Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century (52 page)

“
Well,” Cathie interjected gingerly between gurgling bubbles, “maybe the reason you say you’re gay is that you have such liberal ideas and feel the need to rebel.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. Stan and Cathie were both highly intelligent people. How could they possibly think that anyone would choose to be a social pariah? “That’s not how someone becomes gay,” I shook my head. “It’s not a political choice. If anything, you’ve got it backwards. Maybe the reason I have such liberal ideas is because I’m gay, because I have no choice but to see the world through a different set of lenses and to rebel against things that most people take for granted as fair. Because the rules of the game aren’t fair.” I suspected that it was my turn to get kicked out of a house.

“
But how can you be gay?” Stan shifted his line of attack. “I don’t understand it. I never had any problems with girls. If anything, it was too easy to meet girls.”

“
It’s not about meeting girls,” I laughed a little and began to settle down. “It’s too easy for me to meet girls, too, but that’s because I’m not attracted to them. Asking me how I can be gay is like asking you how you can be straight. Why are you attracted to women? You just are. You can’t explain it, can you? There’s no rationality on your end, either. Sex is the most irrational thing in the world—gay, straight, or whatever.”

We soaked and sighed and hemmed and hawed for about a half hour more. The steam thickened between us and obscured the light from the moon above.

But then, Stan concluded the conversation with a statement that was, to my self-righteously oppressed ears, a startling climax: “I just don’t understand it, John. But you’re my brother. And you’re always welcome here.”

I gazed into the flickering torch, mesmerized. I was left to ponder the improbability of the moment. Stan and I had become the polar opposites of our generation. He had become pro-military but anti-government, while I had become anti-military but pro-government. We embodied the dueling factions of a culture war sparked by the Vietnam War and Watergate—those dual ruptures in mutual trust that had scarred our psyches and ripped our generation in two, disillusioning us in contrary ways and shredding our ability to mend our own divisions. But stewing in the hot tub that evening, I learned the last thing I’d expected to learn: the fundamental meaning of brotherhood.

Although the evening was uplifting for me, it was traumatizing for Stan. “I couldn’t do anything for two weeks after that,” he revealed years later. “I was trying to figure it out. I was talking to people. I was canceling my patients. I finally came to the point where it was easier for me to just accept it as something I couldn’t understand. I had to keep living my life.”

Pope John Paul II arrived in San Francisco on September 17, 1987. I sat waiting with the press corps in the balcony overlooking the altar of Mission Dolores Basilica, where the pope would meet face-to-face with people with AIDS. The world awaited the encounter, the most controversial event of his 11-day U.S. itinerary. Friends of mine joined about 400 protesters across the street from the basilica. Other friends sat in the pews, waiting to be the first people with AIDS to officially greet the pope.

From the balcony, we cynical journalists could observe how everything had been staged. Scores of gay, grown men with AIDS, including three priests—a Roman Catholic, a Greek Orthodox, and an Episcopalian—were seated at the furthest ends of the pews, barely within reach of the pope and virtually out of range of the camera angles. The only person with AIDS seated close to the center aisle was a four-year-old boy who had contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion. He was accompanied by his parents.

“
Typical,” one of the journalists snickered. “The world will see the pope embrace the one ‘innocent’ person with AIDS, thus sparing the pope the awkwardness of directly confronting any of the 60 ‘intrinsically evil’ men with AIDS.”

We all laughed.

The pope arrived at the back of the basilica and walked slowly down the center aisle toward the altar, shaking hands and blessing his flock. He reached the pew with the young boy. As anticipated, the boy leapt from his father’s arms into the grasp of the Holy Father, who hugged the boy repeatedly. Snap, snap. Click, click. Flash, flash. The cameras hissed and whirred. The congregation roared its approval. The pope cried. The shot seen ’round the world captured the moment.

But our cynicism in the balcony proved to be only half accurate. Off camera, the pope leaned over to shake the hands of the ill men and chatted briefly with them.

Once upon the altar, his words were more surprising than his theatrics. “God loves you all, without distinction, without limit,” the pope said. “He loves those of you who are sick, those who are suffering from AIDS and from AIDS-related complex. He loves the relatives and friends of the sick and those who care for them.” The San Francisco audience knew full well that the pope was referring to gay lovers. “He loves us all with an unconditional and everlasting love.”

The pope added that any attempt to set parameters around love was doomed to failure. “The love of God is so great,” he intoned, “that it goes beyond the limits of human language, beyond the grasp of artistic expression, beyond human understanding.”

Nobody inside or outside the church could argue with that.

A month later, I dislocated my left ankle while playing volleyball. The injury turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Mom flew up to San Francisco to help me out around the flat as I hobbled around on crutches. We sat together at the kitchen table after dinner one night.

“
Mom, do you feel uncomfortable around me?”

“
Well, it took me about a year to get over it,” she admitted, referring to the day that I had made her break down in tears.

“
How did you?”

“
Oh, I guess I had to mourn for the son I thought I knew. I had to learn to love you all over again.”

The visit made things easier for her. The stranger whom she had learned to love turned out to be pretty much the same ordinary son she had always known. She saw that I led a mostly mundane life of buying groceries at Safeway and playing volleyball in Golden Gate Park when I wasn’t hobbling to Chinese restaurants in search of the perfect tofu. She was the one who’d sold me on tofu, after all, as soon as she’d discovered that it could mix seamlessly with ricotta cheese to make an uncommonly light and fluffy spinach lasagna. Mom remained flexible enough to learn how to do things differently.

