Mommy Man

by Jerry Mahoney

  That first day, they split us into groups of ten so we could get to know each other. We were asked to state our name, where we were from, how we identified racially, what social class we were in and—holy shit—our sexual orientation.

  It was obvious our group had been carefully assembled to represent the ideals of college diversity, like a snapshot on the cover of a recruitment catalog of a hot white girl, a nerdy black guy, and an Asian kid in a wheelchair sharing a laugh on the college steps. The upper-class advisers were clearly hoping to score at least one LGBT among our numbers, just to round things out.

  A voice in my head told me this was my big chance. I was about to define myself for the next four years. I should take advantage of being in a blissful liberal utopia where being gay was just one special eccentricity that made me a unique individual. If I could just bring myself to say, “I’m Jerry from New Jersey, a white, middle-class homosexual,” then all of this misery could be over.

  As we went around the circle and introduced ourselves, I kept hearing Greg’s voice in my head: “I could never be friends with someone who was gay.” These people hadn’t been here any longer than I had. The college could encourage them not to judge, but it couldn’t force anyone to hang out with the queer in their orientation group. I wondered if maybe I could just omit the last part of my introduction, end on my economic status, and leave the rest TBA.

  But what if someone called me on it? Just as we were moving on to the trust games, that working-class Korean girl from Kansas would shout out, “Hold on! Jerry from New Jersey didn’t tell us where he falls on the Kinsey scale!” Then everyone would turn to me, gently encouraging me to just admit the truth as my face turned bright red and I crapped my pants. Yeah, it was better to just do it and get it out of the way.

  “I’m Jerry from New Jersey. I’m white, middle class, and . . . heterosexual.”

  As the words came out of my mouth, I realized it was actually the first time I’d ever said that out loud, the first time I’d blatantly lied. As much as I’d been called a “fag” in high school, no one had actually questioned my sexuality, and I’d never had to proclaim to be straight before.

  No one else in my group was gay either. It made sense because if the ratio is one in ten, well, then I was the one.

  I had almost had the courage to test the waters, but unfortunately, that was the closest I would come to outing myself as an undergrad. It was my gay Groundhog Day. I’d poked my head out, seen my shadow, and ducked back down for four more years in the closet.

  After college, I headed to California for film school, confident I would be in an even more accepting environment. Hollywood was the land of the gay mafia, after all. If I could get in with them, I’d be set.

  I prepared myself mentally for the first day, when I’d meet all the other aspiring auteurs in my program. This time I was going to be honest. I might even lead off with the gay thing. “I’m gay Jerry. What else do you need to know? Hey hey!” Finger snap! My new friends would think I’d lived my whole life this way, the fun, happy, well-adjusted homo. Anyone who had a problem with it could just avoid me and hang out with the other douchebags. Screw ’em! I was ready. I was excited.

  And then—no one asked.

  There was no sensitivity training here. Orientation at the University of Southern California was about how to get an ID badge and learning where the bathrooms were. Nobody expected us to stake out our social position on the first day. Whatever icebreaking we did was all movie talk. Gay or straight was beside the point. The big divide here was Spielberg or Scorsese.

  This wasn’t college. It was more like high school, where sexuality, if it existed, wasn’t discussed. We shared screenwriting template plug-ins. We passed along info about which coffee shops would let you sit for hours on the purchase of a single latte. We parsed Barry Levinson and Steven Bochco until we were blue in the face. Nobody expected me to confront my sexuality because nobody was gay here. I was back in the real world, where everyone assumed you were straight unless you went around limp-wristedly belting the Rodgers & Hammerstein catalog.

  Sure, there were opportunities to out myself, like when someone would ask me if I thought Pamela Anderson was hot. But instead of being honest—a “no” would be sure to invite follow-up questions—I’d gently sidestep the issue. “Pamela Anderson? She’s on Baywatch with David Hasselhoff, right? Hey, did you ever see Knight Rider?” It’s amazing more people didn’t see through my shuck-and-jive. I may not embody some of the stereotypes people hold about gays, but I definitely fit the number 1 job description, that is, not sleeping with women. No one ever asked me why I didn’t have any psycho ex-girlfriend stories, let alone current girlfriend stories. They either thought I was really private—or really pathetic.

