by Sam Harris
At night, after everyone was asleep, I would study for hours. I removed the pages from the oversize binding of an Encyclopedia Britannica volume (“Light” through “Metabolism”) and hid whatever book I was reading inside its cover so that if I were caught, I would appear scholarly. I made endless notes on a legal pad, drawn from experts on the subject: Havelock Ellis. Sigmund Freud. Alfred Kinsey. William Masters and Virginia Johnson. All of the books were fairly consistent in their assessment that homosexuality was a mental disorder. Pathological. Perverted. Possibly genetic, but probably environmental. Some cited sexual trauma as the cause and others reported that an absent father and strong mother were the lethal combination.
If that was the case, I thought, all of the kids I grew up with should be gay.
Masters and Johnson said it might be reversible. I conjured up electroshock treatments or being strapped to a chair with subliminal pictures of female genitalia flashing on a giant screen. Alfred Kinsey claimed that ten percent of the population was gay. That seemed like a lot. Clearly fewer in Sand Springs, which, looking at the national average, helped explain San Francisco.
Mr. McDowell was a lighthouse in a very foggy world. Beyond his ability to make psychology fascinating through exercises and examples that shattered the pretaught constraints of his students, he had an unerring radar for the psychology of the individual. In spite of my attempt to be undetected as someone on the very brink, McDowell saw in me what no one else had. Not even my parents. He knew I was in trouble. Perhaps he had seen it before. Perhaps he had been a troubled teenager himself. Whatever it was, he had a gift.
It began one day with a friendly tap on the shoulder as I exited his class. He asked how I was. I responded with a broad, phony grin and a litany of distracting activities. A few days later he heard me asking around for a ride after school and offered to drive me home. We got in his truck and he asked about my summer away. Nothing deeply inquisitive. Small talk. Very big small talk. He said, “It must have been quite a transition for you to leave Sand Springs.”
“Not so much as coming back,” I replied.
“People experience a lot of discoveries and changes when they go to a new environment. There is a freedom.”
In the days that followed, after-class exchanges continued and several more rides were offered and gratefully taken. I mentioned Scott, as my best friend, and that I missed him. McDowell gave me his home phone number and told me if I ever needed to talk about anything to let him know.
The days slogged by, always ending with me in my room, knees to chest in my gold-flocked upholstered rocking chair playing “You Needed Me” continuously on the stereo. Anne Murray would finish her song and the familiar sad, scratchy dead space followed as the needle leap-frogged over the remaining bands of the 45. The stereo arm lifted in a shocking jerk and mechanically moved up and out and down again to begin the same sad scratchy sound before the ballad played for the thirtieth time in a row. I’d Scotch-taped a penny, then two, and then a nickel to the top of the arm so that the needle could dig farther into the worn grooves of the vinyl without skipping. It was only a record, but poor Anne Murray should have been suffering from chronic laryngitis by then.
My wallet safely guarded the folded scrap of paper on which McDowell had scribbled his number. It tempted me. One night, in a momentary gust of courage, I cracked open my bedroom door and peered into the hallway to see if the coast was clear. My brother was asleep and my parents were downstairs. I dialed the number and shook as I waited for an answer, nearly hanging up after the first ring. Second ring. Third ring. Finally his wife picked up. I introduced myself and asked for Mr. McDowell, and he promptly came to the phone.
“Hey, Sam, what’s going on?” he said with a friendly, carefree tone as if I called every day and this was nothing unusual.
“I’m sorry to bother you at home.”
“Not a bother. That’s why I gave you the number.”
“I think I would like to talk to you about something,” I continued, keeping my voice down. “Privately. But if you don’t have time, it’s not that important.”
I was trembling, plunging into the most terrifying territory I could imagine: a pledge to confess.
“Great,” he said. “Why don’t we meet before school starts tomorrow. Can you come in early? I can get there by seven o’clock.”
“Yes. I’ll be there . . . Thank you.”
“I look forward to it, Sam. I’m glad you called.”
I hung up and couldn’t decide if I was more relieved or frightened. I knew that I could not sustain much longer the slow, sinking sorrow that had so overtaken me. My thoughts of suicide were keeping me alive like a trusted friend who would be there, patiently waiting, in case no one else showed up. I didn’t want to die. And McDowell might be the one who showed up. He seemed smarter than the others. He didn’t accept the norm as the norm. He seemed safe. I knew he liked me, but it was an enormous risk. What if he reported me? What if he called my parents? What if . . .
I didn’t sleep.
I rose early and collected the notes I’d taken from various books as if I were going for a test, or to share my findings with a research colleague. Maybe that’s how it was supposed to go, more academic than personal. I tucked the yellow sheets into my notebook and headed to school.
I arrived at McDowell’s locked classroom door fifteen minutes early. Seven o’clock came. McDowell didn’t. Time thickened like wet cement. He’d probably forgotten or decided it wasn’t important enough to get to school so early. I decided that when I saw him later at class time I wouldn’t mention it.
