The Journey from Freak-dom to Freedom…and Back Again

Posted by Kiley on July 4, 2009 · 5 Comments 

Norfolk, VA, to San Francisco, CA, and Back

It could almost be classified as sadistic to ask that certain someones, having visited San Francisco only once after having lived their entire life in regions much more conservative, enumerate but one sociocultural aspect of the city that they favored.

After all, there exists no shortage of reasons why one might’ve left one’s heart there.

Nonetheless, I would have no trouble, nor even any hesitation, identifying what, socioculturally, had imprinted itself upon me in a searing and unmistakable manner.

After returning to my home in Norfolk, Virginia, the status update I posted on Facebook, and left there for about a week, perhaps in a form of mourning, implied I’d engaged in the would-be, could-be, may-be sport of cross-country crying.  There was little to no exaggeration present in that message.

For me, the tears began even as I waited in the hotel lobby for the arrival of the airport shuttle that would be the beginning of my journey back to freak-dom.  Once in the van, I was happy that the driver’s need to pick up one or two others gave me additional, farewell glimpses at areas of the city not far from where I’d spent much of my time.  Nonetheless, those views seemed to only amplify the tears.  I both hoped for and dreaded that someone might ask why my eyes swam in pools of body-generated saline.  I thought the inquiry might calm me by virtue of the ensuing conversation I assumed would’ve occurred, yet I was just as aware it could prompt my total degeneration into a collection of sobs.  Most in the van, though, seemed not to speak English as their native language, so perhaps it would have been even more culturally taboo to inquire about my state than would be so for many Americans.  In any case, no one asked.

Then, too, I may have succeeded at shielding my condition from those around me, even as I peered out of the windows, consuming the last views of the city, wanting everyone — including me — to be happy, and pondering what a ridiculous, artificial, unnecessary construction the world economy seemed to be.  At that moment, the necessity that people obtain, and the difficulty involved in obtaining, employment sufficient to fund life in an area that resonates with who they are seemed an impediment to my syrupy desire to buy the world a Coke and teach them to sing in perfect harmony (to, paradoxically, conjure images built in the 1970s by one of the world’s mega-corporations).  Since it seemed in my morning of despair that the world’s governments just print and hand out money to everyone anyway, why couldn’t they really do that, I wanted to know, to permit everyone to move themselves into a space, a region, an environment that satisfies the soul.  Surely, if everyone agreed to this arrangement, it would work, wouldn’t it?

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At the airport, I issued to the van driver a tip that equaled the actual cost of the ride in the van.  After all, not only did I not want to look cheap, at that moment, I wanted no one to be limited by something as ridiculous and banal as money, and mine seemed so worthless anyway.  I had enough to fund a glass of freedom, but not a bottle.

I then solemnly transported my multiple bags to the airline counter, even having figured out, for once on the trip, how to move them fairly gracefully, without a cart.  In fact, I surprised myself immediately thereafter by flawlessly operating Southwest’s kiosk to both print boarding passes and check bags, even though I’d never before attempted using it, or any other such machine, for that dual operation.  I appreciated the brief, friendly, distracting and engaging comments of the attendant, who remarked that the machine worked for me (the woman in front of me had insisted, somewhat testily, that it had issues, until, well, she kept trying and it worked), and the other that my checked bag was as large as me (which wasn’t the first time during the trip I’d heard essentially that).  At that moment, any sense of accomplishment, however small, was a needed boost to my self-esteem, and any friendly remark, however fleeting, was a comfort to my heart.

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In the TSA queue, though, the tears commenced again, spurring, amongst the cartwheel of thoughts, the worry that my unusually-moist eyes would flag me as emotionally unstable, and perhaps that was some sort of relatively-unknown hallmark that’d mark me as someone with nefarious intent.  This wasn’t stress I needed, and the charm-free disposition and barky commands of one of the TSA workers (directed to everyone, not me in particular), didn’t help.  However, the watery eyes abated as I focused on the task of partially disrobing and depositing my various articles in plastic bins, to send them on their conveyored journey.  Somehow, I executed the requisite steps more flawlessly than I sometimes have, and with less of the panicked rush I typically have, this as I worry about delaying someone behind me, inadvertently running afoul of some arcane requirement or other, or losing something in the shuffle.  Of course, by that point, I was already fairly emotionally drained.  I hadn’t much energy to panic, and I’m not sure that I cared terribly much, in that instant, about losing any material goods.  (Yes, losing the boarding pass, even though I didn’t want to leave, probably still would’ve elicited a moment in which I would’ve wished for a heart-calming, pulse-reducing tranquilizer.)

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Eventually, on the plane, I noticed in my peripheral vision that on my chest, in the vicinity of my heart — appropriately — were a couple of small damp spots.  Since I didn’t have any reason to believe I might be lactating (really, it was just too early in the pregnancy for that), and neither had I been snoozing and drooling, nor eating and drinking, I had a Karen Walker-esque moment in which the nature of the exudate temporarily befuddled me.  I had one of those moments of incredulity that went something like, “What the hell is that?  Are those tears?“ (Okay, in actuality, not so much…  It wasn’t the fact I’d been crying that caught me unawares, but rather that apparently I’d been getting in a bit more practice with it than I’d realized.)

