Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

by Paul Monette

  I was primed, in other words, for the sort of guilt that seals off all the exits. Yet the moment itself was minimal enough, hardly the stuff of a hurricane fire. Kite was over to play at my house, a dank cold day, and just as the winter dusk was falling, the two of us were kneeling by the bedroom window, the one that looked out on the cherry tree. When Kite announced he had a boner, we unzipped our flies and waggled our weenies, snickering. No big deal. I had enough self-control not to break out the Kama Sutra with parents in earshot. But I left the light off and the door open.

  "What're you boys doing?"

  The scald of my mother's querulous voice seared the dwindling day with judgment. In an instant our two flies were zipped, and I swung around and said, "Nothing." She stood there silent, making me squirm, but neither of us spoke another word.

  In the next two days, the squirm became a way of life, as I filled up every silence in the household with bright chatter. My mother and I avoided being alone together, but I could feel the edge of her preoccupation. My nervous happy-talk was a frantic attempt to make an unspoken deal, that we both forget the whole thing. Was she torturing me by letting me swing by my own grinning rope? Did she even remotely understand that her damning silence was turning sex into something strangely private, just between her and me?

  On the third day, I came home from school and found her brooding at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette. Right away I started to talk, changing the unspoken subject, strewing the table before her with A's. She finally looked at me grimly and upped the ante: "What were you doing with Kite?"

  No deal. "I told you—nothing," I flung back, skittering away to the living room door. Then tossed it again, with bitter emphasis. "Nothing."

  She looked down at the cigarette in her hand, tapping it into the ash tray, and said no more.

  I was right, of course—it had been nothing. Yet I knew as I walked lead-footed to my bedroom that the high-wire act of passion was over, because it was somehow wrong. Even if I'd had the wherewithal to challenge her confusion, it wasn't worth the fight. There had already been enough damage to our family, more than enough of the pain of being different. The last thing they needed was something weird from me. Thus did the subtext of my growing-up get set in stone: I had to be the normal one. To compensate for the family curse, my brother, whose laughing demeanor and scrappiness were already at odds with the tragic whispering of neighbors and gawkers.

  So I told myself I would give it up, even prayed at night for it to be taken away, not knowing that "it" was love. Forgive me for what I did with Kite, and don't let it happen again.

  No moment of my first twenty years is more indelible than the kitchen inquisition of my mother. All the ambiguity of sex reduced to a single question, the implication crystal clear that something very bad had happened—unnatural, even. The flinching of my heart from that point on would ensure our brief exchange a central place in therapy, fifteen years later. Eventually I would come to see that it wasn't the crime of homosex so much as sex itself that had so overwhelmed my mother.

  Oh, we finally had it out, she and I, combing it over like ancient myth in those dialogues of the dining room table, the oxygen hissing softly from the tank that followed her everywhere now. She swore she'd put the entire incident out of her mind, but that, I think, was wishful thinking. She should have told my father, she said, and let him have it out with me. Poor lady—how many mothers hide the first queer evidence from the fathers, compounding the distance all around? And how exactly would it have come out any better if my father had asked the question? My answer would have been just the same—Nothing—and I still would've ended up gritting my teeth to be normal.

  I think she just felt helpless, out of her depth. When she came upon me and Kite in the winter dusk, it was one more thing she couldn't handle. The last straw of who knows how many disappointments and humiliations she and my father faced, defying the world that thought of us as anything but normal. We were all victims of the peculiarly American obsession that everyone be the same, once the pot has melted down. A sameness decreed by the advertisers, and the white-bread fantasies of the tube. Little did we know that being different was our only hope, my brother's as much as mine.

  I've long since forgiven my mother and me. But it used to bother her terribly to hear how unbearable my growing up felt, worse and worse through the minefields of adolescence, on account of the shame of being queer. How fervently she wanted me to remember the happy childhood she swore had taken place. She had all the scalloped pictures to prove it. But I wouldn't budge: the pictures were lies. I had only one small consolation for her, as she battered herself with the very guilt she'd laid on me in the hurricane season on High Street. I told her she and my father must've done it all right in the end, because Bobby and I both managed to find great love. If she'd really fucked up, I'd be all alone.

