Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century (50 page)

When I finished school at Georgetown in 1984 and entered the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley the following semester, I resumed the theological quest by taking courses at Berkeley’s nearby Graduate Theological Union. The leading Catholic thinkers of the 1980s were revising the codes of Catholic sexual ethics by incorporating into their theology the insights of modern science. I joined the seminarians in studying the works of Charles Curran, the former president of the Catholic Theological Society of America. He concluded that any sexual relationship between two human beings of whatever gender could be morally upright in the context of a loving commitment. Other prominent Catholic theologians were saying similar things. There seemed to be immense momentum for institutional evolution—until the Polish pope censored the theologians.

In the 1920s, the Vatican had censored Teilhard as well. But within decades, his writings had become regarded as prophetic. I figured the same turn of fortune could redeem the theologians of the 1980s. In the meantime, their books stood on my shelves.

My guru in Berkeley was a man named Roosevelt Williams. We met in a rap group for gay male graduate students at UC Berkeley in 1985. Sixteen years older than I was, he taught me more than anyone else did about what it meant to be a gay man in America.

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I was raised in the ghettos of Oakland,” he began sharing his story with the group. “I listened to fundamentalist black preachers until the age of 12 when I chose to become a Methodist.” He spoke in the eloquent, mellifluous baritone of a black preacher himself. “I was chairman of the Methodist Youth Fellowship in California and became a spokesman for the civil rights cause within the church. But the summer after high school, I came out to myself and to the church. The minister took me to a psychiatrist, and it was a pretty bad experience. I couldn’t find support or guidance in the church. I couldn’t buy it anymore. I didn’t deny God but did deny established religion in this country.”

Sympathetic nods encircled the room. It was filled with 12 men from diverse racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds from across the nation.

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For years after that,” Roosevelt continued, “I dabbled in alternative spiritualities. A writer named Jiddu Krishnamurti became the most important influence in my way of perceiving things. He doesn’t believe in religion. He believes that if there is such a thing as truth, then the individual can know it for himself. You don’t need an institution.”

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Exactly,” someone echoed.

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However,” Roosevelt scanned the younger faces around him, “at 39 years old, I’m having severe emotional problems with intimacy and closeness. One thing I suspect is that I’m having these problems because I have not chosen to be more true to religion.”

The room fell silent. The nods became tentative. But Roosevelt pressed on.

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Instead, I’ve tended to trust my own senses. So that feeling my own aloneness and alienation very intensely, when someone came along, if he was the least bit attractive to me and seemed to be interested in me, I let myself be open and available to him. And with very few exceptions, I always came out of those experiences feeling incredibly hurt. What I’ve seen lately makes me wonder if the people I’ve chosen to be open to in the past do not regard love or God or religion as importantly as I do. What brings it all home,” he swallowed, “is that today I find myself facing a diagnosis of AIDS basically on my own.”

The nods froze stiff. Maybe it was the revelation that he had AIDS, because most of us in the group had never met a person with AIDS before, and AIDS at that time was still a very new and terrifying illness. Maybe it was the brutal honesty about his personal affairs. Maybe it was the heretical suggestion that traditional religion might be good for gay men after all. Maybe his pain, intensified by the illness, hit just too close to home. The other guys glanced at one another, waiting for somebody else to respond. Nobody said a word.

Sensing the discomfort, the group leader asked somebody else to tell his story.

I didn’t follow much of the next story. I was still engrossed in Roosevelt’s story. He struck me as godly and courageous. I wanted to know more about this man and his struggle to reconcile his sexuality with his faith, a struggle that resonated so deeply with my own. He was also the first person I’d ever met who could speak extemporaneously in such articulate, intricate paragraphs, as if distilling a lifetime of hard-earned wisdom into each utterance. I wanted to hear what he had to say. I approached him after the group meeting. “Hey, Roosevelt. Would you like to get together some time? Just to talk?”

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I’d love to,” he grinned and shrugged, suddenly bashful as a schoolboy.

A few days later, I pedaled my bike up to his home in the Berkeley hills. We went on a walk through Codornices Park. “How’s your health?” I asked at the trailhead.

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Physically, I’m managing fairly well at the moment.” He looked fit and trim in his blue jeans, pullover cotton sweater, and beige moccasins. “But I personally feel that this illness is psychologically related, for myself and for many people who have it.”

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You mean you don’t think AIDS is just a nasty virus?”

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There’re a lot of things we have in common as gay men,” he strode over several exposed tree roots. “A good number of us don’t love ourselves enough as a product of the families we came out of. Or as a product of how society treats us. And as a product of how we treat each other. I think one of the biggest things we’ve done to create our own suffering is the superficial way by which we’ve gone about experiencing closeness and intimacy. We’re a racist minority. We’re a sexist minority. We’re an ageist minority. And we pretty much let ourselves be led around by our cocks. We’ve indulged in sex without love. And I think part of what’s going on is paying the price for that.”

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Wow! You sound like a fire-and-brimstone preacher, hailing the wrath of God!”

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Now I don’t think God’s punishing us,” he countered. “And I’m not saying we’ve done this because we’re bad or wicked people. I think we’ve done it out of desperation, because we’ve felt so alienated and so alone. Because we’re desperate for affection and don’t know how to find it except for the superficial symbols of it.”

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What you seem to be implying is that the root cause of AIDS is loneliness.”

He didn’t dispute the notion.

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If that’s true,” I mulled, “then the virus itself is just an opportunistic infection. But I bet there are lots of guys with AIDS who wouldn’t think of themselves as lonely.”

