A Collection of Words

Intro

All my life I’ve had a penchant for words. I’ve loved elaborate, creative words that assist the user in enforcing their vision, or aid the receiver in understanding the speaker’s intention. Words are abused in today’s society where so many are afraid to leave their small circle of fifty words for everyday conversation. No one waxes poetically anymore, they just talk a lot about stuff. People get uncomfortable around words they don’t understand, and what’s amazing is that most of them have a lexicon or dictionary in their own home, endowing them with the opportunity to discover the meaning. Intelligence is revered in our culture. It is encouraged, and bowed to, and yet, when found in a youth, is almost discouraged, scolding the child for acting like an adult at too young an age.

In the summer of 2006 I was in a musical. It was a new musical. It was in southern Ohio, the blessed land of my upbringing (I’m a fan of sarcasm…). Said musical contained a dancing cow named Wendell and was only orchestrated with music by composer Jerome Kern, who’d been dead a solid 50 years, and whose musical prowess, however brilliant in his time, was not intended for a tap dancing bovine. When asked how my experience went, I always generated the same reply: “The show went as well as any new musical, performed at a dinner theater in southern Ohio, by a full cast of non-union performers, through composed by a man who is no longer living, could’ve gone.” At this some would chuckle, others would be lost at “dinner theater.” It was never my intention to discredit the work; I think that some things just speak for themselves. As a matter of fact, had I never performed that summer, tap dancing in period costumes and wearing a dance belt, aka a man thong, for 30 hours a week, I never would have met the man with whom I now “share my life” if you will.

For a long time I took flack for my penchant for words, and muted myself, or allowed myself to speak ordinarily. I realized quickly that all I was doing was permitting those around me to choose my words for me, and also, allowing them to exist on their plane of intelligence, or lack thereof. There are many a thing that I don’t know, and when the opportunity arises to seize knowledge, my first inclination is never to bash it in the head, and tell it to stifle itself. I decided soon enough that my words were my own, however hefty, and that the listener would just have to carry a pocket-sized dictionary around or else a pair of cotton balls to drown me out.

With all of that said, I’ll start this book with simplicity. Much of the experiences contained herein have a lot to do with my upbringing, and the outside factors that made me who I am, as well as kept me from myself. The easiest way to understand my youth is this: “I’m as well adjusted as is humanly possible for being a homosexual, raised by two marines, in southern Ohio, with 5 uncles, all of whom exist in or around the construction industry, none of whom have a passion for the theater, dance, or music, as I do, and 25 first cousins, none of which, older or younger, are gay as well.” So begins my luxurious and nauseating tale.

Chapter One- Oh So Pretty

I think anyone in my family would agree that somehow, in some way, I was born very pretty. It’s common in my family to have a deep set swell cleft in the chin, making somewhat of a butt on the face. Also, due to a diet of marshmallow encrusted sweet potatoes, and homemade Smore’s at every major family function, I’d dare say we run a bit on the bigger side of the fence. Lastly, and a bullet that I failed to dodge, it seems that someone, or something with a loathing of correctly placed incisors creeps into the room of everyone in my family at some point in their life. They sneak in unnoticed and take a baseball bat to our mouth, contorting the teeth into odd shapes and sizes, leaving them more as a mountainous terrain, something one would hike for pleasure on a brisk autumn morning. Luckily, orthodontics took that hunch off my back in junior high, some of the best years of my young life… again, sarcasm.

At any rate, despite my orthodontia, I had somehow emerged a very pretty little boy, full of youth and folly. I had deep set blue eyes, but not entirely as there was, and still is, a ring of gold surrounding the pupil. This golden band did more than just offset the strained, bloodshot look my eyes took on while I was stoned. It actually served as a ruler by which to gage my demeanor. The more cheerful I was, the less the gold made its presence known, shooting bright blue beams out of my sockets at anyone who saw me. However, catch me on a bad day, and the rings would expand creating an illusion that my eyes were a murky greenish blue, still pretty, but much less vibrant. To this day this little rule of thumb still works, and has saved my husband and I many a fight.

