Merla Patrick - Boys like us : gay writers tell their coming out stories

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I was seventeen when pornography first slammed my senses. I hadnt prepared myself. It was November 1983, and Id arrived at a friends election party in skinny tie, scarlet pants, bowling shoespunk, as yokels in my minuscule Kansas town termed it. Inside, twelve females and males huddled unchaperoned around a TV. The hostess had strategically placed vodka and scotch amid the card tables bowls of popcorn, cashews, cinnamon bears, and ice cubes molded into tiny donkey and elephant heads. Since no one cared about the election results, between updates wed press the Play button on the absent parents VCR. There it was, porn, scenes from a videotape a sandy-haired boy had rented. After a few minutes, most of the males present had centered pillows in their laps or swiveled to lie on the carpet.

That porn film became the rooms volcano. We were stunned and burned by it, but helplessly immobile. Everyone fell silent; or, rather, the occasional laugh or crass opinion went unheard. I couldnt help but focus on one actors penis. It seemed massive, unreal. The actress, Marilyn Chambers, stretched out on a pool table, leaned her head over its edge and planted the cock in her mouth. Damn, someone said, you can see it in her throat. The girls ooh ed and yucked, but I pressed my pillow closer. I felt Id been punched between the eyes, over and over and over. Would anyone notice I was aiming my attention on the actor instead of Ms. Chambers? After he came on her face, someones finger stabbed the Stop button. We saw the latest precinct figures for Rice County, and I knew Id returned to reality, to small-town Midwest teenage life, where tangible flesh-to-flesh contact didnt exist.

Later, home past curfew, I grappled with what I remembered of that flurry of sucking and fucking, those tits and cocks and cunts. I tiptoed through the living room. There, in a buttery vee of lamplight, I saw my mother, waiting up for me in the antique rocker shed recently upholstered The scotch glass glittered in her hand, resembling something pulled from a treasure chest. Youre late, she said.

During my high school years, my mother maintained a surprising level of trust and leniency. She often offered wise bits of advice, but remained misguided on any matter regarding sex. She was the woman who, years earlier, had answered my question about the homosexuals depicted on Anita Bryants TV program with a deft, Oh, theyre bad people who live in cities and play with themselves a lot. Shed dismissed the evidence of my older sisters menstruation by explaining that shed cut herself down there.

Hmmmm. On that night, I knew my mother would inquire about the party. Half of me wanted to extricate myself from an explanation. The other half, in an uncharacteristic move, decided to sketch an outline of the film Id just seen, to get my mothers reaction.

As expected, her opinion didnt deviate much from that of the females at the party. When I told a tamer version of the pool table scene, she muttered Yikes, her favorite word. I explained how my male classmates appeared pale, flustered, fidgety. Then I slipped in the detail of the pillows. My stomach felt fizzy: It thrilled me to speak to my mother about sex, after all these years. They obviously had hard-ons, I told her. One kid practically whipped it out right there.

Perhaps it was the animation with which I described my male accomplices reactions, the way I dwelled on their expressions, their exclamations, the fine tuning of their positions in that room. Maybe, with both of us drunk, my mother deemed it time for the shell of our conversation to crack. Or maybe, there in the dark room smelling of the wood stove and her cheap booze, she saw me as I might have appeared to an interloper, to someone other than family: a boy wearing red pants and bowling shoes, lip gloss, a haircut spiked and painted in a disarrayed bouquet. Whatever the case, my mother mustered the nerve for something shed obviously been wanting to ask. Scott, she said, her voice smoothed to a whisper. Her tone shut me up, hoisted my heart three inches higher in my chest. I felt it happening. Im going to ask you a question now, and I want you to tell me the truth.

I paused. She knew. Is it what I think youre going to ask?

She took a sip, finishing the scotch. Probably so.

I looked away. Then dont ask it, I said. The lamp seemed brighter, as if its bulb were bursting. I thought about sitting beside my mother, but didnt. Instead, I left the room.

I hobbled jelly-legged upstairs, then collapsed on my bed. The porn film seemed days, weeks ago. My mother had come so close to asking me, and I had demolished my chance. Here I was, unafraid to dress for school in space garb one day, Renaissance the next, yet I couldnt confess my sexuality to my mother. I was a total failure. I knew it would take something major, some bizarre circumstance or catastrophe, to get her to ask again, to get me to reveal myself. I fumbled with a record and lowered the needle, the volume soft, to usher me toward sleep.

Back then, music governed my life. It still does, I suppose, but at seventeen, the bands I loved seemed so profound, every lyric speaking directly to me. I was floundering for an identity, and my favorite British New Wavers delivered it. A recurring memory shows me pogoing and lip-synching in front of my bedroom mirror. Mom would knock-knock-knock. Cant you turn that crap down a little? shed ask. I never did.

I had three loyal friends, all girls. They were my partners in crime, and together we made a quartet of outcasts, the weirdos of Little River, Kansas. Traci, Deb, Lori, and Scott. With New Wave as accompaniment, we dressed in the thrift-store rags or garish costumes of our favorite bands. We wore makeup, a lot for the girls, a little for me. We dyed our hair; decorated it with feathered roach clips; spiked it with twisted pipe cleaners. (Debs hairstyle saw the most metamorphoses that year, once, after applying a red food coloring rinse, she got caught in a rainstorm and wound up resembling Sissy Spacek in the finale of Carrie .)

Daring and outlandish, yes, but we were far from perfect. The girls were either considerably over- or underweight. We all had some feature most teenagers would deem unsightly: an upturned, porcine nose, spectacle lenses thick as Coke bottle bottoms; a forehead speckled with zits. And I was gay, although Id yet to tell anyone. For Traci, Deb, Lori, and me, dressing as those British band members afforded the possibility that, instead of our enemies calling us fat cow, ugly bitch, or fucking faggot, we might instead be called something like weirdo or punk. Now those were names we could handle.

My status as hometown New Wave freak, then, was my first coming out. I exposed myself as someone eccentric, nonconformist, unafraid to take chances. Not that it was hard to be distinctive in Little River. With a population slightly under one thousand, the community prided itself on a devotion to Sunday church services, school board meetings, and the random Main Street hootenanny, music provided by a local country-western outfit. My friends and I gritted our teeth and waited for graduations inevitable deliverance. Until then, we were content to gather during lunch hour in the school gym to blast tapes of our latest records, our cowboy-booted classmates glaring as if we belonged among Satans profane legions.

One of our favorite bands was Adam and the Ants. They wore satiny pirate pants, Spanish military jackets, Indian warrior gear. Their album Kings of the Wild Frontier seemed the appropriate sound track for our lives. When the groups leader, Adam Ant, sang about a new breed of outcasts who would welcome tomorrow / instead of yesterday and soar above the rest, I considered him spokesperson for me and my pals. Weekends, away from schoolmates, we would gawk at photos of the Ants, their tribal rhythms blaring from Tracis bedroom stereos puny speakers. Then wed dress up. I still have a photo of Traci, hair spiked into a blonde crown, white lines crisscrossing her face like war paint. In another, Im pouting at the camera, glittery silver stars trailing an arc from my eyelinered eye to my lipsticked mouth.