The point is, while you're not being honest, you've had a lot of help hiding in that closet of yours. And the fact that one of your best friends since middle school just told you that only lesbians went into the University of Utah theater department really didn't help things, either. That and the holy hell Senator Orrin Hatch raised sophomore year about the kids who wanted a gay-straight alliance over at East High. It's no wonder you'd locked your closet door and tried with all your might to turn yourself into a prom dress. But none of that ultimately matters. I can go on and on for ten pages pointing fingers and laying the blame on school, society, church and state, and God and country, and it won't make any difference. Because no matter what “they've” done to you, you're the one who has to deal with it. You're the one who has to pick yourself out of the dirt and move on.
You've got to. Time is running out for us. In less than a year you're going to get a telephone call from your uncle. He's going to be crying so hard Mom can't make out what he's saying. When he finally manages to force the news out between sobs, she's going to say “I have to tell her” in a voice that's so small and scared and hurt you barely recognize it. And then she'll lower the phone and say the words that will hang around your neck for the rest of your life: “Your father committed suicide.”
Let me tell you, when that happens all hell is going to break loose. You're going to run to the arms of your best male friend seeking a father, and think that you're in love. You'll believe that he's going to marry you and suddenly everything will be okay—you'll have children, you'll be happy, and most of all he'll protect you. That, and you'll never, ever have to think about girls again. He'll say he loves you and then leave you two weeks later with an “I'm not ready for this” speech. You'll hold it together just long enough to pass your AP tests and give your valedictorian address, and then you're going to fall apart. You're going to have a breakdown and spend most of the summer of 1998 watching Eve 6 videos on VH1. I still can't listen to “Rendezvous” without feeling sick.
What would coming out to yourself do to solve all this? Maybe not a whole lot, sure, because we all have to go through our share of high school bull. Still, it might make your first year of college easier if you did. That way you won't have to feel so degraded after throwing yourself at one man after another, even though you realize by now that it's a joke that you've long since forgotten the punch line to. It'll save you from having a fight with a good friend when you find out she's dating your ex. Who knows? It might even spare you loneliness at nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two.
Even if it doesn't, you'll be one step closer to feeling some of that peace they talk about in church all the time. That's what cracks me up inside, you know? Knowing that at twenty-two, you're going to be sitting in a bathroom thinking maybe you should kill yourself because your gayness offends God. At twenty-two, when most of your Mormon friends are married with children, you're still fighting this adolescent war because even then, even now, you still sometimes think Maybe it was the sexual abuse. Maybe it was the fact I had a cold and distant father. Maybe if I just called Exodus or Courage and got some therapy everything would be all right, and I could be safe and happy and know I'm going to heaven.
I feel so old now, Joey. I'm not even twenty-five and I feel like I've been carrying the world on my shoulders. Only the world is shaped like you, and I'm not as strong as Atlas. I look back through the years at you, your innocence and your damned naïveté, and I just feel like my heart has been shattered beneath a window. I want to protect you. I want to wrap you up in cotton at each stage—at sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty—wrap you up in a little cocoon that's soft and warm and keep you safe so you can fully develop. So you won't end up like me, feeling spent before you can even run for political office, before you can even rent a car without paying a penalty. I want to hug you at twenty, when your first girlfriend leaves you, and tell you that in four years you'll meet the love of your life. I want to crouch next to you in the bathroom at twenty-two and tell you that you should read what Catholic tradition really has to say about marriage and sexuality instead of feeling like God is going to punish you just because your partner happens to be a woman. I want to tell you every day of your life that sexual abuse, your father, the fact you broke your toe on a chair once, whatever, has nothing to do with your sexual orientation. And someday I want you to breathe and realize, in the middle of a street in whatever city you call home, that you don't have to feel ashamed anymore.
But most of all, I want to be able to forgive you for making the mistakes you had to make, for doing the stupid things you had to do in order to survive in the best way you knew how. I guess, ultimately, that's why I've written you a drawer of these things. Because someday I want to be able to really say “we're okay” and mean it.
For now, please accept that I'm still learning. You've vanished into the past and you'll never see this. But I will. I'll read it over and over until I know that my heart understands as well as my head. And on that day, though you and every other JoSelle is dead except for the one flickering in the present tense, on that day maybe I'll be able to say
I love you,
______.
Without a Trace
by Anthony Rella
Someone's dog is chasing a trio of mountain goats across a talus slope on Mount Princeton, leaving small avalanches in his wake. His owner's screaming causes the other hikers to stop and watch this high-altitude drama unfold, as the goats leap across a precipice and pause. The dog paces at the edge, posturing and threatening. It looks like a precarious situation; a mistake might send the dog sliding down the slope, which could make it a difficult hike home. Another hiker starts yelling with the owner. We know that the dog does not belong on the mountain, just as the goats have more right to the altitude than us; certainly their hooves are more adept at traversing the terrain than our Gore-Tex boots.
I am hiking with my friends Jack and Neal as part of a two-week road trip commemorating our mutual retirement as Boy Scout backpacking instructors in New Mexico the previous year. We pause and rest our packs against the rocks. “I bet the mountain goats win,” Neal says.
