Stranger in a stranger land

By LINDSAY BIANCHI
lbianchi@thecitizennews.com

Many of you will see the news next weekend and just shake your head. Plastered on the screen and newspapers will be images of drag queens and leather boys celebrating Gay Pride in Atlanta. But those flamboyant folks are not the only stories Pride has to tell ...

I've been sneaking around this planet for about 50 years now, living and working among the "heteros" trying to pass myself off as one of them. At first it was easy. I even fooled myself into thinking I could be just like them, but as time went by and I reached my 30s, it became more and more obvious that something was amiss.

I had never had a steady girlfriend and the women that I dated were more like friends than lovers. I can remember trying to awkwardly put my arm around my date at a movie or fumbling to hold her hand as we walked down the street. A goodnight kiss was sheer terror for me and anything beyond that seemed completely alien. I was a real gentleman, all right. I was also lost and lonely.

I knew when I was a young teenager that I had certain feelings, which set me apart from most other boys. It wasn't just my disinterest in sports, although I was corralled into several pathetic attempts to "be a man." Somehow, I became the pitcher of the Little League team. Imagine my horror. Imagine everyone else’s horror when I couldn't figure out the whole pitching mound thing. I stood there crying and they took me out of the game.

"Thank God!" I thought. I just wanted to go home and color or watch cartoons. I couldn't understand why everyone was yelling and screaming and insisting they were having a great time. It seemed like a real drag to me. I think it was soon after that I became ostracized from the group I called my friends. I didn't speak their lingo, didn't share their state of mind. The password was Mickey Mantle and I was into Vincent Price.

A couple years later I was coerced into joining the track team. My father thought I should follow in my brother's footsteps. He was several years older than me and ran cross-country. I was skinny as a rail and it seemed like a good idea to cash in on my ability to run away. I was more bored than ever running around in circles, sweat pouring off of me as I became even more emaciated. I was geekin' big time!

That summer I finally got involved in something I liked: a play. Having spent most of my childhood in the company of little girls (I have three sisters and there were a dozen more in our neighborhood), play-acting was in my blood. I had an overactive imagination and a tendency to dream. I was ripe for the stage. I'm sure my father was mortified. This was the first red flag to go up in a long series of crimson fabrics.

I acted in plays and helped on crews all through high school. It was my social world. My father would chew me out for going to play practice every night saying that he didn't run a "personal cab service." Sure, I only had a few lines, but it was fun being backstage, more fun than hiding from my parents up in my room.

Eventually I went to college. I was going to be a commercial artist. It was just an excuse to get out of Dodge. My first year at Illinois State University was a fabulous disaster. I became the classic dropout. I had made so many new friends that year. The thought of another summer in Dachau was just too horrible to think about. I ran away from home soon after. I was 19.

It totally freaked out my family. My brother called me "The runaway kid." He always had an endearing nickname for me. When I was younger, it was "Brains" or "Coordination." The year I got a job washing dishes at a local restaurant, my father began calling me "Professionally Speaking."

Why would I not want to stay where there was so much love and mutual respect? I wasn't sure, but I was going to find out ... elsewhere.

I lived with friends or on my own in many different places over the years. I joined the Navy about 10 months after leaving home. I wanted to get the GI Bill so I could go back to school. I went in on the "buddy system" with my roommate who talked me into it in the first place. I was discharged just over 15 months later for homosexuality.

I was stationed in Keflavik, Iceland, in 1975. Over the course of boot camp I had begun a passionate outpouring of letters to my best friend and he to me. By the time my leave came around, we were inseparable, madly in love with each other. After I had been shipped off to Iceland, he had come flying out of the closet on great gossamer wings. I was still in a closet of my own making. He told me in a letter that I should be honest and open about my sexuality. It seemed like a good idea.

I told my two best friends on the base about it, not realizing that their reaction, cloaked in blank expressions, was one of utter disgust. I began to suspect something about two weeks before New Year’s when they stopped speaking to me. They wouldn't even acknowledge my presence.

On New Year's Eve, a beer party in the room next to mine erupted into an attack on my orientation. I endured some awful speeches that night, some terrible threats. I tried to escape out the third-floor window of my room, but it was frozen shut. A moment came when I was able to make a run for it and I didn't stop until I got to Security.

They said they had been waiting for me, that the whole base knew. I gave a statement admitting my homosexuality and three months later, after being transferred back to the Great Lakes restricted barracks, which felt like Colditz, I was discharged. I was able to keep my Corframs, but that was all. I got half of my GI bill and eventually took more courses in gay behavior: theatre, speech, line drawing, and English literature.

That was a long time ago and hardly half the path that brought me here. I know a lot of people don't understand how someone can be attracted to and love somebody of the same sex. There are those who say I will go to Hell. I can't help but think, "Who died and made you king?" I never really cared what others thought. Not interested!

Perhaps they don't understand that you can't force people to agree with you, to adopt your thinking as their own. You can persuade until you are blue in the face. You can scream and point at the eternal tome as if you wrote it yourself. Not impressed!

Beat me up. Lock me up but you will never shut me up ... Sad, isn't? While you all are busy wringing your hands and having conniption fits, my girlfriends and me are having a faboo time!