That Would Be Me (dot net)

I am surprised when people I meet don’t know I’m gay. How could they not figure that out? I am also surprised when I meet someone and they do know. How can they tell? It’s a little schizophrenic, I guess (no disrespect intended to any of my schizophrenic readers) but both are true. I have been out of the closet for so long it’s almost like water to a fish for me and yet I don’t think I come off as particularly “gay” (whatever that means. And I know at least Steve will have several comments about it. Be nice, Steve. This is my blog and I’ll equivocate if I want to.)

As unexceptional as it is for me to think of myself as gay, the process of coming out was a long and circuitous one. (What, you may ask, should I have expected, that the path be straight?) It was not, I’m sure, as arduous as that of numerous other gay men and women, but it took many, many years. I knew I was attracted to men even before I really knew what sexuality was. I grew up in a tavern in a small town in northern New Jersey and most of the patrons were blue collar men. Trust me, I noticed a lot of them.

I have no idea when I first knew what a homosexual was, but I remember quite clearly when I started to realize there may be something wrong with being one. My older brother, who was perhaps thirteen at the time, told me that the way they treated homosexuals was to show them pictures of naked men at the same time as giving them an electric shock. He didn’t call it aversion therapy, I’m sure, but it seemed to me at age ten a rational way of dealing with the issue. I also wondered when I would have to have the procedure.

Several years later, and on the other side of the continent, my mother decided to have a “talk” with me. I had no idea of her agenda, of course. We had decided to take a drive to visit some family friends who lived in a big, old house on a scraggly piece of land in a small town about two hours drive from us. We often visited them on a moment’s notice, both families enjoyed each other’s company. It was a little odd to me that it was only Mom and me going, but what the hell, I was fourteen or fifteen and not that inquisitive about such things. We had a nice visit. Then, on the way back, my mother initiated “the conversation.” It was obvious she was having a hard time starting, but I didn’t help. In fact, I didn’t say anything. After a lot of hemming and stammering, she said she thought I might be (might be, mind you) gay, that she didn’t know if I’d had any overt experiences, that I could talk to her any time and that, if I needed it, we’d find a good therapist.

I didn’t say a single word the entire ride home, which couldn’t have made her task any easier. Thinking back on it, it must have been excruciating for her. What if she’d been wrong? What if her supposition put the thought into my head for the very first time, made me question, then experiment, then BECOME gay? My silence couldn’t have eased her trepidation, yet I remained silent. Being a parent can’t be easy sometimes. When I got home, I went downstairs to my room, dragged out my dictionary and looked up the word “overt”. I was disappointed. I’d thought it was something sexual. To be truthful, “overt” is the only actual word I remember from her long talk, the rest is only a vague sense of extreme discomfort and the sound of my heart beating fast.

I hadn’t had any overt experiences at that point, though. My first was when I was seventeen, with a twenty-eight year old relative of that same family, ironically, at their house during a weekend visit. My heart beat fast then, too, as I recall.

Many years later, again in another corner of the country, I finally “came out” to my mother. I was in my mid twenties and living in Los Angeles. I had moved here in part to have a big, anonymous place to figure out what all this sex stuff was about. I told myself and others I came here to be in the movies, which was true to a point, of course. I’d been here a few years by then, living in a house in the Silverlake area. I called my mother long distance (back when long distance actually meant something momentarily) and this time it was I who hemmed and stammered. Which I did for some fifteen minutes before I got out the operative sentence. I’m sure my mother figured out within the first two seconds what was up, but there wasn’t much she could say until I actually said, “I’m gay.” She said, “I know, honey.”

I cried and said the thing that hurt the most was the thought that I would be with someone who wouldn’t be welcome in her home. She said, “Oh, Honey, anyone you love I love.”

She proved it, too. When I was with Jerry, my one long-term boyfriend (if two years can be considered long-term), we took a trip up to her cabin in Idaho. One day I’d been out doing something in town with mom’s husband. That night, Jerry told me that my mother had asked him if he felt like part of the family.

“Of course, Toni,” he’d told her.

“Good,” she’d said. “Could you pick up all the coffee mugs in the living room and bring them into the kitchen?”

