It's All Relative (30 page)

He would then sometimes shake his head in admiration.

“That doesn't even make sense,” my mom would answer, turning to head into the kitchen.

My dad viewed politics as he did any sport, be it football or boxing:
He expected it to be ruthless and dirty, bloody and unpredictable. In fact, he screamed at the TV more watching the nightly news than he did watching Friday-night boxing or Sunday football.

In addition to the favorite phrases my dad used to yell at my brother and me, such as “Get your ass out of bed!” and “Clean your plate!” and “What're you doing in that bathroom?” my father also had a stockpile of catchphrases he loved to bombard newscasters and Democratic politicians with such as “term limits,” “welfare state,” and “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.”

I understood where my father was coming from, though. My family was self-made. We were, as cliché as it may sound, pull-ourselves-up-by-our-own-bootstraps-type folks. My grandfathers labored in mines and rock fields and sold vacuums; my grandmothers sewed. They worked like no one else I've ever known just so they could have the American dream: a home, a car, a better life for their children.

And the lifetime of dirt they collected under their nails meant their families wouldn't have to scratch and claw as hard just to make it through every single day. My mother and father were the first in their families to graduate college.

Ultimately, the older I got, I ended up following my father's advice and turning away from my mother's: To win in politics and life, I thought, you not only had to fight the odds and be determined, but more than anything else you had to be ruthless.

As a result, this is the philosophy I brought to school. Determined not only to make my father proud but also to conquer the popular crowd, I ran for political office.

When I stumped for student council, I ran against a girl who was undoubtedly smarter and significantly better qualified, as well as prettier and more popular.

She deserved to win.

The posters of my contestant showed her looking like a supermodel
in her cheerleading uniform. Mine said simply,
WIN WITH WADE
. Her campaign manager, a fellow cheerleader, was obviously more savvy and astute; she was more in tune with what the electorate wanted than was my campaign manager, a girl who played piccolo and dreamed of being a mechanical engineer.

But the best, most qualified candidates, I had learned, didn't always come out on top.

“Nixon doesn't take any fucking prisoners,” my father told me as my election neared.

So I began by defacing a few of my competitor's posters, drawing mustaches on her face and hair across the chest of her cheerleading uniform with a black El Marko.

On some of her posters, I penciled this important question across her chest: “Do you want a boob representing you?”

I spread rumors that she was failing algebra and I started handling my own media outreach, which included hanging some rather disturbing but attention-grabbing posters that featured baby seals being beaten, with the following slogan:
WADE WILL CLUB THE COMPETITION!

When it came time for my final skit in front of the student body, I pulled a few of the most popular kids from every grade and had them do asinine things, promising them everything from more pizza parties to soda in the lunchroom.

And it worked.

I won.

That night my mom strolled into my bedroom before dinner. I expected her to congratulate me on my upset win. Instead she told me that she knew what I had done to win.

Down to defacing the posters.

“Ethics,” she told me, “is what you do when no one is looking or telling you how to act.”

I took this to heart the next fall when I ran for class office. I spoke
about improving the school lunches and doing away with study hall so we could add much-needed advanced classes. Not exactly the issues rural high school kids care much about. As a result, I lost to a hot guy who made his final speech while cloaked in a mesh football-practice half jersey. He asked the class, while pointing at me with a flexed arm, “Come on, who would you rather have representing you? Me or him?”

I mean, I was ready to blow him after his five-second speech.

Fast-forward a few decades to 2000, the train wreck that was Bush vs. Gore.

Ethics.

The best candidates didn't always win.

Politics, as my dad had taught me, were brutal and ruthless indeed.

That election (and the 2004 election) became watershed moments in my life. I felt, as a gay man, ostracized from my own nation, hated, bullied, just like Gary among those who used to spit on him in school.

I also knew I had once won using the same tactics.

During these eight years, my family stopped debating politics for the first time in our lives. Even through the good and bad, the natural ebb and flow, the checks and balances of our political system, no matter how bitterly my father and I had debated over candidates and issues, we always did so with a sense of love and respect, almost like two tiger cubs playing.

But during these Bush years, when I would visit or we would chat on the phone, we focused solely on the weather or sports.

My father, I knew, firmly believed in the president and his views on morality and “family values.”

And this hurt me, hurt me so deeply as to leave a stinging void in my chest every time I would visit or hang up the phone.

And then in the fall of 2008, when I was visiting, my mom fixed the ultimate meal of irony: pot roast and mashed potatoes.

It was a tense visit. Gary had been campaigning tirelessly for Obama. Both of us once again felt that this was not simply an election but a referendum on our lives. Electing Obama could change our nation forever. It would provide hope to any person who ever felt ostracized, different. Yet I knew my father had long admired McCain, his tenacity and fight, his heroism.

The only sounds that night at dinner were nervous knives cutting too deeply, scratching the plates, a spine-tingling scream none of us could voice.

“Dad, this has been a nasty election. Too nasty, don't you think?” I asked, trying to bridge our gap.

“Damn right!” my dad bellowed. “And it needs to get nastier. McCain and Palin need to take those liberals to the ropes!”

I had felt the same thing at one time when Obama fell behind in the polls, screaming at the TV for him to get nasty, to get dirty, to not simply deface some posters and air some negative commercials but literally to gut his competition.

“You have to vote for Obama,” I said suddenly, without warning, staring directly at my father. “Missouri is a battleground state. You have to do it for me. For your son.”

