of the boys from school now had girls with them—Tony had two, one under each arm. My trembling tripled. Then Ryan made everyone get up and move over to make a space for me right next to him. I foolishly mistook the gesture for kindness and accepted the position. After ignoring me for what felt like an eternity, he picked up a spoon and passed it to his left.
“Everyone contribute,” he said.
One by one, they each added something to the spoon—food remnants, condiments, salt, pepper, hot sauce—until it made it all the way back around to me. It was a vile dripping mess. I added a drizzle of maple syrup and offered the gruesome spoon back to Ryan. He didn’t take it. That’s when I realized that the rest of the kids were staring at me with crooked grins and stifled laughter. The girls under Tony’s arms offered pitying gazes.
“If you want to be here,” Ryan said with flare, “you’ll eat it.”
My first instinct was to run, but I couldn’t take the lonely walk of shame that not eating this concoction would surely result in. I felt certain that this was my first and only shot at ever leading a less than lonely existence, and looking back, I may have been right. So I opened my mouth, shoved the mess inside, and ate it. All of it. And then a little bit of my mom’s toughness bubbled up in me, and I licked that damn spoon clean.
When I look in the rearview mirror now, it becomes increasingly clear that despite all of our ambitious efforts to effect change in our lives and our world, it’s often the small, unplanned events that lead to cataclysms and triumphs. That late-night spoonful of rotten hell would come to alter the course of my life.
II
There’s a moment I can’t shake, a time I could clearly see my footprints changing as I stepped from one kind of America into another. Texas and Salinas were both rather conservative areas. Strictly red or blue thinkers might not have guessed I’d find too many differences, but one had begun to affect me—a difference whose power I had missed, until this moment.
One afternoon in late January, I scrawled an X across the top of a cardboard moving box with a black permanent marker. I drew a hyphen beside it, and added “mas.” Christmas had been over for weeks. It was well past time to pack it back into the many boxes we used to store our now massive decoration collection.
Jeff had proven even better than advertised—strong, playful, loving, handy, and, most important, safe. Bonus points: Jeff wasn’t Mormon, so despite the relentless door knocks from two impossibly cute, celestially concerned Mormon missionaries who’d been assigned the task of saving us from eternal damnation, we stopped going to church on Sundays. Here lived a subtle difference between our new and old homes. In Salinas folks were faithful, but church wasn’t the center of community like it had been in the South, and so it didn’t form the core of conversations with classmates and neighbors. Missing church in Salinas didn’t feel like missing out on life. I had hardly noticed the change, but our mom had.
When I dared to scrawl “Xmas” on that box, my mom looked up, saw it, and slowly and deliberately looked away.
I started filling the box: in went a macramé Santa Claus, a three-foot-tall Mr. and Mrs. Claus made of felt and cardboard, and an intricately beaded Advent calendar. All handmade, all testaments to my mom’s years in the Relief Society, the women’s group in the Mormon Church that she’d proudly presided over before our vanishing act. She hadn’t been called to be its president out of sympathy. Not by a long shot. She knew every crafty skill there was, and our house at Christmastime was a testament to her LDS homemaking virtuosity.
The box was nearly filled when she looked back up and said, “Do you realize what you just did?”
I didn’t, but from her tone it clearly leaned more toward naughty than nice. She wagged her index finger at my X.
“It’s just less letters,” I answered.
I could see her wheels spinning. This was likely the first time she had acknowledged the effect this move was having on her boys. Sure, Marcus was out tattooing FTW on his arm with a busted guitar string while under the influence of weed, Jack Daniel’s, and Marlboro Reds, but that was like looking into the sun—far too hot for her to see. I had just taken the “Christ” out of Christmas as if it were no big deal.
My mom always treaded most lightly when she was most pissed off. So now she very quietly said: “I hope you know I still believe in the stories we shared when you were growing up. In Texas. Just because we don’t live there, or go to church anymore, doesn’t mean those stories aren’t true.”
Truth be told, I had little clue anymore if any of those stories held water, and I was growing increasingly certain some were outright make-believe. “Seer stones” dropped into a top hat to help decode a set of golden plates dug out of the ground in New York in the early 1800s by a horny teenager named Joe who wanted lots of wives—this, the discovery of the long-awaited sequel to the Old and New Testaments? Really?
But my mom missed the community and stability of our old church. She missed the promises of an eternal family and that perfect body she’d clung to for so long. She wasn’t going to let go of all that overnight, not even for the healthy kind of love and family we now had.
I could read those concerns in her tone, so I chose not to voice my doubts. Instead, I carefully wrote “CHRISTmas Decorations” on the rest of the boxes, and I helped her wrap, pad, pack, and protect all of the individual ornaments she’d carefully selected for each of us boys every year of our lives to date. Crisis averted. For now.