  The way I saw it, I had two choices. Option One was to keep going like this forever. I could do what millions of gays, politicians, and gay politicians before me had done: find some naive, easily satisfied woman, get married, and have kids. After all, every family is messed up in its own way. Our little idiosyncrasy would be a complete lack of love between the parents and a cringingly unpleasant sex life. And some people are alcoholics. Big difference. It was the ideal family model that had been drummed into my head since I was a baby. Parents plus kids plus dysfunction. It’s what people are supposed to do. It’s what would make me happy. It’s what Pat Robertson would want, right?

  Or—I could take what was behind Door Number Two. Door Number Two was My Gay Life, and everything about it was a complete mystery. I didn’t have any role models or road maps in the gay world. I didn’t know what my goals would be or where I would end up. San Francisco? Broadway? Jail? Maybe I’d find some nice guy and grow old with him, if I was lucky. Maybe I’d be that lifelong bachelor everybody feels sorry for. Or maybe I’d end up as the creep who hung out behind the middle school. One thing was for sure. Door Number Two meant no kids. There would be no Little League games, no vacations at Disney World, no one to pass my childhood toys on to. I’d just be that weird, sad old man who died with a box of Smurfs gathering dust in the basement.

  Option One had so much more to offer—to me, at least—but I couldn’t help wondering about the woman who would be my unsuspecting victim—or, rather, “wife.” Let’s call her Stacey.

  Stacey’s a sweet girl with a good sense of humor. I meet her in a chat room for Scritti Politti fans. She likes short guys with glasses who once collected Smurfs and who know the entire libretto to Miss Saigon. I’m the answer to her prayers, and we get serious fast, like in a romantic comedy montage. A shared milkshake. Fireworks above a Ferris wheel. A burned casserole at a candlelit dinner in my apartment. We snuggle and stuff, but that’s about it. I play shy. Maybe she’s super-religious, so that’s all she asks for. “Jerry’s so respectful,” she tells her church friends, proudly. “I think he’d be willing to wait for me forever!”

  Okay, so I marry Stacey. The sex is abysmal, but she doesn’t really know what good sex is anyway, so she doesn’t complain. I have to picture her hot brother Mike in order to get the job done. Oh, yeah. Stacey has a hot brother, Mike. I’m sure of it.

  Soon, Stacey and I have a couple of adorable kids. Let’s call them Zack and Stacey Jr. Zack thinks his dad is the coolest, even though he doesn’t know how to fix a leaky faucet and he squeals like a baby whenever he sees a spider. Almost every week, Zack gets into a fight with some kid who mocks the way his dad throws a football. For Stacey Jr., I become the ideal male, the standard by which all the future men in her life will be judged. She ends up going to theater camp and dating her flamboyant leading man in Spring Awakening.

  If I’m lucky, no one ever figures out my secret. We just each go on living in denial, satisfied with whatever fulfillment we can scrape out of life. And my kids never know their own father. In my best-case scenario, I bring two new people into the world just to lie to them the way I lie to everyone else.

  Or—one day it a
ll comes crumbling down. Zack finds some shirtless pictures of Scott Bakula on my computer. Stacey Jr. picks up on the way I ogle Uncle Mike. They compare notes. It all adds up. Now they pity their mom and resent their dad. My wife kicks me out and starts dating a series of abusive creeps. I’ve skewed her standards so the only thing she demands of men is that they be heterosexual, though not beating the shit out of her is a plus. Zack shuns me, humiliated that his hero has been exposed as a selfish, pathetic mess who chose to live a lie. Stacey Jr. becomes hopelessly clingy, terrified that my love for her is as fake as the love I had for her mom. All three of them rack up enormous therapy bills and write tell-all memoirs about how I ruined their life. Zack’s is a graphic novel.

