by Guy Branum
My parents drove me to Minnesota, I found an apartment, I started law school, and I was off on a new adventure. Then the novelty wore off. There were a lot of factors for what happened after that. Let us consider them:
1. Minnesota is cold. While I had seen snow before in my life, it was only in the context of a trip up to the Sierra Nevadas on a seventy-degree day to “play in the snow,” which mainly involved slipping in melting snow and getting very damp. I was not used to temperatures below sixty degrees, so used the word “winter” to describe what most Minnesotans would call “May.”
2. Law school is very serious. I thought I was going to “graduate school” but for law. I thought it would be like Berkeley. A lot of discussion of building blocks of the law, analysis of the social contexts that created common law cases. That’s not what law school is. Law school is people learning to be lawyers. At Berkeley, people wore pajamas to class and said “Let’s define our terms” a lot. At law school, people wore business casual and tried to memorize the right answer.
3. The produce is terrible. My first couple of weeks of law school were full of mixers and organizational breakfasts, and all of them had fruit plates. I would invariably see a fruit plate and think, “Ooh, strawberries!” because the strawberries looked nice, then I’d bite into one, and it would be white, flavorless ice on the inside.
4. Minnesotans are cold. Now, they are very nice. They always have a smile and a “How ya doin’?,” but they do not want to hear how you’re actually doing. They want you to say “Fine” and turn down your music. Every Minnesota smile hides a judgment; it hides an annoyance they’d never think of actually complaining about. I was used to Californians, who wouldn’t help you but will hug and cry with you. I was used to Jews, who would tell you exactly what they didn’t like about the salad dressing. I was used to people whose spirits were warm and present. But the Minnesotans were like those strawberries I bit into: Their surface was the very image of inviting flavor, but underneath that nice was white, flavorless ice.
Basically, I had been at a shifting point in my life where, after a couple of years at Berkeley, I was finally acknowledging the real forces that lived inside me. I wanted to talk about ideas; I wanted to express myself. I needed to have big emotions and engage in frivolity. I needed that from my world on a daily basis. I liked so many of the people I met at law school, and I think they enjoyed me for all of my nonsense, but we were at different places in our lives.
I may have just been immature. Most of the people starting law school with me had been out of school and in the work world for a few years. One was in his mid-thirties and had a PhD in English, one was a former sheriff in his mid-fifties, but most of them were twenty-seven-year-olds who’d decided they wanted middle-class prerogatives and were willing to work hard for three years to make that happen. Meanwhile, there was a twenty-two-year-old there because his mom told him to.
Here’s a thing no one ever tells you about law school: It’s just like high school. I get it, people rarely tell you anything about law school except “It was expensive” and “I went there,” but you know how the people on How to Get Away with Murder are always researching real-life crimes and bludgeoning people to death with trophies? You will be shocked to learn that’s not what happens in law school. Here’s what happens in law school:
You have lockers. Like lockers, so you can keep all of your gigantic case books in one place and don’t have to carry them around.
You have assigned seats. Like it’s goddamned ninth-grade homeroom. At the beginning of class, you either get to pick a spot or you’re lined up alphabetically, and where you sit is where you sit for the rest of the year.
You take classes with the same people. This isn’t college, where you decide your schedule. One semester at Berkeley, I took only Tuesday and Thursday classes so I could really open up my weekends.4 In law school, for your first year, they put you in a “section,” and you all have classes with each other from eight in the morning until four or five at night.
It’s intimate. Some law schools are bigger, but mine was somewhere around 400 people, which meant 130 of them were in my year, which meant you saw the same people all day long. At Berkeley, there were 400 people in my History of Europe survey class. I saw 400 people before I got out of bed every morning. At Berkeley, there was always someone new and dazzling to meet, and in law school, you had met pretty much everyone by the third day. You know the nice stable boyfriend the girl has at the beginning of a romantic comedy, but then she realizes life has more to offer her, so she leaves him? That’s essentially everyone in law school, just a bunch of Bill Pullmans, Tate Donovans, and Greg Kinnears.
There was one thing I liked about law school, though. The Socratic method.5 This is the style of discourse Plato had Socrates use in his dialogues, I think, but what it means is just teaching something by asking a lot of questions. It also meant that class lectures weren’t just lectures, they were improvised talk shows. At any given time, a professor could turn his or her steely gaze upon you, and you had to sink or swim on your own merits. I liked that part.
But mostly, I hated my life. I hated where I lived, I hated what I did every day, I hated that I didn’t have any good friends, I hated that I didn’t have any fun left in my life. As time went on, I also began to recognize that my lack of enthusiasm for law school might mean I wouldn’t love being a lawyer enough to be good at it, and that scared me deeply. Spending my life in a career I didn’t love would be hard, but spending my life doing something I’d be mediocre at . . . that was chilling. All of these hatreds were melding together into a worldview devoid of joy; I was scared.
At the University of Minnesota Law School, the honor code mandates that you can use only study materials to which you contributed at least 25 percent. What this means is that everyone is in a four-member study group. It’s cataclysmically important. This four-person team is your eyes and ears in class. They gossip, they research, they tell you when you need to get your shit together. And when study groups formed . . . I was left without a dance partner. First finals came, first grades came. Academically, I was doing fine but not amazing; emotionally, I was failing.