What seemed like hours was only a few minutes before the glass door on the side of the building burst open and McDowell hurried in, wearing his regular brown tweed jacket with elbow patches, wrinkled khakis, which draped sloppily over his scuffed saddle oxfords, and an ill-fitting duck-hunting hat. He carried his well-worn brown leather case in one hand and juggled a Styrofoam coffee container in the other as he fumbled through a key chain so overloaded it could have belonged to a slumlord.
“Sorry I’m late.”
“I just got here,” I lied.
He unlocked the door and opened it for me, slowing his pace to assume a casual, no-big-deal demeanor. He threw his things on his desk and pulled up two student chair-desks to face each other. He sat down and took a swig from his coffee and just looked at me with a sort of patient strength that didn’t suggest the least bit of gravity. My heart pounded and my face grew hot, my hands as cold as clay. I smiled. I paused. I assembled strength.
“I’m different,” I began, slowly.
“Well, thank God for that,” he said with an easy laugh.
I took a deep breath and sat silent another full minute. He waited. And then I summoned the words. “I’m gay.”
I told him everything. I told him that I’d known I was different since my earliest memories. Long before it had a name that specified shame. I told him about falling in love with Scott. I told him about the Seconal. I waited for shock to register but it never came. I told him I was afraid. And he listened. He listened with a kind of active intensity most people have only when talking. And when I had exhausted myself, he gently spoke.
“There is nothing wrong with you.”
I stared at him, fixed, trying to digest the words I had wanted someone, anyone—my father, my mother, a friend, Scott, a doctor, a preacher, a politician, Walter Cronkite, a newspaper editor, a character in a book or on television or in a movie, anyone—to say.
There is nothing wrong with you.
It couldn’t be that simple. The years of anguish justified proof. I began to argue the opposing side and took out my notes—scientific verification and expert opinions. I even resorted to the tactics of the Bible-thumpers, quoting Leviticus and Corinthians for corroboration. They were the only scriptures I knew by heart.
McDowell slid out from his student chair-desk and easily located an American Psychiatric Association book and showed me that in 1973, only five
years prior, homosexuality had been declassified as a mental disorder. It said that clinical studies demonstrated that same-sex attractions, feelings, and behaviors are normal and positive variations of human sexuality.
What? How could this be? The books I’d been reading were completely out of date. If only the Sand Springs Public Library had modernized its inventory. But then, if Sand Springs had modernized at all, I might not have this dilemma. I’d been desperately looking for any evidence of normalcy and even sanity and was, once again, stuck in a time warp. If I’d been looking for medical advice, the local library probably would have suggested literature on bloodletting or lobotomies. Still, even the research McDowell revealed to me was very new and had not reached or been accepted by the general public. Especially not my general public.
“Okay, so you know this,” I said. “What about everybody else? What about everyone in this town and everywhere else?”
“They’re wrong,” he stated bluntly. “They’re just wrong.”
McDowell said that few people are completely straight or completely gay. That most of us fall somewhere in the gray, with the majority of our sexual orientation leaning to one side or the other. He said that most males bristle in fear at the part of them, no matter how small, that has been attracted to other males or has, God forbid, even experimented on some beerful summer night. Manhood is in jeopardy. And anger and even violence is the first choice for the uneducated because when we accept anything as absolute without personal investigation, our flimsy foundation is threatened by the smallest chink in the armor.
“Also,” he said, “some people are assholes.”
I genuinely laughed for the first time in weeks.
And then he talked about my contribution to the world, which he said came from the amalgam of all of me, and that if I took away any part of the amalgam, I wouldn’t be the singular person that I am.
“Where do you think your particular talent comes from?” he asked. “And your drive and your humor and your compassion? You can’t pick and choose and snatch away pieces of who you are and expect to be the same person. It’s all one thing. Either you accept and like yourself as a complete picture or you don’t. If I were you, I wouldn’t trade the person you are or any of what got you here. What a loss that would be.”
He asked me to promise that if I ever again decided to kill myself, I would call him first.
I promised.
“I would be very, very sad and very, very angry if you didn’t call me.”
A stillness fell. And then I suddenly declared, “I want to be happy.”
“Then be happy,” he said. “It’s not easy. People who have the most to give are very often the people who have the most to overcome. You’re not an accident, Sam. You have a purpose. And part of that purpose is to be happy. Just be a good person. And live your life. Live your life.”
I might have wept in his arms, but he didn’t offer them. Instead, he looked resolutely into my eyes and, in doing so, was the first adult to acknowledge my true self.
The bell rang and it was time for school.
• • •
The next two hours were unaccounted for as I showed up in body only for my first classes. I entered McDowell’s classroom for third period. He gave me a nod that acknowledged I hadn’t imagined our talk.
After roll was called, McDowell told us to put away our books. He was leaving the planned curriculum and was going to talk about something else. He took to the floor like Clarence Darrow and lectured on prejudice and hate. He spoke of America’s perception of blacks and how it has too slowly evolved through education and legislature. He talked about the treatment of American Indians and the unfair stereotypes we’d placed on them. He talked about Hitler and anti-Semitism. He talked about using religion as a platform for judgment.
