Are Gay Christmases Merry? A Look At the Holiday Consequences of Coming Out to Families For Many Gay Men
Dear HillBuzz,
I have an elderly gay neighbor who is my “let’s have coffee” buddy. He is a very nice man who lives alone and I asked him this year if he was going to see his family for the holidays and he told me he was not welcome at their Christmas celebrations because he is gay. He also told me that he has not spoken to his parents — who are still living and must be in their 90s — in decades because they don’t want to know their gay son and their family is ashamed of him and likes to forget he’s alive. They have erased him from their lives because he never wanted to be with a woman.
I was wondering if this kind of thing still happens to younger gay guys or is common with the gay community that you know. I understand if you don’t want to answer this and if I don’t get a response because it’s a personal question and I am sure you get a lot of people asking questions so you can’t get to them all.
But, I hope you have a merry Christmas and that you and Justin enjoyed yourselves whatever you ended up doing.I hope you were somewhere that people were kind to you and you were surrounded by people who love you.
God Bless,
Tori in Minneapolis
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Dear Tori,
I love getting emails like this from anyone wondering anything at all about the gay community, particularly about what happens to a lot of gay men during the holidays…so of course I’ll answer your letter as best as I can. If anyone out there ever has a question like this, I will always try to answer it and enjoy the opportunity to address things you may have always wondered about Boystown.
I will note, right upfront, however, that everything I say will be purely anecdotal to my own experiences and to my understanding of the lives of my gay friends. I did not conduct any surveys before writing this. I did not go door to door in Boystown asking everyone who lives here what his take on this is. I know someone out there will chime in below in comments with “Well, I’m gay and I don’t agree with this” or “You don’t speak for everyone!”…so I’ll say right here, right now, that NO, I don’t speak for everyone and that YES I’m sure your friend’s cousin’s neighbor would have the exact opposite take on everything I say, because he’s gay but doesn’t agree with me and you need to feel important by making a point to note that.
There seems to be a whole generation (or maybe two or three generations) of people who went to public school and were taught by Leftist teachers that nothing can ever be said about anything at all in life because someone will always know of someone (or someone’s cousin or neighbor or a Britney Spears backup dancer) who had the complete opposite life experience. I think that’s garbage, because there are a great many things I can say about the “gay community” that are largely true, even if some people you may know are the exception to the rule. If something seems to happen over and over again, it’s a pattern, not a coincidence, and just because a gay guy you know has a different experience doesn’t mean the pattern doesn’t exist.
I’ll also note that when I talk about the “gay community” I speak almost exclusively about the gay male experience, since I don’t presume to speak for lesbians on anything. I’ve known some terrific gay women through the years but I’ve never been close enough to any to have them share their private thoughts on things like the holidays, so in everything that follows the deliberate lack of attention to the lives of lesbians is not meant as any affront, but instead is purely because I don’t have any basis of experience to speak for lesbians on what their holiday experiences are like.
Lesbians and gay men largely live in two separate spheres of the “gay community”: they have their own bars, restaurants, and favorite hangouts that gay men rarely frequent and we have our classic haunts. There’s no rule that says we can’t intermingle and hangout, but it’s rare for this to ever happen (usually, to be honest, because lesbians prefer keeping to themselves and gay guys are too into themselves to actively seek out lesbians for friendships). If you think of Disneyland, gay guys are in Fantasyland trying to get their pictures taken with all the princesses milling about (or critiquing the paint job on all the buildings and remarking to anyone who’d listen how they could have done it better) while the lesbians are in Frontierland scrapping over the last Davy Crockett hat in the gift shop and trying to make the last raft onto Tom Sawyer island. Never the twain shall meet, in most cases, because of a sharp divide in interests and their typical definitions of “fun”.
With all this in mind, I’m happy to give you a very candid and uncensored take on just how merry a gay Christmas is for many guys here in Boystown, based on what I’ve observed of gay life since the mid-1990s.
I know I’ll get at least once piece of hatemail today for using the word “Boystown”, because there is a very dedicated and determined group of people out there who are perpetually angry about this term “being stolen from the actual, original Boys’ Town”, which is a charitable organization dating back many years that helps troubled and neglected youth. I didn’t coin the term “Boystown” for Chicago’s gay neighborhood, and Chicago’s not the only city with a “Boystown”. Los Angeles has one, too, and so does New Orleans. New York would have a “Boystown” if it didn’t already have “The Village”. Any neighborhood where gay bars and gay-friendly restaurants and shops flourish ultimately gets called “Boystown” unless, like Greenwich Village, it already had a nickname of its own (“The Castro” in San Francisco is another example of that). “Boystown” is the official unofficial name for the several blocks of homes and businesses surrounding Halsted Street from Belmont to roughly Grace on the northeast side of Chicago; the Mayor’s office and national publications use the term “Boystown”, so don’t blame me for its usage.
