Mama's Boy

by Dustin Lance Black

  “What is it, Mom?” I asked.

  Her crying quieted. “Lancer?”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t you dare let Jeff in here!” She sounded furious.

  I looked at Jeff, who gave me a bewildered shrug. “Okay. I won’t.”

  She shouted, “Jeff, go away!”

  I nodded to Jeff as if to say “I got this,” but God only knows what I had on my hands. Jeff left the room.

  “He’s gone, Mom.”

  “If you’re lying to me, I’m going to be really mad at you, Lance!”

  “I’m not lying. It’s just me….Can I come in?”

  A quiet beat; then I could hear her pulling her body across the floor, then the sound of her unlocking the door, then more tears. I slowly opened the door, terrified of what I might find inside.

  There she was, my tough mom who’d bravely slayed the world for her three boys, now looking so very small, in a lump on the floor with only a towel wrapped around her skeletal body and shaking. She looked up at me, tears streaming from her beautiful blue eyes, her favorite amethyst earrings still dangling from her ears—but no longer framed by anything. Almost all of her treasured blond hair, her “crown and glory,” her secret weapon with doctors, nurses, and push-boys in all those children’s hospitals, was now at the bottom of the tub. It had chosen to fall out en masse during her bath. Refusing to look away, she dared me to disagree when she decreed, “I’m a monster.”

  Like I’ve said before, I never learned how to lie to my good Southern mom. I knew even trying to was a path to pain, so I just said it like I saw it: “Mom, you look a lot like Gollum”—as in the pale, shriveled, mostly bald bog creature from Lord of the Rings.

  “No…,” she blubbered out, desperate for this not to be true.

  I had two choices: take it back or go full tilt. Knowing my mom, I really only had one way to go. “It’s true, Mom….And with those earrings in, you’re Gollum in drag.”

  A burst of laughter, snot, and tears tumbled out of her.

  I sat down on the floor, held her, and after asking permission, got Jeff’s clippers out of the drawer and shaved what little hair she had left from her white, round little head. I’m not going to lie, it was incredibly difficult seeing my once indestructible mom like that, but I didn’t want her to know that, so I didn’t show an ounce of it. It was my turn to be shatterproof. And when the last of her hair was gone, I put a soft knit hat on her head and listened very closely as she beseeched: “I never, ever want Jeff to see me how you just did. Promise me, Lancer. Promise.”

  I held her, forcing back tears of my own, and made this sacred promise. For now, my job in this battle would be to help her hold on to whatever dignity she could, to help her stay beautiful for the man she loved. This was my family, this was my mother, and so of course I was up for this call to action: the many flights, tears, and hand-holding ahead. At that very moment, I had no real job, just a film premiere on my schedule. And so, I felt blessed to have unlimited time to share with my mom in this hour. But life is never generous with its time for long, and far too soon a second fight for our lives would erupt, this time out west begging my return to California.

  CHAPTER 19

  Cataclysm

  I

  Irony is a wicked little fellow who likes to pay me frequent visits. Milk was nearly finished and set to premiere in the late fall of 2008. Its story centered on an actual statewide California ballot initiative, Proposition 6, that sought to ban gay teachers and any who supported them. Now, on the eve of Milk’s premiere, a brand-new statewide proposition was on the ballot in California that sought to take away the rights of gay and lesbian couples to be legally wed. It was called Proposition 8. Months earlier, California had begun allowing such marriages, and with tears of joy and a helluva lot of rainbow bow ties, eighteen thousand couples took advantage of this opportunity, including Ryan and his now long-term boyfriend, Aaron. They too chose to strike while the iron was still hot and said “I do” with tears in their eyes in a West Hollywood park alongside hundreds of other devoted gay and lesbian couples. But now these unions, and all of that joy, were being threatened. And who was the main funder of this regressive ballot initiative? None other than my good old childhood pal the Mormon Church. Oh, life.