My tears continued, sporadically, at least until Chicago, and perhaps further.  In a general sense, I was traumatized to be leaving a city that offered so much personal opportunity, an opportunity to live as a fully-realized human being, to feel fully human and of worth, in a way that seemed impossible in socially-conservative Hampton Roads.  In a specific sense, I knew very well that I was leaving a place in which, perhaps for the first time in my life, I did not attract attention for all the wrong reasons.  Not for the way I stood, sat, spoke, or moved.  Not on the bus, not on the sidewalk, not in a restaurant.  I did not, in San Francisco, have to endure the raised eyebrows of Norfolk that sometimes arch in surprise when the first words emerge from my mouth, not sounding, in terms of pitch, as someone had anticipated for a man.  And I did not, in San Francisco, have to endure the laughs and titters, either to my face, or slamming into my back after I’d turned away.  I could just be, and I could just do the ordinary things in which most people engage daily, countless times, without even the flicker of a second thought.

In short, in San Francisco, I was not a freak.  Indeed, I’m unsure that such a concept exists there, but, if it does, the barrier to entry is extraordinarily high and, apparently, I failed to inadvertently crash through it.

While the mere fact that the parameters of normalcy in San Francisco were actually broader than I’d ever before experienced did not catch me unawares, nor even, perhaps, the fact that they were broad enough to comfortably and effortlessly encompass even me, what I hadn’t necessarily anticipated was how readily I’d sense that this was so and become at least partially adapted to it, shedding quite rapidly some of my scales, my armor, developed over many years.  Yet, certainly, I knew to what I was returning; there was no ambiguity about that.  Those memories had remained as pointed as a set of fine chef’s cutlery, though they’d temporarily been stowed farther from ready awareness and reach than I would’ve guessed.  My hasty stowage of them did not, however, render them lost, never to be found again.  The return trip was resurrecting them, and I knew that, as soon as my body returned to Norfolk, the self-awareness would likewise return, that the blissful forgetting of self — or, rather, the antithesis of an often-painful awareness of self on a day-to-day basis — was soon to vanish.

I was about to become a freak again, and I knew it.

Indeed, in the Norfolk airport, my awareness ramped upward as I commenced a phone conversation with my dad to tell him I’d arrived back at home base.  A woman who heard my voice appear suddenly behind her, as I’d otherwise noiselessly approached, turned around.  She wore no look of surprise specific to me, but that was the first tangible reminder of how public conversations on cell phones — something I tend to avoid as much as possible in Hampton Roads — would now once again subject me to unwanted scrutiny.

I’d learned as a kid, based on experiences and observation, that you (if you are me) keep your head down and your mouth shut to minimize the risk of someone yelling “fag” or “queer,” these being words that were lobbed at me before I even knew what they meant.  Certainly, however, the tone and derisive laughter conveyed to me they were not intended as compliments, even before I knew they had any relationship to sex or sexuality, much less the idea of men having sex with men.

Make no mistake about it, though: I’m flagged as a fag, or at least publicly called out as one, far less often than I used to be.  While I’m not sure I’m any less flaming, I am sure that America has evolved, considerably, in the past 10 to 15 years.  Pop culture has shone a light upon homos that many of them would never have shone upon themselves and, by so doing, has fomented an increased comfort with GLBT people that has fanned out across the land.  However, those winds of acceptance have not bathed all of America equally in the fresh breeze that serves to dislodge the stale, foul air that for so many years has shrouded and entombed so many men in and to a life of silence and loneliness, and dispatched many to a literal grave.

While I’m less-silent now than in my teen years regarding the distaste, the hatred that is still sometimes directed toward me, I nearly succumbed then to the abiding and occasionally intense desire to escape, permanently.  Surely, the rot of bigotry sometimes sickens the victims to the point of collapse, and beyond.  This evening, on July 4, 2009, as I walked home from a friend’s place, I was reminded of that in Ghent, Hampton Roads’ most liberal and welcoming of neighborhoods.

It was then and there that a man, ostensibly voicing his remark to the woman beside him, but with sufficient volume to succeed wildly in propelling across the street his intention that the invective be perfectly, unmistakably, indelibly audible, said, “He’s a fag, and he knows it.”  I then glanced up and over, beyond the asphalt ribbon, a third of a block or less up and across Botetourt St., and he was, of course, looking at me.  Indeed, apart from the woman, there did not appear to be a soul else he could’ve seen from his vantage point, sitting amidst what otherwise would have been the peaceful beauty of the compact, urban-sized lawn area immediately in front of the stone facade of his historic building.

Sometimes, I’m astonished by how much ugliness can lurk beyond and dwell within a pretty landscape.  Sometimes, I’m amazed by the shame these misguided, and quite possibly evil, people manage to impart with systematic abuse, in spite of the fact that it is they who are shameful and should bear the totality of the shame in circumstances such as these.  Sometimes, I detect, anew and again, the stench that accompanies the rot of bigotry creeping toward me once more.

And sometimes, keeping one’s mouth shut and one’s head down isn’t enough.

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