A Cage of My Own Making

When I was about seven, I heard the word “homosexual” for the first time. I didn’t know what a homosexual was, but it had the word “sex” in it, so I figured it had to be juicy. So, I asked my mother: “Mom, what’s a homosexual?”

Neither my mother nor I knew at that moment that a homosexual was, among other things, me. So, my mother answered as best she could: “Well, Eric … a homosexual is a man who loves men the way he ought to love women, or a woman who loves women the way she ought to love men.” Needless to say, I didn’t come out to my mom for quite a while after that.

And I want to be clear, I’m not writing this to attack my mother. This was 1977, after all. Just five years before, homosexuality was still listed in the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of mental illnesses. My very heterosexual mother had come of age in the 50’s and early 60’s, and there was every reason for her to believe that homosexuality was a choice, and not the best one.

But those words affected me. I spent my teenage years ogling the men’s underwear section of the JCPenney catalogue, but convincing myself that it was only because I wanted to look like that – not because I wanted to get with that.

When I was twenty-five, I was living in Washington DC as an aspiring playwright. Gay theatre was booming in the 90s, and I remember wishing that I was gay, because it would be good for my career. But even so, I still couldn’t face the truth about myself. Back then, the Washington Theatre Festival was an annual event that staged works by local writers, and in 1996, one of my plays was produced. The play featured a scene between a committed gay couple, debating whether to have a child, and it ended with a kiss – not a hot, passionate snog with lots of tongue, more of a romantic we’ll-get-through-this and I-really-do-love-you kiss.

One Saturday, as we were auditioning for actors, an actor showed up alone. The other actor who was scheduled was a no-show, and this tall, lanky drink of water had no one to read with. Knowing that I had done some acting, the director asked me if I’d be willing to read with him, and I agreed. As the scene drew near the close, I wondered if he was going to kiss me, as the script indicated. My heart started to race, and my mouth went arid. Somehow, I continued to say my lines, the lines I knew so well because I had written them myself. And then he did it. He kissed me. I think, for a moment, my brain left my body. I felt that kiss in my toes. It was an experience I’d never had before, and I now knew what people meant when they used the word “fireworks” to describe romantic attraction.

Anybody out there?

I drove home in a state of shock. There was simply no longer any point in denying what I had kept from myself for so long. I was gay. I was a homosexual. I was a man who loved men the way he always thought he ought to love women. I came out to my mom about six months later. All things considered, she took the news pretty well.

But for years afterward, I marveled at my own coming out story. What if I’d changed the scene so it was no longer gay? What if my scene partner hadn’t decided to plant one on me? And what if that other, forgotten, nameless, actor had shown up for his audition? Who knows how long it would have taken me to figure myself out? (By the way, whoever and wherever you are, thank you for staying home that day.)

For a long time, I believed that if I had been born in a less tolerant time, I might have lived in denial forever. If I had come of age in the 50’s and early 60’s like my mom, I might have married a woman, had kids, and never had the top of my head blown off by another man’s lips touching mine. And I felt lucky. But now I believe that I probably would have figured myself out eventually. After all, anyone who literally writes their own script to facilitate their first kiss wants out of the closet, desperately.

Because people want their freedom. Each of us will do just about anything to get it, and in the meantime, we will pull whatever scraps of joy we can find to nourish themselves and fight another day. I’m now convinced that we will do just about anything to escape our chains, whether they be literal chains, or simply a lie we’ve been telling ourselves our whole lives.

I think about E.M. Forster, who wrote an entire gay romance novel in 1913 that he knew he couldn’t print so long as homosexuality was illegal in the UK (Maurice was eventually published in 1971). I think about Jane Addams, who spent her days fighting for women’s suffrage and her nights with Mary Rozet Smith, a philanthropist. I think about Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, who fought at Stonewall and spent the rest of their lives advocating for their rights and nurturing a found family of young LGBT people. I think of Josephine Baker, Gertrude Stein, and James Baldwin, who all moved to Paris so they could be themselves in ways that America would never allow.

(Clockwise from top left) Josephine Baker, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Rivera, E.M. Forster, Marsha P. Johnson, Jane Addams, James Baldwin

I think about all the gay people whose names I will never know, who snuck into back alley bars and improbably found love, either for a night or for a lifetime, at a time when being gay could cost them their jobs and put them in jail.

In 2023, we know these stories, or we should. And yet, there are still those in Florida, Tennessee, Texas, and elsewhere who are trying to protect our children from what they call “the gay agenda,” which as far as I can tell contains only two items: love and freedom. A record number 417 anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced in state legislatures around the country. Those who sponsor these bills say they’re protecting their children from those who would groom them and seduce them into a life of depravity, pain, and despair. If these folks had ever met an LGBTQ person and listened to our stories, they’d know that for many of us, the only pain and despair associated with being gay are the years we spent pretending to be something we’re just not. Those who sponsor these bills say they’re protecting their children from us, but what they’re doing is hiding their children from their own minds.

I don’t know if this essay will reach anyone who truly needs to read it, but let me just state for the record: A book about gay penguins or lesbian mommies will not make your child gay. A comic book about a trans superhero or a drag queen reading stories at your local library will not make your child question their gender. And if you’re scared to death of books, movies, or the fact that LGBTQ people simply exist in the world, then I suspect your child is already the thing you fear most. And all you’re doing is telling your child that a gay man is a “man who loves men the way he ought to love women” and that a trans woman is “a man who sees a woman where he ought to see a man.”

It would be so much easier for everyone, yourself included, if you’d just tell your kids that you love them and let them be. And who knows, maybe your child will be the cisgender heterosexual you always wanted. And if that’s true, your cisgender heterosexual child will know they are loved for who they are, not tolerated because of who they’re not. And if your child turns out to be neither straight nor cisgender, believe me when I tell you that they would have found their way to themselves someday anyway.

Because that’s what we do.