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I’m not so sure about that,” said Roosevelt. “I bet there are lots who would. I see the AIDS crisis in part as the result of a lifestyle lived without love. I don’t mean just sexual and romantic love; I mean love of self and love of fellow man.”

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By that, do you mean a willingness to abstain from sex without love?”

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I mean having enough respect for oneself and for one another to make love, not just have sex.”

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But don’t you think the AIDS crisis is altering a lot of that kind of behavior, turning people away from quickies and one-night stands in favor of something more?”

Roosevelt took a deep breath. “When the AIDS crisis became public, the first thing gay people seemed to be concerned about was what to do not to get AIDS, and I respect that concern. But what I fear—my biggest objection in all of this—is that no one seemed to stop and examine how it came about. No one seemed willing to be critical of our lifestyle. And that’s what’s always bothered me about being gay: We tend to look upon the rest of the world as being wrong for how they treat us, but we don’t seem to ever be willing to criticize ourselves for the choices we’ve made, as if somehow because we’ve been badly treated, everything we do is okay because we’ve been oppressed.”

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That’s a powerful statement,” I said. “But it’s hard to criticize people when they’re sick. Would you want people to criticize or blame you for having AIDS, or would you want them to help? I think the first thing for people to do should be to help.”

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The very first question that occurred to me when the AIDS crisis hit was, ‘If this disease comes about through having sex, and if modifying sex or giving up sex is a way to control it, then what does sex mean to me? What does love mean to me?’ I wanted to hear the entire community ask, ‘What can we do that would mean greater success for us in terms of finding love?’ The fact of the disease, and the fact of having to curtail our sexual activities, to me doesn’t negate the possibility of experiencing love. If anything, I should think it would encourage us to search for the truth of what love might be between two men. But no one seems to be asking those questions, and that really bothers me.”

I looked into his face as we doubled back. An age line ran down his right cheek like a permanent tear.

I regained my stride. “Okay, then. Let’s ask ourselves those questions. How can we do better? What would a truly loving relationship between two men look like?”

He closed his eyes for a moment, freeing his imagination. “I see the role of an ideal gay couple functioning kind of like a social priest and priestess in the sense that we have our vision to offer—our unique vision of love, peace, and the reality of the human condition. I think we can be very instrumental in shaping things in this world. Because of the way straight men are conditioned, they’re far more violent than they need to be. But because we allow ourselves to address both the masculine and the feminine, we give ourselves an opportunity to see more peaceful ways of being in the world.”

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I can see how relationships like that could work. We need more of them.”

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I think to the degree that we fail to do that, to the degree that we fail to live up to the truth of ourselves, it’s to that same degree that we create struggle, oppression, disease, and unhappiness for ourselves.”

We returned to the trailhead and crossed Euclid Avenue. We stood atop the Berkeley Rose Garden, drinking in the view of a sparkling San Francisco Bay.

I broke the ephemeral silence. “Gay men aren’t the only ones who get AIDS. And sex isn’t the only transmission route. What about intravenous drug users?”

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Drugs are all about alienation,” Roosevelt intoned, “about people who don’t fit in, people who are desperate to escape.” He gazed out across the bay, with San Francisco glistening like Oz on the horizon. “Are we in this society slowly killing ourselves from alienation? The question is not just AIDS, but how do we give meaning back to our lives so there’s less of a need to escape, whether to sex or to drugs?”

We descended a staircase into the tiers of the rose garden, which was carved into the hillside like a natural amphitheater. We ambled across one of the middle tiers.

It was the autumn of 1985. Thickets of rose trees bloomed along both sides of us.

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Roosevelt,” I asked, “do you ever feel like an outcast in the gay community?”

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I don’t feel like an outcast, but I do feel like a minority. And I say that not because I’m black or because I’ve got AIDS or because I’m getting older. I say that because of my beliefs. I believe that we should believe in ourselves more. To me, the greatest sin is acting against yourself. It’s failing to live up to all the power that life has naturally given to you. It’s the act of saying to yourself, ‘I don’t deserve more than this, I don’t want more than this, I won’t ask more of myself than this.’ That to me is the sin. I am as guilty of it as anyone, but I’m trying to do better. That’s the only way I think I can beat this illness.”

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It really is a spiritual condition for you as much as a physical condition.”

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I have to acknowledge I’m less than whole. It may be that I already have a death sentence. Or it may be that I don’t have the spiritual strength or development to rise above this and will succumb to it.”

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That’s a heavy burden to lay on yourself.”

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My biggest hurdle right now is learning to love myself. That’s hard, because there just isn’t a lot of love in my life, and so I have to learn to love myself by myself.”

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But there’s gotta be a way to meet someone who can share your priorities. I do.”

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I’d just love for you to find someone who’ll make you happy,” he jumped a step ahead of me, then stopped. “But I don’t know . . . ,” he trailed off, an aberration.

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Why not?”

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What you and I are seeking is a kind of love I’ve found to be just so rare. It exists, but it’s hard enough for straight people to find it, and there are lots more of them, and they’ve had centuries of practice and all kinds of social institutions to support them.”

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We’ve got none of that.”

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Right.”

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But that’s all the more reason for us to build new models of relationships, just like you said. Like priests and priestesses, offering the world something it sorely needs!”

He smiled at my childlike enthusiasm, but there was sadness in his smile. “Perhaps someday that sort of relationship can become more common. I hope to God so. But I’m not convinced many gay men of today would choose that kind of relationship.”

I sensed that Roosevelt wanted to shield me from his degree of sadness, if only by disabusing me of any unrealistic expectations. He seemed intent on protecting me from the world as it was, even while nudging me to work toward a world that could be. I clenched the inside of my mouth: “You’re not painting a very promising picture.”