  In Milk, and in real life in 1978, Harvey aggressively went after the proponents of Prop 6, built coalitions of other minorities and unions to fight against it, and boldly put gay and lesbian faces on the front lines of the debate to tell their personal stories, a demonstration of strength worthy of respect. Prop 6 was defeated. Milk’s team won, and in a time that was arguably far more homophobic. But those fighting Prop 8 were almost exclusively putting straight faces forward, talking more about rights than lives, love, or families, and the LGBTQ organizers of the “No on 8” campaign had seemingly forgotten the power and necessity of building strong coalitions in a minority movement. Their campaign came off as cold, often confusing, and spineless.

  I wanted more than anything for Milk to premiere before the November 4 election, so that perhaps the No on 8 campaign leaders, who refused to listen to criticisms, and the grassroots activists out working their tails off, might draw on Harvey’s team’s lessons and correct course. But moving up the release date proved impossible. As Election Day neared, I manned phone banks and roared at rallies. Yet witnessing the mistakes being repeated, I grew increasingly certain that come November 4, Proposition 8 would become the law of the land, and our right to marriage would be stripped away. Sadly, I was right.

  The night after this devastating loss, I walked down into West Hollywood with Ryan and Aaron to join a rally to decry Prop 8’s passage, but it turned out to be a stage filled with the very LGBTQ leaders whose tepid, mostly closeted tactics had lost this winnable fight. Frustrated with their rally’s equally flaccid feel, Ryan and I asked each other, “What would Harvey do right now?” Once upon a time Ryan and I had felt sure that coming out would be the end of us. Now we were plotting an impromptu, aggressive, highly visible, unpermitted takeover of L.A.’s busiest streets.

  With the help of at least one rowdy local elected official, we started a whisper campaign through the growing crowd to march north and away from the rally stage at 8:00 p.m. When that hour struck, one by one, and then all at once, young and old did just that. We turned away from that ghettoized stage and began stepping into Santa Monica Boulevard at San Vicente, immediately shutting down this major intersection. I’ll never forget the supposed LGBTQ leader up on that stage shouting at us all, “Wait! Where are you going? I’m not done!” And how most refused to heed her demand to stand still. Not tonight. Not one minute longer. We marched.

  My heart raced. Something very new for me and for my generation was happening now. Drawing on lessons I’d learned from Cleve. I quickly spoke with the police, told them our planned route (which I made up on the spot), and then helped lead our people and their anger up to Sunset Boulevard, out of the gay ghetto and into the “straight” area, then east toward Hollywood and Highland, a major city thoroughfare. We wanted to shut the city down. We wanted a peaceful but clear demonstration that our people were not going to hide in our ghettos, we were not going to lie down and accept this injustice. I remember looking back at the marchers behind me, our numbers growing exponentially, our hundreds turning to thousands. And with those numbers, we did shut down Los Angeles’ streets that night, news helicopters hovering over our heads until the wee hours. It was fearless, shameless, and undeniably visible. So much of what the Prop 8 campaign hadn’t been. And over the next several weeks, we all watched with gratitude and satisfaction as our anger and resistance grew and spread across the nation like fire—to New York, San Francisco, Boston, even Salt Lake City. And far beyond.

  We could feel it in the air and in every conversation. Proposition 8’s passage had sparked something in a new generation that had never felt the sting of discri
mination before, while simultaneously calling an older generation back to the fight. Now, locked arm in arm—energy and experience—we were rising up together. But as aware as I was that this new fighting spirit was necessary, I also understood from history that it wasn’t sufficient. Alone, our anger wouldn’t create the change we needed.

  So when I wasn’t taking care of my mom in Virginia, I began researching what other civil rights movements had done when faced with similar circumstances. I started asking very different questions of those same folks I’d interviewed when making Milk: What had they done to win alongside Harvey, and what had they accomplished before the LGBTQ movement—in the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the peace movement? How and why were those battles won or lost?

  There were two oft-repeated ideas from those in Milk’s generation of activists. One: the only way to ensure equality for all Americans “in all matters governed by civil law in all fifty states” is to take the fight to the federal level. “Enough of this state-by-state chickenshit crumb begging,” said eighty-year-old Frank Robinson, who had been Milk’s speechwriter and right hand. “You beg for crumbs, you get less than crumbs.” Two: it had to be done now. Cleve and I wrote an op-ed “manifesto” for the San Francisco Chronicle that said just that, plain and clear: “Now is the time for federal action.”