Also as a child I had quite the frame on me. I was thin and yet quite strong. I was a very active youth and rather enjoyed running as fast as I could, or biking up a hill with the toughest setting on my 18 speed just to see if I could do it. I wasn’t really even aware of weight, not mine or anyone else’s until I was 11 or so. Also, as all children seemed to be blessed with this gift, I could eat and eat and eat, whether a full sheet cake or a fistful of dirty cookies, and still never see the weight. I am still under the impression that we’d all do better if adult playgrounds were built, and we were forced to go out and relieve stress on them daily before typing our meaningless essays or readings the latest trashy magazine. At any rate, suffice it to say that I was like most children my age, wiry and unaware of calories or carbs, and much the better for it.

The last little bit of narcissistic writing I’ll do is about my smile. Even before refined metal was glued to my jagged chompers, I had a dazzling smile. I was always seen smiling and laughing, full of imagination, completely content to sit in my room for hours, devising a plan for escape from an evil dungeon, or having full conversations with my stuffed animals, most important of which was a mint green bear that in retrospect, looked a lot like the Snuggle mascot. Fantasy was my best friend, and I needed no other. I read most every fairy tale a child can read, and loved pretending I was a part of them. I smiled when Cinderella married the prince, and I giggled at the ridiculous phrase bippity-boppety-boo. To steal from old William, all the world was a stage to me, and I was all the better for it.

Why do I tell you all of this? Why take the time to describe myself as an adorable youngster with a zeal for life? Because by the time I was 20, I would have given anything to have had the strength and determination to commit suicide. I wanted nothing more to do with life, and had been stripped of all of my treasures. I gained weight, I never smiled, and no one lived in my world of fantasy anymore. Now it’s only occupants were hate-mongers, existing only to remind me day in and day out of my short-comings, keeping me from reaching any of my numerous potentials. Relationships died, parents, family members, friends. My school work suffered and I lost my will to learn. All of these repercussions and more came from my supposed “childhood,” one that drastically turned from a fairy tale to a nightmare more quickly than hunger sets in after eating Chinese food. If we know who we are as a child, I’d surely lost grasp and spent many years rummaging through the waste of my youth, trying to re-assemble this broken child. My collected tears could fill and ocean, fears could outdo Stephen King’s worst imaginings. The collected whole of myself was somehow still in the red, and would stay that way for quite some time.

Be assured that change has swept into my life, returning my smile and svelte figure. Happiness is no longer a stranger, and yet, neither is pain. I’ve come through quite a few battles, certainly scarred, but still smiling. I hope that my life serves as inspiration for many a reader, or at least material for the $1.99 bargain bin at your local used book store.

Chapter 2- The F Word

When I was growing up, the ladies that lived next door to my grandparents were an interesting pair of people. They didn’t socialize much, something that all women in southern Ohio are well versed in. They didn’t really take much care of themselves, walking out in any old stone washed jeans they could find, and allowing banana clips and hair ties to do all of the work on their unwashed, unkempt “hairdos.” They did however have a knack for keeping their cars running well, and always knew how to re-attach any siding that may have flown off during tornado season. I didn’t see too much of them growing up, but what I did was lack-luster, and very private. I’m surprised I even remember them at all from my childhood, but something seemed to stick. One day, back when I was 6 or 7, while coming to my grandma’s to be babysat after school, one of my classmates, walked me home, and then continued on to her own home. She took one look at the house next door, belonging to the homely, muscular women, and said some L word that I had never heard before. We were a Baptist bunch, and if it wasn’t in the bible, we didn’t really say it much. At any rate, the word intrigued me and the next day we walked home together again. This time I stopped before going up the steps to my grandma’s and got her attention.

“What word did you say about that house yesterday?” I asked. Curiosity has always gotten the best of me, and it was eating me alive to hear a word that I’d never heard before, and worse yet, not to know what it meant.

“About that house? Where the two ladies live?” she replied.

“Yes, about the two ladies, what did you say about their house?” I quickly replied. I was so excited to find out that I nearly pushed all of my words together into one.

“Oh, my mommy calls that house Lezbeen. She says that only those ladies live there, alone. There’s no daddy, no babies, and that no one likes them because they are mean.”