He said he’d felt very welcome, indeed.

The one thing she asked of me was that I not tell my great aunt. She didn’t want any blowback from that side of the family. I did anyway (many years later, of course, I said it was a long process.) Aunt Lou’s only comment was, “Well, do you have a friend?” I said I had lots of them and she said that’s not what she meant. I told her no, I didn’t have a friend and she told me I’d find someone and then changed the subject.

As the years progressed, my mother began wearing a pin that said, “Straight but not narrow”. She called me her fairy god son, and once asked if I were bothered that she had used me as an example when she showed the documentary Pink Triangles, about homosexuals in Nazi Germany, to her YWCA luncheon group. One of the group had said, “Gay people are disgusting.” My mother was horrified and said, “That’s my son you’re talking about.” I gave her retroactive permission and told her she could use me to enlighten someone anytime she wanted.

Oh. By the way. I’m gay. Did you know?

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

My mother liked extreme foods. The tea she liked was smoked. I have no idea what the brand or type was, although I have a vague memory that it was something British. It came loose in a tin and my mother would put well over a teaspoon of it in a tea bell, put it in her large coffee mug and pour boiling water over it. Then she would let it steep for hours. Literally hours. Some days she’d make her tea right after breakfast and it would still be sitting on the kitchen counter in the late afternoon. The water would have cooled by then, of course, and there would be a dark grey-brown ring on the ceramic just above the level of the tea and the musky, smokey aroma of it would permeate the house. Tea should not be smokey. Scotch is smokey. Which, of course, is why I prefer a good Irish. Steak grilled over hickory chips should be smokey. Not tea.

Once my mother got her tea to this tepid, almost viscous state she would put a little more hot water in to warm it up, pull the tea bell out, stir it a few times to mix all the tannins evenly and contentedly sit sipping the venomous brew. I was sure the bowl of her spoon would dissolve while she stirred, but it never seemed to.

She also enjoyed Limburger cheese. Not the pot of mildly fragrant cheese you find at your local greengrocer, jar cheese that spreads smoothly across your rye cracker. This cheese was a gently aged block of runny offal that had legs. And feet. And armpits. I used to say Limburger smelled like dirty socks, but that’s not quite accurate. It smelled like athletic socks that had been worn for eight days on a forced march across a burning desert by a very masculine man who suffered from severe athlete’s foot and profuse sweating, then stuffed into moldy sneakers and left in a damp basement for a couple of years. It actually singed the hairs in your nose. Mom would store her chunk of precious matter in a small, tightly sealed Tupperware container in the fridge so that it could marinate in its own essence to its most piquant fullness. (I recently read that the bacteria that is used to ferment Limburger is the same found on human skin that causes body odor. So, in essence, if I wear the same tee shirt two days in a row, I’m a delicacy. Who would have imagined?)

She liked her Limburger in a sandwich, but not just any sandwich. She would cut two thick slices of bread which, I assume, was rye or pumpernickel. She just called it “black bread.” Then she cut a thick slice from a Bermuda onion. Then a couple of hacks from the cheese, put them all together and once again sit down to her special treat. She rarely made these sandwiches while we were around, from fear of Child Services, I suspect, but I would know she was indulging when I turned the corner at the end of our block on the way home from school. Something in the air would quietly whisper, “go visit someone for an hour or two.”

Don’t get me wrong, I loved my mother. She introduced us to some amazing culinary delights such as lox, pickled schmaltz herring and pasta con pesto so strong you sweat garlic for three days. And she never forced Limburger or smoked tea on us. It was there if we wanted it. We didn’t.

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

It would probably come as no surprise to anyone who knew me that I’m a college graduate; I’m fairly well spoken, fairly well read, use multi-syllabic words and have a subtle air of pretension that precedes me into any room. It may come as a surprise, however, to know that not once in the thirty years (!) since I graduated has it made any difference that I hold a Bachelor of Arts degree. In fact, no potential employer, potential business partner, potential casting director, potential arresting officer or potential date has ever even asked if I even attended college. It was all, it seems, entirely solipsistic. (Okay, I’m sorry. I’ll try to behave. Solipsism is a theory that the self is the only reality, so a solipsistic experience is one that only matters to the person who experienced it. But you knew that. And it doesn’t matter.)

