I'll Be Homo for Christmas

Christmas on the farm.

My best Christmas was spent drunk with friends and drag queens performing Mariah Carey's "All I Want For Christmas Is You" in terrifying holiday drag. I wore a "naughty reindeer" look — jockstrap and felt antlers. My friend wore a Santa hat and a latex catsuit.

That was last Christmas. The day after, still coming out of my drunken stupor, I drove home.

Dad had become a hugger. I was not comfortable with it. (I am still not comfortable with it.) He hugged me when I walked in the door, and I let him. I even hugged back, gently, like hugging a bull.

When I was young, people said I looked like him. I never saw the resemblance. In his youth, he had flaming red hair and I've always been a brunette. But all traces of resemblance have gone now. His red hair has faded to gray. Our skin was always different. Mine tanned easily, his was freckled and damaged from years in the sun. I had a beard and earrings. I was muscular from weightlifting.

I was big, but he was strong, strong as an ox. My father is pushing sixty and still goes out to chop wood, build fences, dig trenches, and build footbridges over the river. I know he wants to die this way, and he will. I envy his death. With HIV, I will die old and weak, a tired queen with cancer in some big-city hospital bed with my sassy gay friends gathered around me saying, "Girl, we'll be here every step of the way." Dad will die at twilight, sweat under his shirt, in a field with purple flowers at his feet. He'll collapse after a long day's work.

Dad is a surgeon, but his strength is the strength of mid-Georgia farmers, the men who used to work at the quarry and sock mill when they were still around. They, like many businesses, shuttered and left the town — the one my parents still live near — economically destitute, starved of youth. My strength, like many of my features, was superficial, a product of protein supplements and barbells. His came from a life outside, from the work of his hands.

On my visits home from college, he told me to come home more, and he meant this. He missed me. But I was not sure which version of me he missed, which picture of me he held in his mind. My presence at home was always, for the most part, tense. I was the suggestion of a fight, a raw nerve. I was not the same as when I left home for school, and I did not think he'd like who I had become.

Dad and I are, in many ways, each other's equal and opposite. I inherited his rage, his intelligence, his stubbornness. As adults, we have embodied ideological differences and remain locked to what we believe. I am proud of that in me and he is proud of that in him. And I would never want him to relent, not for a moment. If he did, who would I be? Our horns are interlaced in a death match.

When I arrived home last Christmas, I missed dinner. My family was seated at the table when I walked in.

"Look who made it home!" Dad said.

"Yes, I made it."

"Your sister made a great dinner tonight," he said with a note of disappointment.

Rebecca looked at me: "I left you a steak in case you want it."

They never ate steak. Steak was special. Then I realized this was a gift for me. I was the special occasion. Christmas lights hung in the kitchen. I imagined them doing all this last minute, then waiting in silence until deciding to eat. No one told me a time to arrive. As I ate the steak, they cleared the table and Dad started the interrogation. "How was the drive?" "How is school?" "Tell me about your classes."

I had little to tell. Classes were hard. My work was hard. I wanted to tell them about the drag queens and glow-in-the-dark paint parties. I wanted to tell them about my HIV. I wanted to tell so much. But all that fun stuff was the "living art" — the work that, in their eyes, did not count toward my future. I knew I was being unreasonable — every parent wants to know their child is prepared to face the world of work — but after a life on a quiet farm in Georgia, the drag shows and paint parties were lessons I needed. They were the education.

None of this would have made sense to them. The work I was doing at art school was fine, but most of it could not be shown to them — not while they were footing the bill. In the end, I didn't say much, just gave the cursory details.

As a family, we expressed love through money. They supported my career at art school and I didn't speak about anything that would offend them. During my first year at college, I made the mistake of explaining a class, "Color Theory", and they laughed. "This is what I'm paying for," Dad said. The class was about paint mixing, understanding how light affects hue, and how light can be manipulated. "It's chemistry," I said. But it wasn't chemistry, not really. It wasn't tissue or bone, incisions or symptoms — practical things that had objective value in the world. It wasn't the world they knew.

My parents were both doctors. The work they did was essential in every way that art was nonessential. We have always spoken differently and understood different concepts, but I knew I could communicate things that were tactile — burnishing, etching, spreading ink — because this was closer to their language of scalpels and skin. But this was just a communication tool. My true language was forbidden. Foucault. Beatnik. Marxist.

During the questioning, I wondered what they would like to hear. My new class, "Design Four", was out of the question — it taught time as an artistic element, as with installation sculpture and outdoor work. Active and negative space. Compositional decay.

We fell back on a neutral topic: the farm tasks they've been working on, what projects they were doing around the house. They were building a bridge, repairing a barn, or building a treehouse. Then my dad attempted a discussion on sports.

"Alex, you need to know about this game," he said. "Your friends at school will all be talking about it and you need to know about it."

My friends at art school would not be talking about it. The last conversation I had with my friends was about the word "patriarchy," which they decided was too resonant of elitist liberalism to be seriously discussed. "Perhaps we should find a new word?" my friend Astoria asked, setting down her glass of wine. "Of course, patriarchy is real and should be talked about, but the word is terrible."

I offered Dad this: "My school has a mascot. For the soccer team."

"What is it?"

"We're the bees! I just found out."

"Alex, you've been there four years."

After dinner, I carried my bag upstairs to my old bedroom. The room was unchanged, untouched since I lived there, but I saw the most controversial books on the shelf had been put in the closet. Ah, but they missed a few: Naked Lunch and Lolita were still on the shelf.

I stepped into the bathroom where I first studied my body and knew I was gay. When was that? How many years ago? Since then, my body had changed. More muscles, more tattoos. If my younger self could see me, he would giggle with excitement. But I did not feel proud or handsome. Would I always be so unsatisfied?

