The Best American Essays 2016

by Jonathan Franzen

  Just a couple of months after coming out to my parents, I received a letter, signed by both my mother and father, though written in my father’s hand. I was living in Virginia, where I was teaching. My relationship with T., which had inspired my revelation, had just ended.

  The letter seemed oddly familiar to me, since I had seen versions of it in various made-for-TV movies about families torn apart by a son’s homosexuality. And though my parents never actually said what was always said in those movies—“I would rather you were dead”—they did write that they would prefer anything to my being gay. The work of filling in the blank of that “anything” was left to me.

  They asked me never to speak to them again about my romantic life. I wasn’t to mention T., nor was I to speak about any of this to my brother or anyone else in the family. I would always be welcome in their home, they wrote, but only if I came alone, and only if I played by the rules concerning what could and couldn’t be said.

  The irony wasn’t lost on me. By refusing to hear any news of T., they missed the biggest news of all: that we were no longer a couple. Had I been able to tell them that I had broken T.’s heart on a beach in Oregon, perhaps they could have escaped whatever depraved visions troubled their sleep.

  I kept this letter for almost a decade. I was angry, and whenever I felt the anger fading, I would retrieve the letter from the box on the top shelf of my closet and feed the anger that had become as essential to me as my name. I imagined the letter as a kind of eternal flame, threatening to engulf the closet that hid it, the house, my life. When the house was quiet, I could almost hear the letter crackle and pop, its flicker dancing in the darkness. Fires eventually burn themselves out, people say. They run out of fuel. I wasn’t so sure.

  My mother died two years after sending that letter. In the aftermath, communication with my father was even more strained, since my mother was the oil that kept a barely functioning machine going. And when my uncle died, six years later, this left just my father and me, with so much to talk about but no ability to do so. Wanting a smaller house, he sold his and bought my uncle’s, so on my rare trips home to see him, I found myself in what had been Uncle Mason’s house, choking on the silence.

  As a diversion, I spent a fair amount of time snooping through my uncle’s things. Silence breeds a longing to know, and in an effort to fill in the missing pieces, I had already constructed a story for him, a tragic account of missed opportunities. He was, in this fantasy, the gay man born fifty years too soon, a man whose desires found no home in the world. That thing inside him that made him want the things he shouldn’t want: that was sickness. That was the work of the Devil. And it could be resisted only through discipline, denial, and a surrender to God. In shaping his story this way, I was able to cast myself as its hero, the man who had the opportunities my uncle lacked, who could live his gay life—his real life—for him. I would dedicate every kiss, every grope, every exchange of fluids to my uncle’s queer memory.

  The first thing I discovered in my snooping was a painful reminder of the distance between us. I had hoped to find, of course, a diary, something that laid out, in dishy detail, the love that dare not speak its name. I had come to expect such things of figures from the queer past, who were, according to my research, obsessive diary-keepers. I knew that Arthur Benson, for example, English writer and master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, had filled 180 volumes with over four million words, almost all of them an attempt to understand the unseemly things he felt for the undergraduates in his charge.

  My uncle, it turned out, was no Arthur Benson. He left behind no “Dear Diary” recounting of things that couldn’t be spoken. He did keep, however, a rather sporadic log, less a diary than a kind of shorthand remembrance of the day’s events. There were no secrets here, no revelations. I scanned for any mention of me, but found only one, from the day I had told the truth about myself: “Distressing news from Mason today.” There it was, in his beautiful if prissy hand—he had studied calligraphy—proof that I had been the cause of distress. In those five words I learned more about how he truly felt than I had in any conversation. I had hurt him in ways he never let me know.

  The transition from this log entry to a photo of my uncle, probably in his seventies, posing in front of the Liberace Museum was both jarring and hopeful. I knew this museum well, having spent a delightful afternoon there once with a boyfriend, both of us eager to escape the Vegas Strip. We marveled at the mirrored piano, the capes, the sequins, the chandeliers, the pink-feathered boas. But mostly we marveled at our fellow visitors, a bimodal mix of queens and grandparents, thirty-something gay men seeking their idol and senior citizens seeking theirs. How to read my uncle’s presence there? A whole generation would go to their graves certain that Liberace was the most heterosexual of men. Another would find in him the flamboyance and camp they needed to survive. What did Liberace mean, when he meant so many very different things at once?

