THE CANCELED INVITATION (NOTES ON GRIFFITH PARK) by Wes Hempel
If you’re a gay man who frequented L.A.’s Griffith Park during the late 1970s, chances are I had sex with you. In the hills above the tennis courts, behind the fern dell, the Hollywood sign, in pine stands and oak groves, in bushes, ravines, glens and hollows. I was the boy sitting on the drainage pipe near the turnout. You came in flannel shirts and tank tops, in cut-offs and mustaches, wedding rings, sports coats, khaki business slacks. I remember you. But looking back, I remember not only that particular place and time, but more so the odd link we seemed to forge. It’s that link I want to talk about now, the curious intersection between injury and desire.
I was a student in Bible college when I discovered Griffith Park. It wasn’t far from my dormitory, and a new friend suggested we take a drive there. I suspected nothing, though perhaps I should have. In those days, the mid-1970s, Scottie’s earring and dyed blond hair meant only one thing: he was defiantly gay. We had met the previous week at church. He’d been dragged there by his parents, and afterwards we went around the corner to Bob’s Big Boy in Glendale. We ended up talking most of the night, Scottie narrating his recent sexual encounters in language designed to make me blush. I complied. He enjoyed scandalizing me, and I couldn’t have been more ripe.
L.I.F.E. Bible College, the Lighthouse of International Foursquare Evangelism, founded by Aimee Semple McPherson and attached to Angelus Temple, sits across the street from Echo Park in Los Angeles. It was summer, and the dorms were mostly empty. I had a room to myself, which Scottie wanted to see. He stood just inside the door, shaking his dyed blond head. The walls were bare. My bed, neatly made, sat next to a small dresser, the only other piece of furniture in the room.
I had seen his room at his parents’ house, beads, tie-dyed swaths of cloth, David Bowie posters, incense, black lights, pages from Tiger Beat taped to his headboard. Our rooms were telling of our respective personalities. Nineteen-year-old Scottie, exuberant and spontaneous, was completely unashamed. He could see I was in need of rescuing. His plan couldn’t have been more effective had he whisked me onto the back of a white steed. Let’s go to the park.
I wonder now about the timing. I had just come off a seven day fast. I often fasted in Bible college. Taking water only, I kept extending the time – two days, three days, four days. This had been the longest fast I’d completed, and it is a testament to how desperately I wanted God to change my sexual orientation. It’s one thing to get past the second or third day. Anyone who’s voluntarily gone seven days without food can tell you you don’t get past the fourth day unless you mean it. Young and naive, I couldn’t have been more sincere. Or more miserable. I was still holding out hope, though I must’ve known by then my prayers were in service of a hopeless cause. God was not going to transform me into a heterosexual. There is no God who transforms homosexuals into heterosexuals.
Near The Greek Theatre, Scottie directed me down a lane behind the golf course where we parked the car. I followed him up a steep path and then another. We climbed through a section of pine forest and then descended into a canyon where we were surrounded by half-naked men.
* * *
It was, for me, like something out of science fiction. One minute I was studying Hermeneutics and the next I was on the Planet Risa. If I could’ve at twenty-one designed a Holodeck program to mimic my sexual fantasies, it would’ve looked very similar to what I encountered that day in real life: a series of interconnected paths crossing the wooded hillsides and leading to small secluded clearings and bowers, the paths populated with the most remarkable array of men, from youths and muscled laborers to fatherly bears and even jocular grandfatherly types, most wearing little or no clothing. A Fellini version of Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights,” tailored to my specific tastes. All of this, not fifteen minutes from my dorm room.
The place seemed familiar to me the first time I set foot in it. Nestled in a spur of the Santa Monica Mountains that reach into the Los Angeles basin, Griffith Park is, according to their literature, the largest municipal park in the U.S. Its over 4000 acres contain over fifty miles of trails. I couldn’t make sense of how familiar it seemed (had I been here in a previous life?) until someone informed me that dozens of Hollywood movies contain scenes filmed in the park, among them Birth of a Nation, Rebel Without a Cause, and the 1956 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The tunnel to Bronson’s canyon was used as the entrance to the Batcave in the 1960s television series “Batman,” a program I watched avidly despite being irked by its parodic nature. Later I would witness firsthand studio crews arriving and setting up equipment. I wasn’t particularly starstruck at the time, but I remember watching with interest from a secluded ridge the filming of what would turn out to be a scene from Back to the Future.