  I'm not sure it was ever enough for her, who never stopped wishing the leatherbound album and life had been the same? I'd exonerate her as best I could, telling her she had a right to be happy in the past, even if I wasn't. But I also know that once she'd made her peace with me being gay, she realized how much time she'd wasted. Those were the sunsets she came to regret, the years when she dreaded the terrible knowledge of what she'd walked in on, that watershed day in '55. Her closet became as airless as mine. And her and my father's coming out would be as needlessly protracted, like raising a family all over again.

  For years after—this I didn't tell her—a rainy day at dusk would render me almost suicidal. And later on, that violet hour would find me out cruising to fill the void, fucking on the cusp of nightfall. I never saw Kite again, or never more than a stiff walk home from school together, both acting as if our year of wildfire had been all a mirage. I heard he ended up in reform school—or was it prison?—or is it a trick of my memory that has invented a punishing fate for him? Just the sort of comeuppance I would've relished in my closet years, when I was my people's enemy.

  In the spring I learned we were moving away from High Street, and I was punchy with relief. There was nothing left for me there. The frontier country of Jeff and Porky had faded into the common light of day. The backyard barns and sheds had changed before my guilty eyes into the rooms of hell. Not only would sixth grade be a new slate, I would start all over in a new neighborhood—a chance to be normal, without a past.

  As for my longing to be an adult, master of all the storms, in the end I got half my wish. A twist on the fate of Tithonis in the Trojan legend, who asked the goddess Aurora for immortality, but neglected to specify immortally young. Older and older forever, that was Tithonis's curse. In the case of Little Paul, the raging loss of innocence with Kite had rid me of the invisibility of childhood. (Good riddance, as my French grandmother would've harrumphed.) But it also left me stuck in the amber of wrong desire—kneeling by my bedroom window, looking out on a leafless cherry tree. In a twilight world where no one is ever a child again, and where no one ever grows up.

  Two

  I DON'T KNOW WHEN hate starts. Bigotry has to be taught, that much is clear, because babies and small children don't think in vicious epithets. On the other hand, it certainly doesn't take much to find yourself a scapegoat. We only had one black family in Andover, but by the fourth grade all the nigger jokes were in place. I remember this quite vividly, because that was the year the oldest boy of that family was hit by a train and decapitated, crossing the Boston & Maine tracks to the poorest pocket of town. Nobody cried at school or observed a moment of silence. They told nigger jokes instead, kicking around that severed head like a football.

  I suppose there must have been more than one Jewish family. It happened that I was friends at school with Peter Goodman, the other kid in the class with straight A's. And therefore I was more attuned to the kike jokes whispered behind his back—though rather than protest them I pretended not to hear them. My first collaboration with the enemy. The most I could summon up was a cluck of disdain when Maidie Lynch or one of her pious ilk came out wit
h the hissing judgment that the Jews had killed Our Lord.

  She learned that in church. Organized religion is the school of hate, and never more exultant in its righteous indignation than when it talks about gay and lesbian. In America the unholy alliance between the know-nothing fundamentalists and the Catholic hierarchy keeps the faithful whipped up to a frenzy of witch-hunting and fag-bashing. We "stand as a proxy for all that is evil," according to one researcher of homophobia, such that "hating gay men and lesbians is a litmus test for being a moral person."[3]

  The "Roman problem," as a priest once put it to me ruefully, goes all the way back to Aquinas—a thirteenth-century barbarian of the Church whose seething nonsense about women and gays has passed into Holy Writ. It's worth recalling that the Church was a welcoming place for gays and lesbians in its first millennium, as open to them as it was to married priests. I also recognize that there was a moment, in the benign reign of John XXIII, when the warp and the bigotry could have been confronted. It's no accident that Vatican II was letting in the light at the same time that feminism and the Stonewall revolution threw down the gauntlet before the patriarchy.

