Navel Gazing

by Michael Ian Black

  “Well, this is the telephone conversation where I tell you I’m gay.”

  “I’ll mark it down,” she says.

  To be fair, I can understand how my sexuality might have come under suspicion. The signs were everywhere. For one thing, at the age of nine, I declared my intention to devote my life to the theater, an institution not known for its robust heterosexual male population. Undeclared, however, was that much of my newfound interest in the theater had to do with a girl I’d fallen in love with while doing a play at summer camp. Mom heard “theater,” and thought “gay.” She also noticed the way I sometimes crossed my legs, and thought “gay.” She saw that most of my friends were girls and thought “gay.” In fact, she was a lot like my middle and high school classmates who noticed the same things and came to the same conclusion, albeit with fewer understanding words and more hard shoves into lockers.

  Neither they nor Mom understood that I consciously cultivated a lot of my more “feminine” characteristics as a kind of informal protest against the New Jersey jock culture in which I found myself marooned. Guys in my hometown were expected to fall within a willfully stupid spectrum of masculinity that revolved around sports worship and farting. I didn’t understand it and I didn’t want to be part of it. The simple act of crossing my legs one on top of the other instead of ankle on knee was an act of quiet rebellion.

  Back in the mid-’70s, when Mom and Elaine spent their weekends campaigning for the Equal Rights Amendment, they never quite realized that gender equality cuts both ways. The same protections for which they fought could also apply to men. No, we weren’t subjected to workplace discrimination in the same way or harassed in the same way, but we, too, were vulnerable to cultural discrimination. A man had to conform to his role just as a woman was meant to conform to hers. While they struggled for women and girls to be free to become whomever they chose, it never occurred to them that some men and boys felt just as stifled. Boys like me. Nobody ever told me there were different ways to be male, so I felt forced to improvise, to play with masculine conventions and find ways to bend them to meet my own needs; they misinterpreted that improvisation as sexual confusion. Yes, most of my friends were girls, but not because I liked boys: It was because I liked girls.

  As a father now myself, I am sensitive to all signs pointing toward the different directions my children may take. And I am sensitive to how gentleness in boys can be taken for evidence of incipient homosexuality. All the neighborhood parents gossip over which of the toddlers on the playground are going to grow up gay. Of course, now parents want their kids to be gay because having a gay kid has become a lifestyle, like eco-tourism. I try not to engage with this kind of tongue-wagging, because I know how it feels to be labeled as something you are not and because I know that boys are sometimes quiet and sometimes they eschew backyard football games in lieu of fingering the new girl down the street.

  Our talk in the living room ended not long after it began. They told me I was gay. I told them I was not. We went back and forth like this a few times, with my bewilderment turning to embarrassment and then to anger. Within a few minutes I stormed off, screaming at them that they were crazy. That was the last time they raised the subject of my sexuality until an excruciating accusation during my senior year that I’d been having sex with my girlfriend in our house while Mom was at work, an accusation I vigorously and adamantly (and tearfully) denied, but which I will now cop to—yes, Mom, we were totally doing it while you were at work.

  As transgressive as I felt my gay intervention to be, the event takes on a more complicated dimension when coupled with an event I learned of from Mom regarding her own sexual history, of which I knew nothing before I began interviewing her for this book. We’d never discussed that aspect of her life before because asking your mother about her sexual history is kind of like asking her to take off her top. It simply isn’t done. But I have never been afraid to be creepy in the service of art, so I asked. And she told me.

  Growing up, Mom never suspected herself to be gay. She’s not even sure she knew what being gay meant. Nobody discussed homosexuality during Mom’s formative years in the 1950s and early ’60s. Having never been exposed to the idea, or even to the Indigo Girls, she had no reason to believe herself to be anything other than an ordinary Goody Two-shoes Chicago girl, an easy enough fiction to maintain during high school, when dating rituals were different than today. Back then, Mom says, couples didn’t pair off and hook up the way they do today. Instead, teens went out in groups, presumably to sock hops and soda fountains and other pagan rituals from the mists of prehistory. All innocent Technicolor fun. Although I am sure some young ladies hoisted up their petticoats for whichever Marlon Brando wannabe smoldered in their direction, my prim mother-to-be did not knowingly consort with such hussies.

