True True

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I was born. In southern Florida. 

When I was two my parents moved to the panhandle, just outside the bustling “city” of Tallahassee. Far enough away to be considered “the boondocks” by its standards. It was the 70s so it wasn't the romanticized southern living depicted in movies and literature, but it was the Deep South. There weren't many old plantations where I lived, though, after my parents divorce when I was four, my father moved 20 miles away, and much deeper into the Deep South. In the Florida Panhandle, 20-miles can be a world of difference. 

I split my time between my father's farmhouse outside of Quincy, in an area appropriately called “Sawdust Community,” and my mother's typical 70s-80s home in a sub-division outside of Tallahassee called “Plantation Woods.” It was developed on an old pecan plantation, so there were pecan trees, and pecans everywhere. My father had moved in with his future wife whose family had owned the farmhouse for generations. They were a large part of the community of Quincy, and their family reunions were enormous, effectively shutting down the town so that relatives could attend. She was one of seven children. My father came from a smaller family, and I had never really met any of them.

When I stayed with him it was another world. The house was old, creaky, with no central heat or air conditioning, and only one gas heater, the size of three toasters piled up, and one exhausted window AC in the family room. Other than that, it was all box fans and heating blankets. In the winter I'd run to the family room and stand by the heater, warming up my backside and jeans, and then lying under a quilt on the couch. In the summer it was thin sheets, a box fan in the window, and the roaring sound of cicadas over the whirring of the fan.

The house was on a red-clay dirt road, surrounded by fields and with a small beaver-created lake. There were dilapidated tobacco barns, those used for drying the leaves, as well as abandoned houses and slaves quarters overrun with young trees and thick underbrush. Encountering rattlesnakes while exploring was all too common. Never bit, though. We had an altering number of dogs, often strays that would just show up and that lived under the house. They were good at spotting dangers when I was exploring. Always just me and the dogs, wandering through pastures and woods. At night it was pitch black, with no street lights or city lights on the horizon. It could be eerie at times. But, you could see the Milky Way in the summer night sky, and it was always fun watching summer lightning illuminate the angry mass of distant clouds. These are what I think about when I reminisce about the South, and the food.

My father was mostly absent, even when present. He was an adult child whose grasp on parenting was tenuous. I existed as his child insofar as it served something for him, whether as an example of his ability to create a progeny, or as his sounding board and therapist on long weekend drives in the country so that he could listen to a college football game and escape his wife. He would make proclamations about who I was and who I would become based upon his own history, rarely considering me and my own. Unlike my mother, his affections weren’t withheld for the purpose of coercion, they were, at most, an extension of his own vacillating sense of self-worth. His own mother, a Scottish immigrant to the harsh living of NYC in the early 1900s, often berated and diminished him, so any affection he had to give was usual spent bolstering his own insecurities. He never really escaped that past.

He was a lawyer, and a philanderer. Years after my parents’ divorce, my mother confided in me that she had eaves dropped on a phone call one night and overheard my father talking to a woman in a suspicious way. My mother left him shortly thereafter. I was two. My father eventually married a legal assistant, and many years later he would leave his second wife for his third, who was his secretary. His own father had done the same, so it must run in the family. At least on my father’s side. My father’s father had died when my dad was 11 or 12, leaving his puberty in the hands of my tough-as-nails, Dewars-thirsting Scottish “grandma Nancy.” I liked her matter-of-fact demeanor, brutal at times, but there was care. From my sense of him, that my father had unmet ego needs, I suspect he would have preferred that she were more supportive and compassionate, but then, he wouldn’t have married my mother. I suppose harsh mothers is something my father and I had in common.

My mother had grown up in Miami, one of three kids. I know little about her mother and father, other than he’d died when my mother was young, and my grandmother was born somewhere in Georgia where it seems few public birth records were kept at the time. Nana, my mother’s mother, had an air of propriety, a touch of Southern gentry from the Deep South, i.e., she was genteel in a Southern sense, polished but with a razor sharp tongue. The lack of records and the vague oral history of her childhood, in all likelihood, suggests she was probably raised in less genteel settings.  Always striving to be more than her past, similar to my mother. Nevertheless, this propriety created a controlling and perpetually social-conscious streak in my mother. She was vigilantly aware of what others might think, thus she rarely if ever displayed emotions out of fear of embarrassment. Typically she saw them as weakness, and even at her brother’s funeral she was angered by the “uselessness” and “inappropriateness” of her crying, and that people were watching. As a result, her deeper feelings, the insecurities activated when my father started flirting with his secretary, his own emotional neediness, all of these I suspect developed in her a general distrust of any emotions that weren’t her own. My sister and I were to be emotionless vessels, into which she could discharge her own emotions and emotional needs which she herself could not express. We were to be surrogates for her self.

