by Guy Branum
Let us first address the fact that they could have just never spoken to me again. Lots of parents do that. My parents thought they were being bold and liberal for not doing that. Their generosity was continuing to speak to me until the point at which I said anything incorporating the idea that I might be gay or date guys. And yes, they needed these ideas to be separate, because they deeply, fundamentally believed that my homo178sexuality was an affectation I just wanted to bring up to hurt them and seem cool at parties.14 It could not have a practical meaning in my life. I had made so much of my life invisible to them for such a long time that any time I tried to make it visible, they were horrified.
And they did stop loving me as much. You can say, “Guy! They never stopped loving you.” You don’t fucking know. And I didn’t say they stopped loving me. I’m saying they withdrew. They became cold. They hardened their hearts, like when God hardened Pharaoh’s. Their sympathy was gone, their interest gone. As I was sliding into the hardest period of my life, the two people best positioned to be there for me let me know that wasn’t an option.
There is little good art about coming out. Yes, it’s the only story we’ve got, and we sure do put it in our one-man shows, but we can’t represent it. The people who have experienced it cannot have enough distance to comment on it. Also, it is a moment of raw feelings. “Raw” doesn’t capture what I’m trying to say. Rather, let us say it is an act of graphic emotional nudity with no poise or sophistication. It’s snot-dripping-out-of-your nose emotions, and gay men don’t like those. We like watching Viola Davis experience them, but only because we never let ourselves be that honest. We are creatures with the option of hiding, and even when we’re trying to be frank about a moment like this, we’ll always retreat to the safety of a bland smile and presumed normalcy.
There’s an exception: Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” You know and are familiar with “Bohemian Rhapsody.” You loved it in Wayne’s World. You may say, “That’s not what it’s about!” or the gentler “Is that what it’s about?” But you will skeptically hold to a construction of the song that is not about gayness. You know Freddie Mercury was gay, or you may insist he was bisexual, because he was married to a woman and no gay man has ever been married to a woman.15
Also, you have no idea what “Bohemian Rhapsody” is about. You don’t have some rival theory, you just know that your nonreading is more valid than my reading (which we still haven’t gotten to because I’m fighting with you about opinions you probably don’t have) because I’m not allowed to just say something’s gay when it isn’t explicitly gay.
That’s one of the magnificent things about “Bohemian Rhapsody.” It couldn’t be explicitly gay. Freddie Mercury, like all other gay guys, had this bundle of emotions that he could not let the world see directly, because if they saw, they would be horrified. He also needed to share them, just as much as I needed to share them in 1999, maybe as much as I need to share them now, so he created a puzzle with all the pieces a gay guy would need to create art that could soothe him but enough complexity to be plausibly deniable.
“Bohemian Rhapsody” is a breakup song for your mom. Let’s do a close reading.16
The speaker in the song begins by asking if what he’s experiencing is real or fantasy. He’s talking about his sexual desires. He is fantasizing about men, but is it part of the real life of who he is, or just his brain playing a trick on him? Like me at any point before July 11, 1999. He, for the first of many times, identifies his sexual desire as something that has been thrust upon him. He cannot deny the landslide of emotions men give him, or the simple reality of what makes his dick hard. A line after speculating that this whole thing is fantasy, he admits it’s not just reality but inescapable. Like me on July 11, 1999.
Okay, why is the person who’s about to sing you “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the most melodramatic song of all time, saying nothing really matters to him? Why is this person about to sing of pain telling you he needs no sympathy? This passage is all about the emotional displacement of closetedness. It’s about the managed mind of the closet case that divests itself from an emotional world it can’t participate in. He’s telling himself he needs no sympathy, because there’s going to be none for him if he asks for it. The singer in “Bohemian Rhapsody” is looking up at the sky for the same reason I spent my teen years studying for the SAT too much: the slim hope that there might be something else out there better than the life you’re currently living. A place where you fit.
