my Gay Soul

A few weeks ago a gay brother and I interviewed a lawyer who is a kind of Charles Garry for the gay community in San Francisco. I asked him if he is gay. He said, “If you’re trying to get me to say I’m queer, I won’t do it. What I do in bed is nobody’s business.”

I wanted to scream, “Honey, I don’t care what you do in bed, I just asked if you are gay.”

A few days later I was rapping with some women who are heavy into Women’s Liberation. “You zero in on sex; you always zero in on sex,” they said. I’ve been told the same thing by liberal homosexuals and straights alike: “What you do in bed is your business, do your thing.” They are saying that gay means SEX, nothing but sex.

Well, I’m tired to the bone of being told what I am. I am gay.

Yes, yes, my cock, my mouth and my asshole are gay. So are my fingernails, my big toe, my nose and my brain. I am not gay because of where I put my cock or who I sleep with. I am gay because everything about me is gay, because I am part of a gay community.

I was gay long before I admitted my homosexuality to myself, long before I had sex, long before I knew what sex was.

When I was ten, I played paper dolls with the girls and dug it; when I had to, I played baseball with the guys and didn’t dig it.

When I was thirteen a gang of four or five guys tormented me, all through junior high school. They called me a cocksucker. I didn’t know what it meant, but I knew it was the worst thing a guy could call another guy. They called me “Mrs. Alinder.” They probably had homosexual fantasies and wanted to relate to me physically and the only way they could do it was to provoke me to fight them. But I didn’t. I was scared shitless. There were five of them, and I was alone.

I grew up on a farm in southern Minnesota, where you proved your masculinity in competitive athletics. I had too much self-doubt to be any good. In high school I earned a bit of respect through journalism, theater and art. But I was never the man I was supposed to be, although I did drive a tractor, plow the fields, toss bales of hay into the hay loft and join the Future Farmers of America.

I went to a small liberal arts college near my home for two years. It was a super-straight middle-class parochial place, everything based on a social pecking order of fraternities and sororities. Even the lowest fraternity, a bunch of creeps, didn’t want me. Did I have B.O.? Bad breath? No. I was hipper and in some ways more together than they. But I couldn’t censor myself enough. My gay self was showing through. And my gay self was me. And every response I got from the world told me that my gay self was despicable. So I censored myself more, built higher and thicker walls around my soul and retreated deeper into my closet.

I had friends, other guys at the bottom. I was afraid to be seen on campus with them. I thought I would slip even lower. We were all gay, but that could never be talked about, never be acted out. We were the outcasts, but we were not together.

Two years later a good friend came out. Finally I admitted that I was gay too. We had been friends since we were seven years old. But it was not until we were twenty-two and twenty-three that we could deal with what brought us together. Since then, although we live far apart, I’ve felt very close to that friend. We’ve been through a lot.

What separates me from the straight boy is not just the things we do in bed, but what our lives have been. When I meet an upfront gay brother, I make a connection. I already know a lot about him.

I need to be together with other gay men. We have not been together—we’ve not had enough self-respect for that. Isolated sex, from one partner to the next. Enough of that. That’s where we’ve been; let’s go somewhere else. Let’s go where we value each other as more than just a hunk of meat.

We need to recognize one another wherever we are, start talking to each other.

 We need to say “Hi, brother” when we see each other on the street. We need consciousness-raising groups and communes.

Our gay souls have nearly been stomped to death in that desert called America. If we are to bloom, we can only do it together. I need you, brother, because brother, you are all I have.