Years after she divorced my father, and married my step-father, we moved into a new home in Plantation Woods. The house was new, and the suburb reminded me of the one in Poltergeist...although not as posh or expansive. There were, though, remnants of Native American culture, and the mystery of hidden history behind the facade of a new subdivision which enthralled me. Tallahassee was once Anhaica, the seat of the Apalachee province, and the Lake Jackson Indian Mounds were only 2 miles away from where we lived. I biked there a couple of times in my tweens. When my step-father dug up the front yard for a new septic line I found an arrowhead, and in a neighbor’s yard, in an area eroded from runoff, I found many pieces of ancient pottery.  Following the train tracks on the other side of the woods outside my neighborhood, I found an overgrown road that led to an old family burial plot with gravestones from the late 1700-1800s. Marking those that once owned the land. There was an escape in this, a way to pursue interests in isolation from the family.

My mother’s husband’s family was also large, he was also one of seven children, and his siblings had many children closer to my age. My mother, on the other hand, had two brothers, and only one had a child. I didn’t meet them until I was much older. Needless to say, it was overwhelming for me. We would go to my step-father Richard’s parents, Meemaw and Peepaw, for Sunday dinner. The family home that once housed seven children and two adults with three small bedrooms was always overrun. The kitchen was bustling, always, and the kids were always causing some kind of ruckus. My mother’s upbringing had instilled her with the a southern sense of propriety displayed through the patina of southern charm. If you’re from the South, you’ll understand how quickly that “patina” wears thin behind the backs of others. Under his cold and scrutinizing demeanor, my step-father’s upbringing had instilled him with a hypertrophic masculine work ethic. A compassionless, salt-of-the-earth, and scrutinizing perfectionism. With others, on the right occasions, he could pour on the charm, even when being demeaning or just plain mean. It was a kind of hostility, acceptable because it was done with a smile in true southern fashion.

My childhood was situated in this threshold. I moved from room to room, between the careless liberating expanses of exploratory isolation of my father’s home to the tight and constant pressure of emotionless scrutiny at my mother’s. It’s no wonder I came out the way I did.

I came out to myself when I was 13, with the assistance of Encyclopedia Britannica. I wanted to know what the term “faggot” and “gay” meant, terms that were often thrown at me by other kids. The most contemporary version defines homosexuality as the “sexual interest in and attraction to members of one’s own sex.” Who knows what the late-70s version on my bookshelf said, but it was enough. It felt right to me, accurate. From this version I had learned something true about myself, but I also knew at the time that that truth was not something I could share. 

This was also about the time that the usual violence of my childhood seemed to increase. My step-father was always cruel. Years later, when confronted, my mother admitted she thought his cruelty was sadistic towards me. She was right. He had always reserved the most intense cruelty for me. I can still feel the seething hatred, the threat of death hidden behind his gritted teeth. Bruised upper arms where he would dig his fingers into me as he pulled me close. The slaps across the dinner table when I did or said something “inappropriate,” like trying to rebuild a chicken from the pieces of fried chicken on the platter, disagreeing with him about the “uselessness” of other races, or simply defending my mother or sister from some charge made against them. I often had black and blue marks up and down my back and sides, remnants from beatings with the belt, or its buckle. If I flinched, he beat me harder. If I somehow escaped his vice-like grip, he taunted me as he easily chased me down and beat me harder still as I lay curled up on the ground. 

Afterwards, it was always my fault. I would have to agree. If I had only listened. If I had not made him do it. If I would just stop trying to break up their marriage. I find it interesting, though, that years later she still couldn’t see he had been cruel to us all. She’s still married to him. 

They did separate for a while, though, around the time I turned 15. Even though I discovered what the word gay meant when I was 13, I thought I might nevertheless turn out straight, or at least bisexual. Perhaps I’m misinterpreting it though. It’s more than likely that, despite knowing my sexual orientation, I tried to “fit in.” It’s probably even more likely that those beatings had something to do with it. In my 20s my mother admitted to me she married my step-father so that I could have a male role model in my life, that from a young age she feared I would be gay and that I needed a “man” to look up to. My experience of it? She married someone to beat the sissy out of me. Even though I may have thought I might turn out straight, and even though I tried to have girlfriends after I was 13, this probably resulted from an attempt to avoid the abuse, and out of a need for verifiability. My being gay was only a theory until proven. Even then I was intellectualizing my feelings, my sexuality. But then there was James.

I met James in the fall of my freshman year. I was 14. He was a 16 year-old friend of 15 year-old friends. He had a car. That was a big thing at that age. I was a freshman in high school and could sneak off campus with my older friends, tucked down in the backseat. The spring before I turned 15 I admitted to some of those friends that I might be “bisexual.” Despite his being straight, at least not out yet, James and I started to spend more time together. 