I didn’t raise my hand or participate. It was a demonstration that I knew was for my benefit, and perhaps the kindest thing anyone had ever done for me. Then, in the last fifteen minutes of class, McDowell strode to the blackboard and wrote in enormous block letters, clicking and clacking: BLACK, INDIAN, JEW, HOMOSEXUAL.
“Which one of these people would you least want to live next door to?”
There was one black student and a couple of “Indians” in class who were surely startled by the brazen question. McDowell pointed to the person sitting in the front far left row of desks.
“You start.”
“I don’t know . . . a homosexual, I guess.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s against God.”
McDowell pointed to the person at the next desk.
“A homosexual.”
And the next.
“A gay.”
“Homosexual.”
“A Jew.”
“Why?”
“Because you can’t always identify them and they’re sneaky.”
“A fag.”
“A queer.”
“A homosexual.”
“I don’t care who lives next door to me.”
“Queer.”
“Queer.”
“Why?”
“Because they’re not real men or real women.”
“Because they’re evil.”
“They molest children.”
“Because God hates them.”
But for the single Nazi and abstainer, it was a landslide.
McDowell then asked, “Do you know any gay people, personally?”
“Well, no.”
“Not that I know of.”
“Oooh, gross.”
“Then how do you know what you’re talking about?” he asked. “Did you know that ten percent of the population is gay? That means ten percent of your friends, your neighbors, your families. That means three people in this classroom.”
Everyone looked around suspiciously. I did the same, feigning bewilderment and secretly wondering who the other two might be.
“And none of you have been adversely affected or threatened by a gay person, am I right?” he continued.
The class fell silent for a moment and then McDowell resumed the exercise. The responses remained the same.
“A homosexual. Sorry. It’s weird.”
“Queer . . . It ain’t natural. I don’t need to know one to know it ain’t right.”
I wanted the black kid and the Indians to leave the room so at least I had a fair shake. My desk was situated fourth row in, halfway up the aisle. As McDowell continued to question, desk by desk, row by row, I grew more and more afraid. What did he want me to do? Choose another minority to live next door to? Be honest? Say I knew gay people? Say I was one? Was all of his empathy and goodness just a trick meant to set me up and destroy me, publicly, like some kind of witch hunt? Or was it part of his plan for me to disclose my true identity while he was present in order to protect me from the angry mob?
“A homosexual.”
“I’d keep a close eye and a cocked gun.”
As the questioning etched its way to my seat, I knew I didn’t need to be polled—the sweat pouring down my pekid face was enough evidence to convict me. My eyes darted to the clock every few seconds. Class was almost over, but there were only two people ahead of me. I imagined a fuse spitting like a Fourth of July sparkler, making its way to a cluster of dynamite named Sam.
“If I have to choose . . . I guess a gay person.”
“Queer.”
I was next up. McDowell began talking. Something about ignorance. Something about responsibility. Something about unqualified hate. But I couldn’t concentrate on what he was saying because I was trying to figure out what I was going to say myself. And then the bell rang. His timing was planned. A bit torturous, but planned. As the class poured out into the hallway, I held back for a private exchange to understand his purpose.
“I told you,” he said. “Ignorance. Fear. Also, some people are assholes.”
• • •
A few weeks later, I got the call from Opryland. In addition to the season at the park, they wanted
to shoot a television special and take the company to Hawaii for a corporate performance. Rehearsal would begin in a couple of months. I asked if Scott had been asked. Yes.
My parents had known that I would more than likely go away again for the summer, but this offer would mean quitting high school and leaving Sand Springs and them forever. They knew there was little choice.
I moved back to Nashville and received my high school diploma through correspondence courses. Scott and I shared a one-bedroom apartment and a life together. We kept the Lucy and Ricky beds for show, but unless we had guests, they remained pushed together, joined, like we were.
We may not have held hands in public or even acknowledged our relationship openly among friends, but if this was as good as it would get, it was okay with me.
16. Better
It wasn’t that I’d come to terms with a childless existence. It was just that when I was growing up, fatherhood was simply never part of the possible picture.
Ten years into my relationship with Danny, the parental horizon had completely changed and I was sober. The United States and I had both evolved. All of my natural fatherhood desires that had been sequestered to an out-of-the-way corner of my heart were suddenly ignited and unleashed.
Every Saturday morning, Danny and I went to our neighborhood farmers’ market where vendors from all over California set up tented stands on a narrow street, bookended by a latte café and a bicycle shop, to sell organic produce and artisanal goat cheese and herbs and honey and hummus and flowers. Behind the stands is a grassy square with family-packed picnic tables on one side and a Spanish tiled fountain on the other. A punked-out haberdasher is perched within splashing distance. “Old Eddie Dred” sits on a foldout stool behind a worn blanket, spread and strewn with miniature percussion instruments for the kids, and plays the conga while he sings homespun songs about “sunny days at the marketplace” in his scraggy, chapped voice. The smell of fresh pupusas and mango salsa is strong enough to taste. Neighbors shop and congregate, and kids’ stained faces tattle of pilfered blueberries.