Christmas in our family had always been and still remains the time when past meets present and whispers to us about our most hopeful futures. Marcus, Todd, and I understood that, and we knew well that nothing should ever get in the way of its promise. A quarter century later, my views on Mormonism, Christianity, and faith have changed and grown. But each year, far too late in January, I still write “CHRISTmas” on each of the ever-increasing number of boxes it takes to house our family’s ornament collection, and I wrap, pad, pack, and protect those treasures with even more care than I did on that January day in 1989. Because, while we can debate the effects of taking Christ out of Christmas until we hate our own neighbors, we can’t debate that Chr
istmas in America is about family, and that the preservation of family merits our making some compromises and allowances.
But despite my giving in to her preferred CHRISTmas orthography, my mom concluded she needed to keep a closer eye on her sons’ celestral futures in this new place—and thus on any outside influences that might threaten our salvation.
III
Ryan was from a family of immigrants from Mexico and the Philippines who had been in California for a couple of generations now but most often still spoke Spanish at home. They were Pentecostal, but I never once saw Ryan go to church. They drank caffeine and a little alcohol, worked on Sundays, sometimes smoked, and had very likely done the unthinkable: voted for Democrats. One of Ryan’s brothers had even had a child out of wedlock. His family checked most of the boxes I’d long been taught to steer clear of.
But those contrasts aren’t what worried my mom most. What lifted her brow was what was left unsaid.
Ryan and I shared an invisible bridge, that secret Oscar Wilde’s lover Lord Alfred Douglas had rightly observed dared not speak its name—not in Europe a century before, and still not here in central California in the late 1980s. And so, despite our many differences, we were members of a secret family as old as the ages, and we felt that bond, even while refusing to acknowledge or confess it.
Despite this connection (or more likely because of it), Ryan never missed a chance to use me as a foil for his showmanship. He tortured me in public every opportunity he got. Secretly loving the attention, I gave him ample opportunities. I was the Jerry Lewis to his Dean Martin. As the only person in school who didn’t need a fake ID to buy alcohol, and who had the power to employ classmates, Ryan had become North High’s godfather. When I was by his side, I felt confident that if anyone attacked me, Ryan would use his power to destroy that aggressor. So I stuck close to him, and within months, Mr. Mustache and I had become inseparable. I could often be spotted zipping around Salinas, Monterey, or Santa Cruz on the back of his motorcycle.
We toured all over central California, often ditching my last two classes to catch a sunset over some solitary beach in Big Sur. Nature filled the space in our hearts that our peers filled with girls’ affections. Eventually, Ryan and I picked up cameras to capture her beauty and majesty.
In one of Ryan’s shots, I’m sitting on a fallen tree that’s sunken almost entirely into the sand of a beach in Big Sur—my favorite place in the world then and still today. My hands are covering my sensitive ears, my chin is tilted up to the sky, and my mouth is wide open as I scream out into the abyss. I appear bold, uninhibited, and unashamed—qualities I wouldn’t dare touch publicly yet but could experiment with in the safety of Ryan’s friendship. Yes, I ditched classes to do it, but as I look back, it’s clear to me that these adventures were the early hours of a young man searching for the voice he would one day find. And in that era, when our hearts’ desires spelled danger and death for our kind, Ryan and I found ample substitutes in Mother Nature—in whose embrace we never felt oppressed or afraid. And despite Ryan’s cool act, I knew I wasn’t the only one who felt lucky to have this friendship.
My mom wasn’t so sure about Ryan. This was partly because I’d avoided letting them meet, but also because when they finally did, he’d shown up on his motorcycle wearing ripped jeans and a jacket covered in safety pins. He made George Michael’s hoop earrings seem butch. Then, after assurances Ryan wasn’t as old as he looked (it wasn’t his fault that puberty had doubled its dose on him—or mine that it had skipped me altogether), I climbed on the back of his motorcycle, wrapped my arms around his waist, and we roared away as one. My poor mom’s heart.
That night, Ryan finally brought me to the caverns of North High lore. I spent the entire ride quivering in anticipation of some orgiastic boy festival. But when we arrived, I found surprising communion. There was less booze and more hiking than I’d imagined. Finding our way deep into a ravine, Ryan and I came upon a dozen other youngsters—some I recognized, some I didn’t—and we set about building a campfire on the sandy floor. Thanks to Texas and the Boy Scouts, I knew how to build a big, healthy campfire. Soon, everyone had gathered around its warmth, sitting together quietly. And I wasn’t the only one finding comfort in this silence. This was the first hint that perhaps even the well-liked kids in school felt like outsiders in their own ways too.