Now we get to the mama. He’s telling her or longing to tell her. “But Guy,” you say, “this isn’t about sex. He says he has a gun, it’s a crime. He’s sad because he committed a crime.” And I say, “Yes, he is sad that he committed a crime, because that’s what gay sex was in Britain in the 1970s. His dick was as deadly a weapon as a pistol. It turned the other dude into a nonperson as his cum verified that dude’s homosexuality.”
I know it’s not an easy or transparent reading, but one of the things I’m saying is that Mercury had to code this song to make it not obviously gay, or it would have destroyed him. Worse, revealed him.
The key is the word “my.” He didn’t pull “the” trigger, he pulled “my” trigger. It links him to the bullet/orgasm/ejaculation in an intimate way.
If he’s talking about a literal murder, why does he seem to be saying he’s thrown his life away? Again, one might say, “Because he committed a crime.” The singer doesn’t seem to be worried about being caught, though. It seems that whatever he’s done to throw away his life was completed with the act committed by his “gun.”
The preoccupation of this song is deadening emotions. The singer who has already expressed his ability to not be emotionally invested is now urging his mother to do the same. She’s crying, and as we previously established, moms always cry. Whatever he’s done means he needs to leave, and his mom needs to deaden her emotions around that fact.
Then we get to the spine shivers and body aching. This is how we know it’s not a literal murder. Murders don’t send shivers down your spine or make your body ache. That’s what dicks do, that’s what dicks in your butt do, that’s what sexual desire does. The singer’s sexual desire is the truth he must face, and after the brief refractory period since he “killed” that man with his “gun,” the desire is back.
The singer does not want to die, but he also says he wishes he’d never been born. It’s a strange paradox. One could say he fears the punishment of the state for the murder he previously committed, but you’d be the one bringing the state into this. The singer’s words make clear that whatever death this is would be caused by nothing more than the actions he’s already discussed. He is also unmade by the act of gay sex. As much as he is a murderer, he is a suicide.
Then the song changes. It lets go of gravity and depression and starts being fun. He sees a man’s “little silhouetto.”
A dick. I think it’s a dick. It’s a little silhouette of a hard dick inside pants. Is it his, is it someone else’s? I don’t care. After all the emotional hand-wringing of the song, finally, this kid has something to be positive about. In this portion of the song, Mercury is throwing a lot of proper nouns at us. Everyone likes all these cool-sounding words, but no one can ever give you a plausible reading for what they mean together. Because keeping his meaning opaque is really important to Mercury, I think he uses these words as a kind of collage to give us ideas of his construction of gay sexuality, but not a clear narrative.
Scaramouche, of course, is a commedia dell’arte character. He’s a clown. Is the singer saying sexual desire makes us all clowns? Maybe. Scaramouche also showed up as a popular puppet in Punch and Judy shows. He was always getting beaten by Punch, which led to Scaramouche becoming a term for a type of puppet with an extendable neck. A thing that gets beaten and has an extendable neck, you say? Maybe the little clown he’s speaking of is a dick, and I think we know what kind of fandango he’d want to do with that.
This person who keeps saying nothing matters to him is deep
ly frightened once the “thunderbolts and lightning” start. If the thunderbolts and lightning are the electric desire that comes from sex, the fear is what that sex might mean to the outside world. That is immediately followed by name-checking Galileo, a dude who was tried for heresy by the Catholic Church. Then he name-checks a famous comic lover. The forces that are working on the singer are making him a heretic and a fool.
Then the song shrinks again to describe his emotional impoverishment. The singer cycles from the empowered invocation of these figures back to his pathos. The forces that created the thunderbolts and lightning are a monstrosity that threaten him and his family. He’s not indulging in it; he’s begging to be saved.
Now the song approaches its apex. The singer has been kidnapped and spirited away by his desire. He’s a damsel getting tied to the railroad tracks. He uses the word “bismillah,” which is an Arabic word meaning “in the name of God.” The forces that hold him are so demonic, it’s going to take God to save him.