  By December, I felt called to fight for both of my families: my mother in Virginia, my big brother under my own roof, and also for my wider LGBTQ family, whose members were now hungry for ways to channel their new anger. A student of our history, I understood that if our energy was not directed soon, it would dissipate, and come to nothing, but who was I to help direct such fire and fury? No matter what I had in my head about how a movement worked, I still couldn’t speak in front of five people without trembling, and nobody outside of Hollywood gave two cents what I had to say politically.

  And then Milk premiered. And not only did it “not suck balls,” as Marcus so eloquently put it on our premiere night in San Francisco’s Castro Theater, the film received a helluva lot of love from critics.

  Then, on January 23, I rose before the sun to call my mom and watch live on TV with her as Milk garnered a stunning eight Academy Award nominations, including for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. I’d hardly dared to dream that Milk would make it to the big screen. Now I was an Academy Award nominee. I didn’t know it that morning—I was too busy screaming with my mom, calling Todd, jumping up and down on Marcus’s bed, and popping champagne corks up at producer Dan Jinks’s house—but with this unexpected success, I would have a shot at finding both the finances and the platform to help lead. The challenge now would be lassoing that opportunity and finding the courage to use its power.

  II

  I drove into Beverly Hills and stepped onto Rodeo Drive, where, with the help of my fellow Academy Award nominee Danny Glicker, Milk’s talented costume designer, I picked out the most striking strands of pearls I’d ever seen. Not too big, because their recipient was quite small, but not too understated, because I wanted my mom, that girl from Lake Providence, to feel like the queen she was on the Academy Awards ceremony’s red carpet. And we wouldn’t be alone: thanks to the academy’s generosity, I had enough tickets to bring Jeff and his mustache; Cleve, who with new medications and renewed purpose looked a decade younger than when we’d met; and Ryan, who had never wavered, and who now asked, “Girl, don’t you think you owe me a house now?”

  The day before the Academy Awards show in 2009, my mom and Jeff flew in from Virginia. When they arrived at my house, it was the very first time I’d ever seen my mom in a wheelchair. It was a punch in the gut. She had finished her first round of chemo, had a mastectomy, and was now undergoing radiation, which surprisingly to her doctors was taking the greatest toll on her strength. But she was still Anne: she wouldn’t allow anyone to push the chair; she had to wheel it around herself, and she promised to be back on her feet the following night. She showed off the lovely blond wig she’d found, and an absolutely stunning black dress for our big night. She was tickled pink, so I forgot all about her new wheels and let myself go pink too.

  But that night, I found myself sitting catatonic in the chair beside her hotel room bed. Usually she and Jeff would have stayed at my bungalow, but Marcus, Todd, Todd’s delightful new girlfriend, Allison, and Max the dog were all filling those cozy nine hundred square feet. Here in the hotel room, our mom had her own bathroom and the privacy she needed to keep her pain and exhaustion a secret.

  Studying me in that chair, my mom could tell that I was stressed out of my mind, and the caretaker roles flipped back to normal. My mom took my hand and gave me the same advice she had on my sixth Christmas Eve when I was sick with pneumonia on my aunt Martha’s floor: stroking my eyebrows, she had encouraged me to breathe, and to dream of a better place. So now again, I closed my eyes, took a few breaths, and imagined the very best outcome for the following night. No, not golden trophies or champagne. If I’m being honest, I was more worried about winning than I was about losing. I was still very much the same shy kid who couldn’t play percussion sticks in the Jingle Bell Band. A few weeks earlier, Sean Penn, who had already won an Oscar, described the moment of triumph as “like being hit by a freight train.” I wasn’t sure I’d survive that impact.

