The Eye of the Beholder: Part 1

I was born forty six years ago in a small town in Minnesota.  We had one grocery store, one drug store, one gas station, one church and three bars.  There were cornfields all around us and, although I did not grow up on a farm, many of my firsts happened in those fields.  The first time I kissed a girl, the first time I kissed a boy, my first cigarette, my first Playboy, my first Playgirl.  Yes, I virtually discovered I was gay in a cornfield, sitting in the dirt, paging through Playgirl.  I always felt as if I was born in the wrong place, always had fancier designs on what my life should be.  Those designs certainly had nothing to do with cornfields or with towns offering just one of anything.  I didn’t always know there was more; TV showed me.  Inside that tiny box I discovered there were private detectives, high priced prostitutes, fashion designers, drug addicts and alcoholics, alcoholics that looked nothing at all like my parents or their friends.  I didn’t see the sadness or stark reality in the things depicted on television.  I only saw the glamor.  I guess you can say I found some kind of allure in tragedy.  I fantasized about being a private detective.  I even fantasized about being a high priced prostitute and a drug addict.  I know that these situations were, of course, sensationalized on TV.  I knew the inherent horror behind the glamor, as well.  The problem was that that these people were attractive in a way I’d never seen before. 

I think every little boy has a moment when he looks at his mother and sees the most beautiful woman in the world.  I certainly did.  My parents were having a party and my mother had excused herself to tuck me in.  I was five, maybe six years old.  She brushed the hair from my forehead and leaned in to kiss me gently.  I knew in that moment that there was no one more beautiful than her.  I was filled with a sense of awe.  I wondered how did the other kids feel knowing that my mother was more beautiful than theirs?  Clearly I loved my mother and her beauty was based primarily on the fact that I loved no one in the world more than her.   At some point, though, my definition of beauty strayed from love and became about fascination and desire, innocent at first, but eventually even lust. 

Now would be a good time to tell you that I was born with brown hair and brown eyes.  I wasn’t born with skin that tanned easily.  I wasn’t destined to grow tall and muscular.  I was short, skinny, and awkward.  I was cute as a child, but as I grew into adolescence, I became pretty much just average, certainly not the teenage boy of a teenage girl’s dreams.  I was the boy who would watch the girl’s purse when she danced with the boy of her dreams.  I had been cursed with looks that screamed, “GET A PERSONALITY and do it quick!”   And so I did.  I told jokes I had memorized, became a storyteller, a performer.  I craved being the center of attention and I was.  I was the youngest of seven children.  The nearest in age to me was six and a half years old when I was born.  For many years, I did not lack regard.  And my personality grew and grew until it nearly arrived at a place five minutes before I did.  

The thing about a personality is it’s less marketable than beauty.  How do you dress up a sense of humor?  What color goes well with charm when the charm is not preceded by a tan, blonde hair and blue eyes.

Adorable doesn’t always play as well as gorgeous.  

So at four, five, and six years old, I could command a room.  The thing about the rooms though, is that they were filled with people who already, at least in theory, adored me.  Sometimes, maybe, they were people who adored the people who adored me, always a source of embarrassment for my poor brothers and sisters.  Imagine any of our surprise when the further I got in school, the more shy I became.  The further away from my audience I traveled the less inclined I was to perform. By the time I was seven, my oldest siblings were away at school or getting married.  Miserably my fan club was dwindling. The recipe for disaster inherent in this proposition wasn’t just that I was getting less and less attention; it was also that I was craving it more and more.  I was a preteen egomaniac, an attention whore.  I suppose this isn’t entirely abnormal.  I imagine there are many parents of teenagers and preteens that see the same qualities in their children, although perhaps not put quite as darkly.  

For a long time I did have something going for me.  I was thin and I was young.  Our culture certainly celebrates those attributes especially in girls, but yes even in boys.  My adolescence was, not uncharacteristically, filled with heartache, real and imagined.  My parents separated when I was fourteen and my mother moved away, further isolating me.  I did spend time with her on weekends, but most of my time was spent with my father and one older brother. By that time, the five older siblings were all gone, too.  I retreated even further into television and into myself, the child star turned introvert.  In school I sat in the back of the room because I didn’t want anyone behind me.  I didn’t want anyone to see me. 

I was raised Catholic, too,  and this was the 1980s.  I was taught shame early.  I shared a room with my two older brothers for years, but never saw either of them naked.  Our bodies were merely functional, dirty, not to be looked at, certainly not to be celebrated.  I was well into my twenties, a trip to a bathhouse and not my first, when I realized, all of a sudden, that I’d been walking around naked, shocked at how normal it felt, how liberating, and certainly not dirty or disgusting.