“Lezbeen… so the house is lezbeen, or the ladies are lezbeen?” I wondered.

“I don’t know, I just heard the word, so I say it whenever I pass the house. I think it might be a bad word, because every one in my house calls them that and laughs about it,” she said. Clearly she felt a little bad for them, but didn’t want to be any different from her family.

“Okay, I’d better get inside, see ya tomorrow!” I had no idea what I had just learned. My first encounter with homosexuality was that brief, and not revisited again for another year or so.

Now, it may seem unrelated, but I have only a handful of female cousins out of the copious amount produced by my virile, masculine uncles. Two of these girl cousins, Sarah and Jenny, were sisters and lived just across town from me. When I say just across town, I mean that on a skateboard, and obese adult male, waiting for a heart transplant, on the hottest day in July, could be there in less than 15 minutes, which is most likely all he’d have left in him. Our humble township of Greenfield, OH housed a meager 5,000 people. Actually, it didn’t quite make it to 5,000 people one year in the census, so a few of the towns lesser active individuals, mostly due to the fact that they were dead, were counted anyhow, making us a full-fledged township, and giving us a much nicer budget with which to build and fix things.

At any rate, Sarah and Jenny lived maybe fifteen blocks away from me my whole childhood and once I was old enough to ride my bike there, around eight or nine, I would go and play for hours. My parents saw the immediate bond I had with them, and set Jenny to the task of taking care of me after school, because she was already in Junior High. As I’d mentioned before, I was full of imagination in my youth, and nothing served as a better tool to get it going than a perfectly chosen prom outfit, with shoes to match, on one of Sarah’s Barbie dolls. I was a prodigy. She’d coming begging to know which hairpiece to add to her Barbie’s ensemb, and I’d chastise her for putting a denim jacket over a corduroy jumper, telling her that they were fabrics that didn’t belong in the same room, let alone on the same doll. We’d laugh about how Ken was always late to pick up Barbie, and that he forgot to get gas before driving to dinner, so they’d miss their reservations. At that age I was certain that any artist in need of a jump start could go to their nearest K-Mart, pick up a few of these blessed tools, and go home able to pump out that next best seller, or create a Picasso.

I envied Barbie all of her clothing, and ill-fitting shoes. I loved and hated her for having the perfect boyfriend, and the seemingly perfect life. If only I lived in a plastic box that reeked of hairspray and red dye number seven, I’d be truly happy. My parents soon caught on, and I begged them for one of my own. I wished only to open a present at Christmas time, while wearing my garage sale original “New Kids On The Block” sweater, and find inside a serene, lovely Barbie doll staring back at me, waiting to enrich my life with all the jealousy I could possibly imagine. Well, I wore my sweater, and opened my box, and what did I get… Ken. “Who cares about Ken?” I thought as my parents hoped it would suffice. I realized a little later on that their intention wasn’t to dissuade my creativity, merely my inclination to kissing men.

You may wonder what happened to the Lezbeens next door, and why I’ve included them at all. Well, it is my earliest recollection of homosexuality that I can recall. Cleary I hadn’t truly encountered it, nor had I even comprehended the meaning of “Lezbeen” at the time. However, my heart went out to them the first time I was walking down the hallway at school and someone dropped the F word. Not fuck, but Faggot. Similarly, I had no idea what it meant, nor that it was intended to hurt my feelings, just that it was a word, that I didn’t know, and my curiosity burned again with the desire to find out.

Had I known then what I know now, I’d believe that ignorance is bliss. After my first solid year of being called a faggot nearly every day at school, I had plenty a clue what it meant, and what it was intended to do to me when hurled my way. After 3 years or so, somewhere around 5^th grade, I didn’t hear it so much anymore, despite the fact that it was definitely there. It had become numb to me, and rarely did it evoke any kind of emotion within me, save those rare occasions when it was accompanied with a forceful shove, or scribed upon my locker, etched into the metal so as to remain there the rest of the year. I attempted normalcy, asking girls out, and pretending that I cared when they said no, when in actuality I was relieved that I didn’t have to do anything with them to solidify the deal. At this point I’d gained a little weight, equating food to comfort as so many do, and I tried my hand at most sports, but as you can imagine, a grade school locker room full of overly testosteroned jock-in-training with the need to prove themselves wasn’t exactly a safe-haven for me.

