I'm Coming Out

I’m Coming Out

            “Mom, I’m gay.”

            “Mother.  I am a homosexual.”

            “Mama, I’m a big ‘mo.”

            I was twenty eight years old and, ready or not, about to come out of the closet. And unable to find the perfect way to break the news.  It was June 2001, and I had just moved back to Birmingham after an unsuccessful two-month stint in New York City.  Throughout the previous year, I told a few close friends who, to my surprise, were not really surprised.  I guess my penchant for fashion and Barbra Streisand spoke volumes. 

One evening, after a few too many beers, I told a childhood friend who was notorious for being loose-lipped.  Three weeks later, I discovered that news of my sexual proclivities had made it down the interstate, through the woods, and around the hollow to my tiny hometown of Linden, two hours south of Birmingham.  After an emergency cocktail meeting with my roommate, Allison, she told me what I already knew I needed to do.

            “Craig, you have to tell your parents.  What if they hear it on the street?  Besides, you moved back here from New York because you had unfinished business, right?”

            “Fine, I’ll do it.  But only over the phone,” I replied.

            “Over the phone?”  She was incredulous.

            When I was growing up, I stayed in my room most of the time and talked to my parents through the walls.  So I figured that coming out via the telephone wouldn’t be much different.  So on a beautiful Sunday afternoon in late June, I made a phone call.  I rehearsed various versions of my speech for an hour but still didn’t know how I was going to say the words.  When she answered, my mother was busy in the kitchen cooking something.  I took a deep breath.

            I always knew that I was different.  I distinctly remember having strange feelings for other boys even in grammar school.  Not that I knew how to act on them.  However, our next-door neighbor, Barry, did.  He was a grade level ahead of me and liked to watch “Wonder Woman.”  Apparently, Lynda Carter locked lips with someone on the previous night’s episode, because the next afternoon, Barry pulled me into our laundry room to show me something. 

“Let me show you what Wonder Woman did last night to Steve Trevor.”

He laid a big fat kiss on me, right on the lips.  It was by far, the grossest thing I ever felt.  The lips, the tongue, the smell of Doritos.  But as disgusting as it was, it opened something up inside my gut.  For better or worse, I knew that everything changed with that one kiss. 

            I went on through grammar school playing occasional games of “doctor” with Bobby Barkley, a boy in my class.  But I always pushed the thoughts aside and tried to focus on girls.  Usually to no avail.  In junior high, after my clandestine year-long affair with Steve Avery ended, it was back to the occasional tryst with Barry, who by this time, had grown out of his “Wonder Woman” obsession but not his love for Doritos.  I assumed that these feelings for other boys would one day disappear and I could date girls, marry, and have children.  I even dated a few during high school and college, but most girls don’t want a boyfriend who can also style their hair. 

            After college, I moved to Birmingham and went to my first gay bar.  The men, the music, the energy.  I was mesmerized.  So were they.  Gay men love a fresh-faced blonde just out of college.  And I was so emotionally retarded, I didn’t realize this.  I just assumed they all wanted to date me.  Sure, they wanted to spend time with me, but the time they wanted to spend with me was horizontal.  I became somewhat of a tramp.  During this entire period, I assumed still that I could play around with guys, maybe even have a short-term relationship, then put it all aside and marry a woman. 

After three years of this behavior, I was a wreck.  I slowly came to the realization that my homosexuality was here to stay.  And the pressure of keeping it a secret was about to make me implode.  So I made a decision.  I told my friend Lindsy.  She was so supportive and happy that I finally came out to her.  She gave me the confidence to tell my other close friends.  Their reaction was all the same. 

“I’ve known for quite awhile.”

“Seems like somebody could have clued me in,” I would always say.

