home is where the heart is

Tears well up in my eyes, I cry and let them spill out, softly. I use the back of my forefinger and wipe them away, but still they spill. I cry as I am touched by a story of love and loss. I cry as I listen and remember all the young men lost: Peter, Butter, Mario. Young gay men I once knew who blazed their way out of the closet, drunk and happy as they found they could claim what they had always hidden. All these young men are dead, lost to a disease of sexuality and love making. All these young men are gone now and I miss them and I missed the opportunity to connect with them. These stories are my apology for not connecting when I had the chance. These stories are my squares in the AIDs quilt. I keep looking for their names, but have yet to see them.

I remember Butter clearly but I can’t remember his real name. We called him Butter after that silly margarine commercial that kept insisting that Parkay margarine was ‘butter.’ We laughed and joked with one another. I don’t think the name had any deep meaning, it just got us to laugh. We got high in the high school parking lot and in parks and in the woods and anywhere we could find privacy. We cut school and went to the beach as often as possible. We smoked a lot of pot, drank lots of cheap wine and beer, whatever we could get a hold of. Some of us kept our grades up knowing that we needed to get into college to escape this life, but we partied as much as we could in the interim. Enjoying our youth and freedom, we bellowed and stumbled our way into the world.

Butter came out to us in 11th grade. Of course, we all knew he was gay but no one had dared name it before. He had been teased for his femininity all his life. Our small clique of tolerant liberal-minded dope-smoking young women were safe friends for a young gay man. We were certainly safer than the high school boys. We wouldn’t beat him up for his sexuality. Butter had lived with that threat since grade school. He could try out his newly-named sexual identity with us. One day he told me jubilantly that he had a boy friend. He invited me to meet this young man. I remember cutting school and going to the boyfriend’s home, a young soldier on shore leave. Butter and the boyfriend were in bed together. I did my best to be cool. We smoked a joint and laughed. I felt awkward, mentally adrift, like when I get off an airplane in a country I’ve never been too before, where I don’t speak the language and I am terribly jet-lagged. I was confused and searching for a bearing or a landmark. I don’t know if I ever found one. I don’t remember seeing him much after that encounter. I think he ran away shortly after this, fleeing the taunting and torture of high school for the freedom of LA gay scene. I know we lost him to the bath houses and the sexual indulgence of the late seventies. I wish I could hear his story now. I imagine him at 17, discovering he could sell his body on the streets of West LA. I imagine him a play thing for an older man. I imagine him struggling to support himself and being drunk on the pleasure of gay community in 1976. I know we lost him to AIDs, someone told me that long ago. I know the bookends of his story, the beginning and end, everything in between is my imagination.

Mario passed through our circle of friends more briefly at the end of high school. He was flamboyant and fun, creative and edgy. We played word games and dressed wild and went to the Hollywood Bars to cruise. In those days underage women could easily get into bars and we could usually sneak a young man in with us. It probably would have been even easier to talk Mario in if he had been openly gay at that time. He provided some protection when things got out of control and we were in dicey situations. My friend Amanda stayed close with Mario through the years and I’d see him occasionally when I went home to LA to visit. Mario was successful and very out the last time I saw him. Running a swank restaurant and living the hip fashionable life. Living high and happy it seemed. And then the next time I returned to LA, perhaps a year later, he was gone. It seemed to happen so suddenly but it was only the time lapse of my occasional trips to LA. Another friend had slipped away without my staying connected. Again I had not said goodbye.

Peter was a soul mate of mine. We were so much alike. He didn’t come out to me until long after we graduated. We were both so busy looking good and trying to keep face with one another that I was probably one of the last to know. In fact we once tried to date in high school. We would have made a great looking couple he and I. But there was no spark, no attraction between us. We tried, but we were just good friends and no more. I remember another friend, Alvaro, who came to Liz and I to tell us that Peter had made a pass at him. Alvaro was disgusted and angry. I didn’t want to believe it, I knew that Peter had dated other women from time to time. He was good looking and not stereotypically feminine as Butter was. Peter didn’t ‘act gay.’ Alvaro’s story broke up that circle of friends. We scattered into a new constellation because Peter and Alvaro couldn’t be together any more. We all went off to college or to start our lives. Peter went to UC Santa Barbara. We heard odd stories through the grapevine. He was living with an older woman, a ‘sugar momma.’ I didn’t really understand that, but it was the late 70s and early 80s and we all tried various sexual configurations to see what worked. It wasn’t my place to judge Peter or ask too many questions. We drifted apart through graduate school and early adulthood, making our way into careers and respectability. We met again in the early 90s when I moved to the Bay area. Our old friend Liz was living there too, with her sweetheart Gina. I didn’t feel so confused any more with my gay and lesbian friends. In fact I got a kick out of all the art and humor they brought to my life. We lived across the street from women who were part of ‘dykes on bikes.’ On weekends a provocative gang of women wearing leather and riding Harleys would gather on our street. I was charmed by them. I liked living in a place where people could live so out and wild and comfortable. I liked living where people were so happily living on the fringes of acceptable behavior. My serious scientific life became colorful an interesting by association.

