by Dan Savage
Ninety minutes earlier I would’ve given anything to be in bed in our hotel room, sound asleep. But at that moment, I wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else, or with anyone else, on earth.
Another high: A few years later, we moved into a new neighborhood and one day D.J. and a friend were rude to a pack of girls who lived down the block. The girls’ mother came over, introduced herself, told us what had happened, and helpfully suggested that maybe D.J. had “issues with women.” We suggested that D.J. was an eight-year-old boy, and like a lot of eight-year-old boys, he didn’t have much use for girls. That’s no excuse for rudeness, of course, and we were sincerely grateful to our new neighbor for giving us a heads-up. We assured her that we would sit D.J. down and read him the riot act. And we did just that: Sitting at the kitchen table we explained to D.J. that he had to be nice to all the kids in the neighborhood, boys and girls. He didn’t have to play with the girls on the block. But there would be swift and painful consequences if he wasn’t civil to the girls.
“Anyway, D.J.,” I added, as the conversation was wrapping up, “one day you’re going to want to talk to girls, so it might not be a bad idea to talk to one or two now, at age eight, while the stakes are still low.”
D.J. pulled himself up and said, nope, he would never have to talk to girls because he was gay. He hated girls, girls were gross, and he had no use for them. So he was definitely going to be gay. Terry and I both burst out laughing. We explained that disliking girls at age eight typically isn’t a sign that a boy is going to be gay when he grows up. Quite the opposite, in fact. D.J. dug in: hates girls, girls are gross, gonna be gay. Terry pulled out a photo album and showed D.J. a picture from his ninth birthday party: The only other boy at Terry’s party was his brother. All the other guests—all twenty of them—were girls. All of his friends, when he was D.J.’s age, were girls. Gross girls.
D.J.’s eyes went from the photo album, to Terry, to me, and back to the photo album. Then he broke into a fit of laughter. At first D.J. was laughing at Terry—all your friends were girls?!?—but the quality of D.J.’s laughter quickly changed. It was the laughter of recognition—self-recognition.
Five short years and one casual coming-out scene later, I would sit at the same kitchen table and talk with D.J. about birth control. We’d had the birds-and-the-bees talk years earlier (botched at first, later amended), but now he had a girlfriend and I thought a review was in order.
“Dad! We’re not doing anything,” D.J. protested. “We’re only thirteen!”
I told him I didn’t think he was doing anything, I didn’t want him doing anything, and that he was way too young to be doing anything. But plenty of thirteen-year-old boys have gotten their thirteen-year-old girlfriends pregnant. At this point I showed him teen pregnancy statistics from the CDC. (Being confronted with such statistics is one of the chief terrors of having a sex writer for a parent.) Without a doubt, the parents of all these pregnant thirteen-year-olds assumed their kids weren’t doing anything either, I said. And they were wrong.
“Sorry, D.J.,” I said, “but if you’re old enough to have a girlfriend, you’re old enough to listen to your dad talk about condoms.”
Same kitchen table, same laughter, same high.
There’s one more high I’d like to share—a more recent one—but there’s something I need to come clean about first.
At the start of this chapter I claimed a small measure of credit for the boom in families headed by same-sex couples. And while it’s true that there are a lot more same-sex couples adopting today than there were a decade and a half ago, and while it’s also true that a lot of gay male couples have been inspired to adopt by The Kid (an e-mail arrived from a gay man thanking me and Terry for inspiring him and his partner to adopt while I was working on this chapter), those facts need to be placed in context.
The truth is that my contribution to the gay-parenting movement pales in comparison to the contributions made by others. These men—and they’re almost always men—are the true heroes of the gay-parenting movement. I speak of Tony Perkins, Bryan Fischer, Rick Warren, Joel Osteen, Marcus Bachmann, Mike Huckabee, Gary Bauer, Peter LaBarbera, Pope Benedict XVI, and Rick Santorum, as well as homophobic preachers and parents everywhere.
