North Tonawanda was a mean place. It was mean and ugly. The local newspaper had a column, “Sound Off,” where you could call and anonymously berate your neighbor. If you had a grievance, you’d just unload, for an answering machine, and then your comments would get transcribed in the paper, without a signature. (Years later, at a school were I worked, it was suggested that teachers could critique one another via unsigned Post-It slips, in a kind of hat. I had traumatic flashbacks.)
One day, the paper ran a critical piece about funding for the local community theater, and the semi-closeted married man who ran the theater was affronted. And so he wrote an editorial--this was signed, I think; it wasn’t “Sound Off”--and he attacked his critic. At one point, he accused her of hypocrisy, and he said her behavior was like “the tub calling the kettle black.” He used “tub,” not “kettle," because he wanted to get in a subtextual dig regarding this person’s excessive weight. North Tonawanda: My Hometown.
My brother would take me outside to play catch. My brother had real concern for me; you could see, in his eyes, he worried I was not equipped to handle the outside world. This worry was valid. The “playing catch” outings were excruciating. My “throws” would get ever wilder; I would do a kind of limp-wristed flailing, and the ball would end up in someone else’s yard. As I sensed my brother’s growing frustration, I would try harder and harder, and the throws would get ever crazier, ever more disastrous. If I’d known myself, if I’d been more articulate, I might have thrown an arm around H’s shoulder and said, “Listen, Sweetheart. We both know this won’t be happening. How about a mani/pedi?”
Finally, in exasperation, my brother dropped his glove in the grass. With the weight of a grave pronouncement, a calamitous judgment: “You throw like a girl.” I felt my brother’s suffering. He wanted me to have some basic skills. He wanted me to be a boy who could handle himself on the diamond, and who took an interest in current events--a boy who had a set of facts about, say, the presidency of George H.W. Bush. I would never be that boy. I spent most of my afternoons leafing through my mother’s copies of People Magazine. Would Princess Di recover from the divorce? Had her enemies really stripped her of the title “HRH”? And that Brad Pitt/Gwyneth Paltrow courtship--That looked promising!
The child is the father of the man. I still spend too much time with my celebrity gossip. I still don’t know how to throw a baseball. For a long while, I savored an image of myself as a victim--the noble gay, beset by brutal, oppressive forces, required to spend time with a baseball! But I see, now, I could have been craftier. There are rhythms in family life, such that you know when the dreaded “let’s-play-catch” moment is around the corner. You just feel it in the air. I could have made myself invisible. That’s my trick, now, when I don’t want to do something at work. Oops! I need to disappear for an important errand. Or, at least, I try to demand what I require. Guidelines. A sense of the purpose behind a seemingly meaningless task. On good days, I fight for those things. And then often I’m just privately enraged, and, like any person who has spent a fair amount of time in “the closet,” I fake sunniness. I wear a mask.
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