Look, let’s not catastrophize. After first semester, there were a couple of key breakups that shattered social stability and left some of the best and brightest scraping to find new study groups. I landed in a great one. There was Tara, a savvy but grounded Wisconsinite who always knew the right thing to say; Bryan, a scruffy San Francisco bike messenger with two dogs and the coolest wife in America; and Rachel, a Minnesota Jewess (that means she’s still half-Norwegian) with a keen mind and quality one-liners. I had found a little family, but I spent most of my time complaining to them.
A cloud was growing inside me. I had always experienced depression, I think, but no one in Sutter County in 1990 had been looking at a fourteen-year-old and saying, “Oh, yes, he satisfies five of the nine diagnostic categories for major depression.” They would’ve just said . . . I guess they probably would’ve just said I was weird. I was weird enough that no one was really paying attention to how my mood drifted around in that weirdness.
The truth is that my brain has a likelihood to go into periods of depression when I stop being able to sleep, can’t get things done, and obsess over external obstacles and internal inadequacies. I lose the ability to get happy. I get sad for no reason. I get sad when happy things happen. During the longest period of unbroken success in my life, when I was on Chelsea Lately and mildly famous and had great friends and went out a lot, on the very night I was celebrating getting hired to write a feature screenplay,6 at this time when everything was going right, I realized I was still slightly sad. I made myself remember that. “Even now, you are sad, Guy. The sadness is not a reflection of the world; it is in you.”
That is what I know now. Then, I was a shithead. And I was sad; nothing gave me pleasure. I wasn’t noticing the ways that this sadness was showing up in my physical life. Lack of energy. Lack of sleep. I didn’t thi
nk about why they were happening, I was just mad at myself that they were true.
There’s another ingredient to this story that we have to mention. A revolution more powerful than my little depression, a catalyst that would have forced these developments whether I liked them or not.
In 1986, Senator Al Gore invented a system of tubes we now refer to as “The Internet.” Twelve years later, when the events of this chapter were taking place, said system of tubes had advanced to a point when one could, with patience and dial-up service, download a naked photo of a muscley guy over the course of about ten minutes, and steal a song with breezy efficiency in just under two hours.
Here’s how old I am: I remember being in a physical anthropology class in my second year at Berkeley. A girl leaned over to another girl and explained that she was in this very cool class: “It’s about the information superhighway,” she said, stressing every syllable. I kind of knew what that meant. I had an email address and had learned how to check message boards for information about Janeane Garofalo’s career.7 It would be years before I thought to use the anonymity and access of the Internet to start probing the meaning of my attraction to men.
A big part of this was just our old friend denial. As I have said, my brain was split down the middle: It knew full well that I was only and exclusively and explosively attracted to men. It remembered that time I’d called a hot guy from student government and not said anything just so I could hear his voice and be in his life for a moment. It knew about those muscle-magazine photos on the wall of the high school weight room and just how much they meant to me.8 It was also, simultaneously, very certain I was not gay. What gay is, that’s not me. That’s other people, weird people, bad people.
Also, the Internet was terrible. I have already made a hack “dial-up was slow” joke, but I must underline the point for my younger viewers. The summer before I went to law school, I was living at my parents’ house and had finally worked up the nerve to use the Internet to get naked photos of men. Some will rail against this broad presence of the salacious online, but I must respect it. The desire of people with dicks to look at the stuff that turns us on is a potent fuel that powered the Internet bubble that became Mark Zuckerberg’s fortune and the precipitous rise and fall of Pets.com. Yeah, stealing music is cool, but online porn is the stack of cinder blocks that built our current culture.
And the thing is, in the long run, online porn is why I can get married in this country. It’s why we have an openly gay U.S. senator and a whole slate of Ryan Murphy productions on FX. In a history department, they teach you that the printing press changed Europe for centuries afterward. The printing press made pamphleteering possible in a way that broke religion, economics, and politics and catapulted us into a world of protest and revolution. The printing press executed Marie Antoinette, shoved the Catholic Church out of Northern Europe, and set up Karl Marx and Adam Smith to fight for control of the globe. The Internet did the same in a number of ways, but noteworthy here is its effect on gayness. Basically, dial-up was the beginning of the end for the closet. Once gays could safely, anonymously dip our toes into gayness, we could learn to accept it within ourselves and be open, and for any holdouts, the Internet was also full of the thing even the most closeted of gays was hankering for: porn.9
That night at my parents’ place, I tried to download a photo. It was a black-and-white photo of these twins10 frolicking with each other. The twins actually became medium-famous and were featured in some Old Navy commercials with Tia and Tamera, then I think they had the Internet scoured to remove all the photos of them with their dicks out. What I am sure of is that they were the sexiest thing I’d seen to that date, and it took a half hour for that photo to download just to the nipples-visible level. I gave up and came. I didn’t have time to wait for dick.11
A year later, at the end of my first year in law school, I’d become even more adventuresome with my Interent explorations. As we will discuss later in the book, I regularly went into gay chat rooms on AOL. Yes, I know, I am old and un-tech-savvy. Half the people I went to college with became tech billionaires, and I was using an AOL CD to hit on guys in Australia. Also, I always went into said chat rooms with a fake identity. If I revealed even the smallest fact about myself, someone would clearly piece together my real identity and immediately call my mother to tell her that I wanted to fuck in the poop hole.