  But Vatican II castrated itself, and the rosy 60's are no more. A new Inquisition is in full cry, led by the rabid dog in brocade, Cardinal Ratzinger of the Curia, the malevolent divine who laid down the law that loving gay was a matter of "intrinsic evil." In the decade of the AIDS calamity I've come to see the church of the Polish pope as a sort of Greenwich Mean of moral rot—thus in my small way returning the compliment of Sturmführer Ratzinger. Hardly a week goes by that we don't hear from the pope's minions in the colonies—O'Connor in New York, Mahony in L.A.—spewing their misogyny and homophobia, delirious with triumph that sex finally equals death.

  But I try not to hate Catholics, even so. In this I take my cue from the Holy Fathers themselves, who assure us God hates the sin and not the sinner. So I bite my tongue for the little old ladies who go to Mass, the yearning ethnic poor who somehow manage to see God through all the brocade, and even the wincing priests who write to me that the present reign of terror will pass.

  They are welcome to their deity, and whatever ceremonies get them there. But I and my brothers and sisters are the victims of a pogrom, cold-bloodedly orchestrated in the situation rooms of the Vatican. The Roman problem is political, not religious. And the parameters were set for the modern age by Pius XII, who washed his hands like Pilate because Jews weren't a Catholic charity, and anyway they killed Our Lord. Pius—the absent defendant at Nuremburg.

  Nevertheless, it makes me sick inside, to hate the way my enemies hate. I understand that I'll never get around my rage at the tyranny of religion to see if there's anything Higher out there. The Bible is still the only dirty book I've ever read, at least in its current incarnation as a weapon of the homophobes. Bible scholarship keeps trying to catch up, proving that all the hatred of gay is just stupid translation, though the snake-oil preachers don't want to hear it. But perhaps I'm just as stuck as they are—with the acquired prejudices of Grandpa Joe, to whom the Irish and their priests were a subhuman species.

  "You're so angry at God," my mother used to say, maddeningly countering my unbelief. Is it as simple as that: my mother with her rock-steady faith, and me the atheist throwing it in her face? The children of atheists, they say, are always first at the altar for Communion—presumably because they sit in the front pew. As a friend of mine lamented after she read Women Who Love Too Much: "It's so depressing to be a cliché."

  Yet if my Roman prejudice is intense, I still saw what I saw, and can't unsee it. Sixth grade at Central: the Irish toughs led by Vinnie O'Connor, a bully's bully, huge and hulking with a blood-lust sneer that made even Kite look like a choirboy. It happened in the basement corridor, just outside the boys' lavatory, where the sixth grade had its lockers. Vinnie and a group of three or four others had somebody pinned in a corner. Vinnie was snarling and shoving.

  "Yeah, you're a homo, ain't ya? Little fairy homo. Ain't that right?"

  Then he shot out a fist and slammed his victim's head against the wall. A bustle of students streamed past to their lockers, eyes front and pretending not to see. But my locker was just a few feet away; I couldn't help but hear it all if I wanted to get my lunch-box. Besides, I was drawn to it now, as to a wreck on the freeway.

  "Homo, homo, homo," Vinnie kept repeating, accompanying each taunt with a savage rabbit punch. The victim pleaded, terrified but trying not to cry. It was Austin Singer, a meek, nervous kid who was always working too hard to make friends; the son of a math teacher at Phillips Academy. He vigorously denied the homo charge, choking it out between punches, which only made Vinnie angrier. He growled at two of his mick henchboys, who pinned poor Austin's face to the wall.

  Vinnie made a hawking sound and spit a glob of phlegm on the brick beside Austin's face. "Come on, homo—lick that off." Austin whimpered and tried to pull back. Vinnie brought up his knee into Austin's kidney, making him cry out. Where were the teachers? All old maids, two floors away in the teachers' room, eating their own bird lunches. "Lick it, homo," Vinnie hissed.

  One of the brute lieutenants pushed Austin's face along the brick, scraping it raw. And now Austin, broken, surrendered whatever dignity was left. His tongue lolled out, and he licked up the phlegm while the bullies cheered. "Swallow it!" Vinnie commanded. From where I stood, by my locker, I saw in a daze of horror, the self-disgust in Austin's face as he got it down without retching.