In Boystown, Christmas is aggressively and joyfully celebrated as a purely secular, non-religious, green-and-red, wintery event with ample imagination and requisite sex appeal. Go-go boys are clad in red Speedos or jocks, depending on how much skin a bar allows to show, and drag queens pile on the tinsel and sparkle and create some truly stunning Christmas-inspired getups; one year I saw a queen with a towering Douglas fir on her head, fully adorned with working lights and spinning ornaments, balanced perfectly over a giant tree skirt turned muumuu — and as over the top as it was, it was still more respectable-looking and age-appropriate than a third of the outfits Michelle Antoinette Obama is seen in public wearing while being called “a trendsetting global fashion icon” by the agenda-driven media. All the bars in Boystown compete to see which one can create the most spectacular “holiday” display, though there’s decidedly no mention of Christ in any of this. “Christmas” in Boystown is all about sexy spins on gingerbread men (in edible undies), elves (with mistletoe stitched to the front of their jocks and jingle bells in the rear), and reindeer (which the gay leather community has embraced due to their shared admiration of harnesses).
The gay community long ago declared it’s own quiet war on Christians that ramps up the importance of Santa, his reindeer, and the most scantily-clad of his elves to eclipse any sort of religious meaning for the holiday. If you were a space alien that landed in Boystown with no concept at all of “Christmas”, you’d think the season was all about things painted red and green, muscled guys wearing white-fur-trimmed athletic supporters, drag queens trading candy canes for quick kisses, and the celebration of hideously ugly Christmas sweaters (that, in Chicago at least, are the star attractions when going out for the holidays). This being the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ has no bearing at all on any of the festivities of Boystown (though, to be fair, it’s no different than in most shopping malls…save for all the effort to make things as sexy and scantily clad as possible).
Christmas Eve is a big bar night, actually — though it’s nowhere near as big as Black Out Wednesday (the day before Thanksgiving, with the name echoing the Black Friday shopping explosion that begins the day after Thanksgiving). Apart from Pride (the last Sunday in June) and Halloween, “Black Out Wednesday” is the most lucrative night of the year for bartenders’ tips. The holidays are a strong invitation for drinking for many gay men. Part of this, I’ve been told, is because many guys return home to Chicago from cities they’ve moved to and are hitting the bars before “having to endure” the holidays with their families. The way a lot of these guys tell it, they need to get smashed the night before Thanksgiving so they can “bear to be around their family” for a meal the next day. As soon as they’re able to leave the relatives, they hit the bars again for some Wild Turkey to douse whatever remnants of those holiday meals are clogging their psyches afterwards. A lot of the guys attending a Black Out Wednesday bar crawl claim to be martyrs, subjected to torture every year by being “forced” to come home to see their relatives.
I’ve noticed the guys who feel this way about the holidays all seem to be in their twenties and thirties…and decidedly under about 45 or so. Many of these guys are out to their families, and while their families might not all be thrilled that they are gay, they are still invited to the holiday meals…even if these guys feel on some level these are events to “endure” and not “enjoy”. At least they get two letters in those words common, so I think that’s some kind of progress in the end.
With some exceptions, I think there’s been definite effort made by families with twenty or thirty-something year old gay guys to make them feel at least somewhat wanted at these family events. It’s very rare to find anyone in this age cohort who binge-drinks to kill the pain of being exiled from Christmas (which in fact happens in the guys over 40, who I’ll get to later). But, it’s also pretty rare to find any of these guys who express any joy at coming back to town to see their families and not treat it as some kind of chore they need to escape from and hit the bars either before or afterwards.
A few years ago, one of the gay magazines here in Chicago, Nightspots, ran a column detailing readers’ “worst” Christmas presents ever. One guy wrote in with a story I will never forget. He said that he had come out to his family a few years before, and that the family was very religious somewhere in the Bible belt south. They didn’t throw him a parade when he told them he was gay, but they didn’t exile him from family gatherings either: their reaction was muted and more along the lines of “we’ll love you Tommy no matter what you do, even if you’re an axe murderer or a gay”. It was “awkward” between them after he came out, and the awkwardness continued over a few holiday gatherings. Clearly, his mother or some other relative took the initiative to put a stop to that so the whole family got together to give this guy a large group present that they coordinated on one year — which precipitated his “Dear Nightspots” letter. When the gay “Tommy” went home for Christmas, he saw a very large box wrapped under the tree for him, with “From Your Family” or something to that effect on the card.
