COMING OUT TO THE FAMILY...PART I... BIG BROTHER

Last week a friend from Germany suddenly e-mailed me to ask if he could come visit on his way to pick up his kids from a summer camp in the Adirondacks. After a certain amount of remedial American geography training, we agreed that it would be better for him not to drive all the way across Vermont and back from NY state to spend one night in New Hampshire. A visit might also have been the straw that broke the camel's back here, so we reconnoitred at my mother's place.

"O" was his usual charming self, and showed up as if his last visit twenty years ago had ended yesterday; his wife, "B", was her usual not-so-charming self, and their little girl was charming if a little relentless [even her mother looked a little weary]. A good time was had by all, but it wasn't until they had left that I could even begin to find a time to talk to my mother about TGT.

She took the bad news rather well, with a compassion for my wife -- and a complete alignment with all her reactions -- that made me happy, if not exactly cheerful. She suggested that I ask my eldest brother, who lives just up the road, down to break it to him before I send the letter out to my siblings, who are otherwise scattered far and wide. OK. We are, or rather, have been close, and I had planned to do it, but maybe not just then -- we had missed his cocktail hour, and knew we couldn't interrupt his dinner preparations with a phone call, but thought 8:15 might be safe...

So I called and said that I had something I wanted to discuss with him, would he be willing to come down and talk? No, he said, he was watching a movie. He could come down tomorrow before lunch -- no, I said, let's just let it drop then. So for a while I ranted and raved in the kitchen about how his stupid movie was more important than a rare request from me, while my mother urged me to relax. The phone rings. He apologizes; he is coming down. I relax. OK, so far, so good. My mother decides to leave us alone and heads upstairs.

Big Brother arrives and takes a seat. I launch into my story: M and I have separated, and this is the reason: it turns out that I am in fact as gay I was 35 years ago. I am planning to move to D___ in the fall after the children go off to college. There is a moment of silence, and a few moments of confused conversation, in which he alludes to the fact that his marriage had also gone through some travails, as though my wife and I were just going through a rough patch.

And then we are really and truly off to Kafka-land: "Where we part company on the gay thing," are his opening words, as if this were something I merely had an opinion on, as though I had not just told him I was gay and was leaving my family. Then he launches into a diatribe about how there are too many lesbians living in O____ County in general, and on his road in particular, as it is. It's a known fact that once one couple moves into an area, others do, too, he says.

Just like Jews, I remark. Or blacks.

I can't escape the feeling, quite aside from the fact that his response to my telling him that my life as I have known it is coming to an end forever is to lecture me about lesbian real estate investment, that I am now trapped in the Twilight Zone. He proceeds to tell me how upset HE is that we didn't invite him into the house when he was one of twenty-five people attending a meeting at our house, and I had particularly asked those attending to leave my family in peace while they were there... With which he storms out of the house. This is where my wife would say: am I taking crazy pills? If it didn't hurt so much, it would be funny. He's right, of course, I'm sure it did hurt him to be included in the e-mail list that asked people to leave those who wanted nothing to do with our meeting alone, but it was an e-mail to twenty-five people, not to him personally... And why the need to trump my sorrow with his?

My mother talks me down off my crying jag, quietly remarking that he probably hadn't come down to listen to me in the first place, but to tell me what HE had to say, and that he wouldn't take on board what I had told him until he got home and thought about it. OK. My mother asks if she should cancel the lunch invitation she had issued for the next day. Oh, no, I said, I'm going to have to see him again some day, it may as well be tomorrow.

Lunch today was great, but here's the weird bit. Well, the first weird bit was that he came, but had just gone on a diet, came with his own food and wouldn't eat anything we had made, including the salad... That was a LITTLE weird. But then he says NOTHING to me about last night, let alone apologizing, so I can't figure out whether or not he has told his wife, or his teen-age children, who are also present, though I suspect he has done both. My sister-in-law hugs me tight as I leave, which makes me doubly sure they know. BUT NOBODY ACKNOWLEDGES IT. I want to scream at them, but instead just pack up and head for home once they launch into the ice cream course.

I get home, or rather, return my wife's car to what USED to be my home, and my car is gone [as the more fuel-efficient car, it had headed off to Boston before I left], and there is no indication when it's coming back. The laundry that I left on the line to dry on Thursday is still on the line, and now sopping wet, as it's been raining cats and dogs today -- it wasn't even all mine, so it seems to me that SOMEBODY could have taken it in once it dried... So I go out in the pouring rain and drag the laundry back off the line; I take it into the house, spin it, and put it in the dryer...

****************************************************************************

My son is in Deo____ at a concert/beer fest. My wife and daughter come home, see the car, and sit there for a while in the driveway with the brake lights on... Then they go into the house. No one stops by at the studio... When I go in to pick up the laundry, now dry, there is some small chat about DVDs and laundry, though no word as to why it stayed on the line for three days... She has cooked for two and I am de trop. I could be a complete stranger...

and I have to live with the fact that this is what I chose...

Well, tonight I am just in a raw place.

And it will be my first night in the little apartment. I will miss sleeping in my oldest son's room almost as much as sleeping in my own. I had gotten used to all the little quirky left-overs of his high-school and college days that still clutter the place up -- it was somehow reassuring. But tonight is the beginning of the end of something, the arrival of a new set of realities I have been holding at arm's length. God help me.

Stay with me.
This road is not going anywhere pretty in the short run, and we are most definitely not in Kansas anymore.