* * *
Over the next several years, through the rest of the seventies, I went to Griffith Park almost every day. It was the era before AIDS, and as I had spent my teenage years begging a Pentecostal God to turn me straight, I was motivated to make up for lost time.
I started my senior year of Bible college but a few weeks into the semester dropped out. Renting a tiny carriage house in Glendale, I got a job at the large Adventist hospital nearby. My official position, a source of endless amusement to Scottie, was “Call Boy,” though I soon worked my way up to “Surgical Assistant.” Despite the fancy title, I was more or less an ordinary orderly at the beck and call of the OR. Occasionally a doctor would walk me through an operation, mistaking me for one of the aspiring technicians or a pre-med student. I often found myself wondering afterward if it might be possible, something like med school, though my three years at L.I.F.E. Bible College had not left me in good stead. The school was not accredited.
I had to be at the hospital at six in the morning, which meant I ate breakfast around five, often getting up at four a.m. to go jogging first. I had my lunch at 10:30, and then was off some time between two and three, depending on the afternoon schedule. I was trying at the time to gain weight, working out at the gym in the evenings, drinking protein shakes and eating thick peanut butter and jelly sandwiches between meals. Whenever I had time at work, I stopped by the cafeteria. The Seventh Day Adventists know how to make lasagna and they know how to make desserts, and I filled up on both, but as I was on such an aggressive regimen of exercise (at my therapist’s urging in lieu of anti-depressants), I still hovered around 130 pounds. I’m not that tall, just under 5 foot 8, but I was still skinny.
Then my doctor suggested steroids. No one took steroids in those days. Anabolic drugs were a fairly recent development. They were not in the news. I had been lifting weights for years with only minimal results, but inside nine months on Dianabol, I gained over fifteen pounds of muscle.
After work, I went to the park. It’s only a short drive from Glendale. If I made the lights, I was there in less than twenty minutes. I parked beside the tennis courts, stashed most of my clothes under the front seat and climbed the hill. As the afternoon sun slanted through the trees, I hiked the trails in my new body. For someone who’d been nicknamed “beanpole” in grade school, who’d been mostly invisible in high school, and who when he had been noticed was called “queer” and “homo,” beaten up behind Five Points Bowl and Uncle John’s Pancake House and Thrifty Drug, for a boy who was seen as a source of shame by his siblings and ignominy by his parents, it was nice to be admired. A rush, being the object of someone else’s lust. I felt such gratefulness for the men who smiled at me I found it impossible to remain aloof.
If you’re living two separate lives – and I was one person in scrubs at the hospital and another out of them at the park – a place like those hillsides can become addictive. Attention is like an opiate. Get enough in sufficient doses, you don’t seek out deeper connections. My therapist urged me to consider whether a longer term relationship might be more fulfilling than non-stop anonymous sex, and I could see his point. But it took several years for the place to feel oppressive to me.
I was, quite literally, in love with Griffith Park. My habit was to get there early on weekend mornings to hike and be alone. There are days in southern California when the winds have blown the smog away and a spring rain has washed the air and the sky is a liquid, prehistoric blue so that the Los Angeles basin is one of the most spectacularly beautiful places on earth. Such days are few and far between, but you’re reminded, occasionally, why upwards of ten million people live there.
From the upper trails of the park on such days, you can see the crisp outline of the Sierra Madres and down to the Pacific and to Catalina Island beyond. The air is redolent with pine and eucalyptus resins, the hillsides lush with coastal sage scrub, and the craggy wildness of the place asserts itself. There’s a broadness to the light, climbing the ledges of the park and dropping over the valley where red tiled roofs dot the palm-lined streets below. It’s a western landscape, a Pacific landscape, and what it brings to mind for me are the Laguna Arts Colony paintings of Old California, of burro trails and the adobe missions founded by the Franciscan friars.