  In a separate folder I discovered an honorable discharge from the army, evidence of a thing I had never quite believed: that my uncle served in World War II. I had heard his stories of raucous nights in the Officer’s Club in London, where he played the piano, but I could never square those stories with my very nonmilitary sense of my uncle. But here it was, dated December 20, 1945, a “testimonial of honest and faithful service to this country.” My uncle was twenty-one years old, not even finished growing, since the paper listed his height at five-nine, and I knew that he had six feet in his future. His weight was a scrawny 132 pounds. Under “Battles and Campaigns,” the document listed “Northern France FO 105 WD 45,” which, for all its gibberish, sounded a far cry from the drunken hijinks of that Officer’s Club in London. Under “Wounds Received in Action,” thankfully, “none.”

  But when I discovered an envelope marked “Army Pictures, World War 2,” I found a version of my uncle that made more sense to me. The first photo captures a military version of the Island of Misfit Toys, six young men in full dress uniform, my uncle among them, all six radiating an awkwardness—let’s put it plainly—a queerness, that I find immediately endearing. Having lived most of my life among boys and men like these, I recognize them immediately. These were not “the guys”; these were, rather, “those guys,” men of questionable masculinity who found solace in their collective otherness. Their facial expressions range from pinched to goofy, their height from my uncle’s five-nine to something more like the five-two of a man in the first row, who, according to my uncle’s writing on the back, went by the nickname “Short Boy.” My uncle is the most striking of the pack, his eyes meeting the camera with a quiet confidence. He’s beautiful, in his way, and I’m unsettled by my attraction to him. But I’m particularly drawn to a man in the front row, the most misfitted of this misfit group. Bad hair, cheeks with more than a memory of baby fat, an attempt at manly seriousness that doesn’t convince. He’s adorable, like a teddy bear. His name is included in the caption on the back (I’ll call him J.P.), and I wonder what he’s thinking, what it feels like for him to be among these men.

  Next I find a photo that looks like an outtake from the Gomer Pyle show, my uncle and two other men posed with helmets and rifles. They’re holding the rifles at a forty-five-degree angle, and the middle man’s helmet is askew. Their uniforms are too large, the pants bunching at the ankles. There’s an attempt at masculine bravado, but it fails. These men should not have guns. They’re not the gun type. There’s another of my uncle with three men on a beach, either France or England. They’re in bathing suits, shirtless, huddled together for the camera. My uncle’s hand rests lightly on the shoulder of the homely man in front of him. There’s a woman in the far background, half clad in a towel. The caption on the back reads, in my uncle’s writing, “Beautiful, aren’t we? Note the lady undressing behind us.” And the thing is, they are beautiful, all pale, gangly limbs, exposed and vulnerable. And again, the thought hits me that these are my people. If I saw any of them on the street, I would look twice. I would risk a know
ing glance.

  And then I find the photo I’m looking for: my uncle, embracing another man. It’s J.P. from the first picture, tucked under my uncle’s arm, and he’s wrapped my uncle in a teddy bear hug. My uncle’s left arm draws J.P. to him, his right hand clasping J.P.’s wrist. There’s no way to describe this other than romantic. This isn’t the kind of physical contact that straight men love to perform, their heterosexuality assured and thus unimpeachable. There’s no irony here, no self-consciousness. There’s only the comfort of the embrace, and a refusal to let go. I turn the picture over, hoping for a caption, but find only my uncle’s last name.

