Swell Zine: Vietnam and Pride Sunday

As I wake, rain is splattering on the patio umbrella outside my open bedroom window-- a gentle sound that lures me back to sleep. But I will be late if I linger in bed. This is unusual. Gay Pride day has been sunny and warm for as long as I can remember and I think of drag queens fussing over ways to protect elaborate makeup and go-go boys pulling jeans over red speedos for warmth until the floats roll.

I remember I have cancelled my plans to see Sam. On paper, Sam is everything I should want: a decent shot at being part of the dominant culture. Our conversations had been deep and long. He suggested we try a relationship. I felt afraid, cracked and fragile, unable to make reason or willpower override my reaction.

Dan Savage once wrote to a lovelorn gay man that he must pretend when he is dating that all gay men have served in Vietnam. They are a bit shell shocked, walking cases of post traumatic stress disorder. If he started from that premise, he'd have a better crack at handling erratic behavior and his own expectations. I always felt this a bit patronizing until I began to see it in myself. My obsessive worry about Sam this morning convinces me I fit Dan's profile.

I shower, contemplate how I will protect myself from the rain and cold and think, it is just water and, what the hell, I'll get wet. On my way out the door, I change my mind and grab a pullover and a collapsible umbrella and get in my car. I park outside a friend's apartment, where we will gather later on the broad deck overlooking the city and the lake.

Walking to the parade, I think of my space in history. I expected I'd recreate what my parents had in their marriage. They met in a beehive of conservative Christians where my father was studying to be a minister and couples seemed to find one another at just the right time. Human sexuality was a cut-and-dried transaction prescribed by God. The male was to dominate, the female was to submit. Children were the sign of blessing and they were to be cycled back into the system; more dominant males and submitting females. It was impossible for a couple like my parents to raise a gay son.

Last night, Scott and Joe brought their twins to the party and kept them safely at the front of the house where they could sleep uninterrupted away from the crush of bodies in the back yard. The caterer came out to admire the sleeping babies and I realized she was the only other female in the house beside little three-month-old Rebecca. Scott said, "Two sperm, two fathers, one egg donor, one surrogate mother: meet Rebecca and Jacob." "You must be so proud," she smiled behind enormous black-framed glasses and matching jet black hair. I stared at the babies, warmed as though I was in front of a campfire. Peaceful inside, I wondered why I had not chosen to create a family like this.

Tacky floats are jockeying for position at Belmont and Halsted. I volunteer to carry one side of the banner for my running club. I need something to do today. I just don't have it in me to be spontaneous. I think of the way I have heard introverts and extroverts defined. Crowds energize extroverts. This morning I feel an enormous vortex of energy sucking the life out of me. I want to vacate my body, command my feet to walk with my characteristic bounce while I float like a balloon above the crowd. I am saying "fuck gay pride" inside, but it feels blasphemous and I don't allow the thought for long.

In 1969, gay and transgendered men rioted in the streets of New York just for the right to participate in the free love of the sexual revolution. Sex was uppermost on everyone's minds. Now the crowd I am seeing has gathered because this is one hell of a party. We look pretty middle of the road. A collective of lovely people. I am happy for us. But I shouldn't have cancelled on Sam. There are the street preachers with their carefully hand-lettered well-worn signs. "Sodomites burn in hell." The throngs would like to pick a fight, so there are flanks of policemen around them.

I picture myself like the policemen, caught in the liminal place between two opposing forces. So many years I wasted in that impossible pressure cooker. When I knew I was gay, my logic-loving God presented a puzzle to be solved; a gauntlet thrown down. I was supposed to get over this. For years I dreaded the coming of June, when men would doff their shirts and I would be faced with the reality that I was failing the test miserably. I was still drooling at the sight of the boys of summer.

David is on Diversey smiling broadly at me. I am so lucky this man was my first love. I picture him on his first day at the design firm we worked for-- a full head of dark hair, a bow tie that matched his socks, his intoxicating cologne, his attention to fashion, his passion for creativity. I believed we were really, really good friends. One night I lied in bed thinking of him and love gushed out of me like a dam bursting and I thought, this is what the fuss is all about. Only most people don't work so hard fussing with leaks in a dam. His smile follows me as I pass him and I can't think of anyone else so unequivocally good.

Some part of my head went rapidly to my heart when we met and our lunches up and down Michigan Avenue became the best part of my day. I refused to admit my attraction and instead tutored him in the sinfulness of being gay. Yet any excuse I could find to meet him after work was a priority for me. I was dancing around the heat of my passion and holding myself at bay with my own rhetoric. And doing a lot of secret pleading. "Please don't let this be wrong." Years later, he forgave me my reticence and all my religious rhetoric. (It was an illness.)

The parade spills out onto Canon Drive and people drop their banners, peel off their wigs, fall out of position and run for the bathrooms. I am compelled to go back to watch the parade I have missed. PFLAG goes by accompanied by the roar of the crowds on either side of the street. The mothers and fathers standing in the crowd wonder if they would have the courage to march if they had a gay son or daughter. Gay women and men, estranged from their parents, see a loving mother, a loving father. I clap loudly and whistle and give my happy, sad smile. A woman meets my eyes and walks straight toward me and takes my hand for a second. It is warm and soft and wrinkled.

A gay son is no longer an intellectual, existential problem for my father. My mother was easily convinced that her emotions of love and loyalty outweighed her need for impeccable theology. Still, I found it hard to enjoy the simple acts around the dance of attraction. More often I had intense relationships with dramatic endings or sexual encounters that grew into lengthy dating relationships, or just sexual encounters where I lost all ability to be objective. I consistently turned away a good solid deal on an available husband.

I see Sam. He is marching with a contingent of gay religious leaders. I think I should race out and embrace him, but I sit unobserved on the street curb. Floats pass by and I am still thinking of Sam. I should have greeted him. I head back south on Canon Drive to look for him, hoping to see him debriefing with his cadre of heady types. He's not there. I call him on my cell phone and leave a confusing message-- more guilt than desire to talk. I hang up thinking, its official. I'm behaving badly. Vietnam. He won't call back.

On one hand, I am a romantic-- on the outside looking longingly toward the center of belonging. On the other, I flee from commitments, expectations, and any religion that doesn't add up to love. I am something of a mystery to myself. I am not an accident here, but an invited guest, back from my own Vietnam. I walk back toward the oncoming parade like a salmon swimming upstream-- all instinct to make new life out of the fragments of the old.

Stephen B. Starr is a graphic designer with a business in Evanston, Illinois. He sees his work as the art of putting visual and poetic metaphor together to communicate. He has been writing poetry and prose as an avocation since his high school English teacher told him to pursue writing as a career. Personal experience, the natural world and spirituality are his sources of inspiration. Stephen's work has appeared in SWELL (Winter '05-'06) and in White Crane Journal.