Body image issues, shyness, shame for being gay, it’s a miracle I ever attempted to have sex, but that takes me back to that desire I was referring to earlier.  Thank goodness desire is stronger in most people than self-consciousness.   I had both in abundance.  I was seventeen and not out of the closet when I learned of a bar in Minneapolis called the Gay 90s and knew I had to go.  I agonized over how to accomplish this, for weeks, until finally hatching a plan. I had no idea if I could even get into the bar, but I took the bus from the suburbs to downtown Minneapolis anyway  I knew I could get there, but the buses didn’t run all night, so I wouldn't be able to get home until morning.  I didn’t care.  Not in the slightest. 

I actually dressed up.  How cute! How embarrassing! I wore dress pants, a sweater and boots, an outfit I wouldn’t be caught dead in, in a gay bar, today.  I got downtown about 8PM on a Friday night. It took me until almost 10 to muster up the courage to attempt an entrance.  Before that, I had walked around and around the block, studying the people going in.  I was absolutely terrified and have no idea how with my shyness and awkwardness, I expected to pull this off, but finally I decided to go for it. There was a group of 4 or 5 guys going in and I did my best to blend in with them.  My heart felt as if it would pound right out of my chest.  I didn’t count on there being a bouncer.  I’m sure I didn’t even know what one of those was at that age, but just inside the door of the bar was a six and a half foot tall, easily three hundred pound man with a beard.  I nearly fainted.  He wasn’t checking anyone's IDs, but he certainly looked me up and down.  He made some kind of obligatory greeting to my imaginary friends, each one something different, and when he came to me he simply said, “Evening.”  That was it.  It was in easy as pie, though I have no idea how I’d managed to not wet myself.    

I walked into a long room filled with tables and chairs.  There were booths along the wall, a bar almost the length of the entire room and a tiny dance floor all the way in back.  On the bar were two incredibly beautiful men, in just underwear, dancing to Taylor Dayne’s Tell it to my Heart.  Thank god for gay bars!  In many I have been in since, there have been beautiful men in nothing but underwear dancing on the bar.  Those tend to be my favorites.  It’s almost a given that I will prefer a bar with strippers or a piano.  The second gay bar I ever set foot in was a piano bar.  Having grown up on a steady diet of Country music and Neil Diamond, it was in that bar that I was introduced to and began a love affair with the music of Joni Mitchell, Elton John, James Taylor, Van Morrison and even Fleetwood Mac that continues to this day.  That, of course, is a entirely different story, so back to the men.    

For me, watching male dancers undress on stage was akin to watching television.  It really transported me into a world where I was somebody else.  The hick kid from small town Minnesota who just a couple of years earlier was discovering his homosexuality in the pages of a Playgirl magazine, by himself, in a cornfield, was all but gone.  At the Gay 90s, that night, I became who I was meant to be.  I was, for the first time in my life, in the right place.  I’m fairly certainly I gaped moving through that huge bar for the first time.  The Gay 90s is almost a city block long and a quarter of a city block wide and two stories tall.  Throughout the night, I noticed the bouncer eying me and although a small part of me was afraid I’d be kicked out on my ass at any moment, again I didn’t care.  I had found a place where I belonged and nothing was going to dampen the euphoria.  I was 17 years old and for the first time, probably since that night my mom had put me to bed and kissed my forehead, ten

years earlier, the world was beautiful again.  There was purpose. 

At the end of the night, bar close, I made my way to the exit on a cloud, through the smoke and the sounds of music and laughter and the amazing scent of cigarettes mixed with alcohol, mixed with men.  There are certain elements to that combination that have, over the years, become less pleasing, but on that night and many, many to come, it was the scent of drugs and pheromones that made my head spin and my breath quicken and my heart smile.  At the exit, I saw the bouncer again. I can't begin to tell you how imposing he was, especially to a five foot eight, hundred and thirty pound brown eyed boy in cowboy boots. He smiled at me and there was a gleam in  his eye I hadn't noticed before.  It was something like love.  I realized he hadn't been watching me as much as watching out for me.  As I stepped by him, he grabbed me and spun me around by the shoulder picked me up in a huge bear hug and whispered, “You’re home, handsome.”  

And I was!  That bouncer’s name was Adam.  You should have seen him in drag.  It was a sight to behold.  Even in flats, this man towered over nearly everyone.  He did only camp drag, usually keeping the beard.  He was a flurry of feathers and sequins and costume jewelry casting a shadow of love anywhere he went in the bar.  I wouldn’t say we were ever close, but we knew each other by name  and by smile.  I’m certain he knew I had no business in a gay bar, no business drinking, no business pretty much to do anything and he turned a blind eye to it all, knowing how desperately I needed to be there, whether it was legal for me to be or not. Adam died of AIDS several years ago while I was living on the West Coast.  I came home to find him gone.  How strange it was to walk in the door of the Gay 90s and not see him.