But God isn’t strong enough to save him. The forces will not let him go, and Beelzebub, Satan himself, has identified him for torture. The singer is having to tell his mom that however much she might hope he could use self-discipline and self-hatred to manage his sexual desire, there is a devil of desire that will not release him.
Then we turn to the resolution, which is also the most delicious part of the song. He is indignant about the lack of empathy he’s facing from the people around him. He references stoning, a biblical punishment, and spitting in his eye, an assault to personal dignity. His family and loved ones want the right to humiliate him for his desires. That’s when the singer wants to “get out” of the situation and abandon his audience. Our singer finally lashes out at his mother. He’s gone through a drama of self-hatred to illustrate his lack of control, but now he takes control enough to blame his mom for not being able to deal with the situation.
He’s mad that she’s doing this, but he still calls her baby. His injury and his love for the person who is injuring him are at war, so the only option is to leave and start suppressing a new set of emotions.
That’s why we return to the cries of “nothing really matters.” The gay man must return to suppressing his emotions to get through a new situation. Before he was hoping he could live without a lover; now he must accept that wanting a lover means he can’t have a mom.
I didn’t become “easy come, easy go.” I struggled, I strove, I fought tooth and nail with my parents, and my depression got worse and worse.
There was one cute gay boy in my law school. He seemed impossibly tall and impossibly handsome and so very good at being sophisticated and gay. I got a crush on him; I’d never gotten a crush before, and it overwhelmed me. The thunderbolts and lightning from the song. And he was kind and patient with my loudness and obsession until he couldn’t take it anymore and told me he’d never be into me.
I cracked, I crashed. I drank too much and sent a message of help to everyone in my email contacts list. It was a bad thing, but it also sent me to the campus health service for mental health care. I went to a therapist, and I went on Prozac.
Prozac helped me become easy come, easy go. It helped me make the emotions the right size so I could move past them.
But I wonder, like the singer in “Bohemian Rhapsody,” did I go too far? Did I release my hope to protect my heart and, in the process, insulate myself too much?
There’s only one way to find out. If you’re an attractive, funny, resilient gay man, try making me fall in love with you. I’m sure I’ve got some fandango left in me.
* * *
1. If my editor had been allowed to dock portions of my book advance for lateness, I would currently owe Atria Books tens of thousands of dollars.
2. Besides, what better way to spice up a banal coming-out story than with a detailed account of attending law school in the Midwest?
3. After the Chelsea Clinton incident, their academic senate formally condemned me.
4. I did not go out or have fun on weekends. I primarily watched independent films on IFC and anything Comedy Central had to offer me.
5. I’m sure this isn’t the aspect of ancient Greek culture you expected to be most discussed in my coming-out story.
6. That didn’t work out, but we’ll have to leave that for another book.
7. I deeply cared about Janeane Garofalo during the nascent years of the Internet. We all did.
8. The most truly, deeply handsome of these bodybuilder photos my coach had put up in the weight room was of a guy in saffron-colored trunks posing in front of some ornate European architecture. I thought, “This man is so perfect, he could never be gay.” Turns out that photo was of Bob Paris, the first openly gay competitive bodybuilder. Please keep this in mind when you read the Babette’s Feast chapter.
9. If Johannes Gutenberg had the forethought to print gay porn instead of bibles, the gay civil rights movement may have happened much, much sooner, and he definitely would have made more guilders.
10. The Brewer twins.
11. Waiting for Dick is, of course, the title of my erotically charged, all-nude adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s classic Waiting for Godot.
12. However chill with Elio being gay she was, you know that professor mom from Call Me By Your Name cried. She’s Jewish and Italian—of course she cried.
13. There was one photo in George magazine of Cameron Diaz in a knit bikini that gave me a boner once in high school, but that may just have been a reaction to the idea of a knit bikini.
14. My mother told me I only thought I was gay because I was depressed and had fallen in with a band of homosexuals who treated me kindly to take advantage of me. I wish I had met such a band. I knew like two gay guys in Minnesota.