Because you’re surrounded by this beauty, and because you feel removed from the dailiness of the city below – people driving to work, taking their kids to school, families going to church – because you’re standing on this abandoned hillside taking in your share of oxygen allotted all God’s creatures, you can’t help but ask questions about the ultimate meaning of things. The question I ask myself is what would human beings look like without acculturation, without assimilation, without religious traditions. What would we make of ourselves without the juggernaut of culture co-opting the synapses in our brains?
No one invents the world. Everything we learn is filtered through language and beliefs we inherit. Only Adam got to name things. We don’t broker directly with nature, rarely even with our own natures. Yet all of us have within us the ability to assign our own meanings and, as sovereign individuals, must feel at least inchoately the indignity of that loss.
With the other gay men in the park I step back into something from boyhood, the dirt paths reminiscent of unpaved streets, or further, deeper into something more primitive, back before the code, before language.
* * *
One morning at the hospital, I got a call to bring up a victim of a motorcycle accident, a teenage boy. Believing time of the essence, I rushed to the staff elevator, wheeled the gurney into the Emergency Room but then had to wait. The doctors were still busy trying to stabilize him. A nurse who was bent over his torso told me to put on a pair of gloves. Blood is “dirty,” of course, you can catch all kinds of nasty things from it. I thought she was afraid I might touch the bloodied sheets during transport, but after I had the gloves on, she handed me the tweezers she’d been using to pick glass and gravel from his flesh. “Here. Make yourself useful.”
I’d worked at the hospital long enough to read this as a sign. They didn’t expect him to make it. I set to work, trying not to glance at his face. But I couldn’t help but wonder who he was. Anything like me? Was he straight? Gay? A bully? At what point does it not matter? At what point does everything – all the beliefs and views that govern our lives – fall away? I dropped a shard of glass into the pan, irrigated his wounds, and I knew. This was that moment.
They kept “losing” him and bringing him back. At death’s door, he refused to walk through. I had not prayed in a while, but I prayed then.
As it turned out, he surprised everyone. He did not die in the emergency room. Eventually they let me wheel him up to the OR where he made it through not only the initial operation but subsequent ones that followed. He would come to characterize that summer for me, this injured boy. He was never far from my mind. In the coming weeks, I would wheel him from surgery to Intensive Care, from ICU to Pulmonary ICU, from Pulmonary ICU again to surgery – back and forth – and only two months later to the morgue, where alone in the staff elevator at the back of the hospital, I would weep onto the sheet that covered his face.
Life is tenuous. It’s one thing to aknowledge a fact intellectually, and another to know it firsthand. When all is said and done, what ultimately matters? There was a reason that question kept haunting me. I had lost the beliefs that had previously helped me make sense of things like death. And I had lost the one thing, so I increasingly came to realize, that meant more to me than anything else in the world, my family.
* * *
In my version of Back to the Future (or perhaps in a Holodeck program of returning to the past), I’m fourteen again and don’t back down in the confrontation with my parents. I’m queer, I say. Get used to it. There’s nothing wrong with it. You’re going to have to change your religious beliefs because I need you to champion me as a gay boy. I need you to help me fight the school and the church and everyone else. Sorry for upsetting you, but this is the way things are.
I wouldn’t ask for their acceptance, I’d demand it. In the end (either end, real or imagined), it wouldn’t help. They would still disown me, but I would not let them convince me – the thing I most regret in my life – I would not let them convince me, as I did at fourteen, that I was sick, that being homosexual meant there was something wrong with me, that I was in need of a cure.
I embraced my family’s religion in the same breezy way I went to the movies with my brother. Summers we had passes to the Wednesday matinee, and one week we saw the 1956 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I edged close to my older brother, gripping the arms of the seat. Afterward we laughed about it as we walked home. How preposterous! It was ludicrous – wasn’t it – giant plant-like pods! Aliens from outer space! As if something sinister could infiltrate one’s brain. As if something could take you over “cell by cell, atom by atom,” as one of the characters put it. As if “suddenly while you’re asleep they’ll absorb your minds, your memories, and you’ll be reborn” as someone else, something else, no longer you.