I also had a moment of false clarity.  Still firmly entrenched in denial, I figured that coming out to my family would be easier if I moved to New York City.  I could build this fabulous “Sex and the City” life, be out and proud, and live amongst all the gays.  So, in 2001, I said goodbye to Alabama and moved to New York with no plan, no leads for a job.  I was also much younger than I thought I was.  I moved in with a gay guy and a straight girl that I met through an online roommate finder.  I butted heads with Mark immediately.  He was too brash and pushy for my taste.  Valerie and I, however, hit it off.  She guided me through two months of job rejections, drunken nights, and one night stands.  She was going through a break-up, so we often found ourselves sitting on the fire escape, mid-afternoon, drinking Coronas.  She in her robe and me in my ill-fitting, banana-yellow swimming trunks working on my tan.   

Something happened during those two months of negativity though.  I changed.  I got stronger and realized that to succeed in New York, I needed to move back to Alabama and finish some unfinished business.  I needed to learn to live like an out and proud gay man in a place where “out and proud” isn’t widely accepted.  Because if a gay guy can make it there, he can make it anywhere.  After much soul-searching and several thousand dollars down the drain, I decided to move back to Birmingham.  I bought some cheesy self-help book called “Now That I’m Out, What Do I Do?” to prepare me for the life I was dealt, said a temporary goodbye to Valerie and to New York and flew home.

A month later, I was making the phone call.  As the phone rang, I was strangely calm.  But when Mom answered, everything I planned to say flew out the window.

“Mom.  I need to tell you something.”

“What’s wrong?” she immediately asked.

“Nothing’s wrong.  I just need to tell you something….you know…how…I haven’t had a date in a long time?”

“Yes,” she casually replied.

“That was rhetorical.  And…you also know…how much I…um…love Barbra Streisand?  And…I do like…um….’Will and Grace’ a lot.  And…Bette Midler.”

“Are you trying to say what I think you’re trying to say?”

“I think so.”

“Well, that’s your choice.”

I began to get irritated. 

“No, it’s not a choice.  It goes all the way back to birth.  Back to the birth canal.  Back to you.” 

“You don’t have to get rude.  You’re my son.  I don’t understand it right now, but I still love you.  Now I have to get back to this recipe.”

We got off the phone, and I was confused.  I expected either complete acceptance or fireworks.  I got neither.  I didn’t really know where we were.  The phone rang.  It was Dad.

“Your mother just told me what you said.  I wasn’t surprised,” he deadpanned.

“Well goddamn it.  You could have let me in on the secret that everyone else seemed to be privy to.”

“Don’t cuss,” he continued.  “I just meant that I suspected so I did some research on the internet.”

My mind was agog.

“It’s just the way the cards fall out of the bag.  I know you didn’t choose it, and someday your mother will know too.  Just be careful and know that both your mom and I love you.”

We got off the phone.  That was the first time I ever heard my father say that he loved me.  Wow.  Fireworks of a different kind. 

Allison came into my room and asked how things went.  I told her I needed a beer and that she should change clothes for happy hour.  I sat down on my bed.  It was done.  No turning back.  It felt strange but exhilarating.  Everything was out in the open now.  I could have gay friends and openly date.  Go to gay clubs without having to pretend I was going to a sports bar.  Bring strange boys home and not have to sneak them out the window in the morning.  I changed into my tightest little tee-shirt, because I was taking Allison to happy hour at a gay bar.  It was time that my parallel lives converged into one.  I looked down at the book that was lying on my bed.  “Now That I’m Out, What Do I Do?”  I picked it up and read the author’s answer to this question.

“Relax.  Be yourself.  Have some fun, and spread your wings and fly.”

So I did.

Once Upon a Mattress

Once Upon a Mattress

            I was eighteen years old and a freshman at the University of Alabama when I learned that it’s hard to maintain a friendship with someone after you take a crap on his floor.  It was an accident, and I was insanely drunk but for whatever reason, none of that mattered to Jim.  He wanted my head.  Or more importantly, he wanted a new mattress.

            The University of Alabama is located in the heart of Tuscaloosa, an otherwise unremarkable town with not much else going for it than the Crimson Tide.  The football team is the main draw, but their academic program is quite stellar.  For my entire life, I wanted to go to a school far away and study acting, writing, and dance.  When the time came, I bowed to the pressures of my conventional little town, chose the University of Alabama, and decided to become an accountant.  I was an Auburn fan but chose UA because I had gotten a blow job in the Sears restroom in Tuscaloosa during my senior year of high school.  So I figured there must be more.