James showed up outside my bedroom window one night that summer. I cannot convey deeply enough the first time I truly experienced beauty. Boundlessness. Acceptance. The seemingly unencumbered space for my own self-expression that resulted when, awoken by the sounds of rocks against my bedroom window, I looked to find James. I snuck out. We walked and talked. As we sat on the steps of the small southern baptist church up the street, he admitted to me that he might be bisexual too. We hugged, but it was more than friendly though less than purely sexual. At least for me. We kissed. Later that summer, just after my 15th birthday, parked under an enormous live oak, off back roads, I lost my “virginity” in the front seat of James’ Le Car. Losing virginity can mean so many things. For me, at that time, it simply meant that I had been with someone sexually, had cum, but it wasn’t only that. I loved James. With him I felt safe with another person for the first time. 

At my mother’s house I was around others who either exacted emotional and physical violence upon me, or constantly threatened to. I was never safe. At my father’s house I was “safe” but I was always alone. It was either violent intrusion or emotional absence. With James I could be safe and vulnerable with someone available to me. I could feel safe—being and feeling are two different experiences for those who have been beaten. It was true intimacy. For those that confuse sexual acts with intimacy, it wasn’t buggery, what we did, at most it was fellatio. What it truly was was being present with someone in a way that you can’t with others. Sexually that’s one thing, emotionally it can mean another. If the latter can lead to the former? That can even mean something else, for whatever that’s worth. Perhaps this is a perspective that only those historically sexually marginalized  and/or physically abused can understand, this divide between the physical and the emotional that seems inconsistent with the heteronormative ideality that sees the need for the emotional before the (inevitably) sexual. When one is marginalized, when acting upon the latter is “wrong,” the former can be all that one can hope for. It can be everything. The latter might seem like confetti at the party, but since, for the marginalized, it is that which is to be ostracized from the ideality of hetero intimacy, it becomes the arena in which the former can truly, overtly be expressed, present.

Nevertheless, what James and I had was short-lived. Shortly afterwards, in a state of elation, I admitted to a mutual friend that I had finally “confirmed” that I was gay. At some level I was simply excited by the confirmation. I didn’t intend to out James. I only wanted to confide in this mutual friend what had happened, not who it was that I had fooled around with. But the friend, John, persisted and reassured; I relented. John then told everyone in our circle of friends, who then confronted James later that day. He denied it. They showed up at my house to confront me that night. It was horrific what they did to me, what they accused me of, with James standing there knowing…denying the truth. They wore me down. Because I had never felt safe with another in the way I had with James, because my friends were standing in front of me denying that such safety was possible, because James denied that it had happened, because I was in houses wherein it could never exist, and had never existed. I conceded it must have been a fantasy. 

If you do not know what gaslighting is, it is this. For those fortunate enough to not know gaslighting, it seems impossible, pitiable that someone’s reality could be altered by another. Fortunate  enough because they’ve never had the experience that their very existence is dependent upon another. Been supplicant to another. Learned helplessness. You do what you can to survive. You do what you can for any grasp at reality to survive, even allowing the alteration of that reality.

All of this happened the night before I was to go to Miami with my mother to visit her brothers, and fortunately, the summer before I was to be transferred to a different high school. I was sullen the entire trip, lost and devastated. My uncles, Bob and Bill, lived bachelor’s lives in fancy Miami. Uncle Bob lived in a very ‘80s-modern apartment off of the Venetian Causeway with an amazing view of downtown Miami. He had a “girl friend,” Joyce? Even though I was away from the friends who had betrayed me, I was in a state of teenage turmoil. I came out to uncle Bob on that trip. And he came out to me…and then told me that uncle Bill was gay too. I was buoyed. Later that summer, at the suggestion of my uncles, my mother let me return to Miami.

Again, this was the mid-‘80s. When I returned to Miami later that summer, unbeknownst to me, I stayed with my uncle Bob because uncle Bill was HIV+. Uncle Bill would survive until 1993, but at this time most did not understand nor know about HIV or AIDS. For my mother and Bob, Bill was a pariah, and sadly, I never got the opportunity to truly get to know him. A year later, after I’d finally come out to my mother, and well after uncle Bob probably had outed me to her, she would tell me of his status, that he lived a “wild life” without concern for what others thought. In short, he was “out,” while his brother Bob was “discreet,” and in her math and the math of that time, this is why Bill was positive and Bob was not. For them, visibility=death.

While there, Bob talked to me a bit about homosexuality, told me to keep it quiet, not to share it, and never to tell my father or step-father. We drove through South Beach while he pointed out gay bars. We went to Key West. He teased me about sneaking out while he slept to hit the gay bars. If only. I longed for more than a survey of homosexuality, but of course I was only 15. I didn’t long for sex, just more of a sense of community than any drive-bys could offer. Unfortunately homosexuality was off limits for anyone but adults at that time.