  Her first inkling that something about her might be different occurred when she began babysitting for a young couple. Over time, she became close to the couple, spending more and more time with the mother because she preferred their house to hers. “I hated being at home,” she says. “Hated it.”

  “Me too!” I want to say, but that seems unkind.

  The couple’s home became Mom’s regular hangout. Alan, the husband, was a jeweler who worked late, so Mom and Alan’s wife, Phyllis, would keep each other company. Nothing sexual ever happened between them, but Phyllis became increasingly important to Mom.

  After graduation, Mom headed off to Indiana for college. While on break, she agreed to babysit for the couple so they could go away for a long weekend. I don’t know what transpired during that long weekend, but upon Alan and Phyllis’s return, Mom had what she calls “a nervous breakdown.”

  What does she mean? What happened? She tells me she has no memory of the details, for reasons that will soon become apparent. All she knows is that the couple called Mom’s parents, who retrieved her from the house and brought her to the “hospital,” where she was confined for six weeks.

  There, Mom underwent an extensive course of electroshock treatments. Her parents, suspecting Mom’s homosexuality, ordered the shock therapy without her consent. “They thought they could shock the gayness out of me,” she says.

  When I ask why her parents thought she was gay when she herself did not consider herself to be so, she has no answers. She doesn’t remember. She doesn’t remember much because the treatments “killed my memory from that point back.”

  Everything that occurred before her hospital stay, every memory, became a hazy blur. The treatment zapped away huge swaths of her childhood and adolescence, leaving her unsure, even today, of which are her actual memories and which are things people told her about herself after the fact. This is an uncommon, but well-documented, reaction to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Many patients experience short-term memory loss but recover. Some, like my mom, never regain their memories. In an op-ed piece written for the Washington Post in 2000, a nurse who had undergone ECT referred to her memory loss as “a rape of the soul.”

  The most common way to administer ECT is to first anesthetize the patient. Next, an electrode is placed near the temple. Finally, varying electrical charges of up to 450 volts are pumped directly into the brain, inducing seizure. Doctors don’t understand exactly what happens during the seizure, but it seems to scramble the brain, the way you might smack a misbehaving television set hoping to reset the picture. The treatment is then repeated again and again and again, two or three times a week, for weeks at a time.

  Although it sounds barbaric, ECT has been shown to have some positive effects on the treatment of depression. Nobody knows why, just as nobody knows why smacking the TV sometimes works. When it comes to altering homosexuality, though, ECT has no effect. Zero. Mom says the only things the treatment accomplished were fucking up both her memory and her feelings about her parents.

  The only other “cure” for homosexuality in wide use at the time—and still in use by some “gay conversion clinics”—is called aversion therapy. If you’ve ever seen A Clock
work Orange, you already understand how this works. A patient is shown images of homosexual behavior while some painful physical sensation is applied to the body. This could be something as simple as ice applied to the hands while watching a gay couple holding hands; or, for more explicit sexual scenes, the treatment might involve applying heat or electricity directly to the genitals. Fun stuff. The idea is to teach the patient to associate homosexual behavior with pain, the same way I associate crème brûlée with throwing up because once I ate six of them in a row and then puked my guts out. Now I can’t even look at the stuff. Aversion therapy, like ECT, does not change homosexuality. To my knowledge, crème brûlée therapy has never been tried. I doubt it would work, though, because the gays love those fancy French desserts.

  I press Mom for more details: Why did her parents take such a drastic step? She says she cannot remember a thing about that time, but I have a theory:

  While she was away at college, lonely and homesick, Mom’s feelings for Phyllis ballooned from close friendship into romantic love. Upon Alan and Phyllis’s return from their long weekend, Mom confessed her feelings to Phyllis in the overdramatic, flailing way of teenagers. She probably wept many tears, yelled many yells, threatened suicide, that sort of thing. The couple, fearing for Mom’s safety, called her parents, who whisked her away to the loony bin and ordered her cured. Again, this is all speculation, but my theory would explain everything. (I also have an alternate theory of how the dinosaurs went extinct if any paleontological journals wish to contact me.)