  Vinnie and his boys sprang away, shrieking with laughter. Instantly I busied myself with my lunchbox, terrified they would notice me. As they swaggered away, neither I nor anyone else made a move toward Austin—slumped in the corner as if it would have been easier to die than survive this thing. We all went hurrying away to eat our waxed-paper lunches. I never, never talked to Austin again. But, as I hastened to assure myself, we hadn't been friends anyway.

  The cold truth I took from the scene of Austin Singer's humiliation was this: At least I could still pass. I never even gave a thought to the evil of what Vinnie had done, how sick with confused desire, the carnal thrill of degradation. The only reality lesson in it for me was not to be recognizably Other. At all costs I would discipline myself to appear as regular as Vinnie's boys, lest he suspect me and pin me to the wall. I'd see those Irish hoods sauntering up the hill to town from St. Augustine's after Mass, and I'd grin and fawn and try to walk with the same bow-legged swagger.

  What did it have to do with their being Catholic? I wondered about that even then, how it was they got away with bullying and torture. It seemed to be all mixed up with confessing and getting absolved—we were studying sacraments in confirmation class, the Romans versus us. I suppose I can't blame Ratzinger for Vinnie O'Connor, a rotten apple in any barrel. But why was it they seemed the very same guys, a decade later on the evening news, mobbing the streets of Boston against forced busing? The nigger jokes of the Irish toughs were translated into a murderous fight for turf. Nobody black was safe in Southie after dark, when the locals began to drink in earnest.

  And nobody gay. One night, in my twenties, I watched a red-faced drunk—the spitting image of Vinnie O'Connor, but full-grown now and twice as lethal—chase two men down Boylston Street for holding hands. He roared that he would shred their faces with the broken bottle he wielded. How much of that did he learn in church, along with his catechism dose of "intrinsic evil"?

  My prejudice in these matters is manifest, even to me, but, then, I'm not seeking rapprochement with the powers of Rome. I leave that task to the outraged nuns, the muzzled theologians, the Dignity groups who are barred the sacraments because they persist in the sin of love. It would be another thirty years before I married an Irishman myself—well, half an Irishman anyway. Stevie's other half was Polish, like the smiling pope himself, another race with a spotless record for snuffing queers. Lech Walesa—talk about choirboys—promised during his summer campaign for the presidency that he would rid Poland of homosexuals. He didn't say how, but the
death camps are still right there.

  So I have one mixed Catholic marriage and four great-aunts who were nuns, and I'm going to hell anyway on account of my lather's transfer. But I had no idea till I started talking out the Catholic stuff with Stevie—so deliciously lapsed himself—how very effectively Vinnie O'Connor had bashed my head the day he broke Austin Singer's spirit. We are creatures of the cruelties we witness.

  Happily, the move to Stratford Road in '56 was a move up the blue-collar scale, away from kids like Kite and Vinnie, from the hardened lives of the millworkers, an underclass ahead of its time. Though still only four blocks east of town, Stratford Road was a suburb compared to High Street: two neat rows of postwar bungalows facing each other, ten on either side. The frontyard trees were still mostly saplings—in front of number 11, a pair of Japanese plums snowed with blossoms every May but more notable for their summer swarms of beetles than for their fruit. It was a bare hundred-yard dash from one end of Stratford Road to the other, a tract builder's shortcut between Chestnut and Summer streets, substantial thoroughfares both, old as the horse days.

  A much more manicured world, most of the houses as white as the people who lived in them. On Stratford Road we had five schoolteachers—four of whom live there still—and otherwise a cozy mix of local businessmen and the rare commuter to Boston. For a while we even had a state senator with a crinkly Kennedy smile and telegenic silver hair, but they moved away quite suddenly, trailed by rumors of a mistress, graft, and kickbacks. The denizens of Stratford Road had no more use for Boston politicians than for Boston itself. Our own form of government was Town Meeting, still manageable enough to hold in the auditorium at Punchard High, every new stoplight the subject of excruciating debate.