It Gets Better (10 page)

WINTHROP, MA

 

 

 

 

I
grew up as a Jehovah's Witness. All my family and friends, and basically everyone I knew, were Jehovah's Witnesses. My parents are still devout followers. I know what it's like to live in that Witness bubble, and I'll bet there are a few gay kids reading this who are Jehovah's Witnesses, too. This story is for you.

When I was eight years old, I remember going to the Kingdom Hall and sitting down and opening up this book called
You Can Live Forever on a Paradise Earth
; you've probably heard of it. Turning through the pages, I stopped at one page that's burned into my mind to this day. It featured a collage of pictures depicting the horrible things in our world that God needs to destroy. There was a picture of an old lady getting her purse snatched, and one of a starving kid in Africa, and another of a junkie shooting up with heroin, and one of some guy who was shot in the head. All the images were very graphic and very scary. But right in the middle was a big picture of two guys dancing at a disco. Two guys embracing and dancing with one another in a disco. When I saw it, I remember thinking,
Oh my God, that's me.
And then I thought,
What if anybody finds out? What if they already know? What if they already know that I'm a big queer?

I kept that a secret for a long time; I had to. You might have to, too. Putting up with everybody else's bullshit is hard. Sometimes you have to put up with it for a long time. But the trick is not to give up until you get what you want.

Those kids who committed suicide had something to offer the world. Something special, something grand. They were unique and they had something to give. And they forfeited it; they let it go. They gave up too early before getting what they wanted out of life. I get it. I tried to commit suicide. I understand what they felt when they did it. Sometimes it feels like you just can't handle it anymore. But I am going to share a secret with you. I am going to tell you what helped me handle those feelings.

I love to dance. I love dancing, and I love teaching dance. I love ballet. And it's something I've done my entire life. When everything else is going wrong in my life I turn to that. I turn to the one thing that I love most. That is my recommendation to you: Whenever you get to that point where you feel you can't go on anymore, just remember that one thing that you love in the world more than anything else, and cling to it. Doesn't matter what it is. Whether it's watching television or listening to music, or putting on makeup, or singing, or doing karaoke, or whatever it is you love. Do it. Do the hell out of it, and try to remember that the bad times don't last forever. The good times don't last forever either, but that's okay.

And if you're one of those queer Jehovah's Witness kids out there, I am here for you. I know what it's like. But I guarantee things do get better.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I
drew this cartoon a long time ago, when I was in my thirties. But things had already gotten a lot better by then—I made it through the excruciating years of high school. I went on to make out with many delightful women, and dress like Fred Astaire when I felt like it. I did not take up boxing, but I did get my black belt in karate. Take
that,
Sylvester Stallone!

NEW YORK, NY

 

 

 

 

I
grew up around wacky artists and knew from very early on that there was something special about me. I didn't really know what it was then, but it turns out it's a number of things. And one of them is that I was a queer-lord. Now I call myself a gay-lord, and art fag, a lezzie, a dyke, straight . . . all sorts of things because, the truth is, labels really shouldn't matter and don't essentially matter if you're lucky enough to come from an artistic background or a gay-friendly household. And I was lucky enough to come from that kind of household.

My story—I guess my queer story—starts from very early on. I really didn't mind if you were a girl or a boy, I just wanted you to love me. I had a very desperate energy about me. I feel sorry for my early self because I realize that I had a lot of shame about being different and special. So I overcompensated. I overcompensated by devaluing myself, putting myself down, sabotaging my success and my relationships with both men and women. I sabotaged it all.

It wasn't until maybe three years ago that I really, really realized that I am queer. And here. Even I'm getting used to it. I can now say that I'm queer and proud, and that I love you if you're having a hard time. I've always loved you. I just didn't know I loved me, too. And at some point, it gets better. It gets better, and you learn to love yourself and you learn to love your specialness.

Only you know when you're ready to come out. And if you're not ready to come out, that's okay too. A lot of us protect ourselves from danger. It's a matter of survival for many of us. But, I'm proud and I hope that one day we all are able to say, “I'm gay” or “I'm a lesbian” or “I'm transgender” or “I'm queer” and that it will be okay. I will tell you that for me, right now, I'm very comfortable with it. And you will be, too. It gets better.

NEW YORK, NY

 

 

 

 

W
hen I told my friend Alex that I was cooking a dinner for my parents and Craig's parents, Alex (who knew me in college) said: “Did you ever think, ten years ago, that this would ever happen? That you'd cook a dinner one day for your parents and your boyfriend and his parents?” The answer to that question was most definitely: “No.”

It's hard to get back into the headspace where that dinner would've seemed impossible. But there've been so many tragic gay suicides—thirteen-year-old Seth Walsh, fifteen-year-old Billy Lucas, thirteen-year-old Asher Brown and, perhaps the most publicized case, Rutgers student Tyler Clementi, who jumped off a bridge after his roommate broadcast his sexual encounter with another man online—that getting back into that headspace seems important. And so, I'd like to tell you how I got from that world of impossibility to the dinner I cooked one recent Friday night.