  My elaborately melodramatic fantasy scenario was just too much for me to bear. How could I live with myself if I did any of these things to a woman I’ve never met plus two kids who wouldn’t even exist otherwise? Poor Stacey, Zack, and Stacey Jr.! They deserve better! Plus, living that lie would mean denying myself the possibility of ever finding true love. Oh, and all that vaginal intercourse. Ick.

  So Door Number Two won out. I came to terms with the fact that I would never have a “normal” family. I would never stuff a piece of wedding cake in Stacey’s face in front of all our loved ones. I would never study the rules of baseball on Wikipedia so I could follow along at Zack’s tee-ball games. I would never watch Stacey Jr. crowning in the delivery room and gazing upon the world for the first time with her tiny blue eyes. Come to think of it, I would probably never even see a vagina. In my mind, I held a little funeral for Stacey, Zack, and Stacey Jr. But it was a funeral for me, too—or at least the me I’d known until then.

  After all my anxiety, the actual coming-out process was fairly anticlimactic. It was awkward, for sure. A couple of my friends expressed surprise or confusion: “But you love Drew Barrymore!” “But you don’t dress gay!” No one shunned me, though, or told me I was going to Hell or asked me if I also raped dogs and little boys. There were no scenes out of a TV movie of the week, where Mom shouts “My baby! My baby!” as Dad shoves the last of my stuff into a U-Haul and slams the front door in my face. People just took it in, hugged me, and then we went back to our regularly scheduled relationship. Even my very Catholic extended family kind of shrugged at the news.

  During all the time I had been struggling with my identity, homophobia actually became a bad thing. Everyone who cared about me just wanted me to be happy. And finally, I was. Not just because I no longer had to lie but because, for the first time, I could be honest—about my thoughts, my feelings, my fears. With very few exceptions, I felt closer to my friends and family, more comfortable around them, now that I could be myself. It was like my own personal Berlin Wall falling. Sure, it exposed the sad remnants of a repressed and doomed realm heretofore hidden from view, but at least people were eager to come in and spruce the place up.

  The entire process took years, but by the time I was thirty-one, I had come out to every person in the world who mattered to me—with one enormous exception.

  Greg.

  More than a dozen years out of high school, we were still close. Greg lived three thousand miles away, in New York, but we talked on the phone regularly, and I saw him every time I went back East. We had outgrown our obsession with Billboard charts, but we now channeled our energy toward professional tennis. We memorized stats and rankings, and when the challenge ladder for a major tournament was released, we would go through round by round and make our predictions. We even took a trip to London together so we could attend Wimbledon. The one thing that remained from adolescence was our unspoken embargo on discussing our love lives.

  Every time I spoke to Greg, it was definitely in the back of my mind. I figured he must have met some gay people in college, that he was probably on good terms with Ned from Accounting, that he still bobbed his head when an Erasure song came on the radio. I was sure he’d seen Ellen and Will & Grace and Tom Hanks’s Oscar-winning performance in Philadelphia. The whole world’s attitudes about gays had changed since we were teenagers. Surely his had, too.

  In fact, he’d probably figured out my big secret. I was a single guy in my early thirties. I’d never had a girlfriend—or any interest in finding one. One day while we were at Wimbledon, I snuck off to a revival of My Fair Lady in the West End. It didn’t take Stephen Hawking to do the math on this one. Greg was probably just dying for me to come out so he could fix me up with Ned from Accounting. Then again, if Greg knew I was gay and he was cool with it, how come he never brought it up?

  Every time I considered having the big talk with him, I would flash back to that moment when we were sixteen. “I could never be friends with someone who was gay.” Instantly, I’d lose my nerve.

  Here I was, feeling like myself for the first time, happier than I’d ever been, and I was still afraid of being rejected by somebody I considered my best friend. I realized I hadn’t come as far as I’d thought, that on some level I was still that scared teenager, full of shame. And there was only one way to change that.