When it came time to open gifts, the relatives all gathered around him, excitedly. Everyone was there, from the grandmother down to the littlest nephew or cousin. They stared at him, with great anticipation, waiting for his reaction to the gift, like dogs do when you’re eating and they hope you’ll drop your sandwich on the floor. When he opened the box, he found a blue Barbara Bush-style dress, a box with a string of real pearls in it, another box with a pair of blue shoes to match the dress, and other items like a wig, makeup, purse, stockings, etc. to go with the dress. Different family members contributed different items to “Tommy’s outfit”. They were so excited and hopeful that “Tommy” would think this was the best Christmas ever and that he’d know his family all loved and supported him.
“Tommy” was horrified — and bolted to the bathroom, not knowing what to do. He wasn’t a cross-dresser. He had no interest in drag. He was just a normal guy who happened to date other guys and had never wanted to wear women’s clothes in his life — because, for those out there that still don’t know this, only about 10% of gay guys ever dress up in any sort of drag (and, actually, more straight frat guys do drag at Halloween or whenever than gay guys ever do).
“Tommy’s” family, not understanding, just assumed that since “Tommy” was gay he must also cross-dress, so to show that they still loved him and were supportive of him they decided to pool together and get him everything he needed to impersonate a former First Lady. Which, clearly, is every gay man’s dream wherever these people lived.
Well, “Tommy” reported in that magazine that his family was shocked he didn’t like the presents, but the awkwardness was forever broken between them. Before dinner was served everyone had a big laugh about the misunderstanding and the family members had a better sense of what it meant for “Tommy” to be gay. “Tommy” flew back to Chicago after the visit realizing his family loved him and were doing their best to understand him.
Everyone returned their contribution to the Barbara Bush drag kit and sent “Tommy” gift certificates to Amazon so he could buy himself something he actually liked and would use.
I’ve always thought it would have been hilarious if he went to the next Christmas dinner dressed up in pink and blue Chanel like Jackie Kennedy, but I doubt “Tommy” did that. It would have been hilarious (if mixed-message-sending) if he had, though.
I think Tommy’s parents are in their late-40s, which jives with my general perception that parents of the Millennial generation and below have a much different reaction to having a gay child than parents of kids in my age group and older. I’ve seen guys who are in their early 20s whose parents are their friends on Facebook…and the guys routinely post photos of themselves dancing on bars in their underwear or write all sorts of very revealing, explicit updates on what they are doing…and the parents chime in good-naturedly and very slightly admonish, “Just be careful you don’t slip, Ryan!” or “At least you wore clean undies!” whatever. These are clearly parents who strive to be “friends” to their kids and not actual “parents”, which may be good in some ways and bad in others…but it’s remarkable, to me at least, that these guys would feel that comfortable letting their folks into their Boystown lives like that. I would never post a picture like that, let alone have it on a site where my parents could access it (but I’m a Generation-Y gay guy and am at odds with Millennials on their love of all things Facebook and social networking).
My boyfriend Justin’s a Millennial and he’s actually the only guy amongst his friends whose parents have any problem at all with him being gay. Justin’s mom and dad are older though, as he was a “surprise” baby many years younger than his older sister, Darcy. I think Justin’s mom was over 40 when she had him. I believe the parents’ reaction to the son being gay depends 100% on how old they are and how they were conditioned when they were growing up and it has almost nothing to do with the son and how gay he acts or how openly he expresses his gayness.
Note that I deliberately never use the word “homosexual” because it’s a very cold and clinical term that I’ve had bad experience with; this was the favored term one mother I knew used for her son, to prove she had no problem at all with him “being a homosexual” and telling the world how good she was to “her homosexual son” when in fact it was clear as day she hated the fact he was “homosexual” and was straining to convince herself otherwise. Ever since dealing with that woman, whenever I hear “homosexual” I cringe. But, just like with “Boystown”, there are hatemail writers who keep insisting that gays “stole the word ‘gay’, which used to mean ‘happy’” and they are determined to take it back. Life is too short to get mixed up in these semantics battles…and I pity the people who invest so much precious energy in waging them.
