What Was It Like?

So what was it like? What was it like to be different in almost every way to those growing up around me? What was it like knowing that, around every corner, down every hallway, in every room, lay the possibility of some new enemy, another chance of being found out, another reminder of just how grotesquely "other" I was? What was it like looking in the mirror every morning after getting out of the shower and seeing for the thousandth time--and yet it always felt as piercing as the first--the myriad ways that my body, with its dainty wrists, string bean arms and legs, washboard rib cage, and downward-sloping shoulders, blatantly betrayed the very thing I was trying to hide? What was it like to know that no matter what I wore, I always felt naked, blatant, and marked. What was it like to know that I dared not speak, for if I did, despite what I might way, my voice itself would be used against me?

What follows are a series of composite vignettes from my teen years. They are not chronological. All names have been changed. Some might be several events compressed into one. My goal is to crack the curtains and open the blind just a tiny bit to allow you to catch a glimpse of the kid who saw himself as a freak, a monster, an outcast.



Scene One: The Birdcage
My good friend Rob had just been accepted to an elite ballet school in Washington D.C. I had idolized and worshipped him ever since we met. He was everything I was not: he had thick, manly muscles in his arms and chest; he walked and spoke with confidence, always knowing who he was and how he fit in; he had a goofy, hilarious sense of humor that drew people to him. This, unfortunately for me, included women. I decided I would put up with that if it meant that I could still be close to him. Rob had a girlfriend, Lisa, who was also a dancer in our youth ballet company. She was also a good friend of mine. In order to fully fit in, I would also need a girlfriend, I decided. It wasn't hard, though: Amanda flirted with me all the time. She was like a puppy nipping constantly at my small, girly heels. So I was at Rob's house for his going-away party, and later in the evening, the four of us, Rob, Lisa, Amanda, and I, were outside in Rob's backyard. Lisa was sitting on a bench and Rob was behind her, his legs straddling hers, his arms wrapped around her waist, his head resting on her shoulder. Amanda was sitting in another chair. I, wanting nothing less than to have to do to Amanda what Rob is doing to Lisa, wandered around the yard, pretending to admire the free-standing, built-from-scratch cage that housed about 15 pigeons. At about seven feet tall and five feet square, it was impressive. While praising its craftsmanship, I was wondering inside who the heck would raise pigeons as pets. Out of nowhere, Rob announced, "Lisa and I are going to take a break behind the birdcage." Lisa and Amanda both snickered, knowing the implications of this "break." My stomach dropped to my flat-arched feet, for I too knew what this meant: I would be left alone with Amanda while they did their "thing" in the dark. The whole time they were gone, Amanda stared at me with stars in her eyes and a clear message on her lips. All too soon, Rob and Lisa reappeared. "Okay, it's your turn now!" Rob announced jovially, cluelessly. I was seized with a sudden and intense panic. What do I do? How do I do this? I want to die right now. Amanda grabbed my hand solemnly like a learned, older woman, and led me back behind our aviary privacy shield. We stood face to face, saying nothing. "Well?" she said coyly. She moved closer to me. I laughed a little, trying to appear not about ready to faint. She raised herself up onto the balls of her feet and put her hands on my shoulders. My arms stayed stiff and corpse-like at my sides. As she pressed her face against mine, I noticed a couple things: first, her lips were very soft while mine felt like cold marble slabs. Second, I could feel her lips twitch slightly, wanting to part while mine might as well have been one single lip, fused together in the middle because there was no way on earth that I was going to let into my mouth that demon in her mouth that was aching to explore mine. To compensate, I moved my head--ridiculously--from side to side, like I'd seen so many times in movies. How long do we have to do this, I wondered. I wonder what Rob and Lisa are doing right now. How long are they expecting us to be back here? Finally, thankfully, mercifully, Amanda rolled back on her heels and removed her hands from my shoulders. She looked at me blankly, dully for a moment, and we turned and walked around the birdcage to the hoots and congratulatory whoops of our friends.