“The dog could probably take down one or two of them,” Jack says.
“No way, those goats know what they're doing. Dogs don't have any depth perception; he has no idea how long that jump is. I bet that guy is pissed he didn't bring a leash.”
“Why the hell did he bring a dog on the mountain anyway?” I say. I am not used to hiking in Colorado, so I have little experience with the backpacking culture and think that hiking with dogs is dangerous. It offends my sense of order, which is the second time this has happened today. An hour ago, we came across a man resting on one of the false peaks while his five-year-old daughter played on the perforated, spongelike gray rocks. She wore the tiniest backpack I have ever seen, possibly large enough to hold a quart of water and a baby jacket, and jumped around as though she were on the school's plastic playground equipment.
“You brought your daughter backpacking?” I asked, trying not to sound accusatory.
“Sure,” he said.
“I would have been panicking when I was her age. It's so steep.”
“Fear is a learned response,” he said with pride. “I want her to respect the mountain, not fear it.” Her ease made me a little jealous, even as I had a sympathetic twinge at the thought of her slipping. I wondered if her fearless upbringing would lead to boldness or boredom.
This dog is not bold, he's poorly trained. It takes five minutes of his owner commanding before he saunters back, unscathed. A little disappointed, the three of us continue our hike until we summit Mount Princeton and pause for lunch and the requisite nude picture that male hikers find so endearing. Then we stare at Colo-rado's Fourteeners, arguing over how we should descend and wondering why the marked trail on the map does not exist. Jack notices a ridge trail almost a thousand feet below us, and a path leading to it—which is actually a wash of loose rock nestled between the curves
of the mountain, but we don't know this.
The year before, I was taking a crew of fourteen-to-eighteen-year-old Scouts through base camp to get their prepackaged meals from the commissary. It was my job to make sure the boys and their adult advisors had all the appropriate gear and supplies to survive a two-week trek through the Sangre de Cristo mountains, and then to hike out with them for two days and teach them notrace camping skills, how to inhabit a spot of wilderness and leave it exactly as you found it, as though you had never been there at all. There were various lessons: raising bear ropes to keep food out of the animals' reach, digging a hole for excretory duties, restoring the plants crushed by tents or boots. The purpose was to minimize environmental impact, sustain the campsites so that others could enjoy them for years to come.
I was enjoying my summer until I noticed that someone in the commissary had made a handmade placard announcing BOY SCOUTS WIN 5–4, the Supreme Court's decision to allow the Scouts to discriminate against homosexuals. I had known when I signed my contract that it would be a summer in the closet, but permitted myself some hope that it would change thanks to the nine people in charge of deciding the fate of an entire nation's laws. I stared at the poster while the Scouts loaded up on food, willing one of the votes to move in the other direction, until an advisor came up beside me.
“Thank God,” he said. “The First Amendment still means something in this country.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but it never should have gone to the Supreme Court at all.”
“Exactly.” He walked away before I realized we had not agreed on the same thing. I wondered, should I run after him and tell him what I meant? Would that get me into trouble? Should I get into trouble? My summer of ambivalence had begun.
I hate descents more than any part of the trek, especially down such slopes; my stomach always sinks with dread. Like Scotty in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, I picture myself falling from any height, although my condition is less debilitating. I do not expect to find solitude and reflection when I go to the mountains—I go for the drama. Every success lessens the terror, broadens my limitations. I want to be like that dog, recklessly indifferent to the dangers of living. I do not know the origin of my phobias. Perhaps the flat forests of my native Indiana made me suspicious of the treacherously shifting land of scree and boulder, the curling scrub oak that reaches like a snare across trails. The arid silence of the Western wilderness unsettles me in the night, unlike home, where the sum-mer's evening air is humid with cicada noise. On my first nights here, the fall of a stick from a tree is loud enough to send me into paroxysms of fright, sure that something thick and hairy approaches to devour me whole.
But Jack and I are from the same town, we grew up in the same Scout troop, and he seems completely unaffected by this geographical displacement. It is my life that is dominated by fear. I am afraid of spiked iron fences, electrified subway tracks, freak incapacitating household accidents, the Department of Homeland Security, nocturnal intruders human or supernatural, the end of the world, mountain lions, darkness. I took an Enneagram personality test and discovered my type, 5, the Observer, has fear as its dominating emotion. There have been many times in my life when I allowed this to intimidate me from doing anything, but cowardice is not an option now, unless I think I can build a good life at 14,000 feet. So I tighten my belt strap and start baby-stepping down the wash.