I never told my parents about it all, because I knew at some point they’d ask me if it was true. They’d want to know if it bothered me that I was being called a faggot every day for 5 years because it was false, or if it bothered me because I knew they were right. Once you’ve accepted a situation, and resigned to it, asking for help five years later seems foolish. Of course the same rule applies when it’s ten and fifteen years later. It’s like a tumor that you didn’t notice at first. What starts out as no big deal soon becomes 80 pounds, and 10 years of embarrassment attached to your spleen, and going to a doctor just means that you have to explain why you waited so long.

As it turned out, Faggot was a name tag I’d wear all through my scholastic career, from 7^th grade when someone got creative and called me, “Nate Nate the Queer Bait,” and then even more so when everyone realized that my last name was Gray… think about it. It was all harsh, and each name ripped a little piece of myself away, breaking my confidence into a billion tiny particles that I’d spend years gluing back together. However horrible the jibes had gotten, and no matter what they said about me, nothing broke my spirit until I was in 9^th grade.

Freshman year turned out to be a difficult one for me. At that point I had only one true friend, named Daniel, but everyone called him Dano. We met in 4^th grade, and fate kept us in the same classes together for a couple of years and we eventually became best friends. He had a crazy spirit about him, and was truly a creative genius. Some days we’d go to his house and play video games, or discuss magical adventures that we’d heard about. Other days I’d think of stories and he’d illustrate them. No matter how bad a day may have been, or how much we hated our teachers, we always smiled when we were around each other. Dano was the first true friend that I’d ever had that lived outside of my mind, or the books that lined my childhood shelf. I don’t know if he ever truly knew that I was gay, but I’m sure that if he did, he really could have cared less.

Well, fate put us in the same class again our freshman year… gym class. It was intolerable. The name calling was at it worst, and even his light hearted nature didn’t ease the pain made by the mean-spirited boys, attempting to claim a little masculinity by taking it away from me. He tried to kid, but it just never did any good and the boys just found more ways to agonize me every day.

Our school had a pool. It was built by a very wealthy man who built us a pool and locker rooms to boot. Sounds fun huh? I hated it. Being an over-weight gay kid in 9^th grade, forced to practice breast stroking in a pair of speedos is not only laughable, it’s downright cruel. The latest locker room fad was the towel whip, and one boy had gotten so good at it he’d actually taken a chunk of tile off the wall one day. Well of course, each time I took my shirt off it was as if a dart board had been painted on my back. Points were allotted for reddest welt, drawing blood, and the ever popular “I made the faggot cry” award. Trying to keep it together, I didn’t tell anyone, hoping that it was somehow prove my masculinity to them, and they’d grow tired of it, and leave me be. No such luck. I also thought that I could just get used to it, and forget about it ever happening, again that didn’t happen either. Dano tried to cheer me up after school with a bike race to his house, or some ice cream at the grocery store, and for a while that pacified me. Fat kids do love their ice cream.

So, as the school year was winding down, somewhere around April, the boys did finally begin growing tired of the game, and it didn’t happen as often. I was relieved, and prayed that it would stay that way, and that I could finally put gym class behind me forever. But I had no idea how bad it was about to become.

The strike came from behind. I was bent over, trying to reach beyond my rolls, to put my socks on. I was a fan in those days of the calf high socks, why I’ll never know. While I was down there putting it on and turning it the right way on my foot, so the colored heel was in place, a searing hot strip of pain ran across my back. I immediately shot up and through the buzzing in my ears I heard ovational laughter. It was as though the blow had solidified a crown of supreme manhood for its creator. Once the burning subsided, and the tears fell away, I was able to compose myself long enough to identify the instrument used to break me. A belt. A boy in the locker room, obviously someone who’d far surpassed the desire to simply snap me with a towel, took the belt off of his jeans and laid it across my back in a mixture of fervor and joy. He thoroughly enjoyed hitting me with it, which even to this day turns my stomach upside down. It baffles me that such blind hatred can exist in this world, because at that point, not only had I never stated whether I was a homosexual, I didn’t even know myself.