Knives screamed.

“Dad?”

“How about this weather?” my dad said, ignoring the Republican elephant in the room. “It's been so rainy.”

I fought back tears and gummed some potatoes.

I did not talk with my parents until November 5, the day after Obama had clinched the presidency. My mom called, and it was a gentle conversation as we tiptoed through the thorns, both of us knowing what was to come in future years: the strain, the silence, the occasional yet unspoken tension at family dinners.

But our talk was heartfelt and necessary.

And then, in a whisper, she confided in me that she had voted
for Obama. “It seemed the only ethical thing to do. As a woman, to walk into a booth in rural Missouri and …”

Here she stopped, not crying exactly, but weeping, bawling, her words coming out like ghosts that were being exorcised.

“… be able to vote for a black man in my lifetime … it means so much.”

She took a deep breath and calmed herself.

“You know, I always wanted to be a doctor, and it just wasn't what women did when I was growing up,” my mother, the nurse, told me. “And you … to have lived a lie for so long because you didn't feel worthy, to not be able to marry the one you love. I know so many others have suffered so much more, but each of us had a dream … and then each of us had to put that dream away … this election is the first step in changing that cycle.”

“What about Dad, Mom?”

“Your father will always be your father, Wade. But …”

And here she stopped.

“… just know he loves you, despite how he will always vote.”

In my heart I still wanted—needed—to believe that when Election Day arrived, my father stepped into that voting booth and decided to do the only thing he could: vote for his son.

But ethics, I know, as my mom first taught me, is what you do when no one is looking, and such lessons are hard to learn, especially when there is always an elephant with you in the booth, occluding your vision.

“When we recall Christmas past, we usually find that the simplest things—not the great occasions—give off the greatest glow of happiness.”

–BOB HOPE

I
f Martha Stewart were to have full-body electrolysis, breast deconstruction, a penis implant, and, well, basically just go whole hog and transgender into a man, she would be Gary.

Gary
is
home.

He is coasters, and table runners, and twig lamps.

He is right scent, right season.

He is place settings, and teacups, and dish towels that cost forty dollars apiece but can never be used.

And Gary
is
holiday.

He is bedecked Fraser firs and red-twig dogwood centerpieces, he is mistletoe and twinkle lights. He has the perfect recipe for a Thanksgiving sweet-potato casserole or a Father's Day breakfast-sausage bake.

In his wallet.

In his previous life, Gary was responsible for bedecking the city of St. Louis in all its holiday splendor. He was Simon Doonan for an entire town, not just a window. He raised forty-foot firs and trimmed them in more shiny shimmer than Liberace's panties. He hung forests of poinsettias from the ceilings of malls, making holiday shoppers both spend more and believe they had just witnessed
the arrival of the baby Jesus. He would've flocked the Gateway Arch if he could've gotten approval from the airport.

And when Gary was finished with the city, he focused on our home, decorating it like the White House
and then
tossing a holiday party.

Every year around Halloween, Gary began thinking seriously about the theme for our holiday bash. I could tell because his face would always grow serious and tight, like Martha's does when she ties a duck with rosemary-infused twine or is firing a kiln to make her own dishes.

All of our parties, no matter how intimate, had themes, like Winter Wonderland or Gingerbread Castle. We had never been Velveeta-on-Ritz–type hosts, even for unannounced drop-bys. We held a Frost & Berries holiday party, meaning everything—food, decor, the table, drinks—had to be frosty and berrylicious. We served frosty cranberry punch out of a frosty antique cut-glass bowl. We had tuxedoed waiters with frosty hair. We transformed pine roping into an old-fashioned garland by stringing it with popcorn, cranberries, and twinkling frosted lights. But the pièce de résistance was a flocked, berry-bedecked Christmas tree that Gary hung upside down over the dining-room table à la
The Poseidon Adventure
. People actually gasped.

Even our Super Bowl parties had themes, much to the chagrin of my old fraternity brothers. “What does ‘Cheer Squad 2006' have to do with the big game?” they would ask. But it gave Gary endless opportunities to decorate our mantel and big-screen with pom-poms, serve popcorn out of megaphones, and choreograph his own halftime show.

One evening just before Halloween, as I watched Gary line our porch with pumpkin lights and scatter our yard with hay as if we lived on a farm and needed to feed the horses, his face grew serious and tight and he looked up in the witch's hat he was wearing
and said, “I've got it! Let's go simple. Let's go retro. Let's do a Blue Christmas, just like Elvira.”

“Elvis,” I said to him. “You're mixing your holiday metaphors.”

“Our theme is simplicity. Simple, simple, nostalgically retro simple!”

Simple to you is like casual Friday to Karl Lagerfeld, I said to myself.

“What? Did you say something?” he asked, before yelling “Boo!” so loudly at a neighbor that I could swear she started to reach in her purse for pepper spray.

Having a
simple
dinner party to Gary meant loads of cash and lots of time. It meant filling McCoy pottery with cranberries, and vases with lake stones and floating votives.
Simple
meant creating a canopy of pine boughs and bittersweet over the dining-room table.

Just something
simple
meant spending four hundred dollars on new place settings and glasses because the dishes we had “weren't simple enough.”

And as simple luck would have it, we, of course, didn't have anything amongst our forty red-and-green holiday storage containers that was “blue” enough for our Blue Christmas.