Jesse Bering - Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us

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For you, you pervert, you

Rarely has man been more cruel against man than in the condemnation and punishment of those accused of the so-called sexual perversions. The penalties have included imprisonment, torture, the loss of life or limb, banishment, blackmail, social ostracism, the loss of social prestige, renunciation by friends and families, the loss of position in school or in business, severe penalties meted out for convictions of men serving in the armed forces, public condemnation by emotionally insecure and vindictive judges on the bench, and the torture endured by those who live in perpetual fear that their non-conformant sexual behavior will be exposed to public view. These are the penalties which have been imposed on and against persons who have done no damage to the property or physical bodies of others, but who have failed to adhere to the mandated custom. Such cruelties have not often been matched, except in religious and racial persecutions.

Alfred Kinsey (1948)

CONTENTS

PREFACE

In 1985, when the AIDS epidemic and its concentrated scourge upon gay men were causing an unprecedented level of panic across America, I was an eminently underwhelming, overly sensitive ten-year-old boy living with my family in the leafy suburbs of Washington, D.C. This new diseasethe gay plague, as people were calling itwas suddenly the talk of our town. At a block cookout one summer evening, I sat near a group of men pontificating about this AIDS thing. Looking back now, I dont think they even realized I was there; I was the sort of child who blended into tree bark and lawn ornaments. The men scratched their heads, threw back a few beers, did some entertaining imitations of outlandish drag queens, and then finally concurred that in all probability, in all seriousness, AIDS was just Gods clever way of getting rid of the queers. (Like most of the men in my neighborhood, these comedians worked for the government, if Im not mistaken.)

When I turned on the television back at home, I saw belligerent housewives and middle-school football coaches shouting antigay epithets at supporters of Ryan White, a gentle, eloquent adolescent with hemophilia whod contracted HIV through a blood transfusion years earlier. The news footage showed his single mother wading patiently through an angry mob in her small Indiana town to enroll her son in the public school. The grim death of an emaciated Rock Hudson that same year riveted peoples attention, and with this attention came that terrible onslaught of jokes about fags and AIDS that saturated the talk in school cafeterias and on playgrounds, the residue of which can still be found in the bigoted banter of some chuckling adults to this day.

Now, by all appearances, I was an average boy; as I said, I didnt stand out in any way, which in this case means I wasnt your stereotypical sissy. I certainly didnt play with dolls, anyway. Well, thats not entirely true. I adored my Superman doll. And what I adored about him most of all was stripping him nude and lying together naked under the covers. (Hugely disappointing, yet somehow each time the anticipation of finding more than a slick plastic crotch would build in my mind just the same.) But this AIDS fiasco made my burgeoning desires more salient to me than they probably otherwise would have been. The menacing ethos of those times, in which it was made abundantly clear to me that people like me were not welcome in this world, prematurely pushed a dim awareness of my own sexuality into my consciousness. What I didnt understand was that gay males were dropping like flies not because theyor rather we were inherently bad and disgusting but because theyd engaged in a form of unprotected sex that made them especially vulnerable to the virus. I wasnt an epidemiologist. I was a fifth grader. I didnt even know what sex was .

To my mind, gays were simply being struck down one by one by a mad God, just as Id heard those men saying at the cookout. So my days, I figured, must be numbered too. When would I start showing those telltale sores on my face, or perhaps the grayish pallor, the strained breathing, the zombielike gait of the other positive ones that I kept seeing on television and in the newspapers? One day I stood before the mirror and lifted up my shirt only to find a loom of prepubescent ribs that served to convince me I had indeed started wasting away from this unholy affliction. In reality, I was just extra scrawny. But my flawed religious interpretation of what was happening is all the more revealing of the caustic moralism of the times given that my family was by no means religious.

I couldnt share my crippling anxiety with my perfectly reasonable parents. That would mean the unthinkable risk of outing myself as one of these social pariahs that everyone was talking about. My fears intensified when I realized that concerted efforts to suss us out from the normal people were already well under way. From scattered threads of gossip and the occasional sound bites, I managed to piece together that the best way to detect our essential evil , to reveal what God alone already knew, was to analyze our blood for evidence of some kind of gay particle. It was only a matter of time before a stern-faced scientist would hold a test tube up to the light and exhibit before a hushed gathering of his peers how my hidden nature danced and mingled in all its monstrous opaqueness against the pure rays of the sun. In the meantime, I stuck my head out the car window and screamed Faggot! at my older brotherwho was then just as he is now, about as straight as straight getswhile he was playing in the street, just to throw off the undercover witch-hunters in the neighborhood. As we all know perfectly well, a person who shouts homophobic slurs cant possibly be gay.

As my annual doctors visit approached ominously on the calendar, my measured apprehension (too strident a protest would only give me away) failed to register to my parents as anything more than run-of-the-mill cowardice. The irony is that by the time I dragged my feet into the pediatricians office and the needle was plucked from my arm after a routine blood draw, all those months of stress boiled over into a very nonimaginary illness. On seeing my liquidized evil lapping forebodingly in a vial in the nurses white-gloved hands, I became so instantly sick over my now inescapable fate that I grew faint and then threw up all over the phlebotomists chair. Imagine my relief when the absentminded doctorprobably, I thought, just distracted by all the commotionmiraculously missed my dark secret and didnt have to break the unspeakable news to my parents.

It would be a decade before I dared to come out to them, and by then theyd divorced. I decided to break the news to my mom first. She was a warm person with a good sense of humor that was tempered (sadly, too often) by a tragedian air to her personality. Id no doubt shed still love me when all was said and done, but I also knew she could be willfully naive about subjects that frightened her or made her uncomfortable. Sex was a big one. I never heard her utter a hateful word about gay people, but neither can I recall her ever saying anything positive. Homosexuality was just a nonissue in our house. Or so she thought.

In the kitchen one evening, I blurted out that I had something I needed to tell her. I sat at the table fiddling nervously with the edges of the newspaper. What ? she said just as nervously. Jesse, what is it? She went on, prodding me. Im gay, I said. It was the first time Id ever said it aloud, and I felt my ears ring at the sound of it. Oh, come on, she said through a widening grin, figuring I must be playing a joke on her. No . Youre kidding. Arent you? No, I said. I really am, I mean, I really am gay.