In January of 2011, The New York Times reported data that the Census Bureau had gathered on gay families. As it turns out, the states with the highest percentages of families headed by same-sex couples aren’t the ones you would expect. Same-sex couples in the Bible Belt (i.e., Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi) are actually much more likely to be raising children than same-sex couples in the Sanity Belt (i.e., the West Coast, New England, the Great Lake states).
“A large number of gay couples…entered into their current relationship after first having children with partners in heterosexual relationships,” Sabrina Tavernise reports. And why are gay people entering into heterosexual relationships? Tavernise quotes a representative gay parent: “People grew up in church, so a lot of us lived in shame,” said Darlene Maffett, a lesbian woman who was married for eight years and had two children before finally coming out in 2002.
There would be far fewer families headed by same-sex couples if not for the efforts of Christian conservatives. The homophobia that Perkins and the rest of his hateful crew work so hard to promote convinces many young gays and lesbians—who fear being rejected by their families—to attempt to live a straight life. And what better way to nail the closet door shut than to marry an opposite-sex partner and quickly have some children? (The study also found that same-sex parents in the Bible Belt tended to have their children at considerably younger ages than same-sex parents in the Sanity Belt.)
Anti-gay Christian conservatives like Tony Perkins and Bryan Fischer have put more gay men and lesbians on their “journey to parenthood” than I ever have. The homophobia they promote, and the fear and self-loathing it instills in gay teenagers, creates more families headed by same-sex couples in the end than all the gay adoption memoirs and gay adoption agencies and gay surrogacy programs in the country combined.
Now, if you’ll indulge me, here’s that one last high I’d like to recount.
We had taken D.J. and two of his friends on a snowboarding trip. The adults were in the kitchen, cleaning up after dinner, while the three teenage boys sat around the dining room table taking the piss out of each other. It was good-natured stuff—crude but not cruel—until one of the boys turned to D.J. and said, “So you have gay parents. Guess that means you’re going to be gay too.”
There was a long silence. D.J. was fourteen then, straight and out and proud, with one girlfriend down (that relationship was short-lived) and God only knows how many to go. Terry and I looked at each other, not sure what to do. D.J.’s friend was baiting him—and baiting him with an unsubtle homophobic jab within earshot of D.J.’s gay parents!—but we hesitated to come to D.J.’s defense. He had long ago made it clear that he didn’t need or want us to fight his battles for him.
“My parents are gay,” D.J. finally said, breaking the silence. “But their parents were straight. Like your parents. So if anyone else is going to be gay around here, it’s you.”
Terry and I looked at each other, our jaws hanging open, not sure how to respond. What D.J.’s friend said to him was homophobic. And D.J.’s response to his friend was homophobic. But it was also genius.
Should we say something? Do something? Terry shook his head and stifled a laugh.
Another high disguised as a low. We let it go.
7. Crazy, Mad, Salacious
My dad liked cop shows.
He was a cop, a homicide detective assigned to Chicago’s seedy gay neighborhood in the seventies. And like a lot of cops, what Dad most enjoyed about watching cop shows was pointing out where they got it wrong. There was just one show on TV that got police work even slightly right, according to my dad. Barney Miller ran on ABC from 1975, when I was eleven, to 1982, when I was seventeen. The officers on Barney Miller weren’t beat cops. They we
re detectives, like my dad. Their jobs were tedious, like my dad’s—all paperwork and bad coffee, no car chases, no shoot-outs. And the detectives were middle-aged and out of shape, like my dad. And like my dad, the detectives on Barney Miller policed a seedy gay neighborhood, New York City’s Greenwich Village.
There was a recurring gay character on Barney Miller, one of the first on television. Very swishy, carried a purse, owned a poodle. Sometimes we would be watching television together when the gay character appeared in an episode, and my dad would always sit there in silence until he was gone. My dad liked cop movies too. And I remember watching one in particular with my dad—The Choirboys, a 1977 movie—in our living room sometime after it came out on video. And how’s this for a coincidence? The cops in The Choirboys policed Los Angeles’s seedy gay neighborhood. And in one scene, one of the guys—one of the cops—is handcuffed to a tree in a cruisy park and left there with his pants around his ankles.
