Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Jesus, another tour group
In Ceremonies, after Mickey came out to his sister, and then to his mother the next day, he found he had to come out to his friend at work. He took his friend Charles to a fast food restaurant on the highway. After some preliminary talk about cars and tires and politics—it’s in the middle of the 1984 presidential election—Mickey says,
“You know the boy who drowned?”
“What boy?”
“The one who was thrown off the bridge?”
“Oh, that. Sure.”
“Well, he was a homosexual—”
[Charles] doesn’t say anything.
“—and it upset a lot of his friends, a lot of the homosexuals in Cardiff—”
“What are you telling me?”
“It upset me. It made me real angry that somebody—”
“Why did it make you angry?” His eyes have narrowed and he has pulled away a little bit.
“I’m a friend of his.”
I am aware of the children shouting and squealing on the slide.
“You queer?” His face has crumpled up into a mask of disbelief.
“I am a homosexual.”
A pause.
“No shit!” He lifts his hands from his knees and then drops them down again and leans on them. “You’re a fucking queer!” He starts to laugh. People look at us. “Why are you telling me? You coming on to me?” He laughs. “I know, you’re telling me to be careful around you, you can’t help yourself, right?”
So, Mickey was out to his little gang—his boyfriend and Jack and Claire and Timothy and Bernie, people who came to his house and ate his food and watched his TV—and then he came out to his sister and to his mother, and now he is coming out to Charles, the guy from work. Later, he will come out on television—by which he comes out to everybody—after the funeral service for Bernie. A television reporter and cameraman stop them as they are walking down the lane from the burial plot:
It is 3:45 p.m. in the afternoon on Friday—the funeral began an hour ago—and the sun is beyond the trees. There is no cloud in the sky. The trees, great elms up against the hillside and willows along the lane, in a light breeze, rustle and cast deep shadows. The cemetery grasses are a deep, rich green, the effect of lavish care, and in the shadows the granite tombstones are gray and cool. The cameraman has turned the camera on me. At first I am aware of this only in the periphery of my vision. And then, drawn naturally toward it, I turn to the camera and face it down, talking, answering the reporter's long questions on Bernie's death and its effect on the gay community in Cardiff, on me and my homosexuality, on grief and loss, staring into the large black round glass eye. "Bernie was very courageous. He said, I am what I am. In many ways, he died of that courage." The camera's lens sees me, and in the broad light of day it takes me in without blinking.
Another friend, Dana, a young woman who is slightly older and has a partner and a baby and a good job, and whom all the kids in Ceremonies look up to, says, “I learned, however, that you never get to the end of coming out. On the other side of the glass there is always a new tour group coming through who haven't been here before. They start using language about you that doesn't apply, and if you're not careful, the words will begin to seep into your mind and cause damage, like water in a gas tank. They need it all explained to them, and you have to put down your business and lay it all out in simple terms.”
You may never get to the end of coming out. You can’t ever come out to everybody, even on television or the newspapers. You may have to do it over and over. It’s not ever going to be finished.
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