            By some strange twist of fate, David, my high school classmate, asked me to room with him as he was going to the community college in Tuscaloosa on a baseball scholarship.  His girlfriend, Cindy, and I weren’t particularly fond of each other, nor did I share a fondness with her roommate, Lynn.  But the pros outweighed the cons.  Besides the daily chance of catching David naked in the hallway of our apartment, it was inevitable that there would be plenty of hot baseball players coming over to drink beer.  And the only difference between a gay guy and a bi-curious guy is a six-pack of Budweiser and a marijuana cigarette.  Our parents moved us in late August of 1991.  Strange feelings began to surface.

            Emotionally, I moved further away from my family during the course of my senior year in high school.  Dad was deployed to Bush War I in November 1990.  Another episode in a series of what I perceived to be abandonment that I learned to handle with irritability, misplaced anger, and withdrawal.  The entire country was awash with patriotism, and our house looked like Uncle Sam had thrown up on it.  Red, white and blue ribbons adorned every door.  Yellow bows hugged our trees and mailbox.  Mom wore patriotic sweatshirts, patriotic ribbons, patriotic badges.  She put patriotic bumper stickers on our cars.  We were the poster family for keeping the home fires burning. 

            I didn’t like to cry in front of people, much less my mother.  So I simply quit going anywhere there would be talk of the war, parents, spirituality, or my father.  No more church, no support groups for the families left behind.  No patriotic assemblies at school.  Nothing.  Dad missed everything that year.  State championships, talent shows, graduation.  Even senior prom, although I was dumped by my date who got back together with the football player who knocked her up.  Dad returned home from the war just in time for me to move to Tuscaloosa.

            So as my family drove off and left me alone in my new home with David, Cindy, and Lynn, I was shocked by my welling emotion.  I waited eighteen years to be out of that house.  Now that I was, it didn’t feel good.  I was almost jealous of Mom, Dad, and my brother Keith.  Driving away, the perfect family going to their perfect home.  The three of them.  Without me.  I walked inside, and the other family of three were deep frying deer meat.  It was like we were in high school again, only with a comfortable couch and a Fry-Daddy.  Too bad I hated high school and fried meat gave me the cramps.

            As I settled into college life, my homesickness didn’t last long.  With a little time, my fondness for Cindy and Lynn grew.  We bonded over Jane Fonda workout tapes and “Steel Magnolias.”  They introduced me to Ms. Fonda’s aerobics tapes, and the skinny Cindy and I would laugh at the heftier Lynn and her reaction to any new form of exercise.

            “Fuck you Jane!” she would yell as she got up from the floor and walked into the kitchen for a doughnut.

            Cindy and Lynn hated their dorm, so they spent many a night with us.  Lynn and I would share my bed, and a jealous Cindy would often sneak into my room and sit up with us giggling until a horny David came in and dragged her back to bed.  If there was a downside to our living arrangement, it was that David never walked around naked.  Only Cindy.

            Classes were okay.  I had certain rules pertaining to my class attendance.  If it was above 90 degrees or below 50 degrees, I didn’t go.  If it was raining, snowing, or too windy, I didn’t go.  If “All My Children” was wrapping up a huge storyline, I didn’t go.  Of course, anytime a hangover was involved, there was no class for me.  My grades suffered, but my social life had never been better.  I was hanging around friends from high school who were introducing me to a whole new set of friends.  My younger gal pals were driving up to see me on weekends, and life was good.  For a while.

            Jim and Will lived together in an apartment just off campus.  Both were pretty good friends of mine in high school and still were.  Will was in a fraternity, and Jim attended the community college with David.  One Saturday, all six of us loaded up and went to a football game.  Game days in Tuscaloosa are huge.  Crowds everywhere.  You can’t swing a stick without hitting a redneck.  We taped flasks of whiskey to our legs and snuck it into the game.  So by the end of fourth quarter, we were lit up.  That particular game day, we followed it with a party at a friend’s house.  To this day, I’m not sure exactly what got into me.  I do know that I remember every single detail of what transpired.  Too bad I didn’t black out.

