a roomful of fairies

Surely I'm not the only homophobic homosexual in the world. Many of them try to hide their sexuality. That's not it for me, I just have this deep-seated self-hatred that I'm sure came from my Fundamentalist roots. (And, trust me, it was less Fun and a lot more mental growing up the way I did.)

I didn't join the choir or drama in high school until after my father died because of a fear that people would perceive me as gay. I don't know how much that decision really had to do with my father; the fact that kids started calling me "Gay Bird" in the eighth grade made me hyper-aware of how I was perceived. It had something to do with the way I walked and carried my books, according to a girl my age who lived on my street and tried to teach me how to hold my schoolbooks at my side and not drop them. Looking back now, I see the irony in that little lesson, since she was a pretty butch girl.

Later, I chose to move to New York City over San Francisco because in the back of my mind I would quickly be "outed" by going to a city that supported and therefore obviously stood for all things queer. I might have liked San Francisco; but then again, I might be dead by now. I believe that my homophobia has kept me HIV negative. Not that I haven't had lots of sex in my time, but there were many times when I held back, didn't do quite as much as I really wanted to, not so much because of a fear of AIDS, but more of a fear as appearing feminine, weak, too gay.

My mother's older brother, C, is gay. After my one year of college -- which I flunked out of because my dorm mates found and read my journal which implicated many of them in my homosexual fantasies -- I lived with my uncle on and off. Like many of my family relationships, ours was and is sort of complicated and troubled in many ways. I'm sad to say we're pretty much estranged from each other, and I believe it's the way it has to be. But back in the happier days, he and his cousin L (who was very "nelly" and died of AIDS -- case in point) and I used to run around doing lots of drugs and hitting the bars and bookstores. I was often embarrassed by L's gayness, asked him not to be so nelly more than once. Fortunately, he had a good sense of humor about himself, and he deserved to be as big and flamboyant a fag as he wanted to be, having been in the armed services and married to a woman for quite a few years who pussy-whipped him in the most literal sense of the word possible.

Once when I was back in Bigtown visiting my mother -- who was at the time married to the most hateful redneck I've ever gotten that close to (his wife left him for another woman) -- my mom asked me nervously over a cocktail if L was "queer" and then if C was "queer." I ratted them out without the slightest compunction, and perhaps that was why she didn't pose the same question to me.

Interestingly, it was after my running around with C and L that I got married to a woman for a brief period of time. She was seventeen years my senior -- I met her through a straight friend I had a crush on who was her son. JM a lot like my mother in many ways. Speaking of my mother, she was so excited when JM and I got together; so long as she was female and white (or at least not black), mom probably wouldn't have cared if she was seventeen or seventy. JM and I both stated our sexuality to each other as bi, and honestly we had great sex. But when the fire died down, she wasn't really all that interested in women, and neither was I. We married because JM had an ailment (she was bipolar) and I had a job that offered health insurance to spouses. That act pretty much pissed the fire out completely.

And so I went to NYC, telling my mother and one of my sisters, just before I turned twenty-five, that I was bisexual on my way out of Houston. My sister said she "didn't care what I was," and my mother didn't say much. (In her defense, mom has since become a lot more open-minded; she even helped Uncle C make a section for the AIDS Quilt in their cousin L's memory.) I did go through a few bouts of bisexual longing while in NYC, but it was simply much easier to have sex with men than women, so that's what I found myself doing more of, and liking more.

S and I met and had a great sex life for awhile, and always a very open relationship (which is likely part of the reason we stopped enjoying each other physically, but whatever, we probably wouldn't be as close now all these sixteen years later had we had forced ourselves into monogamy). We started performing together about a week after we met, and so that was as big a part of our partnership as anything for the ten years we were an official "couple." We played gay and theatrical venues first, but then, after we were booed off a stage at an ACT-UP benefit (we assume because we did sounded a little too "country" for the hip New York queers) we found less and less favor with gay audiences -- though we did play in front of 15,000 people at the Gay Pride Rally that year, which was amazing. At the end of our ten-year career, we were playing more for a true cross-section of Americans at Unitarian Universalist churches, folk venues and (Border's) bookstores, which meant it was about 97% heterosexual.

So, when we stopped performing, I had a hard time socializing with people; for the better part of the previous ten years, I was in the spotlight, people approached me, Middle American homos loved us for just being regular people who happened to be a gay couple. It was a very difficult transition for me, I went through a two-year depression, and have spent the larger part of the the past three-and-a-half years trying to fit in and feeling like a social outcast, drawing on the pain of eighth grade to understand it.

It's not that I don't like homosexuals. Not really. I think sometimes that I would like to be in a relationship with a man again, but then I get all caught up in worrying about how this person might act, or how a "relationship" would even work at my age. My good lesbian friend G says that I need to stop worrying so much about finding a boyfriend and just find some gay males to be friends with.

Austin is a very lesbian-centric town; the gals are organized and socialized, some of them I find quite attractive, too. The only real place it seems that one can meet gay men is at a bar. But I don't really like bars all that much. I'm not against them, and I do go on occasion, but I'd rather smoke pot than drink overpriced beer or cocktails. And I feel awkward in those situations.

Every week, I go through the Chronicle and circle things in the calendar that I might be interested in (that I might want to not miss) over the upcoming week. The most current issue had a listing for the Capital City Men's Chorus -- which is essentially Austin's Gay Men's Chorus, but it's been around for twenty years, so I'm sure some homosexual-phobia went into the naming of it. I read the entry aloud to S, and he said, "You should go."

And so I did, last night. I saw a roomful of fairies, and I was one of them. We were all different kinds of people (in fact there was even one heterosexual man, married and with children -- I recognized him from the Fiction Writing Group I used to go to), and the common denominator for us was that we all like to sing.

There was an orientation, and then we mingled and ate snacks while one at a time, we were called into the sanctuary (of the "gay-friendly Methodist church," ugh!) to "try out," which was really to find out what section we would be in. The guys I had met that I thought were the most interesting and cute(!) were all basses, and I was sure I was a bass, but I was told that I was a baritone, and at first I felt a bit emasculated by the news. "What do you mean I'm not the lowest, most masculine part in the chorus?!" But then, on the way home, I decided that I'll probably enjoy the baritone section better; when I was in the choir at the UU church in Nashville, I always grumbled to myself about how boring the bass parts were.

What a fag.