  The last picture I discover is different. It’s of my uncle, shirtless, with another shirtless man in the background. A military tent stands behind them. I’m struck by my uncle’s body language, and his facial expression. His head is cocked to the side, like a puzzled dog. And there’s something in his face that’s not visible in the other pictures, something resistant, something unwelcoming. It’s as if he wonders why he’s being looked at, and wishes he weren’t. I feel him looking back at me, wondering why I have him in my lens. And he’s asking, What do you want from me? What is it you hope to find? I turn the photo over and find only the word CENSORED and some illegible scrawl.

  We often think of the military as a bastion of antigay hostility, but this doesn’t tell the whole story. In fact, as Allan Bérubé documents in Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II, the war offered gay men and lesbians both a visibility and a community they lacked in civilian life. As Bérubé writes, “The massive mobilization for World War II relaxed social constraints of peacetime that had kept gay men and women unaware of themselves and each other, ‘bringing out’ many in the process.” William Menninger, a psychiatric consultant to the military, called the wartime army “fundamentally a homosexual society,” where men were thrown into close and intimate contact with one another in a space almost completely devoid of women. And while the military worked hard, through psychological profiling, to weed out gay enlistees, both the urgency of the need and the crudeness of their instruments led to a massive failure to ensure the military’s heterosexuality. In fact, something of the opposite happened. An alertness to homosexual stereotypes led in many cases not to dismissal but to a sort of segregation, where gay men were channeled into so-called appropriate occupations: the steno pool, clerical jobs, and, to a significant extent, musical and entertainment corps. This gender-inverted typecasting had the effect of creating, where none had existed, gay work cultures and communities. One begins to understand those pictures of my uncle with his posse of the slightly “off ” men who had found each other and were relieved to have done so.

  These newly formed gay cultures spilled into the cities surrounding army bases, where places like the Pepsi-Cola Servicemen’s Canteen dormitory in San Francisco and the Seven Seas Locker Club in San Diego, along with YMCA hotels, became hotbeds of gay cruising and only slightly covert sex. Given such opportunities, civilian life began to look much less attractive. As one GI said, “If I go home . . . how can I stay out all night or promote a serious affair? My parents would simply consider me something perverted and keep me in the house.”

  Of course, all this new freedom would lead to an inevitable backlash. With the return to civilian life of a newly visible gay culture, the genie had to be put back in the bottle. The decade after the war witnessed an increasing focus on sex perverts and deviants, orchestrated through the federal government, the church, and the media. Returning to their small towns, their families, the eyes of their neighbors, what would happen to men like J.P.? What would happen to my uncle?

  But then I remembered that my uncle didn’t return to South Carolina after the war, but went to Miami instead, to attend college. Had his time in the war taught him the value of port cities with large military populations? Was he looking for a civilian version of the community he had found in the army? A small book of snapshots, dated 1949 and inscribed to my uncle, poked a few holes in this theory. Though there’s the occasional photo of an extremely hunky undergrad, in most of these shots my uncle is surrounded by palm trees and bikinied women. The arms that had held J.P. only a year or two before now linger happily over female shoulders, sometimes two and three at a time. Tucked away at the very back, separated from the other photos by several blank sleeves, as though hidden, is a particularly incriminating shot. It’s of my uncle and a girl. He has his arm around her shoulder, and he’s holding her hand while he looks into her eyes. One wonders if this is the woman who sent him the snapshots, who wrote in the back, “I won’t send you the rest of the pictures until I hear from you! So there.”

  Removed from the all-male context of those war photos, my uncle, in these Miami days, looks decidedly more manly, more heterosexual. If the war photos reveal one face of the confirmed bachelor, these college shots reveal the other: the bachelor as a happy figure of heterosexual excess and possibility.

  And I’m reminded of similar photographic evidence from my own past, a picture that once made my parents very happy. I spent my junior year of college abroad, near London, and I was lucky to discover that a second or third cousin by marriage had a five-bedroom condo in Paris. He needed a house sitter for a few weeks around Christmas, and I leapt at the opportunity. Word soon got out that I had commodious digs in the City of Lights, and friends of mine from home and abroad descended, resulting in a Christmas feast of cheap wine and overcooked duck. My guests—some eight or ten—were all female, and when a photo of that Christmas dinner reached my parents, they must have celebrated. And I was happy to let them celebrate. I was still deeply in the closet—scared to death, in fact, of what I knew to be true about myself—and this picture of the promiscuous bachelor abroad was just what I needed to buttress an increasingly shaky heterosexual facade. It was also just what my parents were looking for. They captioned it “Mason and his Harem” and circulated it throughout the neighborhood.