At that point nothing Dano did was going to relieve me of my anguish, and our friendship slowly began to deteriorate. I don’t know if that helped, or hurt when I got a call early in May that year from my cousin.

“Hey aren’t you good friends with that Dano kid?” he asked.

“Yeah, why?” I wondered.

“Um you might wanna go to the hospital, cause I guess he just got shot or something.” I was sure it was a joke. In my little town, although guns weren’t uncommon, they were never used on people.

“Yeah okay Heath, whatever.” I tossed back. My family has a not all too charming sense of sarcasm that is often totally out of place. I’ve spent a lifetime battling it, and still break hearts on occasion unknowingly.

“No Nate, really, go to the hospital, he’s there right now.” he said with a bit of urgency.

“Oh, okay… oh my god. Okay, thanks.” I was in shock. Surely he’d be fine though, no one really dies at fourteen years old do they?

I got my mom to drive me over, and as I was coming down the hallway a nurse was telling Kim, Dano’s mother, that he was DOA, dead on arrival. Being the nearest to her at the time, she clutched me, and poured into me a warm stream of tears that I still feel from time to time, drenching me in my first bath of true sorrow. As she wept, my mind reeled with the news, unable to fully grasp what had happened. After a few days of mourning my best friend’s death, attending his funeral, weeping uncontrollably while I attempted to console his poor mother, I finally received word of what had happened. You see all small towns come equipped with a beautiful system of whispers and sub-verbal comments to pass along information. In less refined places one may call it gossiping. In Greenfield, it’s a way of life. At any rate, it turns out that it wasn’t any more than a statistical shooting caused by a father’s hunting gun, left loaded after a recent trip. It’s sad to say, but in the mid nineties there were quite a few of these mishaps. Regardless of its commonality, it broke me. From that point on men were nothing to me. I was incapable of trusting them, being around them, anything with them. The only male figure ever to treat me with respect in my life was gone, and with him any desire to waste any energy on men as long as I lived.

As fate would have it, that little word is what finally brought me around to appreciating men, and myself, again: Faggot. I was, and am, a faggot. This startling reality came to me at 17, while “pitching a tent” from the latest episode of Queer as Folk. I finally had some closure. I knew who I was and what I wanted. The nearest gay community was in Columbus, so I dove in. I spent full weekends partying and learning all about what it meant to be gay. I discovered that gay men are not only some of the most trustworthy friends a girl can have, but also, are almost always successful and damn cute too. I met doctors and lawyers and artists and designers. I came to realize that men in general are battered. Gay men have it bad when they’re young, but as soon as they ascertain they’re sexuality, they have a group of people to belong to. Straight men never have that “awakening” if you will. They’re left to decipher who they are from the stereotype left them by their fathers and older brothers. I began to actually pity their inability to create themselves separate of what society wants them to be. Gay men can love dresses and that’s okay, it’s stereotypical, but it’s okay. Gay men can also love football and that’s okay. After all we’re still men. However, straight men can love football and it’s stereotypical, and okay, but nothing special. Or straight men can love fashion and it’s freaky, and not okay, because they’re straight. They’re unable to create their own parameters by which to live their lives because they’ve always been the accepted ones, and now if they choose something outside the norm, they may not be so openly received. However, by being the alien race while growing up, we gay men have been given more than we ever could have wished for: independence. We have the option of going with what society wants, and loving it, or going against the grain, and experiencing nothing worse than we’ve already gone through.

I imagine the Lezbeens hearing that dirty word outside of their window. And even though in a small town like Greenfield, people generally only say it to cut someone down, I hope they welled up with a pride that only gay people can understand. A pride that might be tough to ascertain at first, but that eventually makes us stronger. And so I live my life for those lezbeens now. I hold my husband’s hand for the lezbeens. I kiss him on the subway for the lezbeens. As a matter of fact, I think we all have a little lezbeen inside of us that we need to fess up to, and love, feathered bangs and all.