Justin’s parents pretend he’s not gay but they don’t go the extra mile and invent a fake, straight life for him to tell relatives and family friends about. My parents have done that back in Cleveland for years and it’s a good portion of why I don’t have a relationship with them anymore, because it was humiliating to ever go back to Cleveland and run into people who would ask how my girlfriend “Alice” was. Being not only gay but also a child of the 80s, I’d immediately think of Linda Lavin and the other folks in Mel’s Diner…before wondering why on Earth anyone would ever think I have a girlfriend. But, that was my mother’s way of deflecting questions from the very foolish people she knows in Cleveland who would pepper her with endless questions about why I didn’t have a girlfriend. She didn’t want to tell them I was gay, but she did want them to shut up and leave her alone, so she became the author of this imaginary, alternate reality, romance novel where I’m straight and date women with names from old sitcoms. There was a “Marcia”, and a “Carol”, and a “Blair” too…but definitely never a “Tootie”, since the one thing in Cleveland worse to many of these buffoons than me being gay would have been me dating a black girl.
Justin’s still acclimating to the Cleveland way of doing things, where no one has any bad intentions, but where there’s an aggressive insultsmanship that’s almost a competitive sport with the people of Northeast Ohio. The only other culture I’ve seen this in is with people from the Middle East, where insulting someone doesn’t come from a place of malice, but as something to do to provoke conversation. It’s very much like that in Cleveland, where people greet each other by commenting on how fat the other person got, and then joking that means “you must be doing very well for yourself!”. Har-dee-har-har! The other person then takes a hand and rubs the other person’s head, then looks in his palm, and jokes about finding hairs that have fallen out. “What, are you building a ski slope up there, Chrome Dome, or are you just auditioning to play Lex Luthor?”. Ha-ha-ha-ha! The “hilarity” continues, with these Cleveland comedians going at one another until someone new walks in the room…and then they gang up on that person. If anyone objects to any of this, he’s told “Oh, they don’t mean nothin’ by it, they’re just funnin’ you, that’s all. Don’t be such a spoiled-sport”.
I don’t think anyone under 40 behaves this way, or is so stupid to never notice how uncomfortable they make other people while trying to be “funny” at social gatherings; everyone over 40, however, still acts like this back in Cleveland. I try to remember that when, to this day, whenever I encounter anyone from back home who inquires about my imaginary “girlfriend” that my mother’s told them all about. I’ve never seen the point in making trouble for her and setting these people straight (since, after all, she has to deal with them in her daily life and I don’t), but I refuse to play along with this. I just talk about something else instead, like really excellent politicians do when asked asinine questions by the media. No matter what’s asked of you, you can always talk about something else, as if you’re so excited about the subject you can’t think of anything else. Since most of these Clevelanders love the attention, if I start talking to them about their grandkids or their business or whatever, they’ll forget altogether they asked about my latest imaginary “girlfriend” Nancy or whomever.
I have to say, though, that all of this got a lot more complicated and difficult for me when Fran Eaton of the Illinois Review outed me in December of 2009. This was done as a hit job attack on me because I opposed Mark Kirk’s nomination for the United States Senate here in Illinois, and Fran Eaton decided to punish me for trying to stop Kirk’s coronation. Truthfully, she did it for another reason, too — because I had been dating a closeted bisexual political operative here in Chicago and the two of us had broken up badly. That guy and Fran Eaton remain good friends, so outing me on her site was a way for her to take two punches at me at once. Prior to that outing, I wrote 100% anonymously on politics and was not out as gay to the public at large. Fran Eaton knew that, and knew that I wrote anonymously here in HB because Obama acolytes on the Left wanted nothing more than to get my name so they could come after me on a personal level. Fran Eaton also knew that I wrote anonymously because I covered a lot of gay issues in my writing and that I didn’t want to embarrass family and friends back home by doing so under my real name.
The Cocktail Party GOP establishment outed me, via Fran Eaton, as a political hit job and served me up to the Left and the likes of the Daily Kos and DemocratUnderground so that I would be punished and have my name trashed for working so hard to oppose Barack Obama and what the Left has been doing to this country. The outing had a dramatic and permanent effect on my relationship with family and friends back home in Cleveland — none of whom have spoken with me since. Fran Eaton knew what she was doing when she pulled the trigger on me, and I forever need to note it was the Cocktail Party GOP establishment who nuked me and my personal life, though the Left was happy to take great advantage of it.
Politics is a blood sport, and always will be. Fran Eaton, to this day, claims I was fair game because I write often about Mark Kirk, Aaron Schock, Lindsey Graham, and Barack Obama being gay, but the difference is that these men are all elected officials and have a public duty to present themselves as they really are to voters — since their private lives have great bearing on their public decisions. Kirk, Schock, and Graham are routinely blackmailed by the Left to vote against the wishes of their constituents because the Left threatens to out them if they do not fall in line. Republican voters need to stop sending closeted gay men to Washington where they can be counted as Democrat votes whenever the Left chooses to play the blackmail card. If these guys would just come out — maybe even all at once, together one day in a big joint press conference — they could eliminate the efficacy of that blackmail in one swoop. That’s something I’ve been advocating for years because it would do immense good for the constituents these men are responsible to. I still don’t understand what Fran Eaton achieved by outing me, except to hurt me on a personal level and cause grief for my relatives and friends back home.
