All The World’s A Stage

and queer people are practiced performers

Let me start with a thank you.

I wrote about my adventures? encounters? with depression and anxiety last week, and some people reached out to tell me how grateful they were.

When I write something for this newsletter, nine times out of ten I do so because the topic resonated for me. And when readers tell me that they laughed, or that they could empathize, I am grateful. Maybe some day I’ll have a grasp on the things that people want to read, but in the meantime, I hope you stick around for my shenanigans.

Let me also share a note to my subscribers:

Next week’s issue is for you! I have been gathering some phrases in Japanese designed to make your visit to Japan easier, complete with video. I’ll cover basics like please and thank you, but also the phrases you might need to fall back on, like can you speak English?

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I went looking for a photograph this morning.

A friend of mine in Jersey City, another Gen X coeval, changed his profile pic on Facebook today. It’s an early 1970s mall Santa photo, and my friend, in his curly blond childhood, stares at the camera, no love for Mr. Claus visible.

The photograph I went looking for, below, is similar. I’m with an ersatz Saint Nick, but the location is, I think, the house in Pearl River where my father grew up. I appear to be three or four years old, and clearly have questions for the man in red. Was it my father behind the flimsy beard? One of my uncles? My Auntie Ann will probably remind me, but for now I savor the mystery. Judging by the akimbo pose, the cropped woman on the staircase is my paternal grandmother.

In the same folder, there were two more Christmas photos. The first of them, below, is one of my favorites. I’m just shy of my second birthday, my mother is happy and five months pregnant with my brother Kevin, and my father is as engaging as I always remember him, smiling and a few years before his first heart attack. My parents married young; in this photo, my father would have been twenty-four, my mother twenty-three.

At that age, my favorite toys were cars. I might be clutching a fire truck (my father was a volunteer firefighter), but please don’t mistake that for pre-masculinity. The toy cars and trucks were shiny and pretty, and to hear it told, I could line them up again and again in front of the fireplace, content to lie on the floor for hours before my parents found out that my poor (subsequently addressed but never wholly fixed) gross motor coordination skills hadn’t let me be boisterous as a child.

But I didn’t want to be boisterous.

And that dapper brown suit with matching bow-tie aside, I think I wanted to be girlsterous.

When I was five we lived in a small Orange County, New York, community called Westbrookville, on Manor Lane, house number 69 (a portent if ever there was one).

A German immigrant couple lived next door, at number 67. Our neighbors had two daughters. Barbara was my age and Karen was three, like my brother Kevin.

Barbara and I were refined children, looking down on the roughhousing rambunctiousness of Karen and Kevin, running all over the neighborhood. But Barbara had a toy I had long wanted but was perhaps afraid to ask for: a Barbie doll.

So Barbara and I played for hours, dressing Barbie, styling her hair, searching for her shoes under beds and sofas.

That was 1971. The year my father had his first heart attack. The year a doctor suggested that the stress of a ninety-minute commute from Westbrookville to the Bronx (my father worked at Eastern Savings Bank, their youngest manager, leading a new department called Data Processing) might be, together with cholesterol, the reason why he had had the heart attack.

I therefore waved goodbye to Barbara when we moved to Tappan, in Rockland County. My new next-door neighbor was also a girl, Maureen, and she was in my class at Tappan Grammar. Maureen and I watched the four-thirty movie together, screeching at Godzilla. But alone in my house at 28 Campbell Lane, I adapted to the ongoing lack of my own Barbie doll by pretending to be a beautician.

I had stuffed animals, a pile of them, and each was in desperate need of either some new eyeshadow or at least a new hairstyle. I borrowed the two, perfectly round cushions from the sofa. One, laid flat, became my beauty table. The other, propped up at the perpendicular, a mirror. And my Fisher Price little people transformed into tubes of makeup, lipstick and eyeshadow.

This was the 1970s and parental supervision was quite a different experience then, but my parents never took issue with my games and my friendships when I was that young.

Things changed in the summer of 1974. Another heart attack came with a recommendation that my father shorten his commute even further. He eliminated the Palisades Parkway segment, and moved us all to an apartment building in Nyack, on Gedney Street, right on the Hudson River, and he simply drove to the Tappan Zee Bridge, to the Cross Westchester Parkway, down to the Bronx.

It wasn’t my new set of friends at the apartment building that made me reconsider my girlishness. My new best friend was Emily, a tomboy who taught me to clip baseball cards to my bicycle tire spokes for a really cool sound effect. It wasn’t my brother Kevin and his friends who spent their afternoons looking for new ways to play with caps, those strips of paper with bits of gunpowder sealed inside, whose impact bang was a sure-fire startle for unsuspecting adults.

I first realized that there were rules to being a boy, rules that I was breaking, when I joined the third grade class at Saint Ann’s Parochial School, up the hill from our apartment on Jefferson Avenue. Sister Annella had many reasons for not liking me—my desk was always a mess, I once tried to convince her my sunglasses were prescription, and I was always extra, especially in art class—but she had standards for boyness that I did not meet.

And this is where the third photograph arrives in the story.

I joined the choir in third grade and, come Christmas, starred as Joseph (not the step-dad, the dad who stepped up).

That’s my mother’s scarf re-imagined as a kaffiyeh, although I suspect the rope tying it to my head is from our drapes. I’m also not sure a) why anyone thought that a poor carpenter from Nazareth would have jewelry or b) whose ring I borrowed for the performance, but again, extra.

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Not only did three grade begin my life on the stage (and behind the lectern, and the corner at the party where all the jokes are shared), another performance career began.

I learned to perform heterosexuality.

Stop guffawing, those of you know me. I never said I was good at it. I have always been obviously queer, as I say, even in satellite photos. It’s the accent. It’s the gestures. It’s the extra.

But the interesting thing about life in these United States is that you don’t need EGOT-levels of heterosexuality to convince the audience. They see what they want to see. And they want to see straight.

So I added some rigidity to my wrists.

My humor turned edgier, meaner.

And when puberty arrived, I stopped talking.

I didn’t mention how fascinated I was with male skin. Bare feet. Veined hands. Arms whorled with hair.

I didn’t mention how often I caught myself staring at crotches adorned in denim, where the swell gave way to the inseam.

And I definitely didn’t mention the magazines I found at that store in downtown Nyack. Magazines with titles like Blueboy, Honcho, Playguy and Mandate.

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When I started my coming out journey in 1987, at age twenty-one, I stridently stepped off the heterosexuality stage. I was loud in my new authenticity.

And then, in July of 1988, I flew to Tokyo to start a job teaching English Japan. I soon learned that I needed to re-embrace my closet (if I wanted to keep working) and so I played the music, lit the lights, and performed heterosexuality once more.

I soon remembered, however, that just as I had as a teenager, I could step off the stage once I was in my own room or on my own. And when I got the keys to my Japan apartment in October of 1988, I found the space to remove my straightjacket.

And yes, I stayed in Japan for ten years. The need for performance (at work) only lasted for six of those ten, by which time I was madly in love with Hiro, a love so obvious that I struggled to maintain the façade of heterosexuality in the office and relied on my non-Japanese coworkers for buttressing moments of authenticity.

But my performance, as poor as it was, as D-list as I was at it, kept me safe. That wafer-thin veil of heterosexuality burnished my queerness in unexpected ways, making me a fiercer future advocate, a stronger mentor, a more patient leader.

So maybe there’s an Oscar out there with my name on it after all.