Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century (48 page)

The only people living permanently at home then were Mom, Dad, and me.

Because Mom was working at United Airlines, Dad often took me out to eat at fast-food restaurants. For dinner, he especially liked the filet-o’-fish at McDonald’s. “God has been good to us,” he paused and sighed between bites. “We are truly blessed to live in a country where such good food is always so available in such an abundant supply and served so efficiently at such a reasonable price.” Breakfasts were inspiring for him, too, especially his favorite fast-food ensembles of scrambled eggs, sausage patties, and hash browns. “American efficiency and productivity,” he shook his head in amazement, beholding the mass-produced masterpieces before him, carving the sausage patties with his plastic knife and fork, and envisioning the exquisite inventory, organization, and process flow that had made each tray possible. “It’s just beautiful.”

In my senior year of high school, the drummer had moved on to college. But the underground band played on.

Desperate for someone to talk to, I started spending lots of time with a pal from the ski trip. He was the drum major for the marching band. We went on a weekend camping trip to Leo Carrillo State Beach in Malibu, just the two of us. I yearned to connect with him in every conceivable way.

Beside the campfire, I dropped what I thought was a bomb. “I’m gay,” I exhaled.

“
Don’t worry, dear,” he reached over and patted me on the shoulder. “So am I!”

My heart skipped a beat. Maybe there was hope for me—or for us!—after all.

But he immediately professed with supreme confidence the most unpersuasive theory. “Being gay is just a phase we’re going through,” he promised. “We’re gonna change. We just have to believe in it!”

“
I don’t believe you,” my eyes turned starward. For me, it was a stark revelation: The gay guy couldn’t deal with homosexuality any better than the straight guy could.

The drum major stopped talking to me as soon as we returned home. It made sense in only a twisted kind of way. He was not just the drum major for the marching band. He was the senior class president. Founder of the Activist Club. Big Man On Campus. But when it came to the simplest kind of activism on behalf of our right to be gay in our own midst, he buckled. I didn’t think of him as a hypocrite. I just thought he confirmed how difficult it was to be gay in society. Even the most popular, self-assured, and freethinking kid on campus couldn’t admit to it beyond the dim light of the campfire.

Nobody in the marching band knew about the drum major.

Later that year, I grew attached to yet another musician. I told him all about me and the drummer and the drum major. I knew full well that my newest confidant was straight as an arrow. But by this time, I was grasping at emotional straws.

“
I better warn you, just in case,” I dipped my forehead while hanging out in his bedroom one afternoon. “I might fall for you next. I feel like such a yo-yo.”

“
That’s okay, John,” he responded intrepidly. “I need to know what you’re going through so I can help you.”

He was an anomaly. He wasn’t the least bit threatened.

He discussed the matter with his mother and then called me a few days later. “John, I think the best thing I can do for you is convince you to see a psychiatrist.”

“
Why?”

“
Just so you can talk to someone who knows what he’s talking about. My mom knows this guy. He’s pretty cool. He’s not into changing people. I’ve got his name and number, if you want it. He’s willing to meet with you.”

“
Only if you go with me.”

“
Okay. I’ll go with you.”

We drove to an office near downtown Los Angeles late one afternoon. He sat with me on the couch as the psychiatrist spent nearly three hours of unpaid time trying to put my mind at ease that I wasn’t some kind of a freak doomed to lead an unhappy life.

“
I don’t know how I could ever thank you,” I told my friend on the way home.

“
Don’t worry about it. Just lead the life that’s right for you.”

That was probably the most meaningful relationship for me in high school. His sole and abiding interest was to help me be me, no matter how different I was from him.

He played the trumpet.

For years, Dad had prayed to the Blessed Virgin Mary that his three sons would become priests and that his three daughters would become nuns. But by the time Stan had repudiated poverty, Genie had undergone excommunication, Geri had wound up back at Camarillo, Joe had defected to a Protestant university, and Mary Jo had sullied a Jesuit newspaper, Dad realized that his last, best chance for sacerdotal redemption lay with the very youngest. When my 18th birthday fell on Easter Sunday in 1980, Dad pulled me aside. “I hope that you think seriously about the very special significance of this day, as you enter manhood, for the very special role that you could play on this earth. I pray that you reflect carefully on the very sacred significance of this very special day.”

My reverential eyes widened at the prospects.

I did not follow Dad, Stan, Genie, and Mary Jo to Loyola Marymount University. Nor did I ignite a battle with Dad over attending a non-Jesuit school. Instead, I enrolled at Georgetown University, a Jesuit school in Washington, D.C., in August 1980.

On a personal level, I wanted to get as far away from home as possible. On an academic level, I wanted to major in American Studies in our nation’s capital. I wanted to learn about what makes America tick, what lies at its cultural core, what makes America work, and what could make it work better.

To pay my way through college, Mom and Dad sold their dream house on Prospect Avenue, which had been their selfless plan all along. The great big sanctuary in the shadow of the church had served its purpose. The kids were gone. Mom and Dad considered it downright indulgent for the two of them to rattle around in a six-bedroom house. They felt no lingering attachment to the place. Mission accomplished.

They discarded most of the family belongings and moved into a three-bedroom apartment so that we could still visit. They were just as close as ever to the church. But instead of living in its noontime shadow, they were living in its morning shadow.