The most remarkable event of her visit was the most predictable: Mass at Most Holy Redeemer, the Catholic church in the predominantly gay Castro district. It was October 1987, the height of the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco. At Most Holy Redeemer, the lists of the dying and the deceased, read aloud each Sunday, reached into the dozens. The sign of peace—the moment during Mass in which the people usually just shake hands with those right around them—lasted for several minutes at Most Holy Redeemer. Mom stood and watched as the veteran parishioners, mostly elderly widows, and the rookie gay male parishioners strolled up and down the aisles to greet one another, hug, chat, and make plans to meet afterward at the coffee hour across the street in the shadow of a vacant convent. The parish was busy raising money from bingo games to convert the convent into an AIDS hospice. Walking home from Mass, Mom rendered just one judgment: “There’s more love at that church than at any other I’ve ever seen.”

Mom began to feel confident enough in San Francisco to explore the town on her own. She avoided getting lost by staying within view of Market Street. But her favorite destination was on Castro Street. At an arts and crafts shop run by a couple of gay guys, she stumbled upon a treasure trove of kits to satisfy her latest passion: cross-stitching.

Mom went home with several kits. Over the next few months, she stitched a collection of six images of San Francisco and had them pressed and framed for the walls of my home: one of the Golden Gate Bridge, four of historic Victorians, and one of Saint Francis of Assisi in commemoration of the 800th anniversary of his birth in 1182.

For two years, I volunteered as an AIDS buddy with a group at Most Holy Redeemer. I stopped volunteering for strangers when my friends started dying all around me. My roommate. My volleyball buddies. The man whom I considered to be my professional mentor. Roosevelt, whom I considered to be my spiritual mentor. One friend jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. The others deteriorated slowly.

I felt the greatest ever estrangement from Dad in those years with respect to religion. But I felt the greatest ever connection to him with respect to many other things.

Fighting AIDS in San Francisco in the late 1980s felt like fighting at ground zero of a war zone. One by one, my best friends lost their lives in the battle. I checked my roster—Flete, Godges, Kenkelen, Llanora, Williams—and found that I was the sole survivor.

Despite the losses, I rarely felt alone. I felt part of something much bigger than myself and my dwindling circle of friends. I was part of a community that was earning the respect, if sometimes begrudging, of people across the country and around the world. We were showing the world that no matter what society or certain churches said about us, we could make commitments to each other and take care of one another for the duration. We were showing that we didn’t have to be biologically or legally related to one another to love one another as family. In the face of mounting death and despair, we were building a community that was stronger than it had ever been before.

I continued to write articles for the religious press. Some of the articles described the ways in which AIDS, far from being a divine punishment on gay people, was obliging religious leaders to promote healthy gay relationships. The epidemic was prodding these leaders to acknowledge the devotion of gay partners, the worthiness of committed gay relationships, and the importance of blessing, encouraging, and strengthening them.

I channeled the religious awakening into political activism. On behalf of San Francisco Supervisor Harry Britt, himself a former Methodist minister and a longtime gay politician on the national scene, I helped to mobilize 45 San Francisco religious leaders from various denominations: Buddhist, Catholic, Episcopalian, Evangelical, Jewish, Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, Southern Baptist, and others. The religious leaders congregated at City Hall and signed a ballot argument against a proposition to repeal a 1990 city law that was one of the first domestic partners laws in the country.

The 45 signatures filled nearly a page in the voter information guide. In contrast, the ballot argument itself consisted of three simple sentences: “All San Franciscans deserve fairness, justice, and the support of family. Domestic partners registration costs the city nothing. We admire the caring that strengthens our entire San Francisco family.”

The proposition failed. Domestic partnerships prevailed.

In fighting against AIDS and for domestic partners legislation, I wasn’t making a monumental sacrifice like fighting in a world war. However, I was finding a profound sense of purpose on behalf of my community and my God. Earth, heaven, and history seemed to validate that purpose and to sustain me through one of my community’s darkest hours.

The experience strengthened my faith in myself. I came to believe that being gay had been my salvation, not my damnation. Growing up gay had forced me to break through a barrier of religious assumptions that otherwise might have hardened into a rigid and unforgiving code of moral behavior. Growing up gay had forced me to wrestle with—and then to subdue—the harshest judgments of myself and of others. I thanked God for making me a better man than that. I felt intrinsically blessed to be gay.

I then went back to school. Drawing on my life savings, a bunch of student loans from the federal government, and a few no-interest-no-questions-asked-just-take-’em-and-pay-’em-back-whenever-you-can loans of a few thousand dollars from my big brother Stan, I enrolled at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Officially, I was studying public policy. Personally, I was still trying to figure out what makes America work and what could make it work better—not just as an economic and political system, but as a social and cultural force in the world.

I finished school in 1992 and returned home to what was then the battered and broken society of riot-scarred Los Angeles. I helped to manage a government-funded nonprofit organization called The Los Angeles Alliance For A Drug Free Community. The organization helped parents in the city’s burgeoning Latino, Armenian, and Russian immigrant neighborhoods work together to keep their kids off drugs.

The parents attended health fairs and parenting classes at the elementary schools of their kids. The parents spearheaded campaigns to curb the proliferation of liquor outlets near the schools and to prohibit tobacco marketing to minors. Back at the office, we published a multilingual magazine to motivate the parent-driven efforts.

The parents reminded me of my own Italian and Polish parents and grandparents. In the faces of the people we interviewed, photographed, and featured in the magazine, I could recognize the familiar expressions, and I could see the whole process starting all over again nearly a century later. No matter how poor the immigrants were or how poorly they were treated, they were grateful for the chance to work, the chance to improve the lives of their children, and the chance to give something back to the community. It was exhilarating to see firsthand how the greatest hopes and optimism sprung from those who possessed the least and who had sacrificed the most.