And who should come upon this helpless, bare-assed cop? A swishy gay guy carrying a purse, walking a poodle. He takes one look at the cop and says, “I can’t believe it. A naked man chained to a tree. That’s a crazy, mad, salacious dream.”
“I’ll kill you if you touch me, you fag son of a bitch,” the cop says. “I’ll rip your damn kidneys out. I’ll punch your spleen.”
“You’d do that for me?” the swish replies. Then he saunters off with his poodle—which is, of course, dyed pink.
Watching that with my dad when I was a teenager made me want to die because I knew I was going to be some kind of fag when I grew up and so did he. But I wasn’t ready to talk about the subject with him and he certainly wasn’t going to go anywhere near it. So when gays popped up on TV—something that began to happen with much greater frequency just as I hit puberty—things got awkward.
We watched the park scene in The Choirboys in complete silence, just as we watched Barney Miller in silence whenever the recurring gay character was in an episode. Here was this subject we were both trying to avoid at all costs, and all of a sudden, we were ambushed by the television set. I was already painfully self-conscious about certain telltale mannerisms and interests of my own. My passion for musical theater, my complete want of male friends, and my inability to focus on anything else whenever Andy Gibb was on Solid Gold alarmed both my parents. I would sometimes force myself to listen to Top 40 hits, hang out with boys from the neighborhood, or watch a Cubs game. It wasn’t until years later that I found out my mom and dad were fine—or would be eventually—with me being gay. The reason my dad got so quiet when gay characters appeared on TV? (A silence I interpreted at the time for simmering disgust.) It turns out he didn’t want to make me feel bad by laughing.
But sitting in front of the TV with my silent father all those years ago, I made a resolution. I was going to be some kind of fag when I grew up, I knew that, but I wasn’t going to be that kind of fag. I wasn’t going to carry a purse. And I would never come upon a half-naked cop, chained to a tree in a cruisy park, late at night, because I wasn’t going to be walking any poodles around cruisy parks late at night. Because I wasn’t going to be the kind of fag that owned a poodle.
I was going to be a different kind of fag. I wasn’t going to be like the ones on TV in 1982. And straight people—my dad, Ronald Reagan, Anita Bryant—were going to like me.
The gay men portrayed on television when I was growing up distressed me—they put me in an awkward position—but they didn’t upset me. They didn’t upset me then, and they don’t upset me now. I’ve spoken to other gay men close to my age who seethe when they remember gay characters on television with their poodles and purses, their lisps and limp wrists. It never occurred to me to be angry.
But, still, I made up my mind not to be like them. I could see that straight people held effeminate gay men in contempt; they saw them as weak and ridiculous. Gay men with pink poodles were hated; real men wanted to punch their spleens.
Once I came out, of course, it didn’t take me long to realize that, first, not all straight people are homophobes, and second, straight people who are homophobic don’t make distinctions between masculine and feminine gay men. They hate us all, purses or no purses, poodles or no poodles. And the feminine guys I got to know after coming out? The guys I didn’t want to be like? They weren’t weak and ridiculous. They were strong, and they were brave. (And some of them were hot, and some of the hot ones were really good in bed.)
Now whenever a friend complains about gays on television, I immediately concede that, yes, most gay characters are stereotypes. Back then, and even now. But is the portrayal of heterosexuals on television any better? The gays on Will & Grace in the 1990s were caricatures, yes, but so were the straights on Friends. Do real-life straight people act anything like the crazy-ass breeders on Desperate Housewives? And do real straight people act like the fake straight people did on Lost? (Has anyone ever acted like the straight people did on Lost?) Do real straight people act like Tom Cruise on Oprah? On Modern Family the relationship between Cam and Mitch, a gay couple with a small child, is nearly sexless, which, knowing what we do about gay men, seems fairly unrealistic. But Claire and Phil, the harried straight parents of three teenagers, have an active sex life, which, knowing what we do about long-married straight couples, may be even less realistic.
Only an idiot looks to television to form a picture of what straight people are really like. Only an idiot…or a child. Perhaps a child who, like Lily on Modern Family, has gay parents.