Ryan’s friendship was helping my confidence grow—not by a tall measure, not at first, but enough to get me to sign up for drama class again. Unlike my theater class in San Antonio, this one had two teachers: a white-haired librarian and a thin man with a harelip who wore snakeskin boots. I proposed we stage the same play we had at my junior high back in Texas, that collection of stories by and about real adolescents. But to my surprise, this California farm town’s faculty wouldn’t allow any content that got near themes like drugs, loneliness, shame, or suicide. It turned out California wasn’t the monolithic, liberal place so many Texans feared it to be. In fact, in some ways, rural California was even more conservative than central Texas—a fact we would rediscover two decades later in the fight for marriage equality.
My new drama teachers preferred I put my efforts into a production of a tired old 1950s melodrama called Egad, What a Cad! Sharing stories that spoke some brand of truth is what had helped me feel a bit less alone for the first time back in Texas. Egad, What a Cad! had nothing to do with me, anyone in Salinas, or on the planet Earth, for that matter. At fourteen, I already knew that the teachers’ suggestion was condescending, tone-deaf crap. So I abandoned their play and hid in the back row of their class from then on, disappointed, biding my time.
Just before the end of the school year, a local community theater put on a workshop for local high school drama classes, and our class was invited. I went along for the free snacks, but halfway through a day of group theater games, the company’s dramaturge spotted me being my antisocial self in the back of their concrete amphitheater. She walked up, bent down to my level, her hands on her hips, and—talking to me like one might talk to a puppy in a shelter—asked if I was interested in auditioning for their summer apprentice program. I could spy condescension a mile away. Without a doubt, this was an offer born of pity, not perceived talent, and I knew it. But I also knew this was a chance to prove my worth. It turned out to be an act of mercy that set a career in motion—another small turn with enormous repercussions.
Now isn’t the place for all of the details (those will come later), but that community theater, the Western Stage, saved my life. I ran lights on Steel Magnolias and The Crucible, worked set crew on Cabaret and Babes in Arms, toured the central coast in a musical called Polaroids, in which I sang the Beach Boys’ “Surfin’ USA” in public libraries and senior homes. I studied under guest playwrights struggling to adapt Steinbeck to the stage and with directors who taught me to be a Renaissance artist—props, lighting, sets, directing, acting—and who eventually helped me land the role of John in Peter Pan, in which I actually flew.
And in subtle and not so subtle ways, I began to realize that Ryan and I weren’t alone. More than a few of the men in this theater company seemed to lean our way. We had a secret tribe—a tribe that still mostly lived in silence and had yet to find its full voice, but a tribe all the same. And for that reason, I began to feel that life might actually hold possibilities. I stopped trying to vanish, and started stepping out onto limbs.
IV
At some point during these school years, I discovered the “foreign film” section of our local video store. It wasn’t well stocked, but it captured my imagination, though not due to the cinematic curiosity the store’s manager likely hoped to inspire. Gazing out from the cover of one videotape was a cute boy under an alluring title, The 400 Blows. Mistaking François Truffaut’s masterpiece for an oral sex blowout, I smuggled our VCR and TV into my bedroom for the privacy I hoped the film called for. Instead, I found myself enraptured. I’d just stumbled into th
e French New Wave and was witnessing something I’d never known was possible—the ability of cinema to shine light onto regular people’s lives. This wasn’t at all what I’d thought movies were. There were no Ninja Turtles or giant sharks. This was relatable, authentic, and undeniably human. So in place of arousal, I swelled with tears as young Antoine Doinel struggled to understand his challenging familial circumstances and uncompassionate authority figures. I knew those frustrations well. The film helped me feel less alone, and for a painfully shy kid, that felt like salvation. So I began to rent more films from the foreign section, and soon I began to dream beyond just the stage to a future making movies that spoke to my own experiences the way Truffaut had his.
By now it was 1991, and that fall President George H. W. Bush announced that he was shutting down Fort Ord, a decision that immediately put my mom’s and Jeff’s jobs on the endangered species list. Later that same month, I opened the mailbox and pulled out something few but my mom had ever seen in our family.
Months earlier I’d decided to try my luck, take the SATs, and apply to a handful of dream film schools. Certain that my casual relationship with school attendance would put me out of the running, I’d done so without telling a soul. Why risk heaping disappointment on top of rejection? I’d thought. Now, one by one, I threw out the rejection letters as they came in. Until one day, something unbelievable arrived: an acceptance letter to the University of Southern California—all the way down in that wicked city beneath all that light blue smog we’d survived passage through so many years earlier.
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