I was living in the shadow of the church, too, even as I began school on the east coast. I had made the bold intellectual leap to suspect that some church teachings might be wrong, but I wasn’t about to jettison the majority of church teachings that still seemed right. Just because some politician might pass a bad law or prosecute a misbegotten war didn’t mean I’d stop calling myself an American or flee to Canada. That was the quitter’s way out. That was for crybabies. I felt the same way toward the church. If something was wrong at home, the right thing to do was to change it from within and to make it right. I believed that staying and fighting was a far truer sign of fidelity than was blind obedience to either church or state. So I set out to do my part to redeem the church. “That’s the life that’s right for me,” I figured.

During a visit home to California, I sought out my old role model, Father Ferraro, in his new parish. We chatted in his office. “I have three things to say,” I declared. “I’m gay. I feel mistreated by the church. And I’m thinking of becoming a priest anyway.”

He answered each pronouncement with a response that was even more shocking.

“
With regard to yourself,” he began, “you shouldn’t feel alone. Most of the personal problems that parishioners bring to me are of a sexual nature. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have some kind of difficulty managing his or her sexuality,” he said.

“
With regard to the church,” he continued, “its official teaching is one thing, but its pastoral practice is another. How the church lives—and how it expects people to live in reality—are very different from its doctrine. The most important thing for everyone is to do the best with what you are. That means you need to be true to yourself.”

Wow.

“
With regard to the priesthood,” he concluded, “it would probably be wrong for you. By definition, it’s an all-male environment. You’d be grappling with a lot of the same issues you’re grappling with right now.” Becoming a priest wouldn’t necessarily improve matters for me or for the church. If anything, it might just make matters worse.

The most stunning insight was that second one. Father Ferraro taught me that the greatest sin of all was to be untrue to oneself as created by God.

Everything he said sounded so self-evident that I could hardly believe it was true.

Back at Georgetown, I began to trust my heart. I had no idea how risky that was.

In my sophomore year, the American Studies program began in earnest. The 15 of us students in the program took classes together in history, literature, government, philosophy, and theology. We peppered each other with questions about “the American experience,” which we might have defined as “the attempt to carve meaning and virtue out of a vast new frontier.” Historically, some of those attempts had succeeded, while others had failed miserably. As we studied about the search for meaning and virtue in America, we pushed one another to find meaning and virtue in our own lives as well.

One of the other students and I bonded almost instantaneously. It didn’t matter that he was a military cadet and that I was a pacifist. Our differences just made our discussions more dynamic and our quests for meaning more fulfilling.

We began to spend more and more time together, studying and philosophizing. Grilling each other for oral exams. Disagreeing with each other, learning from each other, and caring about each other. Completing each other’s sentences, discovering each other in one another, and not being sure where one of us ended and the other began.

For Thanksgiving, he took me home to Connecticut to meet his large family. “I’d like you to meet John-John,” he introduced me to the folks, using the nickname once used by President John F. Kennedy for his son, John Jr.

We hung out in the basement, talking about our families, friends, frustrations, and dreams. We talked about how thankful we were for each other.

“
It’s weird,” he said as we lay on the bed in the basement. “But I feel closer to you than I’ve ever felt to any of my girlfriends.”

“
I feel closer to you than I’ve ever felt to anyone,” I echoed.

“
Me, too.” He paused for several seconds. “Do you realize what we’re saying?”

“
I think so.”

Silence.

“
Don’t take this the wrong way,” he said. “But if you were a girl, I’d probably want to marry you.”

I still wasn’t sure what that statement was supposed to mean. I sat up in the bed. “There’s something I need to tell you right now.” I held his hands in mine, looked into his sympathetic dark brown eyes, and took a deep breath: “I’m gay.”

His eyes flickered. He then just leaned over and held me. He didn’t say a word.

“
Does that scare you?” I asked.

“
No.”

“
Well, are you?”

“
No. I don’t think so.”

We kept holding each other.

“
I’m in love with you,” I confessed. This time, it felt like forever.

“
I love you, too,” he said. “But it’s a spiritual love more than a physical love.”

We struggled to think of examples of relationships similar to ours. The only places where we could see reflections of our relationship were in art and literature.

We saw ourselves in the American painting, “Kindred Spirits,” by Asher B. Durand. In 1849, Durand had memorialized the intimate friendship of two men standing side by side amid the majesty of the unspoiled wilderness. The friends were Thomas Cole, an American landscape painter, and William Cullen Bryant, an American poet and journalist. Emboldened by each other, the men stood bravely open to the universe.

We saw another reflection of ourselves in the dual protagonists portrayed by Joseph Conrad in
The Secret Sharer
. In 1912, Conrad had written about the intimate friendship of two men aboard a lonely ship. Their souls became so intertwined that it became impossible for the men to distinguish themselves from one another. The situation aboard the ship prohibited the two men from spending enough time together, but the military cadet and I wanted a happier ending for ourselves than that.

“
We shouldn’t let our love for each other be constrained by something as superficial as our sexual orientations,” he said as we sat on the bed.

“
What we have is too important to take for granted,” I agreed.

After all, we were kindred spirits. Secret sharers. Soul mates.

“
I don’t know anyone else who’s done anything like this,” he noted with pride.

“
Me, neither. Do you really think a gay guy and a straight guy can bond in a way that would transcend their differences?”

“
Why not, John-John?” he flouted convention. “Why can’t we explore it? Why can’t we find a new kind of meaning and virtue there?”

“
It’s like we’re venturing into some kind of vast new psychological frontier.”

“
I don’t know where this may lead,” he took my hands in his. “But I pledge my love to you.”

Stunned, I looked into his ardent eyes. “I pledge my love to you, too.”