Justin, thankfully, has never had to deal with a Fran Eaton in his life, but his parents try their level best to ignore the fact that he’s gay. His mother has so convinced herself that he’s “only doing this for attention” that whenever he comes home she tries to set him up with a girl. Now that he’s long out of college, and most of the girls in his hometown in Arkansas have been married off, his mother has had to start picking from the bottom of the barrel. Last Christmas — and this has become my favorite Christmas story EVER — Justin’s mother called for him to come down because there were people there who wanted to meet him. He recognized the older woman as Mrs. Caruthers, and the younger woman was clearly a butch lesbian whom he’d never met. That was Mrs. Caruthers’ daughter, Lisa, who had just got out of the Navy. She was a Sea-Bee, which is a Naval carpenter. She has a motorcycle and evidently loves the Indigo Girls. It does not take a master detective to figure this sort of thing out, even though I freely admit I have zero gaydar when it comes to spotting lesbians. I can usually tell if a guy is gay by looking at his eyes, but I’m clueless when spotting lesbians. Lisa, according to Justin, was obvious…and Lisa picked up on Justin immediately too.
This whole farce played out anyway, though, with Mrs. Caruthers and Justin’s mom Carol-Anne working hard during the “Christmas visit” to set Lisa and Justin up. Mrs. Caruthers nudged Lisa with a “Why don’t you give Justin the present you brought him?” and Lisa mumbled, “Here Justin, Merry Christmas” without enthusiasm. They gave him a little tool kit, which was very nice actually, but it was something Justin had no idea what to do with.
And then Carol-Anne reached behind the couch and plopped a present in Justin’s lap. “Now Justin, give Lisa the nice present you picked out special for her”. This was the first Justin had ever seen or heard about this present. When Lisa opened it, inside was a bunch of scented candles — the really nice kind that smell like apple pie or cinnamon rolls or whatever (which are fun to burn if you love these things but would rather not be actually eating them all day, so you get to enjoy them without the calories…and possibly risk setting your house afire, which is always fun too).
“Thanks, I guess”, Lisa said, clearly not a candle girl.
Mrs. Caruthers and Carol-Anne were left to chit chat and plot and scheme together while Justin and Lisa ended up in the garage eventually, where Lisa fixed the alternator on Justin’s car, since he had no idea why the electricity kept giving out while he was driving. Lisa also changed the oil, repaired the wiring on a broken window, discovered a Smurf-village of tiny mushrooms growing under the front seat where the broken window had let moisture rain down, and possibly installed a flux capacitor for all I know. Ultimately, Lisa and Justin swapped the gifts they were given that day, since Justin loves candles and Lisa can’t get enough tools (and most definitely knows how to use them). Justin also gave her a box of vintage Playboy magazines that his father had given him that year, because clearly Justin had less use for those than he did the tools and Lisa appreciated them with gusto.
This year, Justin’s back in Eureka Springs for Christmas and guess who Carol-Anne invited over to see Justin: Mrs. Caruthers. Apparently, Lisa moved away and lives with a “girl friend” (deliberate space between the words, as if she’s just a friend who is a girl) but Mrs. Caruthers is still single and Carol-Anne has apparently shifted her tactics to include cougars in her never-ending quest to straighten up Justin. If this doesn’t work, I wouldn’t be surprised if Carol-Anne took Justin to visit Mrs. Caruthers’ mother in a nursing home next year before that saber-tooth went extinct.
It’s kind of hilarious, actually, Carol-Anne’s relentlessly (and in truth, her name too, since I forever picture her on her knees staring into the screen of an old television that’s been stuck in between channels and snowing wildly in her living room for some time). But, sad, too, that these people like Carol-Anne don’t want to actually know their son for who he really is and it’s sad how much women like her love living in this world of pretend where Justin loves tools and lesbian Lisa delights in scented candles.
Justin is honestly the sweetest guy you would ever meet, so he was very worried how I’d handle his parents and the way they treat him being gay. But, because my family in Cleveland is even less accepting with my being gay than the folks in Eureka Springs are with Justin, he and I don’t have the issues that a lot of gay couples have with this stuff.