15. Oscar Wilde, Vincente Minnelli, and Rock Hudson were all married to women.
16. For copyright reasons, I cannot reprint the lyrics. You are, however, free to listen to the song or google the lyrics to refresh your memory of the song.
THE DISCO ROUND
WE DO NOT MAKE nice stories about nightlife. It seems like almost a ridiculous idea. If there is nightlife in a story, that story must end poorly. People must be punished and learn lessons about frivolity, drug abuse, and who your real friends really are. Oh, bars can be nice. Bars can be so homey that we put them in TV shows—sitcoms, even. But a place with dancing, with low lights, where everyone doesn’t know your name . . . that’s reserved for a very particular kind of film.1
As we have previously addressed in this book, I am a very good dancer. Further, I like dancing, but that is not the point we should lead with. I, on a dance floor, am like a pig in a deep slop, contented beyond reason and doing precisely the thing I was born to do. Unfortunately, institutionally promoted dancing ends with high school, unless you go to some corny adorable school in the Midwest or belong to a fraternity or sorority. For nice middle- or lower-class kids who go to a state school, after prom, no one is going to make you dance unless your cousin is getting married.
When I was in college, I missed dancing. And dancing, I was reasonably sure, missed me. Tragically, the only dancing that existed for persons in their late teens and early twenties existed at clubs, and clubs, I knew, were dark and dangerous places meant for people far cooler than I.
This paranoia was certainly rooted in my practiced asexuality of the time. I wasn’t gay, so I wasn’t going to gay bars. I wasn’t dating a girl whom I had to sate by taking her dancing. Plus, it was Berkeley in the 1990s, a structureless sit-in of a school where everyone was just coming home from class, reading some Maxine Hong Kingston, then doing heroin until they passed out. It wasn’t a social scene in which trying was prioritized.
But let us not declare that my situation was entirely the product of my personal failings. The fungus floating at the rim of said personal failings was our culture’s representations of nightlife, a quietly accepted construction of dance clubs as bad, soulless, and dangerous that is still with us to
day.
The club isn’t the best place to find a lover
So the bar is where I go
This lyric is from Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You,” which no one is saying isn’t a bop. It is clearly a bop, but it is also representative of a crusty social bias that annoys me.
Why is Ed Sheeran so certain that the club isn’t the best place to find a lover? He doesn’t even defend his thesis; he simply takes it as self-evident. In that line, he builds upon every Boogie Nights or 54, every cautionary Growing Pains where Mike went into the city on a school night, and we therefore accept as fact the idea that dance clubs are inherently loci of turpitude or at least deceit.
“But GUY!” you cry out. “Ed references dancing to Van Morrison mere lines after this passage.”
Really? Van Morrison? What kind of midwestern family wedding in 1987 is this where they’re dancing to “Brown Eyed Girl”? Ed Sheeran wants to massage you through the safety of what he’s doing. This isn’t sexy dancing. It’s affable, wholesome dancing. It’s Ally McBeal bouncing around while Vonda Shepard croons a lifeless rendition of a Motown standard. It is dancing that leads to a nice Presbyterian wedding and 2.4 wanted children.
Pop culture knows you want to go to clubs, but it also demands that you know you’re doing something bad by going to clubs. The moment you get that thrilling, exciting tracking shot of the wonders and delights of the club in Party Monster or 24 Hour Party People or The Last Days of Disco, you know that it’s only a matter of time before the venality, shallowness, and otherness of the club consumes itself and is destroyed. Supporting characters will die of overdoses and be arrested for cooking the books. Pleasure is sin, and sin must be punished. Only our protagonist, probably white, probably male, will escape undestroyed.
Even Party Girl, one of my favorite films of all time, and one deeply rooted in club culture, assents to this view of clubs as corrupt. Mary, the titular Party Girl, played by Parker Posey, has a rich world of friends and fun in the club: Her friend Leo is a DJ, her friend Rene owns the club, and there is a parade of fabulous others ready to dance with her. Despite this normalized, human representation of nightlife, the film insists that the only way to find true, meaningful love is to give up drugs and dancing and become a librarian.