Liz had kept in touch with Peter through the years. When he heard I had moved to town, he invited Liz and I over to his house in the Haight/Ashbury District. His lover was an M.D. working with AIDs patients. I don’t remember meeting the lover. I remember Peter and how good it was to see him again. We were all putting our best faces forward. We were all looking good and trying to show off how we’d succeeded in life. It was important to us then. We were in our early 30s and we needed to be successful to be okay with ourselves. Peter seemed to be making good money as a landscape architect and he was living in a beautiful luxurious home with his lover. He looked successful and happy. I didn’t know he was sick and surviving on experimental medicine cocktails. He invited me to a Cinco de Mayo party in the North Bay where his Dad was living. I went looking forward to seeing his family again. I remember chopping cilantro for the salsa and feeling so at home again in a Mexican family, in a family that prided itself on its climb out of the barrio with children that had successfully crossed over into the white community. Peter and I were both trophy children of passing. Peter and I had both successfully made our way through the white academic world and into white middle/upper class culture. We were children our sweat shop grandparents could be proud of. Peter took me to see his brother Richard whom I had dated for quite some time in high school. It wasn’t a healthy relationship, mainly sex and drugs to tell the truth, but we tried as best we could to figure out something functional and appropriate to our age and time. By the time I saw Richard again, I had been sober for many years. But Richard was lost in his alcoholism and drug addiction. He was literally lost in the backwoods of Marin county and hiding from us all. He said hello to me and then retreated back into the woods. He wasn’t successful, he hadn’t passed as Peter and I had, and so he hid from us and we felt sorry for him. My heart yearned to connect with him again. My heart ached to talk and say “hello, tell me your story, what happened.” My heart didn’t feel any more successful than he. But I didn’t know how to reach out and make that connection through the haze of his alcohol or my accomplishments.

That was the last day I saw Peter. I meant to call so many times afterwards. A year or two went by as I was lost in my career and my push to be successful in the big academic world of Berkeley. I was much too busy to keep up the connection with an old high school friend. I was caught in the ‘publish or perish’ chronically overworked culture of self-important academia. When I finally called Peter again I talked with his boyfriend. Peter had died of AIDs just a month before I called. I had missed the opportunity to say goodbye. I had missed the opportunity of a true heart talk. I had missed sharing the real stories behind our facades. I miss Peter dearly. I wish I had heard his story. I wished that I had listened in high school when he hit on Alvaro. I wish I had asked him to talk to me then. Too many missed opportunities to really connect; too many taken opportunities to impress one another with our success. Our hearts were as deeply retreated in the woods as was Peter’s brother, afraid to tell each other the truth, afraid of being open and vulnerable because we knew each other’s truth so clearly: the need to cross over, the need to succeed, the need to look good, the need to impress others so that we could believe in ourselves. Peter and I were carbon copies of one another on the inside. I guess that is why I miss him so much.

Holly Near’s song, ‘Home is where the heart is’ plays in my head again and I cry. I can’t help myself thinking of Peter, Butter and Mario. Others too, but those three remain the closest to my heart. I mourn the lost connection, the lost opportunities to listen. A friend sings ‘Home is where the heart is’ at church and my sons sit beside me and I wonder what they think and understand. I realize that in spite of my desire to be liberal and open minded I stumble with my language. As my older son enters adolescence I stumble over my words and the assumptions they include. I don’t know if my son is gay or straight. He has never told me who he is attracted too. In fact, he denies all attraction to anyone all together. One of his friends betrayed him and told me that Gabe had a crush on some young girl, and yet, I don’t know if I believe it. He isn’t pining for girls, yet. He isn’t girl crazy. And there goes my assumption hidden gently in that ‘yet’ – ‘he isn’t pining for girls, yet’ implies that someday he will. I find myself making those kinds of slips, not knowing how to avoid the assumption of heterosexuality. I don’t know how to use the language in a way that says – ‘whomever you fall in love with; whomever you are attracted to’ I don’t know how to introduce sexual education in a way that isn’t heterosexist because heterosexuality is the only sexuality that I know. In my desire to be open and liberal and inclusive I stumble over my words and have to apologize for myself. I have to apologize and say, “You know that song we heard at church, what did you think of that?” … “I want you to know that it is okay, whomever you love. It is okay and I love you for who and all that you are.” I want to open the door so that my son can be safe regardless of whom he loves. I want to open the door to adulthood and sexuality in a safe and loving way. I don’t want sex to kill him. When I came of age, I ignorantly thought anything I could catch from sex was treatable with penicillin. Peter, Butter and Mario, are the causalities of our shared ignorance. I write this letter to own my ignorance. I write this letter to help myself climb out of it, to remind myself that ‘home is where the heart is,’ to open my heart to whomever my son might be. I write this letter because love is big and hearts are too easily broken. I write this letter because life and love are precious and vulnerable. I write this letter to remind myself of what is important.