I know many guys who have the uneven relationship where one’s set of parents is loving and supportive and the other side won’t be hospitable because they don’t like that their son lives with another man. So the guy who has the mean-spirited and hateful relatives always feels bad, since he can’t bring his boyfriend home for nice gatherings the way he gets invited to by the other side of the relationship. With me and Justin, he won’t be invited to anything in Cleveland because I’m not even invited myself…and I won’t be invited to Eureka Springs for anything, but I don’t mind because it’s not like Justin’s being feted by my family ever and so there’s no imbalance with us. We are on equal footing in terms of holidays and the point to which either of us are welcome at the other side’s events.
I do admit I’m missing him like crazy over Christmas, but next year I think I’ll take the drive with him and stay in a hotel downtown in Eureka Springs so at least we’re in the same state on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and maybe he can sneak away and spend a few hours with me before returning to the family events (and whatever setup his mother plans next). I’ve always wanted to see the Clinton Library so after Christmas I can catch a bus or something to Little Rock and spend a day or two there before heading back to Chicago. I think this sounds like fun 2012 holiday plans and am 100% fine with never meeting his parents, just as Justin’s fine with never meeting mine. I hope he brings home more scented candles this year though, because honestly, the cinnamon rolls one turns your whole apartment into a realistic facsimile of a CinnaBunn.
If you are reading this and think all of it is sad (the family stuff, not the candles), I admit it probably is. I have a few very good friends who have children who are in their twenties, so these are more of those “40-something or older” parents who have a different take on being gay than Justin’s or my own parents do. This really is a generational thing, and not a religious thing at all. Justin’s parents aren’t religious per se, though they nominally go to church. His mother sometimes claims the reason she won’t believe he is gay is because she thinks he is going to Hell, but I am sure it’s really because she’s afraid of what the neighbors in Eureka Springs will say if she admits she has a gay son. Justin’s father is 100% upset because he feels he failed as a father by having his son turn out gay — that’s why I think he tries giving Justin those old Playboys; it’s like he’s trying to fix Justin by forcing that pornography on him. I feel sad for them because Justin’s a truly terrific guy and they’re missing out on really experiencing that by continuing to insist they can “fix him” or set him up with either lesbians or the mothers of lesbians at the holidays.
Justin can’t be fixed because he’s not broken.
That brings us to the saddest part of this post because I need to address the guys who are much older than Justin and me, since these guys got the really raw end of all deals in terms of how their families treat them, during the holidays or otherwise. These are guys who are in their 50s and older, whose families made them pariahs for being gay and turned them into misfit toys forever doomed to be alone, and literally crying into their beer, during the holidays.
I also need to include black gay men in this section, since even the twenty and thirty something year old gay black guys have families who in many cases would rather kill them than admit the son was gay. The black community is the most ignorant and bigoted cultural subset in this country in more ways than the agenda-driven media will ever admit, but the capacity for hatred in black families is nowhere more evident than the treatment of black gay men (many of whom, like Barack Obama, live their whole lives “on the down low” for fear of becoming pariahs if the truth about them got out).
In Boystown at Christmas, you see a lot of old gay men and a lot of black gay men of any age really pounding back the alcohol during Thanksgiving and Christmas. The two places where this is most poignant are at Little Jim’s and in The Lucky Horseshoe. The former is a small dive bar that’s open later than the other bars, where the really hardcore alcoholics have been hanging out for years (it’s also, coincidentally, THE BEST place to get scoop from guys who know things about Barack Obama being gay, since many of these guys went to Man’s Country bathhouse back when he used to go there in the late 1990s and very early 2000s) and the latter is a male strip club where very old men slowly slip their life savings, dollar-by-dollar, into the jockstraps of dancers young enough to be their grandsons (though almost all of these dancers are straight).
At the holidays, there are many of these older guys who openly cry on their bar stools as they keep pounding back the shots and beer. They attract flocks of ducklings, because the holidays make them so drunk and generous. “Ducklings” are younger gay guys who follow drunks like this around because they are like little ducklings in the park trailing behind anyone who is dropping bread crumbs for them to snatch up; the ducklings want the older guys to buy them shots, so they flock around them. The older guys just love having good looking young guys around them, so they don’t mind. As long as the money holds out, these are the old guys’ holiday “friends”.
If you ever get one of these guys talking, he’ll tell you horror stories of what it was like growing up gay back in the 50s, 60s, or 70s. Many of their families kicked them out into the cold when they found muscle magazines or any sort of gay paraphernalia in their rooms. Some of these guys lost their families when they were much older, usually when they decided to move in with a guy because when they were still single, the families could pretend they were “just bachelors” but when they moved into a one bedroom apartment with another guy the families could no longer invent such fiction. It’s really pretty cruel what some parents did to their gay sons in the past; a lot of these guys are severely damaged from having been ostracized their entire adult lives. THESE guys are the ones who are broken and can never, ever be fixed.