  Following my mom’s advice, I tried to stop thinking about the million potential disasters that might unfold and turned my attention to a fantasy: What would I have dreamed of hearing from the Oscars stage as a young boy in San Antonio, Texas, struggling in shame and isolation? I let words pass through that child’s mind, and when a word or sentence felt right, when it felt hopeful, necessary, strong, and honest, I held on to it with my grown-up mind, saving it, just in case.

  The next day, Focus Features sent a hair and makeup person to my house. Focus was treating me and my guests like absolute royalty, and my mom had no problem soaking it all in. It turned out that the makeup artist specialized in folks undergoing cancer treatment, and knew how to apply makeup to my mom’s chemo-and-radiation-ravaged skin to keep her looking perfect for the many hours the show and subsequent Governors Ball would take. I put on the tuxedo Tom Ford had built for me, complete with a nice wide Milk-era lapel. Ryan showed up looking sharp as a tack, his head clean-shaven in solidarity with my mom, and a lot of hugs and laughs temporarily distracted me from the reality of the billion global eyes that would soon be on us.

  The limo arrived, but first, I had a special gift for my mom: those Beverly Hills pearls. She protested that they were far too fancy for a Southern girl who used to make mud pies on a tenant farm, but she didn’t hesitate a millisecond getting those bad boys around her neck.

  Loaded into the limo, we headed down the hill to the Kodak Theatre, and as we rounded the corner on Highland, I laid eyes on a scene that helped measure the scale of Milk’s achievement. Not only had Milk proven a box office success in a difficult time for dramas, but now the Westboro Baptist Church had shown up with their iconic neon “God Hates Fags” signs to protest our film’s many nominations and prominent status in this year’s show. It was the same Southern church that had protested at the funerals of Matthew Shepard, Pedro Zamora, and so many other gay icons and heroes—the church that had become the symbol of homophobia and intolerance in the part of America my family hailed from.

  I said out loud to no one in particular, “Looks like our people showed up,” not expecting any response.

  But my mom quickly shot back, “They aren’t really our people.”

  I looked to her warm eyes. She wasn’t divorcing herself from the South, she was divorcing them from it. I held her gaze in silence, so nervous, so grateful, and noticed that she had pinned a white ribbon, knotted in the center, to her dress. It was the new symbol for the fight for marriage equality—a quiet act of pride and support for my LGBTQ family from the same woman who had been so challenged years earlier when I had come out.

 
; The limo’s doors swung open without our even touching them, and there we were, at the edge of the most renowned red carpet in the world. Pop! Pop! Pop! A thousand cameras were flashing. The Latin boy with his pornstache, the soldier with the failed chute, the gay warrior named Jones rising yet again, and my itty-bitty mom from the poorest city in the nation were all heading into the Oscars together. When my mom got out of that car, despite the debilitating weakness brought on by the radiation, she did so under her own power, no wheelchair, just her and her trusty crutches. And together, we swung and walked that goddamn red carpet like the fierce and freaky outsiders we knew we were.

  I was whisked away to do interviews, which gave me a chance to see Ryan, Jeff, Cleve, and my mom on the red carpet from afar. My mom’s eyes darted about like a mouse’s as she tried to soak it all in. It couldn’t have seemed real to her; it sure didn’t to me. As always, Jeff was more focused on her needs than on any spectacle before him. Ryan caught me looking and wagged his finger at me to pay attention to the news cameras. Ryan had a keen awareness that this moment shouldn’t be the culmination of anything but the beginning of a larger fight. From what little I’d dared share of the words I might speak if I won, Ryan knew that there was a good chance I was about to declare war.

  I was shown to my seat in the cavernous, majestic Kodak Theatre. The show’s producers had put me in the front row of the second section—a row for nominees. Then a publicist from Focus Features came running up to inform me that the writing categories were coming early in the show this year. I tried to breathe. I reminded myself that, as luck would have it, the producers of this year’s show were two openly gay men. I thought on that and decided that if I was invited up onto that glossy, intimidating stage, I wasn’t going to pay any attention to the massive red clock at the back of the theater ticking down, shouting for each nominee to wrap it up. I would say what I needed to say and dare those producers to play me off.