            I started with bourbon and coke.  From there, I segued to shooting tequila and chasing it with swills of whiskey.  Next up, keg stands!  Before I knew it, I was dancing on a coffee table with some strange chicks singing “Straight to Hell.”  When we finally left the party, it was well after midnight.  We trekked across campus to Jim and Will’s apartment.  I immediately headed for the bathroom where the vomiting was so sudden and violent, I couldn’t pick my head up out of the toilet.  There I was—the guy voted Most Likely to Succeed—on my hands and knees, my head resting on a toilet seat as I vomited up my spleen.  I crawled out of the bathroom, unable to walk while everyone was still boozing and laughing.  I made a few funny remarks, yelled at them for being assholes in high school, and made my way to Jim’s room.  I fell down, hit my head on a vacuum cleaner and passed out cold.

            Maybe two hours later, well after my friends should have taken me to the hospital to have my stomach pumped, I woke up.  Everything was quiet.  I walked around the apartment still in a stupor and looked for everyone.  I was alone.  I felt the urge to use the facilities.  So I walked back into Jim’s room which in a stupor looked like the bathroom.  I pulled my pants down, squatted, and crapped right there on his carpet.  Shag carpet.  I suddenly came to and realized that I was, literally and figuratively, in deep shit.  I made my way into the bathroom, cleaned myself up, and somehow drove myself across town to my apartment.

            The next morning, I opened one eye expecting to see God telling me I’m dead.  No such luck.  It was David, Cindy, and Lynn.  The looks on their faces told me that the night before was no bad dream.  A wave of disgust washed over me.  Their jabs and one-liners didn’t help.  I called Will, apologized and made plans to clean their apartment.  Will laughed it off but made it clear that I was expected to come over immediately with cleaning supplies.  To make matters worse, their air-conditioning broke on this 85-degree day, so their apartment was warm.  Very warm. 

            I arrived at their apartment with sixty dollars worth of cleaning supplies to find them hanging out the second-story window for air.  Will was still laughing.  Jim was eerily quiet.  I cleaned the apartment from floor to ceiling.  I cleaned rooms that I never even touched.  I vacuumed, dusted, mopped, scrubbed.  When I was finished, their place was pristine.  No one could tell that someone had shat the place up the night before.  I was about to leave when Jim spoke.

            “You owe me a new mattress.”

            And he was dead serious.  I’m still not sure how his mattress got muddied, but with that sentence, a two month long battle of words began.  Friends took sides, vicious personal attacks were common, and Jim and I spent an inordinate amount of energy declaring the other mentally unfit.  The whole thing ended when I was forced to tell Dad what happened.  He threatened to send me to rehab and told me to have Jim’s father call him where they could work something out.  Obviously, Jim’s father wanted no part of it, because when I told Jim what Dad said, he told me to have my parents send the money over to him directly.

            “Are you fucking kidding me?”  I was livid.  “For months, you wanted me to tell Dad and that’s exactly what I did.  It’s between him and you now.  If you want your goddamned money, go talk to my father.”

            He didn’t talk to my father, and the damage was done.  Dad watched me like a hawk from then on.  Jim and I didn’t speak for over a year, and since Will was his roommate, we didn’t speak either.  And I realized that both of us accomplished our goals.  I didn’t have to buy Jim a new mattress.  And Jim made sure I was utterly humiliated.  Our months long battle of bitchery came to a close, and even though blood was shed, I could declare victory.  And so could Jim.

            We began our college career as adversaries, but David, Cindy, and Lynn stepped up to the plate and stood up for me every chance they got.  We finished our freshman year. David got a starting position on his college’s baseball team, Cindy continued to walk around naked, Lynn threw away the Jane Fonda tapes, and I got a blow job from one of David’s teammates. 

And I didn’t even have to break out the marijuana. 