* * *
Homosexuals, of course, don’t own the exclusive rights to dubious sexual behavior. There are all kinds of creeds willing to assign all strain of stigma to all manner of practice. Most of us, gay or straight, end up having to negotiate at some point the meter readings on that spectrum. Heterosexuals testing non-textbook sex may be no more inclined to contextualize (or resist contextualizing) their experiments, the difference being: off-center is where gays begin.
Of the men in the park, I was partial to “daddy” types, large-knuckled men who were older than me. I liked then, and do still, a man’s smells. There’s a wide range of opinions among males when it comes to cleanliness. On one end of the spectrum are those who wash and shave without complaint. My father was one of these. He seemed never so cheerful as when he stood before the bathroom mirror, his face lathered with shaving creme, interrupting a whistled song (“Lemon Tree” comes to mind) to mow a broad swath across his chin. On the other end are those who left alone would happily go unshaven, unbathed, unwashed for days, scratching their mangy scalps until dandruff flaked. My older brother was one of these. I often caught him sniffing a days-old T-shirt before putting it on. Clean enough! The clean-enough crowd in the park intrigued me. I find that the chemical odors of after shave and deodorant pale in comparison with a man’s natural smells.
Flannel shirts and mustaches were popular in those days, as were tank tops, nylon running shorts and over the calf socks. Then there were the men who showed up in suits or unfashionable jeans or uninspired golf wear – clothing picked out by their wives. I could often spot what I thought were married men. Some took off their rings, but then there was that band of untanned skin. I’m not sure why I gravitated to them. Perhaps I understood something about their particular brand of loneliness. To hide means to be alone. To lie means to live in fear of being found out. It’s like life lived before the boards, at a parole hearing, or at your orals, the committee, pens poised, appraising your every word. “The eyes of others our prisons,” Virginia Woolf writes, “their thoughts our cages.”
So when they make it to the park and get their brief few minutes with another man, it’s not just the sex. It’s a chance to escape the faces of their judges, to come up for air, to relax a second in their own skins. I try not to think of their wives, the inexplicable absence at the center of their marriages they must continually navigate. Instead I focus on what’s happening in these men’s faces. Think of an exotic plant opening. It’s amazing to watch their hidden selves blossom. And of course they’re grateful, laughing as I joke with them, pulling at their clothes, messing up their hair, play-punching their chests. In the world below I’m reserved, but up here I’m happily social.
In part because it’s L.A., there are men of every ethnicity here. I remember a day sitting on a knoll between a young West African guy and an older VietNamese man, my arms around their naked shoulders, the three of us making out as a Middle Eastern man on his knees blew us. If Freud is right and war finds its source in repressed sexuality, we gay men in the park may hold the key to world peace.
There was one guy, perhaps in his thirties, who appeared occasionally, parking alongside a ridge that was a favorite spot of mine. I would see him driving up the canyon, scanning the cliffs; when he saw me, he’d hang a U and park just below where I was perched, maybe ten feet above. Our encounters, dozens of them over the course of one fall, were conducted completely by gesture. He made no move to get out of his car; I didn’t climb down the ridge. I never got to look into his eyes or put my arms around him or smell his breath, but he enjoyed watching me watch him and always gave me a big smile as he wiped his chest with his shorts before driving away.
* * *
It’s dusk on the trail, the winter sun setting. There’s an anxiety in the air, a move among the men still here to find a mate before darkness sets in. I’m reminded of the street I grew up on, the sky fading and a rush among the boys of my neighborhood to get in one more thing, one more inning, one more score, before our mothers came out on porches to call us home. I’m hesitant to leave the park now but know if I wait much longer, I’ll have to hike down in the dark. It’s against the law to be on the trails after nightfall. A ranger’s flashlight could mean a ticket.
I went to the park in sun and rain, heat and wind, when clouds brushed the top of the Hollywood sign or rumbled out over the valley. Just after I dropped out of L.I.F.E., I sat on a rock in the fog one morning and thought about the high-ceilinged classroom where my former classmates were bent over their Machen’s Greek New Testaments or their Synoptic Gospels – the texts aligned side by side so you could see the life of Jesus from the different points of view. On a yellow hillside below, a pair of deer appeared. It was still and silent, the wet leaves of the eucalyptus arcing from stems as graceful as a Calder mobile. And then a naked man stepped out of the fog. Whether it’s one of those truths universally acknowledged or not, I can tell you that men, in all kinds of weather, look for sex.