This is not about that, however. It’s about my experience getting my degree at a small, private, liberal arts Catholic girls’ school. Okay, so it was no longer a girls’ school when I attended, they had started letting boys in a few years before. They also closed down a few years after I graduated. They’d been having financial trouble for years, a circumstance that I assume contributed to both milestones.

Fort Wright College was run by the Sisters of the Holy Names and was housed on what at one time had been the base and barracks of the famous Indian killer, Colonel George Wright, on the outskirts of Spokane, Washington. I first became aware of it the summer out of high school while performing a very small role in a play at a local civic theater in Spokane called Spokane Civic Theatre. The two leads in the play were the couple who ran the drama department at the Fort and I fell instantly enamored of them. They seemed to know things about acting and theater in general that I had never imagined.

I applied, and with government grants, work study and a job at the campus cafeteria in hand, entered academia. The school was very progressive; most classes were “pass/no pass” with evaluative comments that went on your permanent record. You could request actual grades, of course, at the beginning of each term, which most of the math and science students did and few of the art, music or drama students did. The Sisters of the Holy Names were a fairly liberal order, few of them wore habits, those that did either very old or very Korean. In fact my English professor, Sister Jean Concannon, often said she feared sounding too “nunny”. She needn’t have worried, of course. She taught Dylan, both Thomas and Bob, and Joyce, both James and Carol Oates, who have all been accused of everything from sensualism to obscenity. One professor, who taught math, had been kicked out of several African countries for agitating. I liked it there.

There was a subtle tension between the nuns and the lay faculty (I wonder if they’re called that because they’re allowed to get laid. I digress) and all but one teacher in the drama department was lay, so it was natural that there was tension between our department and the rest of the school. (That one non-lay teacher moved to the English department after only a year with us, poor thing.) The year before I got there, they were preparing to mount a production of The Marat/Sade, a play in which, among many other questionable activities, the inmates of an insane asylum attack and rape a bunch of nuns. The college didn’t demand they not do the play, but made their life so miserable they closed down the production and instead did the “happy and likable” James Thurber comedy, The Male Animal. The nuns were quite pleased, saying that it was a grand show and exactly what should be being done. They entirely missed, it seems, the theme of the play, which was a plea for academic freedom and against censorship.

I was one of perhaps three people in the drama department, students and teachers alike, who didn’t smoke. I was one of very few students who didn’t also smoke pot, drop acid and sleep around. (It was, after all, the Seventies.) I was the only one, as far as I can tell, who didn’t drink. I was naive. (Least you think me unnecessarily pure, I assure you I made up for lost time in the Eighties.) Even so, my four years at the Fort were a happy blur. I fell tragically in love with one of my roommates, a big, burly straight man who always smelled slightly of marijuana, spent hours upon hours every day in the ramshackle theater building that always smelled strongly of stale cigarette smoke, successfully straddled the divide between “us” and “them”, making lasting friendships in and out of the department, acted in four or five plays a year, started classes most days at ten and finished rehearsal most days at midnight, learned so much about so much and graduated never having had to write a single term paper.

I say I’m a college graduate, but I barely remember our actual graduation. It was in the Commons building, I remember, where the cafeteria was, one of the very few “new” buildings on campus. I also remember one of my classmates, that same burly roommate, getting angry upon hearing someone say “now we enter the real world.” “No,” he insisted. “This is the real world. This is as much the real world as any place you will ever find.” I also remember the party afterwards, at the house of Chris and Heather Welch, a couple who had actually been married, where we all helped to prepare and bake a huge tray of “Nachos Especial”, everyone ate and everyone else drank and we never thought to say good bye to the Fort.

In the thirty (!) years since then I’ve moved to Los Angeles, owned several businesses, had several careers, grown slightly less neurotic, loved and lost, written and published, loved and gained, made up for lost time and, now, on an almost daily basis, get email come-ons to get my degree on-line. I would consider it, of course, but no one would care.

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend