What I Learned About Homosexuality

The sixties were a good time to challenge the prevailing norms carried over from the stifling fifties, but to admit to being homosexual was seldom cool, even in that climate. In school and on the playground fear was induced in many young homosexuals; but for myself it was more a case of too many lies accepted too easily at an age when I still didn't know any better than to sop up everything any adult authority figure fed me. My indoctrination into the American anti-homosexual mythology would be followed by my own sexual self-realization by only a few years.

I cannot adequately describe the story of my own coming into awareness without also describing how outrageous the lies were that I was taught, and how casually I accepted them. At 14, I was incredibly naive. The school system whose halls I walked in lead me not to fear and self-loathing but to a lack of self understanding so profound I would almost miss out completely on that most magical of school age experiences, first love.

From what I can tell, my own story is not all that common among Gay people. I went from a state of near-total ignorance to complete acceptance of myself and my sexuality in, literally, a heartbeat. Some find it hard to believe and I can only say in my own defense that I was just a kid at the time and still pretty dumb about a lot of things.

In 1968, I was a junior high school student in Montgomery County, Maryland, an affluent, well-educated suburban community northeast of Washington, DC. I was 14, and in the eighth grade. That year, we were taught a brief sex education course (boy's health) for a week one spring. The course was taught by our gym teachers...which I think gives you an indication of how seriously the school system regarded the subject in those days.

We sat together, a group of 14 year old males, whispering and giggling to each other rudely before our instructors, Mr. Masood and Mr. Ramey, came into the room. The room was a smallish anteroom behind the gym and the usual Bell and Howell projector and screen had been set up. The format of the class was, first, a brief spiel from Mr. Masood about the topic for the day, then the film, then Masood and Ramey would take turns elaborating on the topic, then questions.

The course dealt mostly with anatomy and the changes that were already beginning to take place in our bodies. Hair in various interesting places, voices changing suddenly and embarrassingly. Certain nocturnal events were already beginning to embarrass the dickens out of some of us. Unbeknownst to me, there was another change taking place among my fellows in that room with regards to how they viewed girls. My own feelings at the time were that girls were alright, but guys were a lot more fun to be around. Few girls in my neighborhood shared my enthusiasm, for example, for playing with gasoline and firecrackers.

All was duly explained to us in a manner resembling a shop teacher's instructions for building a bookcase. This, class, is a piece of wood...and this is a saw....

We were shown some 50's health course films which discussed anatomy and reproductive organ construction and operation, but if you blinked you missed exactly how the male's sperm actually made it from the guy over to the female's eggs. We talked about dating...a subject I wasn't terribly interested in and wouldn't be for years to come, well after I had graduated from High School. We were warned darkly to avoid heavy petting, something whose interest by some of my classmates mystified me. To this day I don't know how much of what they told us regarding homosexuality came from their course guide,and how much came from their own beliefs.... It would be interesting to find out.

One day, the topic announced was abnormal sexual behaviors. The subject seemed to come out of the blue and the prospect of fresh material for the usual rude adolescent jokes was invigorating. We listened raptly.

We were assured that masturbation was not, in itself, abnormal for young boys, although neither teacher offered to explain how to accomplish the feat. No, it will not grow hair on the palms of your hands.

Then the topic turned to homosexuality.

We were assured that occasional homosexual dreams and urges were normal at our age and not to worry about them. Going through a brief phase were you became excited at the sight of male bodies was normal for a lot of young men (this produced a lot of giggling in the room). We would, we were assured, all grow up to be normal men so long as we maintained a healthy respect for the proper function of sex (procreation) and lived clean lives.

Firstly, I learned that there are two kinds of homosexuals: Kings and Queens. Kings looked just like any other guy and acted like any other guy, but they were just as queer as Queens, who dressed themselves as women and were sexually submissive. Mr. Masood assured us, however, that all homosexuals believed themselves to be women trapped in men's bodies.

Homosexuals were mentally ill. Even the ones who "look and act somewhat normal" were likely to be at least borderline psychotic. The most grisly murders you read about in the newspapers are usually committed by homosexuals. Homosexuals will, after they kill, often become further deranged and mutilate the bodies of their victims.

Homosexuals preferred young boys for their sexual satisfaction whenever they could get one. Barring that, they would seek out unsuspecting heterosexual men, lure them into quiet secluded places and get them drunk. They will engage another homosexual only when they cannot avail themselves of either boys or unsuspecting heterosexuals. This, however, is always a dangerous thing for them to do, as their partner will invariably be as prone to psychotic behavior as they are themselves. Almost all homosexual liaisons end in murder. Very often, a homosexual will kill during or after having sex.

Homosexuals were responsible for most child abductions and killings. Homosexuals lurked around public restrooms and school yards. Homosexuals will cruise for hitch hikers and abduct them, rape them, murder them, and bury the bodies in some isolated wood. Most disappearances could be traced to homosexual abductions.

Anal intercourse was duly mentioned--along with the fact that it damages one's sphincter so badly that you have to wear diapers for the rest of your life after doing it. Oral sex was illuminated thusly: it is the first thing a homosexual will try to do to you once they get you alone in the woods...but it's dangerous; homosexuals get so excited during oral sex that they frequently bite off the organ of their victim.

We listened, entranced, like kids around a camp fire being told ghost stories by the scoutmaster. Afterwards, I filed this information away under Interesting Facts and forgot about it. That is to say, I did not give it much thought: the premise of homosexual consciousness it elaborated was to dog my better judgement for years to come. I remember after that week that the most useful factoid I'd learned from the whole class was that wet dreams were something that happened to all the other guys, too. I was tremendously relieved.

I find it interesting that I can recall no mention ever being made of Lesbians. As to bisexuality, it was not mentioned and I didn't even hear the word until years later. I doubt that either man would have entertained the thought that there could be such a thing. Anyone who would have sex with another man would have been, in their books, a homo, period.

Being an artist and learning hard, as I was in those days, how to draw the human form, I already knew a great deal about comparative anatomy. Boys have this equipment, girls that. Girls' hips are different and so are the muscles around them. I was always getting that wrong when I drew and it annoyed me; my girls often came out looking like guys. I'd already surmised about how the pieces came together to make babies. I'd seen pigs, horses, cats and so forth doing the same on local farms. Big Deal.

Time passed. Eighth Grade. Ninth Grade. Tenth. One day I entered school facing my last year of it. Nobody in my family had previously gone to college...indeed I would be the first male in my father's side to finish high school. College was a possibility, but not a certainty. We didn't have a lot of money. This, for all I knew, could be it. Then...life.... I was already straining at the gate.

My friends were all people I had known since grade school. I was long since known as something of an oddball, but I was well liked by my friends. I was an artist, a painter, an incessant doodler, to the irritation of my teachers, who found my notebooks filled with just about anything but notes. Every year, I always joined the student paper staff as a cartoonist. I was always building my friends models from scratch of television rocketships, or favorite funny cars. I would doodle sketches of them. I painted designs on their favorite slot cars. In my senior year, I joined the yearbook staff as an artist and photographer. It struck nobody who knew me as funny that someone with an artistic temperament was, well...different. I could be moody, exuberant, intellectual, goofy. They all told me I was fun to be around.

Some of the lame-brained jock-types in the student body would occasionally razz me, calling me queer or faggot, but that was due to my slight build. Skinny, scrawny guys were supposed to be kept frightened of the Big Guys, except I never was. I had my share of school yard fights and, though I lost no few of them, nobody came back for seconds (to this day I can only breath out of one side of my nose). I later learned that nobody seriously considered the possibility that I might really be a homosexual, probably for the same reason I never gave it a thought; our image of homosexuality was hideously wrong. I sure didn't think of it...not even when my friends began to wonder openly, in my company, why I never dated girls.

Long after my own sexual awakenings began to strike even me as ambiguous, I would tell myself--not in panic, as some have, but as a young boy, lazily, as boys will sometimes do, pondering life and trying to fathom it's puzzles--that I was not a homosexual because I was none of the things I had been taught homosexuals were. Therefore, I must be heterosexual. Therefore, what I felt about the opposite sex was what my friends were feeling, too. Dating just wasn't that interesting.

Except they were all doing it. Maybe they were just doing it because it was expected of them, I wondered. But what on earth was the big deal about sitting alone with a girl and holding her hand for hours at a time and necking and so on and so forth, when you could be doing something Really Cool like making smoke bombs and setting them off under the school bleachers, or exploring the underground foundation of the school after everyone had gone home? Every now and then, one of my pals would get starry eyed and wander off, entranced like a zombie. I began to wonder if it wasn't some kind of illness.

My body was developing on schedule, but I noticed that my heart did not race at the sight of females, whereas my friends were already dating...and bragging. Out of a sense of obligation, as much as a genuine curiosity, I tried dating, too. By the time my senior year had rolled around, I was no longer a virgin, yet my feelings about the whole thing remained pretty much as they were before. It was all very well and good...but nothing to get bent out of shape over.

My friends felt, I later learned, that my tepid interest in the opposite sex was probably just due to the fact that I was a late bloomer who hadn't yet found the Right Girl, not that I was a homosexual. I felt they were making mountains out of molehills. Life, I had decided, was too good to waste time and energy merely running hormones to ground. I had other interests, other things I wanted to do with my time on the earth. When I tried to explain how I felt to my friends, they would shake their heads and say...you wait...you just haven't met the Right Girl. I thought they were being immature. My parents felt that teen years were far too young to be getting seriously involved with girls anyway, and so approved of my reserve.

I saw many of my friends get their hearts broken, at one point or another, during their own rites of coming of age, and shook my head sadly for them. Once, a dear friend called me up at 2 in the morning, broken hearted, and I went to see him and consoled him as best I could, thinking all the while that he should never have let his hormones get the better of him. I was a patronizing little shit in those days, and it embarrasses me to recall how I trivialized what he and my other friends were going through. Yet they were glad of me; I was intensely proud of the fact that when they needed someone to confide in, they came to Me. They trusted Me. They were fond of Me. I would bask in that whenever I was with any of them.

I can look back and see all the signs now; hindsight is always 20/20. My essential relationships among my peers were always with other males, and feelings towards the friends I made were fiercely deep and emotional. Their company made me intensely happy. I got jealous, sometimes, of their other friends. When someone would get mad at me and stop seeing me for a period of time, I would be crushed. When one friend moved out of state, I cried for weeks.

I always put my heated emotional reactions to just about anything down to "artistic temperament" and let it go at that. It never dawned on me to ask myself why someone so free and passionate with his emotions would get so tepid when the subject of love came up. Talk to me about fuelers, talk to me about Vietnam, talk to me about the space race, talk to me about my art work, talk to me about the vice principal...and I would get animated, excited, heated. Talk to me about romance, and it was instantly...oh, that...so what? I remember once, a friend of mine, after looking though one of my sketch books, glanced up at me with a curious, undecipherable look on his face and asked, "Bruce, do you realize that your subjects are almost exclusively male?" I told him that guys were easier to draw. When I became interested in photography, I shot rolls of film of my friends, but almost nothing of their girlfriends unless they asked me to, which I would do without hesitation, but it never dawned on me to wonder why I needed to be asked to take pictures of girls.

Once, a friend caught me reading Playboy. I had picked it out of a trash dump when I saw, from the cover, that it held an article about a funny car racer who I was a fan of at the time. My friend asked me if I liked the pet of the month. I told him I only had it because I wanted to read about the guy who raced The Little Red Wagon. He smirked at me and I was annoyed.

The thing that always strikes me when I compare my youth to others is that I never worried about myself. I've heard over and over from other homosexuals that they were terrified of their feelings. I can only say that I was incredibly naive, and maybe I was, in some sense, a late bloomer on top of it. My sexual dreams, when they came, were vague and somewhat formless. Occasionally, they would involve other boys, and when that happened I would say "humph...going though a phase..." and let it pass. The only answer, it seemed to me, in all careful consideration, was that love and sex were the most overrated, uninteresting things since Lost In Space and Herman's Hermits.

It was in this frame of mind, regarding love, that I entered my senior year in high school. I saw nothing unusual about it, it was all just common sense to me. Then, one day, just after the start of my senior year, as I was walking through the school on the way to a class, I met someone.

The ancients used to personalize the spirit of love as a deity, and had all kinds of tales about how it would have its revenge on mortals who did not respect it. I often imagine it saying, one day, "Well, Bruce, you say love is a boring crock, is it? You just haven't met the right...BOY. Now let's work on carbonating those hormones, shall we...?"

It was like walking outside to check the weather before turning in for bed, and being greeted, not just by stars, but by the Aurora Borealis. It was like going out to paint the few flowers you saw on the hillside, for practice, and finding, when you got there, an explosion of color as far as your eye could see, as though a rainbow had come to rest across the hillside and over to the next hill and the next and on into the valley beyond. It was like rummaging through a box of old fireworks the day before the Fourth of July and finding nothing but sparklers and snakes, and then discovering a stash of M-80s.

One moment, I was walking to class and seeing nothing but other random, vacant, hurrying adolescent faces, and the next I was seeing him. We looked at each other in passing, and he smiled at me. I remember seeing that smile all the rest of the way to class.

He was beautiful--tall, lean, long-haired and graceful. He was 16 weeks my junior. His eyes and hair were a beautiful brown and his face was bright and intelligent. He walked with leonine grace down the school hallways. Over a period of weeks, I maneuvered myself into being at just the right spots in the school at just the right times so our paths would cross. We began to talk easily with each other, and he was as interesting inside as he was beautiful outside. I asked him about his interests, and he would compliment me on my drawings for the school newspaper, or a painting or photograph he saw hanging somewhere. We would walk together to classes, as far as we could, talking about all sorts of random things from politics to art. I began filling my sketchbooks of drawings of him.

I recall how, occasionally, some weeks after we had become acquainted, he seemed to pause at random moments in our conversations and look at me as though expecting a response to something...I knew not what...and I would simply, contentedly, smile back at him and wait for him to go on. One day, just as he was leaving for home, he flung an arm across my shoulders and gave me a pat and said "See ya." I nearly went into the stratosphere.

I remember this vividly. Typing this now, I can close my eyes a little and see and feel it all like it happened yesterday. That evening, I went home and after dinner walked out to a favorite hillside to watch the sunset. The air was slightly cool and there was a gentle breeze. The sunset was deep and red and I felt my spirit soar. I was looking at the burning sky and seeing him. I could still feel his touch across my shoulders. I felt as essentially close to the earth, the sky, the sun, to my Creator, as I had ever felt...and like a waft of quiet wind through my hair came the thought: I'm in love.

So, I thought, struck still to my core. This is what it's all about.... It's wonderful.... I sat on that hillside for hours, just feeling his arm across my shoulders and thinking about his smile.

Some have written about how terrified they were. I've heard folks talk about years and years of denial. Maybe it was easy for me because it occurred during the height of the counter-cultural years and the anti-Vietnam protests. Question authority was what the times were about, and we had all done our share of reevaluating our education and our inherited political beliefs. I had been plastering the school with political cartoons for months. I can only say, in all honesty, that at that instant everything I had ever been taught about homosexuality collapsed like a junk bond empire on dividend day. I thought, I'm a homosexual. But I'm STILL not any of those things I was taught homosexuals are. Therefore, I was taught garbage.

That was as much thought as I gave the matter for the rest of that year. It wasn't until after he had moved out of the area and my life and I came down off the incredible high of that one summer that I pondered things more deeply. I have never felt a shred of guilt or shame. I am not saying that to belittle the terrible experiences others, like me, have had. I was like a bewildered infantryman stumbling haphazardly though a field I never suspected was loaded with mines and emerging on the other side with a blank, Well, Golly! Now What? look on my face, while others around me took bad hits and came away burned and deeply scarred. I lucked out. I discovered love and my sexual orientation all in the same glorious rush and it was obvious, seeing it then, that way, that if I renounced the one I'd have to live without the other, and I wasn't about to let it go now that I'd found it. I'd have laughed in the face of anyone who told me I was sick. Sick? Sick?! You Idiot! I'm Cured. I'm, well.... I'm Whole.... I'm alive at last! If anything disturbs me, it is the chilling thought that I could have gone through the rest of my life thinking I knew all there was to know about love, that it was, at best, a pastime for simpletons.

After that, my dreams and desires became suddenly and forcefully specific. It was as if a switch had been thrown somewhere, and all the feelings I was supposed to be having as an adolescent, regarding sex--the feelings I hadn't had for so long--suddenly found their voice. That the images in my heart were male seemed just a curious twist, like an Agatha Christie mystery ending. It was exhilarating.

At the same time, I didn't want to scare my quarry off. I had no firm idea at all that desires such as these could be reciprocated. Was this what he was feeling too? How could I tell...? So the next day, and for weeks afterwards, I tried my best to play it cool at school and nudge things along in the direction I wanted them to go. Not easy when, every time I caught sight of him, my heart began to race. Incredibly, I discovered that I didn't have to nudge things very hard. In fact, I could have probably confessed to him what I was thinking right away--I'm not certain. But as I gently, cautiously, nudged and prodded, I discovered, to my delight, that he knew what he wanted, too, and it wasn't girls for him any more then it was for me.

We shared each other's company for the rest of that school year, and for most of the summer after we graduated. Slowly and deliberately, we drew closer together. One summer afternoon, we arranged to go hiking. There was a place we'd both never been to that we wanted to explore.

At a shop where I once worked, one of the guys there described--a little too graphically, for my taste--the loss of his virginity. A guy never forgets his first woman, he said. Actually he didn't say woman; he made a reference to a woman's organ. What I'll never forget that day when I was 17 is the moment he put his hands on me. That gentle, tentative touch was electric.

I woke up that instant from the dream of childhood. We layed down together and took each other, on that green, warm, golden afternoon, across the threshold into the land of adults. My gym teacher's ravings and everything else I'd ever been told about what homosexuals were and what it meant to be one disappeared in my first passionate embrace of another male. And afterwards, breathless and exalted, we looked into each others eyes for, I don't know, minutes...hours.... To this day, I can still remember quite vividly things like the sounds of birds calling each other in the trees above us, the scent of his skin, the touch of his hands on me, the sunlight drifting over his hair in the warm breeze....

I had been an instrument sitting idly on the maker's shelf, watching, curiously, the work going on around me, hearing the first tentative notes of the other instuments beside me, and not knowing that I, too, had been created to make this music until that moment when the maker took hold of me, and I felt myself lifted up, and I sang.

Nothing kills a lie faster than first-hand experience with the truth. In this case, it was my heart's sudden freedom from its sweet, comfortable prison that finally revealed to me the gaping chasm between what I had been taught about sex and what sex was really about. This was an affluent, well educated, largely college-bound high school community, and as I looked at my diploma one winter night, pondering my future life, it struck me that, though I had a better understanding of myself and humanity than when I entered school, it was not the result of what I was taught in class. It was what I had learned for myself. That, in the end, was the final and best lesson of my school years.

Copyright © 1994, Bruce Garrett.