* * *
The most unconventional friendship I had was with a man five or so years my senior who I saw hundreds of times in the park. I never learned his name. I thought of him as my sailor, in part because he seemed so adrift. He had very clear, very light blue eyes, and despite his lostness, there was something capable about him as if he could do something extraordinary (like break onetwothreefourfive pigoensjustlikethat). We rarely spoke to each other yet shared an intimacy hard to describe. He wasn’t affectionate. He kissed me (a rather solemn kiss) only when we parted. He had a bashful, impish quality to him, a way of lifting one corner of his mouth in a conspiratorial smile. I always made toward him when I saw him. I loved being the recipient of that smile. No matter where we met in the park, he would steer us with gestures and shrugs to a place we could be alone. Of the over fifty miles of trails, he seemed to know every secluded path, every glade and ravine, every remote clearing.
One day, he smiled sheepishly and pointed above his ear, tilting his head for my inspection. His close-cropped scalp was shaved near his temple, and on the blue-white skin ran a row of four or five stitches. For someone who spent his days in the operating room, I surprised myself by feeling queasy.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Didn’t duck,” he said.
He volunteered no further explanation, and as our relationship had never included personal questions, I didn’t ask. Had he been in a fight? Perhaps in some biker bar? The scenario seemed not unlikely for there was something of the bruiser about him. Our affections were often accompanied by wrestling matches, roughhousing, horseplay – one of the things I loved about being with him. In fact, his pointing out his stitches was not a bid for sympathy but by way of apology. We’d have to take it easy.
The point with most of the men in the park was sex, but things evolved differently with the impish sailor and me. Like anyone else, he had seen things, felt things. He had a story to tell and wanted, I think desperately, to tell it but for some reason was bereft of words.
Our lives are stunted by the things we cannot say. Anyone with a secret can tell you that unburdening yourself is the only alternative to wretchedness. It’s a pointed scene in Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass when the protagonist, Lyra, trapped in the Land of the Dead (a kind of purgatory) discovers from the harpies the only way out is to tell her story. “We live the stories we tell,” Mark Doty says in his memoir Firebird, “the stories we don’t tell live us. What you don’t allow yourself to know controls and determines; whatever’s held to the light ‘can be changed’ – not the facts, of course, but how we understand them, how we live with them.”
What my sailor saw in me as a receptive interpreter, I don’t know. We were attuned to the same wavelength and involved in an uncanny reenactment, perhaps, of something that had actually happened to him. I can’t explain it, but I caught a glimpse inside him. Something boyish in him had survived his adolescence – he was beaten (as most of us were, gay boys of that generation) – but a part of him was not broken, and when he took my hand and led me to whatever destination he had in mind, I was reading a part of his soul as if by braille, and I felt each secluded place we entered to be an outpost he’d constructed from what in him had survived the Gulag.
I like to believe it mattered, the time we spent together. Our friendship, our love affair (neither term seems accurate), went on for four or five years. For a couple of weeks one spring I didn’t see him, and then a month went by. Was he ill? Had he an encounter with another broken bottle? I had no way of knowing. Surely, he’d have told me had he knowledge afore of going away. Something else must’ve happened to him, I thought. Later, I wondered if he was perhaps one of the early victims of AIDS. I didn’t know what to think. He simply stopped coming to the park.
* * *
On a gloomy day some years later in Rothenburg, Germany, I got caught in a downpour. I made my way to the nearest museum, paid my marks and descended the stairs, which seemed to go down and down and down. Eventually I emerged into a stone-lined underground chamber: the Medieval Torture Museum. In a glass vitrine was a “mouth pear.” Reminiscent of an actual pear in size and shape, it was made from segmented pieces of metal with a screw at the bottom. Turn the screw, and the segmented leaves open like petals of a flower. Ingenious. An artisan had taken the time to filigree the segments, and before I read the placard I thought the object beautiful. Not much has survived by way of documentation, but the device is believed to have been inserted into the mouths of victims, heretics and sodomites, the screw turned so that their mouths were spread wide enough to render them mute. The executioner was then able to remove their skin, flay them alive, without having to listen to their screams.