Even worse, however, are the guys who were forced to play it straight and get married and have kids. These grandpas wash up at the Lucky Horseshoe, too, and many of them try to make up for lost time by being super grabby and aggressive in their last years. They won’t just pawn the jockstrap-clad dancers at the Shoe, but they’ll grab any young guy who walks by. I guess they figure they have only a few years left, and since they spent most of their lives pretending to be straight they need to work all this out now while they are still breathing. A few times a year the Shoe hosts a private party that costs $100 or more to attend; it’s 100% geared towards these grandpas, with the party selling out within a week or two of the tickets going on sale. They do this every New Year’s Day, Memorial Day, and Fourth of July, and instead of the dancers wearing jockstraps they are totally nude that day. It’s a private, ticketed event so the bar’s allowed to do this when otherwise nudity is prohibited in bars here in Chicago. The old guys who come for the naked days are in absolute heaven seeing these young dancers walk around with nothing on. It is the polar opposite of the intense misery on their faces during holidays when these old guys look like they wish they were dead; during those naked parties at the Shoe, these guys look like they have finally come alive for once in their lives. I bet they wish every day was New Year’s Day and that Christmas and Thanksgiving didn’t exist.
I spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with my friend Althea and her family here in Chicago, while Justin was in Arkansas, and I was touched beyond anything I could ever tell you because I had about a half dozen invitations to spend Christmas with all sorts of friends all across the country. So it doesn’t bother me at all that people in Cleveland don’t like that I’m gay, and are still sore about me being outed by Fran Eaton at Illinois Review (which I’ve been blamed for, for “drawing attention to myself” and “shoving it in everyone’s face” when Fran did that, not me). Althea thinks her son TJ, who is 7, is going to be gay when he grows up and there are indeed a lot of signs indicating that. Althea’s fine with it, but she knows half of her family won’t be so she’s trying to figure out what to do when it’s time to cross that rainbow-colored bridge (I’ve told her to stock up on scented candles). She told me she hopes most of the older people who will have a problem with it will have passed on by then, but TJ’s dad is not going to take it well and neither will TJ’s uncles. Just like with Justin’s dad, these guys will see TJ being gay as some sort of commentary on their own masculinity. Add on top of that the fact that TJ might grow up to be a gay black man and the black community is so intensely prejudiced against gays, and Althea’s got some things to worry about. Althea being Althea, though, she’s taking it all in stride because TJ is a remarkable to the point of prodigy dancer and singer, so all of these relatives aren’t going to have a problem at all with him if he hits it big as an entertainer or becomes a success of any kind.
Suddenly, if you’re famous enough, nobody has a problem with you being gay anymore. That right there also underscores the fact that it’s not religion at all that drives the people who keep their gay sons at arms’ length, but it’s the social stigma they are afraid of for having a gay son. Because if it was really a religious thing — truly — than no matter how famous the kid got the family would still have a problem with him being gay. But, Althea personally knows a few black men who are very famous, and very gay, and the families stopped having problems with the gay part of their lives when the money part started flowing in big time.
“As long as they can brag on you, they don’t hate on you”, she told me.
It’s going to be really weird for me in 2012 though, because Justin and I are going to get a civil union. I’m starting to plan where we’re going to have it and who we’re going to invite. Neither of us are big party people, so I don’t want to have a big fete, just a little dinner after a City Hall ceremony. Part of me wants to have it in New York City as near to Ground Zero as possible so my friend Jane can be there in spirit, because she would have been cheering the loudest for me in real life if she hadn’t been murdered in the 9/11 attacks ten years ago. Justin’s never been to New York, so that would be a fun trip for him, and I have a lot of good friends who live there who have become very much like family to me. Althea has already promised to make the trip wherever we have it, and I have other good friends coast to coast who’ve made the same pledge. I think it’s sad that neither Justin nor I will have any relatives in attendance, but “family” can always be whatever we define it as…and we’ll be able to fill up whatever party room we book wherever we have it, I’m sure.
I never thought I’d be getting civil-unioned, ever. But, missing Justin as much as I do while he’s off visiting his family at Christmas really makes me appreciate how much I love the guy. He drives me absolutely crazy sometimes, but when he’s down in Arkansas I almost don’t know what to do with myself because my best buddy’s not here with me, reading over my shoulder as I type or asking me endless strings of questions about whatever I’m writing. I’ve never wanted what I have with Justin with a woman, and never will. I’ll let the medical and religious experts of the world waste their lives debating why that is, and instead spend my time working on plans to make 2012 the best year Justin and I have ever had.
I really want to spend the rest of my life with him and I want him right beside me on every adventure I have from here on out.
I don’t mind him going back to Arkansas every year for Christmas and will just have to work around the fact that his parents are never going to accept, love, or include me in anything. That’s the hand I’m dealt and there’s nothing I can do to change that. On the upside, I get to spend Christmas with great friends like Althea, which I wouldn’t have been able to do if I had been invited down to Eureka Springs, so everything for me balances out in the end. And it’s not like Justin’s being invited to Cleveland, either.
I know things were not as balanced out for the generations of gay men who came before me, so believe me, I am grateful for what I have and for all the great friends who have no problem at all with my being gay. Because of that, I don’t envy the younger guys whose parents fully support them…though I am really glad the generations that are maturing in the years ahead will never have to go through what those older guys at Little Jim’s or the Shoe went through, and that in time they won’t even be able to fathom what it must have been like for the grandpas who cry in their beers on Christmas.
To answer the question from Tori in Minneapolis who asked about what it’s like to be gay at Christmas, I think it all depends on how old a guy is and what generation his parents came from. I hope the anecdotes above gave you some insight into this — but I’ll say it again, this has only been my anecdotal experience based on what I’ve seen and heard in my own life. If you had a different take on it, please feel free to chime in with a comment below. I’m sure Tori would love to hear it.
And if you ever have a question at all about gay life, please feel free to ask it. I never mind taking the time to write these but also never know what you are interested in hearing unless you take the time to ask.
© 2011, Kevin DuJan. All rights reserved.
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Congratulations to you and Justin on your upcoming civil union! I knew when you started writing about Justin, that you’d found something special. Your online voice seemed to be ‘smiling’. Your relationship has seen some extremely hard times, and has obviously been strengthened by them. So awesome! My very best wishes to you both, for a bright future together.
I completely agree and it comes out so warmly and romantic it makes me smile. Hopefully you can spread those good vibes around to those of us who are still single
My gay cousin's partner is the one who read the Christmas story from the Bible at the family gathering this year. Everybody likes him. The two are accepted as a couple, and they seem to enjoy seeing everybody else at Christmas and other occasions (and I'm always glad to see that they're still together).
Some of the older relatives and the more conservatively religious relatives may have objected to homosexuality as a matter or principle, but they apply the concept of "we are all fallen beings and God loves us anyway, so we will love each other, especially our relatives (and their friends)." I wish everybody could have such great relatives.
I don't care if people are gay, I never have (and I am fascinated by drag queens), but I have come across some really nasty gay people who are hateful hardcore leftists that say some of the most vile things and, you know, they always seem to be older, do you think they are so nasty and mean perhaps because of how horribly they were treated by their families?
On another note, I am delighted that you and Justin are so happy together, just like Violet, I remember when you first started writing about him here at HillBuzz and I too felt that you'd really found someone very special.
Congratulations to you and Justin and thanks again for the great writing. Have Happy New Year (but I think you have that covered )
Thank you for sharing your insights – and your life – with your readers. Congratulations and best wishes for your upcoming union.
Good post, although, I'd say it speaks in generalities. I've known the Black parent who embraces the gay child, The older Catholic parents who do the same. I've seen the younger Asian man never come out to his parents – but give them all the respect they are due as his parents. I've seen the young gay man – who like Justin, has loving parents who simply won't talk about his being gay (they have never tried to set him up). He is not willing to fight with his parents – he loves and respects them, at the moment there is no one special in his life but that will be the point where he makes an issue.
Parent child relations are always a two way street. – no matter what the sexual orientation is.
One thing that horrified me on Glee and other gay themed movies is that initially a parent is shown as accepting of the gay child – but then in order to create drama and conflict – they make a small faux pas that is blown out of proportion and suddenly are no longer considered loving parents.
Unfortunately too many gays get their social cues from TV and movies and so follow suit.
There will always be good and bad parents – but there will never be perfect parents. If you are living in a different city – and can go home for the holidays – suck it in, put aside all your petty anger and be the best child you can be – you may be amazed at how that thaws the relationship.
If it doesn't than just remember – Honor they Mother and Father is in the 10 commandments for a reason, it's not love – it's honor. You can do that for a weekend.
If the parents have cut you off and do fall into the bad parent category – move on and make the effort to friend a lonely old person in a nursing home – you will find people there who have been cut off by bad children and would love to have a relationship with someone from a younger generation.
The bad stuff is unfortunately still happening to some guys even in the younger generations, making them move miles away from families they want to shield from the "embarrassment" of them being themselves. So glad that, for the most part, though, things are changing.