My depression was compounded by this hunger and had grown more concrete through exposure to chat with real gay guys. I wanted a whole life, but I knew I was too scared to take the step. Well, I didn’t fully KNOW this tension was fucking with me, but the parts of my head that were broken apart from each other, the part that knew I liked sexy-twin nipples and the part that told me what my identity was, they were starting to grow back together.
Three events changed things.
The first is that I got a nice, stable job working for the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office as a summer law clerk. It wasn’t as glamorous or lucrative as what my friends were making as summer associates, but it did mean I had an income. I knew that if I ever said anything to my parents about My Secret Shame, they would leave my life to one extent or another. I am a child of the working class, I know the first thing you figure out is money.
The second event was a party. For the Fourth of July, my friend Mike invited a bunch of people from the law school to his parents’ large and glorious home by the banks of Lake Minnetonka. I made guacamole, which in Minnesota in 1999 was considered a form of witchcraft. I drank beer and swam and had fun. Mike, our host, was shortish and athletic and attractive, so I was stealing memories of what he looked like to masturbate to later. The closeted homosexuals are a diligent and resourceful people. He was cuddling with his girlfriend, Mona, and sharply, searingly, I became aware that I would never have that.
Tearing something apart is supposed to hurt, but in this situation, it was the reverse. I was putting together that my life as I was leading it would mean I would never have a relationship, never have love, comfort, cuddling. It burned. My brain, already pushed by my life in Minnesota into the deeper end of depression, seized upon this truth. And I couldn’t say a word about it to anyone. My best friends in Minnesota, Tara, Bryan, Rachel, were all there, but I couldn’t say anything, because my very problem was that I couldn’t say anything.
(For the record, Mike and Mona are still together, and whatever the state of their marriage may be, I am so glad to know that the relationship that triggered this, well, let’s use it, epiphany in me was the real deal. Also, according to photos on Facebook, Mike has kept shit tight.)
That was not enough. I needed further knife-twisting. I needed a different character of motivation. If we know anything about Guy Branum by this point, it’s that he does not learn things from experience. He learns things from books.
Every day at work, I had an hour for lunch. I would get food, then go to the one used bookstore in downtown Minneapolis and read. It’s what lonely people did before we had phones with the Internet on them. I was, in July 1999, reading a book about the Bloomsbury Group, and I got to a section about E. M. Forster’s sexuality. It recounted two things that were of particular note to me:
1. At one party, E. M. Forster left early because, he said, he needed to put his mother to bed. As he left, Virginia Woolf is quoted as quietly muttering to her sister, “The midlife of buggers is a thing not to be contemplated without some degree of horror.”
2. It told the story of Forster losing his virginity at the age of thirty-eight to an Egyptian trolley car conductor.
“That will be me,” I thought. “If I keep going like I’m going, more years will slip away. I’ll keep doing what I’m supposed to be doing, and I’ll do it so long that I will never have a life.”
My life was miserable, and I didn’t know how to fix it. I didn’t know how I’d ask someone to help. Something had to change, so I resolved to change the one thing I knew had to change. July fourth was a Sunday. I called the following Sunday, July eleven
th.
My mom cried. Moms always cry. Maybe not every mom, maybe there’s some cool downtown Manhattan mom who throws up her arms in joy and suggests that her sixteen-year-old son date one of the twenty-nine-year-old gallerists she works with, but for just about everyone I know, their mom cried.12 And when it’s happening, you feel like ice. You know when Annie Lennox sings “Let the wind blow through me” in “Walking on Broken Glass”? That’s what it felt like.
But now that I know all moms cry, I wonder if it’s different. Maybe moms aren’t crying because you’re breaking their heart; they’re just crying like they would cry at a wedding. They’re crying because life has changed, and that needs to be acknowledged through prolactin and salt.
Nah, my mom was crying because I broke her heart.
First of all, I didn’t tell them I was gay. I said I was bisexual, then twenty minutes later, I made clear that I had never really been turned on by women in any way.13
My mom said, “Are you trying to hurt me? Because if that’s what you’re trying to do, you’ve succeeded.”
My dad said, “What? Did God make a mistake?” And I said, “No, you did.” And my mom, to some extent, still believes that if my father had not rhetorically fumbled so hard at the beginning of this, they might have successfully argued me out of homosexuality.
That’s what they tried to do. They tried to argue me out of being gay. They tried to shame me and threaten me. They let me know that they were no longer possible financial support, just as I’d suspected. For weeks and months afterward, my parents let me know that there was no compromise. If there was a me that was gay, they didn’t want it. Finally, they resorted to the final tool. They stopped loving me as much.