  Twenty years later, Mom replayed the same scene with me, shoving me into her old role of the confused teenager. Now was her big chance to correct the mistakes her parents had made. Instead of admonishing and punishing her gay kid, she offered unqualified love and support. A noble gesture—if I were gay. But I knew exactly which team I played for and, in fact, was already taking batting practice with the girl down the street.

  It’s weird that she did that, right? Weird that she reenacted a painful moment from her teen years with her own teenager? Or maybe it’s just a bizarre example of the way families make the same mistakes generation after generation. For some families, it’s booze or domestic abuse or early pregnancies. For mine, it’s outing your kid.

  I don’t know who my kids are going to turn out to be yet—gay, straight, or whatever—but I’m grateful that I at least live in the first generation where any option is a good option. I just want them to find love; whichever genitals come with that love are irrelevant. Our bodies are confusing enough to ourselves without having other people telling us how they should behave or how we should use them. My only advice to them is simple: If they do have sex with their partners during high school, they should make sure to dry off their towels after showering together. It’s a rookie mistake, and it’s how my mom caught me.

  Chapter Ten

  Absurdly, I answered, “I’m fine”

  Having just declared my heterosexuality, I will now supply ammunition for anybody who does not believe me: For a short while, I became obsessed with muscle magazines. No gayer periodical genre exists than those thick, glossy monthlies beguiling readers with promises to “get big.” Splayed across their pages one will find endless photos of glistening, hairless giants grunting and sweating, their faces contorted into orgasmic rictuses. Often, they are pictured draped with chains or weighted down with iron plates. They are almost never photographed with women. The only thing separating these images from straight-up gay porn is a decided lack of mustaches.

  My fascination began innocently enough with a casual magazine rack perusal during a prescription refill. There, amongst People and Newsweek, I discovered homoerotic titles like Flex and Muscle. At first, I flipped through them for the same reason I might look at DDD Cup Magazine: to gaze out in wonder toward the distant event horizon of human freakishness.

  My initial reaction upon first seeing these steroid-addled cover boys was probably the same as most people’s would be: disgust. Pro bodybuilders push the human form to unnatural dimensions, the results no less upsetting than those of Chinese foot binding. But the human mind is nothing if not adaptive, and as my eyes adjusted to these strange and swollen shapes, disgust turned to fascination, and fascination to respect.

  I grew to love these self-described “freaks” and “beasts,” men whose biceps literally have biceps, an additional bump on top of their regular bicep called a “bicep peak.” Their names became as familiar to me as those of any movie star: Dexter Jackson, Lee Haney, Dorian Yates. To give you a sense of their size, consider a few of my measurements versus those of eight-time Mr. Olympia Ronnie Coleman.

  WAIST

  CHEST

  BICEP

  CALVES

  THIGHS

  Me

  32

  39

  12 1/2

  14

  20

  Ronnie Coleman

  36

  58

  24

  22

  36

  In nearly all categories, there is nearly twice as much Ronnie Coleman as there is me. His thighs are bigger than my waist. His chest is bigger than my house. Plus, Ronnie Coleman, like all pro bodybuilders, is so very shiny. In addition to everything else, professional bodybuilders are the shiniest men in the world. I harbored no illusions that I would, or could, ever shine like those guys, but I figured I could make myself into a better, buffer, more Bruce Whitehall–esque me if I applied even 1 percent of the physical effort they did. So I joined a gym, my first.

  That first summer morning in the gym, I attacked my exercises with an animalistic ferocity. Leg presses—BAM! Shoulder presses—SOCKO! Bench presses and squats—KAPOW! I concluded by ripping out a thousand (twelve) (weight-assisted) pull-ups. Sweaty and spent, I exploded onto the New York streets for a well-earned victory strut home. I remember the summer sun, overbright and painful, cutting into my eyes as I emerged from the sweatbox, already feeling my muscles expanding like sponges soaked in lava.