  We see in photographs what we want to see. When is a harem—on a beach or in a Parisian condo—the truth? And when is it a cover for a secret that’s hiding in plain sight?

  I knew my uncle as a deeply religious man. In this he resembled my mother, whose attempts to get me to go to church were heroic, if ultimately doomed to failure. I’ve never been a believer, and this was the source of great and increasing stress in my family. At some point my mother gave up on getting me to church, having grown tired, I imagine, of my postsermon critiques. (I once caught the minister in a misquotation of James Joyce.) But the concern for my everlasting soul lingered, emerging in quiet, if indirect, ways.

  Only a few years before he died, my uncle mailed me a copy of Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days, the first in the blockbuster series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins documenting the rapture—that moment when Jesus returns and the saved ascend with him to heaven, leaving nonbelievers, Jews, and Muslims behind to fight various end-time skirmishes. This gift was astute on my uncle’s part. He knew that I always had my head in a book, and what better way to save an intellectual’s soul than through a novel? I read it immediately. It was fascinating, in the same way that the white supremacist literature I had made the subject of my first scholarly book was fascinating. It was a window into a mind-set that was repugnant to me but that I wanted to understand. Of course, it didn’t have the effect my uncle had intended. Instead of pondering the state of my soul, I wondered why, when the believers were raptured, they left their outer garments behind but took their underwear with them. I wondered what it meant for my uncle to believe that when the rapture came, good people of other faiths would suffer the same fate as atheists. That, say, Gandhi and I, were we contemporaries, would both be doomed to hell.

  I never spoke with my uncle about this novel, and he never brought it up. This was the way with our family. We preferred indirection, anything that allowed us to avoid confrontation: a letter mailed rather than a phone called, a novel that appears with no accompanying message, or, in a more
dramatic example, a message from the grave.

  Just such a message came three days after my uncle’s death—at his funeral service, in fact. I was seated down front in my uncle’s church—a country church, farther out of town than the one I had stopped attending so many years back. I was there with my father, my brother and sister-in-law, perhaps my niece and nephew. Halfway through the preacher’s sermon, I realized that his words were aimed at me—literally. He had found me in the second row and was looking directly at me. He made eye contact, and held it, as he talked about the tragic fate of the nonbeliever, and how easily that fate could be avoided, if only he surrendered his arrogance, his belief that he could think his way through the world. My uncle had spoken in his last days, the preacher said, of his faith in God, of his certainty of the life everlasting that awaited him. But he had also spoken of a heaviness of heart. He was worried, the preacher said, about those who lacked such certainty. He was distraught over the fate of people who weren’t saved, the hellfire that awaited them.

  Although the preacher never mentioned my name, I’m sure that my uncle did, that my uncle’s last wish was for this man of God to accomplish what all others had failed at: the salvation of his nephew, whom he loved.

  And as the preacher was doing this work, his eyes on me and only me, I became angrier and angrier. How dare he use the occasion of my uncle’s funeral to proselytize. How dare he intrude upon my grief to alert me to the dire state of my soul. And I worried, in the days that followed, that this anger would seep onto my uncle, that I would always resent him for such a cheap trick, the hijacking of his own funeral for one last attempt at my salvation.

  But instead of anger toward my uncle, I felt sorrow, and this was much worse. For the first time, I tried to put myself in my uncle’s place. I tried to imagine what it would feel like if you knew—knew, not merely believed—that someone you truly loved was doomed to the worst fate imaginable, everlasting torment. Because that’s what my uncle knew, that someone he had known and loved since his first cry was damned. And knowing this must have killed him, in much crueler fashion than the congestive heart failure that merely took his life.