  I mustered whatever courage I had, and I dialed Greg’s number.

  Coming out of the closet is one thing at which practice never makes perfect. Though I’d done it dozens of times at this point, I still made all the rookie mistakes: being nervous, assuming the reaction would be bad, and, the worst, starting with the words “I’m sorry.” In this case, it was “I’m sorry to do this over the phone,” which, although true, was far too dramatic a setup, as was what followed: “Greg, I have something very important to talk to you about, something I’ve needed to say for fifteen years.”

  Greg knew something was up. He was totally silent. Too silent. Too long. Finally, I just said it. “So . . . I’m gay!” Still no response. Absolutely nothing. Just agonizing quiet that went on for, if memory serves, approximately six hours. I couldn’t bear it, so I started talking again. “It’s been a really long process, and I hope you’re not hurt that it took me so long to tell you, but that’s more a reflection on me than on you and, hey, have you seen Philadelphia?”

  “It’s okay. You can stop,” he said. He took a long pause. “It’s fine. I’m cool with it. I’ve . . . I’ve kind of been going through the same thing.”

  “Um . . . what?”

  “I’ve been . . . you know, questioning.”

  I had prepared myself for a variety of reactions—the most likely being that he would convey a sense of caring and compassion, thus validating our long-term friendship—the least likely being that he would shout “Fag!” and hang up. But I hadn’t quite expected this.

  Greg was gay. He was every bit as gay as I was. Gayer, maybe. He might even be the gayest person in the entire world, but he couldn’t even say the word. Here I was apologizing for being so slow in coming out, and it turned out Greg was even further behind in the process. He hadn’t even accepted himself yet. His voice was shaking. He was petrified.

  A few minutes earlier, he’d picked up the phone, probably expecting to discuss Monica Seles’s comeback, and instead he was forced to confront the personal demons he’d been suppressing for three decades. I could see how that might have thrown him. It became clear that Greg had been “questioning” for years—and that his question had pretty much been answered. But he hadn’t told anyone. Anyone.

  Until now.

  I had certainly considered the possibility that Greg might be gay. If there was one person I’d ever known who was even more secretive about his love life than I was, it was Greg. I think that’s part of why we became such good friends, though I always assumed he was doing me a favor.

  But somewhere along the way, I dismissed my suspicions. I mean, come on, the guy was in his thirties now. He had to be straight. The only other possibility was that he was gay and even more in the closet than I was. What were the odds of that?

  I thought back to what he’d said that day when we were teenagers. “I could never be friends with some
one who was gay.” And then I remembered what he said next:

  “Could you?”

  Suddenly, I realized that his statement hadn’t been motivated by hatred but by fear. It was a possibility I didn’t even consider at the time. Back then, I was crushed. And I had to respond. But how? I was caught off guard. I was afraid. All I could say was, “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t know.”

  And what followed was fifteen years of “I don’t know.” It seems absurd now. All that time we were both struggling in private, and we could have been there for each other, had someone to talk to, someone to share with, someone to make us feel human.

  Growing up gay was hell, and there’s nobody I would rather have gone through that with than Greg. If only we’d known. If only we hadn’t been so afraid.

  I had called hoping for his support, but instead, I was the one being supportive of him. I told him how happy coming out had made me, how accepting everyone had been, how relieved he would feel if he could just be honest with himself. In the days that followed, we spoke constantly. Everything had changed, including the strength of our friendship, which was greater than ever. We cried, we joked, we teased. We talked about being in the closet, about coming out, and about how hot John McEnroe was. It turned out we had even more in common than we ever knew.

  Within a week, Greg came out to his whole family. A few days after that, it was his birthday, and he gave himself the best present he could think of. He took a dozen of his closest friends out to dinner, and just before dessert, he made a big announcement to the whole table. In an instant, his hiding was over.