A relic from the past, but the barbarism lives on. Gay men and women are still tortured and killed today in different parts of the globe. At this writing, there are five nations in the world where you can be put to death for being gay (Saudi Arabia, Mauritania, Sudan, Yemen, Iran), and many more where you can be imprisoned. According to ReligionFacts, an organization that compiles objective data on religions worldwide, the Iranian government has, since the Islamic revolution, executed more than 4000 of its citizens for homosexuality.
* * *
When you’re standing on a ridge in Griffith Park in 1975, watching the men on the paths, it’s hard to put yourself in the wider context of gay experience, or any larger context for that matter – the history of Los Angeles, say, the native Chumash and Tongva who were here before the early Spanish and Portuguese explorers and who traversed the wide basin below and sheltered in the lee of these hills. You don’t think of those who will come after or how you’re only a dot occupying this patch of dirt on this ledge of time. You know only that right now you’re part of a marginalized segment of humanity finding solace in the simplest and ultimately most conventional of forms. We are a republic of outcasts. We do not fit into that world down there. We are not a part. We skirt at best its invisible edges, and so we convene in special places like these hillsides where we can be together.
For a time, it was ours, that section of the park: Vermont canyon, Vista Del Valle Drive, Aberdeen trail, the pine groves along Commonwealth, the large turnout near the water tank, the back side of that water tank, Fern Canyon trail, Upper Beacon trail, all along the Hogback up to Dante’s View. Most of it was remote enough that straight people rarely ventured up there (and then usually scurried quickly away). I tried not to mind that we’d taken it over. Heterosexuals, after all, own the whole rest of the world. That tiny slice belonged to us, and that was okay because so much of our lives had been circumscribed by a society that dismissed us, devalued us or worse. Park rangers mostly left us alone. Occasionally they’d make a sweep (when someone complained, I suspect), and for a week or two the lower trails would be empty. The L.A.P.D. knew we were there, but the only time they bothered us was just after graduation at the Police Academy in neighboring Elysian Park. Then the rookie class would show up to practice swinging their billy clubs and making their first arrests. An introduction to the seedy underworld – how I imagine they saw it. Go next door and harass the queers.
I respect in the abstract the role of the social contract, but I don’t apologize for our having commandeered a corner of that park. It’s been returned now, anyway (thanks, in part, to Craigslist). If you climb those hills today, you’ll likely find yourself in the company of park staff, clothed joggers and those once scurrying heterosexuals out hiking or power walking.
I am inclined to apologize for what this account leaves out: the variety of encounters between the men on a given day, the idiosyncratic scenarios you’d likely not see elsewhere, that certain expanse of cloth you have seen elsewhere, but fashioned on the path with a gambler’s chance of coming off, the modest orgy in the bushes just yards from the Universal Studios crew, the officer I thought was going to arrest me and then had something else in mind, the disabled man who walked all the way up from the Fern Dell on metal arm braces and who, when I invited him to sit with me, wept as I massaged his arms.
* * *
If it’s renegade, our sexuality, it has it source in tragedy – the tragedy of vulnerable children taught to view their most natural desires as wrong, forced to view themselves, who they are, as evil.
In the eighth grade, I fell in love with a boy named Fernando. I wanted to hold him in my arms and press my face into his neck. That’s how my desires expressed themselves to me. I wanted to smell his neck. There was something sacred in my feelings, and I couldn’t comprehend how something that felt so holy could be wrong. But I had grown up in a fundamentalist family in a conservative suburb of Los Angeles. I was thirteen and faced with what seemed to me insurmountable odds, for if my feelings were not wrong, then everyone else had to be wrong, my school, my town, my family, my religion, God. How could God be wrong?