           

My Vagina Monologue

My Vagina Monologue

            I was searching for Michelle’s clitoris when I suddenly realized, “Oh dear, I think I’m gay.” 

The news didn’t come as a complete shock.  By the time I was a junior in high school, I already had a year-long affair with Steve Avery, our star quarterback, and several liaisons with a classmate. I was also fondled by a thirty-year old football coach in a public restroom in Mississippi, but that was just plain scary.  I never wanted to believe that I was gay, so I kept plugging at it.  Being straight, that is.  I wanted desperately to date girls but couldn’t seem to get past the friendship stage.  They wanted me near them, not in them. 

            The summer before my junior year, I started hanging out with Meredith who was a year younger than I.  Our parents were close, so we forged our own friendship.  I was crazy about her.  Not in a boyfriend/girlfriend kind of way.  I just looked out for her, made sure her outfits matched her shoes and that she didn’t wear too much blush.  Soon, our parents started letting us go out to parties together.  In Linden, Alabama, most of the parties that teenagers threw took place in pastures.  Meredith and I would load up in Mom’s Crown Victoria, the Ford equivalent of an army tank, and head over to the projects to score some Budweiser or Boone’s Farm. 

            I worked part-time at the local bank, so I knew the whole town.  For the most part, a white person could live their whole life in Linden and not know but a handful of black people.  Not me.  I knew at least twenty.  And every month, like clockwork, Eddie Lee Johnson walked up to my teller counter and cashed his SSI check.  And I never charged him a fee for being a non-customer.  So, every weekend, like clockwork, Meredith and I hunted Eddie Lee Johnson down in the bowels of the projects, and, for a two dollar fee, he bought us beer or Strawberry Hill.  On Saturday night was the pasture party.  And on Sunday, Meredith and I escaped to the Linden Country Club pool, baked in the sun, and tried not to vomit.

            Since I had never been with a girl, Meredith was more sexually versed on boy-on-girl things than I was.  We worked during the summer for Miss Nell, our school’s lunch lady, out at the baseball diamonds, selling greasy hamburgers and stale popcorn.  Meredith was joking about doing the ’69.’

            “What the hell is 69?” I asked.  I was a lot younger than I thought I was.

            “You don’t know what 69 is?”  She was skeptical.

            “Where the hell have you been?” Miss Nell piped in.  “Even I know what 69 is!” 

            We never kept many secrets from Miss Nell.

            “I probably know what it is but call it something different.”  I was trying desperately to seem cool, even though I was wearing ripped denim shorts and a tie-dyed t-shirt.

            “Come over here, I’ll show you,” Meredith offered.

            She walked over to the popcorn machine, picked out several pieces of popcorn, and delicately arranged them on the counter to look like stick figures.  It looked like stale popcorn strewn about at first, but soon the visual aid combined with Meredith’s voice-over instruction made perfect sense.  I was in awe.

            “People really do that?”

            “Hell yeah!” Miss Nell yelled across the concession stand.  “Now get your asses back over here and help me cook these fuckin’ hamburgers!”  She never minced words.

            Meredith was instrumental in helping me with a delicate transition from junior high school outcast to senior high school somebody.  I would never have gone to any of those parties by myself, and we became partners in crime.  I had the car, and she was my crutch.  But we genuinely liked each other and laughed constantly.  After she joined the softball team, she introduced me to Amanda, a bullish girl who was a year older than I.  Amanda’s tough exterior intimidated me at first, but I soon warmed up to her brashness.  Meredith sassed her one day.

            “Bitch, if you talk to me like that one more time, I’m gonna wrap that Goldilocks hair around your neck and make you smoke it,” Amanda shot back.

            Amanda also informed me that I had an admirer.

            “Michelle has wanted to go out with you for months.”

            “As friends, right?”

            “No.  She thinks you’re really cute.”