Scene Two: Shop Class, 10th Grade
Despite being the least manly human on the planet, I do enjoy building things, working with my hands, measuring, cutting, drilling, and sanding. As much as I enjoyed making something from nothing, I knew that shop class was a danger zone for people like me. Shop class was riddled with jocks, hicks, and dudes. I was surrounded by guys who had an uncanny ability to zero in on my differentness, to smell my fear, to catch on their radar the one person in the room whose hips moved a little too much when he walked. The room, much like many shop classrooms, consisted of long wooden tables in the middle surrounded by tools and machines of every kind around the perimeter. As usual, I stood down at one end of a table, separated by a good ten feet from the next group of students to my left. I was busy sanding a block of clear plastic, slowly and tediously working my way down to finer and finer grains of sandpaper. "Hey! Hey you!" I heard someone yell on my left. I knew that it was directed at me, but I believed that if I just continued what I was doing, they would get bored like they had before and move on. "Hey, I'm talking to you!" He lowered his voice and asked one of his minions, "What's that guy's name?" Some evil person told him. "Hey! Justin! Man, are you gay? Justin, are you gay? Are you??" He wasn't going to let up, not this time. So I did the only thing I could do. I lifted my head and turned to look at him. With a look on my face like he had just asked the most ridiculous question ever uttered, and with an edge to my voice that sounded like I couldn't believe he would ask such a stupid thing, I said, "No. I'm not." And I turned back to my work. They all laughed. "Yeah, right," I heard them saying to each other. "Fairy," several of them said under their breaths. "Fag." Imagine my surprise when I saw most of these same boys at a Stake Youth event one weekend, dressed in their clean, white shirts and ties, saying prayers, and reading the scriptures.

Scene Three: Shower Up!
Of all the most horrifying things in my school career, the second worst thing was P.E. class, but the worst, by far, was being forced to take a shower afterward. Why should I even have to shower, I would wonder. It's  not like I over-exerted myself while I was moving as little as possible while we played basketball, deliberately not moving away from the guy who was guarding me to avoid the possibility of--God forbid!--having the ball passed to me. But we were "required" to shower. Whoever invented this punishment should be hanged. It was a nightmare every single day. It was a nightmare on two distinct levels. First, as a pubescent, hormonal boy, I was very aware that I was surrounded by nakedness. I knew that I would be sieged with an onslaught of so much bare skin that I could die and go to Heaven; I mean, this is the stuff of gay fantasies. Beautifully muscular thighs, pectorals, backs, biceps, and forearms. And don't think I didn't steal a furtive, guilt-ridden glance at other forbidden things. I tried my best to keep my eyes averted, to walk with my gaze forward: I had a system--clothes off, speed walk to the shower, turn on the water, stand under the water and count to 15, grab a  towel, scuttle back to my locker, dry off as quickly as possible, looking only at my feet, and get dressed, still mostly wet. Second, I knew that my body was not like those around me. I was scrawny and weak and waif-like. All the jocks saw me and laughed. They judged. They mocked. On the day in question, I was standing under the water. One, two, three, four, five, six... "Hey you." Standing on the other side of the column of shower heads (another horrible invention) was Jason Hicks, the jockest of the jocks, the most popular of the populars, the most arrogant and jerky of the arrogants and the jerks. He had--as fate would naturally ensure--a gorgeous body, short, but stacked, with shapely pectorals, round mounds on his shoulders, softball-sized biceps, and forearms that were covered in a light brown downy fur. "Hey," he persisted, "stand back and let the water hit your dick." He laughed a little bit. "Go on. It feels good." I was being baited, and I knew it. I looked at him, lead in my stomach, and tried to laugh non-chalantly, like I was in on the joke. My count had been messed up and I had no clue how long I had been standing there, dumbly, mutely, standing naked in front of the most popular guy in school. And he was goading me to do something that he would use against me when he told all his friends how he convinced Justin to stand back and let the water tickle his privates. Turn the water off...grab a towel...return to your locker...dry off as fast as you can...get dressed. Coincidentally, Jason was also in my stake, a good Mormon boy who had been deemed worthy by his bishop to receive the Priesthood.