Junior High, the training ground for high school, was in the sixties like preparing for a lavish ball. It seemed we were all invited. Invitations differed, of course. (Janis Ian would soon clarify that in the most eloquent way.) The lucky ones would get more limelight. But the point was, every child’s invitation had gold lettering reading: Everybody Welcome. Unless you were gay. On the poor gay kid’s invitation was an asterisk next to this lettering. And at the bottom next to the asterisk, in red print it said: Except you, you’re not invited, don’t come.
That’s what it felt like to discover you were gay. Everything everyone was preparing for, not just high school, not just the football games and the dances and the pool parties and the caravans to the beach, but all the benefits of adulthood, life in the larger world – none of that was for you. There would be no place for you. You were not wanted. Whatever talents or gifts you may’ve been granted by fate were abrogated by the fact that you were gay. You’re not invited. Don’t come.
* * *
Above I alluded to some of the more luring things left out of this account. Here are the more poignant ones: the talk I had with the Dean at L.I.F.E. Bible College when I was leaving school, my family’s shock when I told them the news, the time I spent jogging around the track at 4 a.m., wondering what kind of erased blur filled the spot in my father’s heart that used to be me. And perhaps most importantly how a good therapist over the course of several years led me to discover – all previous definitions erased – who I was.
It was with that therapist’s help I came to realize how lucky I am to have been born gay. I am the middle of five children. My younger brother and sister struggle with addiction (heroin and methamphetamine), and my older brother is on anti-psychotic medication (which he doesn’t always take). It’s difficult to connect with them. I’ve tried to talk with my older sister, arguably the ablest of the bunch, but she’s suspicious of me. A devotee of televangelists and conservative talk show hosts, she thinks the gay people are part of a secret plot to “take Jesus away” from her.
My father, to this day, does not know my partner’s name. Jack and I have been together over 25 years, but my father refuses to acknowledge Jack’s existence. On a trip home (one in a series of futile attempts at reconciliation) back when my mother was still alive, I videotaped my parents. I asked my father, the camera rolling, the biggest disappointment in his life. Without hesitation he said, “you.” He’s still waiting for me to leave my “roommate,” renounce my “life of sin,” return to Bible college and become the minister I was “meant to be.”
It’s a tall order to move past the sorrow and find the upside in being discarded by one’s family. Yet, to be labeled shameful when you’ve done nothing wrong is to learn your judges are emperors without clothes. You then get to question everything. And not just as a mental exercise. You get to step outside the system. No longer protective of a creed or worldview, you get to lift the fabric of the universe and peer underneath.
The subject of a different account, perhaps, what I think I’ve seen there, but here is what I’ve come to believe: Whatever of the Divine breathes within us, there is no ultimate meaning other than what each of us assigns. The religious beliefs people embrace have an undeniable power, but it could be their power derives less from a direct correspondence with reality than from the fact so many people embrace them. If that’s the case, then we’re like Adam after all, charged with naming the world. It’s a clever Providence that enlists us as its architects. What better codes than those that crumble? What better invitation than to be asked to rewrite them anew? What better God than one who disappears?
* * *
Many years later, I saw him again, my sailor from the park. It was in Florence of all places, in the piazza fronting Santa Croce. He was with a woman, and I was with Jack. There was a look between us, a moment of recognition and a silent mutual plea, he with a glance at the woman, me with a glance at Jack. He made to scratch his nose so I could see the ring on his finger, which he impishly waved. Married? He had gotten married?
Well, who was I to judge?
Life had taken us different directions, but we remained then and do still today oddly connected. We are members of a secret brotherhood, the consolation prize for having endured the anti-invitation society has bestowed upon us. He made a choice. Perhaps he’d found love. Just as I have with Jack.
Before looking away, he gave me a smile. His beautiful lopsided bashful grin. What could I do but shake my head and smile in return? It meant the world to me, seeing him alive and okay. I doubt I’ll forget that day. I never knew his name, but I knew something about his soul. In his smile was, I think, one of the secret spellings of the universe. Such is life, it said. Such is life, and it’s up to us to make it good.
Wes Hempel’s work has appeared in The Literary Review, Brooklyn Review, Hanging Loose, Poetry LA, and Parnassus Literary Journal.