            I was flabbergasted.  But with Meredith’s insistence, we arranged a group outing.  Amanda, Meredith, Michelle.  And me.  Michelle was in my class, but we never really talked to each other.  Until I learned that she thought I was cute.  Nobody—except for Steve—had ever voiced the opinion that I was cute.  It was decided that Amanda would drive her mother’s car which was even bigger than Mom’s Ford tank.  Michelle and I were comfortable in the roomy back seat when I suggested to Amanda that we head over to the projects for beer.

            “Are you out of your mind?  We can’t go to the projects!”

            “Me and Craig do it all the time,” Meredith offered.

            “Well you and Craig are dumb asses!  You’ll come out of the projects with a bullet in your neck one night and won’t ever be able to buy beer again!  We’re going to Uncle Dick’s.”

            We drove about fifteen miles out of town to Uncle Dick’s who was of no relation to any of us in the car.  He was a Santa Clause-looking man that regularly sold alcohol to minors.  Amanda walked in and ten minutes later walked out with four bottles of Country Quencher, some sort of cheap fruity wine in a twist-off bottle.  We passed around the Dixie cups and hit the back roads, singing along with Bon Jovi and Poison.  We made it to the pasture party du jour and were already lit up.  Meredith and I immediately started making snake eyes at two cheerleaders who we considered to be our arch-enemies.  Amanda sat down in a lawn chair and began mocking people that she didn’t like.  And Michelle made it clear with a quickness exactly what she wanted from me.  Just as I turned up my cup of Quencher, she grabbed my crotch.  And that was all it took.

            We headed back out to the car and got in the backseat.  Steve and I made out in his car all the time when we were hanging out, so I was ready for this.  However, when I hit my back and waited for Michelle to climb on top of me, I got quite a look.  I shifted my brain around and positioned ourselves to where I was on top of her.  We made out for awhile, and I missed the scruffy feeling of a guy’s whiskers.  I missed the smell of Polo cologne and Listerine.  Instead, all I got from Michelle was some cheap Avon perfume and the taste of raspberry lip gloss.  Soon, we were undressed.  I’m still not quite sure what we were planning on doing.  We didn’t have a condom between us. 

            Maybe she had her diaphragm in.  Or whatever the hell those things are called.  Thank God for “All My Children” or I’d be lost.

            Now was the time to try out Meredith’s suggestion.  Only this time, no popcorn.  We got in position.  I was looking around for the clitoris, not even sure what I was looking for.  I was trying to suppress my gag reflex.  At that moment, I would have sucked my own dick rather than put my tongue in there.  But I did.  I held my breath, and I gave her head.  I always thought that when I finally got to go down on a girl, the feelings toward boys would disappear.  Simply dissipate from my brain.  Nope.  I finished up down there and still wanted a penis.  Still wanted the weight of a man on top of me.  Still hard, I had to finish somehow, and her attempt at a blow job was not working.  So I put it in her and after about five quick thrusts, I pulled it out and shot it on Amanda’s seat. 

            Shit!  Amanda is gonna kick my ass!

            “You have your diaphragm in, right?”

            “Um.  No.  I’m on the pill.  Let’s go back to the party.”

            We dressed and joined the rest of the party.  I felt weird but a little exhilarated.  Even though it was gross, I just fucked a girl.  Maybe there was hope for me after all.  Maybe I could have both…guys and girls.  It became clear, however, that I wasn’t going down on Michelle anytime soon.  If ever again.  The next day I got a phone call from her.

            “Hey there.  Meredith told me last night that you could show me how to put on eye shadow better.  I always put on too much and Mama tells me I look cheap.”

            Oh well.  Another girl, another friend. 

And a few hours after that I got another phone call.  Meredith and I were hanging out in my room listening to Belinda Carlisle.  I answered the phone.  It was Amanda.

            “You little shit ass!   I’m on my way to your house!”

            “Why?”  I was suddenly nervous.

            “You know why!  You shot your load in Mama’s backseat, and I’m gonna rub your fuckin’ little nose in it!”

            With that, Meredith and I bundled up some mixed tapes, jumped in Mom’s Crown Victoria, and laughing all the way, hauled ass to Uncle Dick’s.  Leaving Amanda alone with four empty bottles of Country Quencher and my DNA.