  Then, while crossing the street, I had an unexpected thought: “You know what? I feel like sitting down for a moment.”

  One does not often develop an urge to have a sit-down on New York City sidewalks unless something is seriously wrong; after all, dog poo is usually the least offensive thing there. Head spinning, I plopped down onto the lip of the sidewalk to get myself sorted out. “No problem,” I thought. “A little light-headedness is normal after fucking destroying a gym.” Totally normal. Schwarzenegger once said he used to do sit-ups until he passed out, so I took my dizziness and shortness of breath as evidence that I was on the right track. I tried to stand. I sat back down, shoving my head between my legs to clear away the sparkles now detonating behind my eyelids. My heart began doing kangaroo kicks. Deep breathing did not help. Nor did the cooling sensation of brining in fresh sweat. I needed to lie down. “Normal?” I asked myself.

  “Not normal,” I answered, laying my full self out on the sidewalk. “I’m dying,” I thought. “I am dying from a brain aneurysm on Twenty-Second Street between Park and Lex. I am dying on a street that doesn’t even have a decent coffee shop.”

  This was before cell phones were in wide use, so I had no way of contacting Martha to bid her goodbye. Although we lived only a couple blocks away, she might as well have been on the dark side of the moon. My dying thoughts were of her, of the life we could have shared together, and of the fact that she had not yet paid her half of the rent. A minute or so passed before a woman stopped to ask if I was okay.

  Absurdly, I answered, “I’m fine.”

  She didn’t believe me. “Would you like me to call someone for you?”

  “Would you mind calling my girlfriend?” This is what I think I said, but it may have come out more like: “Casneekahlmahgilmend?”

  I gave the woman my telephone number, writing it down because I did not trust my mouth to form digits. Somebody else stopped and offered to buy me a Gatorade, an offer I accepted with gratitude even though he bought me green Gatorade w
hen I would have preferred red. Ask next time, asshole.

  In a few moments, the woman returned from a pay phone, telling me Martha would be there soon. I heaved myself back into a seated position and sipped my (green) Gatorade. My head cleared. Martha ran up, panicked.

  “What happened?” Martha asked.

  “I think I overdid it at the gym,” I answered.

  “You need to be more careful!”

  I shrugged with the cool insouciance of an X Gamer who’d just wrecked while attempting a 720 backside kickflip. Like, “Yeah, I crashed and burned but that’s the price you pay for going to extremes.” I did not tell her that I had been exercising with the weights on the lowest possible setting.

  I never returned to that gym.

  The next time I joined one occurred during a brief relocation to Los Angeles, which is the worst possible place to join a gym if you are somebody who looks as if he needs to join a gym, because nobody else there does. Hot bodies are LA’s primary import. Good-looking people show up there by the thousands every day expecting to be paid for their beauty. It would be ridiculous were it not for the fact that many of them get their wish.

  The sheer number of extraordinary-looking people in Los Angeles is disorienting at first. Everywhere you look is another perfectly symmetrical twentysomething. It is a city populated by people who look like what would happen if Abercrombie mated with Fitch. I would like to say I eventually became inured to all this physical beauty but I did not. Even when I visit now, years later, I am still just as gobsmacked walking around (or driving around, I should say, since walking is illegal in Los Angeles) as when I first arrived. Somehow the same exact beautiful twentysomethings are still there. Literally the same ones. They have not aged. They have not changed. They are the world’s loveliest undead.

  Because LA is a town filled with unemployed young people, its gorgeous denizens have nothing better to do than congregate at the gym. No actual exercise is conducted there because to do so would be redundant. After all, perfection has no need for improvement. Instead, the gym is a place to kvetch about show business, discuss various poolside barbecues, sip fresh-pressed wheatgrass smoothies. The gym is town hall and singles bar. It is beauty pageant ballroom. It is a lonely place for the scrawny and pale.