Scene Four: Off to Seminary!
At my high school--and indeed in my city and my state--there were (and are) a lot of Mormons. For this reason, we had seminary as a part of our school day at a seminary building that was across the street from the school. We had to adjust our schedules so that we had an hour of "release time" I think it was called, wherein we would walk across the street en masse to attend our daily religious studies. One might think that this would be a daily respite from the stresses of life in high school. One might think that this would be the  one place in my day where I could let my mind relax and feel "the Spirit." This may have been the case for some, but it was just another form of torture for me. I've already said that many of the boys who taunted me were also LDS, so I will let you imagine what it was like to sit in seminary with those same people. But there was another form of torture my sophomore year: I had the biggest crush ever on my seminary teacher, Brother Jameson. He had short-cropped, missionary-style dark hair and dark brown eyes that were saucer-large and glistening. He had a slight frame, kind of like mine, and he was maybe 24 or 25 years old, if that. He always wore short-sleeved white shirts and was very expressive with his arms. What this meant was that several times per day, I would catch a glimpse of his dark armpit hair. This might seem like a silly thing to some, yucky even. But imagine, if you will, that I had no way at all of expressing or experiencing the attraction I had; seeing the underside of a man's arm was about as "sexy" as I could at that point imagine. To me, it was intimate and sensual. I would only allow myself to glance. It had to look incidental, just something I happened to see while I was in the process of looking somewhere else, like I hadn't looked on purpose. In my head, I always felt like everyone in the room was watching my every move, looking for something to use against me in the halls, or in the showers, or in shop class. The jocks were constantly on the lookout for any weakness. Luckily, the girls--poor, silly, naive things that they were--always took a liking to me. I made them laugh. I played the piano. They could actually talk to me. In a way, I started using the girls as a shield, guarding me from the laser stares and verbal bullets of the boys and their talk of basketball, baseball, football, scouting trips, and dude-this and dude-that. I knew what I was doing: I knew I was using the girls for my own benefit, but what choice did I have? With Brother Jameson flaunting his pits in my face for an hour every day of the week, I had to have some sort of shield!

Scene Five: Some Books
I think it was probably late in my junior year when I somehow came across an advertisement for a film being shown on PBS, in two parts, on two consecutive Sunday evenings. It was a film adaptation of David Leavitt's The Lost Language of Cranes. I remember very little of the film or the story, but it had a profound effect on me. I watched it in my room, in the dark, on my 5" B&W television. I turned the volume way down to avoid arousing suspicion. On the screen before me was a story about gay men, living "gay" lives, doing "gay" things like kissing each other and holding hands! I had never seen such a thing before. The very few representations of gay people I had seen in movies--they were, of course, not anywhere near as prevalent as they are in movies now--had been caricatures, clowns, stereotypes. But these were real people dealing with coming out and having relationships. Relationships! I used to ask my mom to take me to the city library on weekends. I would spend about three hours there and would always walk out with a stack of books piled up to my chest. It was at these trips to the library that I would go clandestinely into sections that housed books on homosexuality and novels by authors such as David Leavitt. I would check out piano books and books about dream interpretation and books about palm reading and books about ballet, always making sure that I had a stack big enough that my mom wouldn't think to inspect each of them, and a couple that I knew would catch her eye--"Tarot card reading? Justin, I don't like you reading books like that."--so that she wouldn't ask who David Leavitt was, or Edmund White, or any other author I had somehow discovered who wrote stories about men like me. The books and their covers were not anything that would attract attention--Who would suspect anything untoward in a book called While England Sleeps?--so I took them to school with me. I read them in the library, where I spent my lunch periods to avoid the hell that is finding a table in the cafeteria. I read them in the mornings before I left for school. I read them when I got home from ballet class in the evening. I read them when the teasing at school got so bad that I had to temporarily change high schools. Those stories were what saved me from going under. They alone are what gave me hope that I could have a normal life someday. They described what it looked like and felt like for one man to feel love of a romantic (yes, and sexual) nature for another. I continued reading them even when my mom saw that I was reading a biography of a ballet dancer who had died of AIDS. She saw a picture of him in the book and shook her head with a mixture of pity and disdain. "It's such a shame," she said. "It's just so sad that someone so good looking would waste his life by being with other men." Confused, I asked, "So it's okay for ugly guys to be gay?" She responded, "That isn't even funny. It's not okay for anyone to be that way." In a way, I was trying to push boundaries, to make my mom wonder. Many times, on the way home from the library, I tried to will my mom to ask me The Question. Just ask me. You know you want to, I would think over and over. If she would have just asked, all I would have had to do was respond with a simple and succinct "Yes." If she had just asked, I would not have had to sit on her bed a couple years later, sweating, sick to my stomach, with so much blood pumping through my body with such force that I literally couldn't see clearly, and say, "Mom, I'm gay."