When D.J. was old enough to use the remote, I felt as if I were regressing to my teen years, suddenly worried about how people of a certain specific sexuality were portrayed on television. Only this time it wasn’t the homosexual characters I was worried about. It was the heterosexual characters. Because I knew my straight son was watching.
I knew D.J. was straight the same way my parents knew I was gay: I just knew it. I always knew it. I knew it in my gut. But, unlike my parents, I wasn’t in denial. I didn’t push it out of my mind or try not to think about it or hope that I might be wrong.
And I was conscious, as D.J. grew, that he was learning about his sexuality watching television, just as I once learned about mine watching television. And in those formative years, when D.J. was seven, eight years old, the treatment of heterosexuality on one show in particular offended me so much that I banned him from watching it. And I’m not talking about the Real Housewives franchise here. We wouldn’t have let him watch Real Housewives if he had wanted to. And he didn’t want to. Reality shows were, for D.J., just so many grown-ups shouting at each other. And D.J. didn’t have to watch TV for a taste of that.
No, this was a show for kids on the Disney Channel, one of the most popular kids’ shows on TV then. And it was a show D.J. adored. The Suite Life of Zack & Cody is about twin brothers who live in a hotel in Boston, the Tipton, where their divorced mom works as a cabaret singer.
Zack and Cody were always getting into crazy scrapes and hatching harebrained schemes. They were preteens themselves—ten or eleven years old—just a year or two older than D.J. In some ways this show defied stereotypes. There’s a character named London, a spoiled rich girl played by an Asian actress but—get this—she’s Asian, yeah, but she’s dumb. And then there’s Maddie, a teenage girl who works at the hotel candy shop, played by a blond actress, but—are you sitting down?—Maddie is blond, sure, but she’s smart. And then there’s Mr. Moseby, the hotel manager, played by a black actor. But he’s fussy. Don’t know if he owns a poodle, as I haven’t seen every episode, but he’s definitely the poodle-owning type.
But what offended me—what worried me—was the behavior of one of the twins. Zack was sexually precocious in a deeply creepy way. (Can a prepubescent boy be sexually precocious in a way that isn’t deeply creepy?) Zack was also the more charismatic twin: Zack was Lucy to Cody’s Ethel. Zack was the athletic one, the risk taker. And in every episode Zack wanted, ached for, pined for, and sexually harassed Maddie, the smart blond. Maddie was sixteen
or seventeen. Zack was in elementary school; Maddie was in high school. Zack was prepubescent; Maddie was postpubescent.
I didn’t like D.J. to watch TV alone when he was young. So I’d plop down on the couch with a book and sit with him, which is how I caught the episode of Suite Life where Zack worries about Maddie hooking up with other guys. An episode where Zack instructs other little boys on the art of talking to babes. His advice? One lies to babes. In one particular episode, “A Prom Story,” Zack walks up to Maddie and—well, let’s just read the dialogue.
ZACK, looking Maddie up and down: Hey, sweet thing. What’s the special today? I hope it’s tall, blond, and curvy.
I’m not sure how a teenager would react to being hit on by a ten-year-old boy in real life because it never happens. But somehow fictional Zack escapes the humiliation or the punch in the chest that any real-life Zack would immediately be subjected to. Instead, Zack emerges from this encounter with the impression that Maddie has just asked him to go with her to her prom. Zack runs up to Cody.
ZACK, excited: Did you hear that? Maddie wants to dance with me at her prom. I’d better practice my kissing.
CODY, nauseated: Don’t look at me.
That is a threefer right there. You’ve got a prepubescent horny boy joke, an incest joke, and a cliché homophobic reaction to the idea of two boys kissing, brothers or not.
Thanks, Disney.
D.J. watched The Suite Life of Zack & Cody with a look of concentration on his face, a look he didn’t get watching any other shows, a look he certainly doesn’t get when his parents are talking to him. He looked like he was filing things away for future reference. For a boy without older brothers, a boy without straight male uncles or cousins living nearby, we worried that the way Zack treats women could be a problem every bit as damaging to a young straight boy as those images of gay men with poodles were to me.
