I'll Be Homo for Christmas

The holiday with my family revealed how far we’d come and how much still stood between us.

I’m Alexander Cheves, and this is LOVE, BEASTLY—a blog about sex, feelings, and manhood. It’s written mostly for men—gay, straight, bi, MSM, or just curious—but some readers are women, and some don’t fit into categories. Everyone’s welcome here.

This is one of my more personal essays. Heads up: these can sometimes include explicit content or emotionally triggering subjects.

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I spent last Christmas in a gay bar. Local Savannah drag queens did Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas Is You" in terrifying holiday drag. I wore a "naughty reindeer" look—a jockstrap and felt antlers. My friend who went with me wore a Santa hat and a latex catsuit. The day after the bar, still coming out of my drunken fog, I drove home.

By now, Dad had become a hugger. 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 grey, and our skin was different. Mine tanned easily, while his was freckled and damaged from years out in the sun. I had a beard and earrings. I was muscular from weightlifting.

But he was as strong as an ox. He was pushing sixty and still went out to chop wood, build fences, dig trenches, and build footbridges over the river. I know he wants to die this way, and I knew he would.

I envied his death. With HIV, I would die old and weak, a tired queen with cancer in some big-city hospital bed with my sassy friends gathered around me saying things like, "Girl, we'll be here every step of the way." Dad would die at twilight, sweat under his shirt, in a field, with purple flowers blooming at his feet, collapsed after a long day's hard work.

He was a surgeon, but his strength was the strength of mid-Georgia farmers, the men who once worked at the quarry and the sock mill, before they closed—before this small, rural town was forgotten. My strength, like so many of my features, was superficial, a product of protein supplements and barbells. His strength came from a life lived outside, from the farm, from the work of his own hands.

On my visits home from college, he always asked me to come home more, and these requests were sincerely meant. He missed me. But I was not sure which version of me he missed the most, which picture of me played in his mind. My presence at home was always, for the most part, tense. Being there, I was the suggestion of a fight, the outline of an argument, 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 were, in many ways, each other's equal and opposite. I inherited his rage, his intelligence, and his stubbornness. As adults, we have embodied ideological differences and remain locked to what we believe. I was proud of that in me, and he was proud of that in him. And I would never want him to relent, not even for a moment. If he did, who would I be? Like fighting rams, our horns were interlaced in a death match. Who would outlive the other?

When I arrived home that Christmas, I had 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—a note of disappointment in his voice.

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

They never ate steak. Steak was a special occasion. Then I realised: this was a gift for me. I was the special occasion.

Christmas lights hung in the kitchen. I imagined them doing all this at the last minute, then waiting in silence until finally 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 classes."

I had little to tell. Classes were hard. My work was hard. I could not tell them about the drag queens and glow-in-the-dark paint parties, or about the men I was fucking, and who were fucking me. I could not tell them about my HIV.

Everything besides basic updates on school was forbidden territory, 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 ready to face the world of work—but after a life on a quiet farm in Georgia, the drag shows and paint parties were the lessons I really needed. They were an altogether different and more valuable 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 very 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, "Colour Theory,” and they laughed. "This is what I'm paying for," Dad said, exasperated. 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 doctors. The work they did was essential in every way that art was not. We had 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 of time as an artistic element, as with installation sculpture. Active and negative space. Compositional decay.

We fell back on a neutral topic: the farm tasks they were working on, what projects they were doing around the house. They were building a bridge, repairing a barn, or building a treehouse, always doing something. 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."