I turned on the shower and took off my clothes. I was never sexually active when I lived here, so I never douched before sex in this shower. Douching was, by now, a tired sexual ritual. I wondered if my parents knew I did this. Do they think gay men just fuck shit? Probably. Did they ever wonder if I was a top or bottom? Did they know these words?

They probably assumed, as many straight people do, that gay men were all maniacally versatile, fucking and getting fucked equally in large, orgiastic pits. Maybe they saw us like worker ants — hive-minded, ravenous fuckers and fuckees in stinking bedrooms smeared with feces. The last time my father spoke to me about gay sex, he said, "It's poop, Alex. That's all it is. Poop." I have never felt so ashamed in my life. I assumed from that line — one that has haunted me all my life — he knew nothing about douching. 

My fights with him were my core ingredient — the element most responsible for who I became. His face, aged now, could transform in my memory. His jaw could open and his eyes could grow glossy and red with points of deep black. He could clench his teeth and stand over me again — strong, impossibly strong, with the fury in his eyes I remembered from childhood.

When I was little, whenever I misbehaved, he grabbed me and held me down on the floor, gripping my face in his hands. He held his body on top of me, his face inches from mine, his hand squeezing my cheeks and jaw, sometimes with my tongue sticking out. I once bit my tongue and tasted blood, but he didn't stop. He held my head in place so I had to look up into his eyes. His spit splashed on my face. "Alex, apologize to your mother," he'd say between grit teeth. I couldn't speak. I have never been so terrified of a person as I was of him.

In my dreams, I still saw him that way — this heavy, red thing on top of me. In my memory, I was always small and scared. Now I was older and stronger and often had dreams about returning the gesture: gripping his neck in my hands, holding him down on the kitchen floor, and forcing him to stare up into my face.

Before my sexuality was the focus of so much strife, my father and I were close. We rode bikes through the woods, through town, for miles every weekend. But then: homosexuality, fury, pain. My sexuality appeared piece by piece, as folded notes passed to friends, found wrinkled in the pocket of my pants. It was found as strange underwear hidden beneath my bed. My parents were medical missionaries in Zambia, and I went on one of these trips during my sophomore year of high school. I fell in love with a guy on the team and cried in front of everyone when we dropped him off at the airport in Lusaka. The night we got home, Dad walked into my room with his Bible in his hand and asked if I was "still dealing with this gay problem." Yes, I said, I was — and I didn't want to fight it anymore.

After that, there were no more bike rides. In this bedroom, we had nightly devotions. At night before bed, he would come into my room with his Bible. We read passages together, aloud. The verses were chosen to address my sin. After reading them, I had to pray for the part of my body that needed protection from evil spirits and touch my hand there as I did so. I touched my crotch and prayed for it. I touched my head, asking God to guard my thoughts. I touched my hands, one after the other, asking God to keep me from impurity. I did this as Dad watched, making sure it was done.

Before I left home, I dreamed often of stepping down to the kitchen at night, bag in tow, the keys to my pickup truck in my pocket. My truck was so loud, they'd hear it the second I turned the key. How much time would that give me to get away? Could I do it? In the dream, the air outside was so cold, the truck silent, the trees icy and black, and I slipped away without a sound just as dawn broke. In the morning, when I woke up, I knew could not do this. I had to wait. Someday I would go to college. I would get away. And I did.

Now my father was older. Later that night, I would see him sitting by the lamp in the living room wearing reading glasses, head bent over a book. On these visits, he always offered to carry my suitcase upstairs and I told him no. He always asked me to join him on one of the projects around the house — staining wood, drilling floorboards and I said no. This is what we've done, what we've become. I was a son who came home for Christmas because of obligation, not love.

In the shower, I got on my hands and knees and put my ear on the floor. I used to do this all the time in high school. Directly below me was the pathway between my parents' bedroom and bathroom. I could hear their footsteps, they were talking as married people do at the end of the day. I could never hear them clearly, but occasionally some words — or what sounded like words — came through.

My mother was probably in her white bathrobe, seated and beautiful, like an orchid. I loved the smell of her lotion and the way she looked without makeup. Her place in my heart had shifted over the years. I decided I would never need her again when she supported the nightly devotions and said it was a good idea for me to talk to our pastor. They drove me to the church once a week to sit with him in his office. He told me everything the Bible said about homosexuality, and I told him I wanted nothing to do with the Bible. At some point, the meetings stopped. I don't know when she softened, but I think she realized after I went to college that she could — would — lose me.

How sad it must be as a parent to realize you are too late. She has started scrapbooking our lives, mine and my sister's, collecting report cards, drawings, and photographs in leather binders. She hasn't made it past high school for me, and I can't imagine how she can go further. She didn't know the rest. She never would. I was long past the years when I felt safe telling her things, sharing my feelings with her, so I would always be just a scrapbook, things she could collect: mementos of a son. I would never give her anything that could hurt me, never anything that mattered. She would never have my heart.

At that moment, two words came through the floor: "tomorrow," "engine." Maybe Dad had to check the tractor engine tomorrow.

Then I became incredibly sad. I was filled with something like sympathy for them. They were given a child they did not understand. And I was cruel, too. I rebelled at every turn. I lied and lashed out. I was my father's son.

They knew I would grow up to be an unanswered phone call. I could see them, years from now, their hair white, quietly setting down the phone, having missed me again. And it was love — only love — that made them try to hold on.

I whispered down an admission through the floor that they were doing a good job, that I was holding out on them. Maybe it reached them through the floor, but I doubt it.

Love, Beastly