First, the dinner. As a passionate braiser, I decided to braise short ribs using a recipe from
The Babbo Cookbook
. I did this all the night before, browning the meat well, deglazing with red wine and filling the pot with herbs (rosemary, thyme, oregano), covering with foil, and braising in the oven for two hours until the meat came apart with a spoon. Then I cooled it to room temperature and placed in the refrigerator overnight.

I'm not sure if braising acts as a metaphor for the story I want to tell; perhaps in the way that something rigid and tough breaks down and becomes something tender and rich? Was I rigid and tough as a teen? Am I tender and rich now? The metaphor needs work.

But the idea is there: As a teenager, I was really repressed. Whereas some repressed teenagers become angst-ridden and sullen, I was the opposite: I was a manic sack of nervous energy. Fidgety, jokey, always hiding behind my humor, I sat mostly with girls at lunch. My freshman year, in PE class, I was bullied by this guy Nick and his friends who, strangely, called me “Alfredo” and harassed me in the locker room. Once one of those guys, Eric, who worked at the local grocery store, helped my mom to the car with her groceries. Unbeknownst to her, he was my bully. When she told me she met this nice boy from my PE class named Eric, I was mortified.

Needless to say, that was a tough year. And though high school got slightly better, I never truly felt like myself. It wasn't until college that things began to get clearer, that I began to realize that there was a truer me, within the me that everyone else knew.

But first, let's make some polenta. I bought my polenta at the farmer's market, and using a recipe from Lidia Bastianich, I started the polenta thirty minutes before our parents arrived, stirring it throughout the first hour or two until it thickened up, adding mascarpone and Parmesan cheese at the end to make it a little more intense.

And
intense
is a word that definitely describes my junior year of college.

By then, I'd found an incredible group of friends in Rathskellar, Emory's improvisational comedy troupe. It was in Rathskellar that I first learned I didn't have to be “on” all the time, that it was important to be introspective, and that being gay really wasn't that big of a deal. By my junior year of college, I'd made several gay friends. And it was at that point that I'd gotten tired of fielding questions from my family about why I didn't have a girlfriend and if I knew any nice Jewish girls and if any of them were marriable. Around this time of year (it was near Halloween), I came out to my closest college friends (I was so nervous, I couldn't say the word; I told my friend Travis I was a “h . . . h . . . hemophiliac!”). And then I told my parents.

Let's just say it didn't go very well. There were intense, emotional phone calls, awkward trips home, visits to a terrible therapist who tried to turn me straight, an explosive night at the dinner table where my grandmother said: “Why can't you just marry your friend Lisa?” To which I replied: “Because she doesn't have a penis!” It got ugly.

But then it got better. That's why Alex's comment was so on the nose; because things seemed so harrowing back then, I couldn't imagine that we'd ever turn a corner. But we did.

It happened when I met Craig.

This was years later, in 2006. By then, I'd gone to law school and hated it; I'd had my first boyfriend (a sweet guy named Michael, who I dated my senior year of college); I'd been to Atlanta's gay bars and gay pride parades, I'd lived with a lesbian and I'd taken classes on sexuality and the law. Then I moved to New York to go to dramatic writing school at NYU. And at my favorite coffee shop, Joe, I spied a cute guy who was there writing with his friend.

That guy ended up looking at my Friendster profile. Remember Friendster? You could tell who looked at your profile, so I wrote him an e-mail. Turned out he went to NYU, too, for film school. We decided to meet in the school lobby and to walk to dinner.

That first night we each tried to convince the other of where we should eat (I fought for Momofuku, he argued for something else) so we settled on a place neither of us had been to: Lucien, in the East Village. I ordered the cassoulet (note to future daters: don't eat beans on a first date). We went, afterward, to the Anyway Cafe, where they serve infused vodka. We had the black currant.

Things only got better from there. We saw plays, went to museums, we ate the flying saucer-sized chocolate chip cookies (possibly the best in New York) at the Levain Bakery.

And then I formally introduced him to my food blog readers when I burned my mouth on a soup dumpling at a Chinatown restaurant, New Green Bo. I called him “the new man in my life,” and my readers flipped out. Someone wrote: “Whee! You finally told us who you were kissing!” And someone else wrote: “Thank God you finally came out!”

That was almost five years ago. And so that brings us to the dinner.

My parents, over the past few years, have grown to really embrace Craig. How could they not? I think when being gay was an abstraction, it filled them with fear and dread, but when there was a concrete person there, it all made sense. And so now whenever I call home, they ask after Craig (my grandmother always ends her calls with: “Send my love to Craig!”) and they always include Craig when they take me out toto dinner or to see a Broadway show. When my parents went to Barcelona this summer, they bought both of us watches.