I tried to police my behavior while working at the camp, weighing the queerness of every action or statement. My somewhat butch demeanor allowed reprieve from fear of discovery, but my friends were the most visible pursuers of our female co-workers. I wondered if my disinterest, more glaring than their interest, would draw some remarks. I was lucky to be sharing tents with Neal, a vocal atheist, anarchist, and sometime bisexual to whom I outed myself within the first few days. He often went to the local bar with our co-workers and discussed his sexual proclivities loudly to our friends, telling drunken stories. “There was one time I got so drunk and made out with this baby-faced guy, and he wanted to fuck me but I can't handle that. He was so hot!” This frustrated one of our closeted friends so much that he yelled, “Neal, why the hell can you run around screaming about being bi and making out with guys when I can't say one goddamn thing about—” before he realized they were surrounded by the camp administrators. Neal may have escaped suspicion due to his visible encounters with women— well-known stories that I witnessed firsthand one night when he and Jack, who had become friends through their mutual interest in women and punk music, brought girls to our tent and made out with them on his cot. I was trying to get enough sleep to go out on the trail with my crew the next morning. After a few minutes, Jack's girl pushed herself up and asked if maybe they should leave, to which her friend responded, “You can leave if you want.”
“My bed is the demilitarized zone,” I said. “You can sit here and not have sex.” She sat at the end of my cot and watched as her friend kissed Jack and Neal. Finally, the sandwiched girl said, “Do you really want to go?”
“Yes.” The girl on my bed stood up and pulled the other girl out from their clutches, leaving them to bemoan wussy chicks who can't handle their orgies. Neal slid over to my cot, his beard smelling of Pabst Blue Ribbon.
“What?” I said. “Your girls left, so you want to taunt the gayboy?” He laughed, and then kissed me. After a minute, during which my hormones began to shed their summer despair, he stood up and said, “Okay, time for bed.” Neal's bisexuality was a few kisses with a boy if there was no girl around, with no risk to him because he would sober up to his more pressing need for women. I went back to sleep, and nothing more came of the incident.
The problem with summiting mountains, I think, is that you look from the peak and realize you have to do the whole thing again. I see my descent not as a series of exact and gentle steps but as a jagged and bloody roll down. Kierkegaard says dread is “an alien power which lays hold of an individual, and yet one cannot tear oneself away, nor has a will to do so; for one fears what one desires.” I am not sure of the last clause; is my fear of falling an equally strong desire to fall? Do I have a yearning for pain and death too subtle and disturbing to acknowledge? I do throw myself into terrifying situations, promiscuously seeking fear the way some fall in love over and over again, discarding their lovers when the intensity of emotion has passed, looking for a fresh source. This is the feeling of dread, a tenuous marriage of fear and desire, an emotion of the time between the foregone and its conclusion, the desire for the stresses of fear to alleviate with finality—to either get off the mountain or die, no more of this uncertainty.
I mention the end of this thought to Neal, who has been trying to lighten the mood. He likes to develop personae, adopting the voice and attitudes of characters that he creates, and today he's “Pastor Dave,” a Christian youth counselor of dubious integrity.
“God made all this shit for you!” he yells. “You should love it with all your heart, not fear it like some Satan-worshiper!”
“He sure is great,” I yell back. I pretend to be indifferent, moving quickly, planting my heel firmly into the loose rock to form a brief foothold, and there is nothing to worry about, it's only fear that causes accidents—then my heel slips and I land on my ass, sliding. Marble-to-baseball-sized rocks line my fall, marking me with thin red cuts. The rocks counter every attempt to stand and my legs are beginning to shake from wear and near-panic.
Jack is watching all of this and seems unsympathetic. “Doesn't God hate gay people?” he asks. “Maybe he made all this to kill you.” Whenever I'm around the guys, I seem to take my rightful place as the group's weakest, the slowest one, the most damaged by falling, the gay one—despite Neal's borderline bisexuality and Jack's warm appreciation of any form of deviance. I think it's a dynamic with any group of guys; it's a metaphorical position that I happen to literally inhabit.
“No way!” Neal yells. “Jesus died on the cross for sickos like him, too! Isn't that fucking awesome?”
The fourteen-t
o-eighteen-year-old boys who comprised the Scouting crews provided numerous distractions to my political angst. I had a group from Big Clifty, Kentucky, who liked to climb all over the Ponderosa pines, getting butterscotch-scented sap all over their clothes. They also supplemented their weak vocabularies with heavy doses of “fag” and “gay,” which began to sound like George Orwell's Newspeak: “You are a faghiker. This is a gaybackpack. This is a doubleplusgaymountain.” Their crew leader was an eighteen-year-old bulk of fat and muscle whose face suggested a fairy tale in which the frog prince didn't quite complete the transition either way. He and his buddies would become defensive when I asked them to stop climbing the pines.
“Trees are strong,” he said. He never made eye contact when he spoke; his pupils rotated with no object permanence. “Who cares if we break a few—this is a forest.”
I explained that it was our policy. “That is a plusfagpolicy.” I gave the no-trace pep talk; our campsite was so beautiful and surprisingly well preserved, considering how many Scouts we got every summer, wouldn't it be nice if the next group to camp here had the same unspoiled experience? “That is gaythink.” I explained that it was a very long hike for medical help, so if any of them should fall and twist or break something, they would be in pain for many long, long hours. He shrugged.
The frog leader's parents were the adult advisors for the crew, and I found that I preferred them to any of the boys. I especially liked his mother, a no-bullshit rural woman who informed the boys that if the trees and rocks didn't cause them injury, she would. She told me that she and her husband went on a hiking or canoeing trip almost every other month, usually without their children.
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