This is Sixty

feeling both powerful and, yes, exhausted

If, at sixty, the Japanese believe your zodiacal cycle resets, I have returned to my zodiac infancy. Babies wear red vests in Japan, and so do sixty-year-olds. The color is both lucky and a ward against evil. Knowing me, however, I wouldn’t settle for plain red. I may have picked the fabric, but my husband, Hiro, sewed and lined this vest for me. I am at my happiest!

Note: this post is on the long side, with lots of photos. If you have the option to view it in your browser, please do.

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Two weeks into the year, and I have three pieces to share with you.

First off, my review of the powerful Black Genius, by Tre Johnson.

Secondly (and thirdly), I am deeply grateful to Jerry Portwood at the Queer Love Project. My essay, Splash Damage, about the moment I realized I was in the wrong relationship and what I needed to do to get out of it (and also about how my closeted emotions set me up for that hurt in the first place, was published in two parts.

Splash Damage (Part 1)

Splash Damage (Part 2)

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Last week, I shared some thoughts in this space about the increasing lawlessness everyone in America, immigrant and citizen alike, is forced to experience. I am grateful for the positive responses and empathy I received, and I will continue to share my queer perspective on this in future issues.

Right now, however, I’m feeling reflective. The shower of birthday love I received two days ago (including the eight AM phone call and birthday serenade from my parents) brought me to happy tears four times.

Hiro’s birthday card had me in stitches. On the cover, it says: “I’d hold in my farts for you.” Inside, it reads: “Just keeping the romance alive.”

He bought the card four years ago, waiting for the perfect time to share it, and I howled. I might have fallen in love with him on our first date, that moment he grabbed the hem of my jacket in a Tōkyō crowd and said, “I don’t want to lose you,” but twenty-seven-year-old me had no way of knowing that I’d keep falling in love, over and over, for the rest of my life.

Segue!

I just want to laughingly share some of the influences over the past sixty years that have created the genderqueer, dare I say, masterpiece, you see before you.

1966

I arrive as my parents’ first child and, perhaps to my ruination, the first grandchild on both sides of the family. Let the spoiling begin!

I get most of my good looks from my mother, even though my paternal grandmother swore (as only an Irishwoman will) that I was the spitting image of my father, saints preserve us!

1968

Paradise lost. My first younger brother arrives on the scene, prompting me to a childhood of creative competition and a reassertion of my dominance within the family. (Who am I kidding?)

And here my troubles began.

1971

I don’t have memories of kindergarten in Middletown, New York, but I remember two unrelated events. My father, then age 27, had his first heart attack. But that was also the year that my father decided that although Sesame Street was fine for his children to watch, he wouldn’t allow us to watch Fred Rogers, for fear it would turn me gay. Oops!

1974

After a few more heart attacks, my father relocates us to Nyack, NY (after a few years in Tappan), to shorten his commute—he worked at a bank in the Bronx. From the third grade onward, I am increasingly attuned to my creative abilities. (I insisted to Sister Annella at Saint Ann’s Parochial that my sunglasses were prescription, for example. She didn’t buy it.) But my awareness of television also kicked in. My education in queerness included the romantic (I had crushes on Randolph Mantooth in Emergency and on Bruce Bixby in The Courtship of Eddie’s Father), the attitudinal (I learned sass and innuendo from the masters: Paul Lynde, Brett Somers, and Charles Nelson Reilly), and the proto-sexual (oh, George Takei, you gratefully primed me away from Caucasian men during a rerun of The Naked Time, on Star Trek).

1977

Friends of my parents create a scholarship for me to attend a private school, where I not only give in to the glories of education (especially foreign languages), but I also make my first lifelong friendships. I discover Mary Renault’s The Persian Boy at the Nyack Library, and I melt, along with the protagonist, Bagoas, in the presence of history’s first pansexual icon, Alexander the Great.

1980

My father dies. My hatred of emotions, the source of all pain, begins.

The mass card created for my father’s wake and funeral. He was an ordained Roman Catholic deacon.

1983

I fall victim to puppy love, crushing hard for the captain of my school’s baseball team. I also learn what unrequited means. I don’t have any photos of him, but trust me when I say his eyes could flash mystically between green and brown.

1987

I begin the lifelong coming-out journey with the best first step: coming out to myself.

Yes, he’s gay.

1988

My decade in Japan really begins when I get my own apartment after three months of homestays. With independence, I can fit the closet my job requires with a revolving door. I’ll pass on the photos because I was beardless from 1988 to 1991. Not my favorite look.

1992

A chance meeting, described in the two-part Splash Damage essay (links above), offers me the key to escape my emotional closets. It turns out I was not only hiding from grief and anger, but I was also running away from joy.

1993

Boom!

Hiro on our second date, late November of 1993. The laughter in those eyes… swoon.

1995

I am hired on at a company in Yokohama and, for the first time, come out during the interview. Never again would I be in the closet for work.

1998

I start work in the Seattle area and, several months later, Hiro gets a student visa and joins me. Culture shock smacked us both around, not to mention the transition to living together full-time.

2005

After a mentally exhausting four years at a tech company in Redmond, I opt for what becomes ten years of contract employment at a gaming company. Thankfully, when Hiro and I choose to relocate to British Columbia in 2006 (thereby freeing him from his student visa trap), I am able to take my work with me, offering technical translations and proofreading work remotely.

2013

After the US Supreme Court nullifies most of the Defense of Marriage Act, Hiro and I are wed in British Columbia. A few months later, we begin his application for a United States green card.

A garden wedding in Burnaby, with our witnesses and their spouses.

2015

Everything changes. Hiro gets his green card. I am hired for full-time employment. We return to the United States. And my years of treatment for morbid anxiety come to an end, releasing me from the prison of my medications. (It turns out my diagnosis was inaccurate—I suffered from situational, not morbid, anxiety.)

2020

I complete a first draft of a manuscript for a memoir. Much changes over the subsequent years, including the title, the timeline, and the structure, but the writing triggers a lot of introspection. I realize I am queer, not gay (to better reflect who I am as a political being). I also begin to understand that I am genderqueer, an ever-changing ratio of masculine, feminine, and non-binary traits.

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My life wouldn’t be the same if I hadn’t been blessed the whole time by people who came along for the ride. The friends, lovers, and family members who not only saw me as I was but agreed to keep seeing me through the closets, open and shut, and the changing diagnoses and self-discoveries.

My sixty is exuberant, yes. But current events are exhausting. May we all live in times that are unprecedented, for once, in terms of kindness, community, and equity.