Reflections on Peg Kerr's The Wild Swans



Originally posted March 7, 2003:

For the last several hours or so I have been steadily choking back tears from emotion I didn't know what to do with, and I finally just gave up, left the bookstore where I had gone to read, and let the tears fall as I came back here.



I guess in a way this is all my mom's fault. My mom was the one who wanted me to be in theatre. I started theatre when I was 9. I was the Badger in the Wind in the Willows. The guy who did my stage makeup for my first play was named Jerry. Jerry Boles. he had red hair and bright blue eyes and a really big smile. He was friendly and nice and highstrung and I loved him. My mom always had so much trouble getting me to sit still for makeup but whenever Jerry did it I was as still as a mouse. From then on, whenever my mom wanted me to smile, for application of blush or for any other reason, she'd tell me to make Jerry Cheeks.

I knew Jerry for the rest of our mutual life together in the theatre. We did plays and stage work together, and when I was old enough to do so I wondered if he and Scott, one of my favorite directors, were partners or just good friends who had come to terms with their sexuality in a small redneck Southern town together.

In 1993 a friend of mine who later graduated valedictorian of her high school sat in a circle of teenage actors and actresses and declared virulently "That's disgusting--I think all gays should be shot," and I looked across to where Scott was reeling, as if he'd been slapped, before turning away and muttering, "How'd you like to be in a play with one?" as he left. I leaned across the circle and I snatched her arm and just dug my nails into it from anger as I hissed words to her that made her understand that she'd just damned members of the cast in their hearing. That night after the show (a dress rehearsal) I was quiet and sullen for a long long time and I remember my mom asking me what was wrong.

Later that year, my mom and I attended a play, some play. And Jerry was in it, in a very very small role, and I realized when I saw him that I hadn't seen him in months. After the show I went up to him, and he was emaciated. He was gaunt, and pale, and weak-voiced, and I didn't even *realize* it because I was so happy to see him. I went up to him and said what a great job he'd done, and his eyes met mine--and for a split-second-- that I had nearly forgotten about til today--for a split second he looked *grateful* to me. He gave me this look of such gratitude mixed with surprise, as if he couldn't believe that I had just come up to him and speak to him that way. I couldn't understand it--he was Jerry, I had always loved Jerry, but my god, he was so *gaunt* and the hollows under his eyes were so alarming to me. That night, after the show, my mom said, in this kind of reluctant, forceful tone that I have *always* remembered,

"Bless his heart, I guess he's got AIDS."

I don't remember what we said after that but I have never forgotten those words or the way she said them and I guess I never will.

In 1994 I went away to Governor's School and found people like myself for the first time in my life. It was liberating. While I was there, the name "Jerry Boles" came through the paper, just one obituary out of a million. Cause of death: pneumonia.

Later that summer I wrote my first play based on my governor's school experiences. it won first prize in a local young playwrights' contest, and was performed by the same theatre company in which I first met Jerry.

I dedicated my play to him.

Somewhere around there my Southern Baptist church began officially boycotting Disney because of its pro-gays and lesbians stance. I was openly horrified but I kept attending church.

In 1995 I faced the newly elected governer of Tennessee, Don Sundquist, who was at Girls' State talking about his new health plan for state employees and their families. I asked him if the health plan extended to partners of gays and lesbians. He turned red and stammered and dodged my question and took no more questions after me.

In 1997 I decided to really pursue the art of being the good, dedicated, honest Christian I was raised to be. I had always hovered on the brink, unwilling to give in, but this time around I found a friend who was really wonderful, sweet, and willing to help me grow and move closer to Christ (and to the ridiculous things Campus Crusade wanted us to do). I couldn't understand why my dear friend Chris and I always fought and why there was this seemingly impossible hurdle that we couldn't overcome even though we got along fine in all other ways. Over the summer I found out that Stephen Sondheim was gay. I confessed myself kinda disappointed, because, well, I wasn't really sure why, I just was, because there was that whole church thing....

Chris emailed me going, I know how much you love Sondheim, why does this one thing of all things disappoint you? I couldn't formulate a really good answer to that--just wondered why we always had to fight over the most trivial things.

A month later school reconvened, and Chris told me he was gay. He likes to joke about that moment now-- that my mouth hung moving wordlessly for about 30 full seconds, doing that fish underwater thing I do.

I think he knows without ever having to talk about it how much everything changed for me in that moment as much as for him.

In the spring of 1998, my good Christian friend who I loved and adored and had always respected wrote me a letter telling me that if I loved Chris then it was my duty as a Christian to condemn his life of sin and refuse to accept it. I told her I would never do that. Our friendship ended--and so did my long-time true-to-my-southern-baptist-upbringing waffle stance on homosexuality and the church. My friendship with Christopher is still one of the cornerstone relationships of my life.

Two years later just before graduation, Chris came out to his parents and asked me to be there when it happened. His mom is a Methodist minister in Seattle. All his family is very active in the church. When it happened I cried more than anybody even though I was supposed to be the one there giving support. His mom just embraced him, wordlessly for a long time, and said, "I love you to the core of my being."

When I had told my own mom the summer before that Chris and another friend were coming to stay with us in Tennessee for a week, I explained that he had come out, and my mom said, "that's fine, just as long as you don't start getting any ideas."

I came so close to telling my mother about slash, and about love under will, about everything, over christmas holidays this year. I was seconds away from bringing it up when she said, "You've always been sort of obsessed with that kind of thing. Just, you know, gay...stuff of that nature. It's *odd*."

I've been reading the Wild Swans over the last two days. I waited over a year before reading this book because I felt that it was something I wasn't prepared to invest in emotionally. I knew, rationally, I knew that it dealt with AIDS. But I got so fully into this world that I had gone to this kind of happy place in my mind where the main character went through his self-discovery, something that resonated so much with me, and he and his lover fell in love and lived happily ever after, *even though* I knew I was reading a detailed, well-researched account of life as a gay New Yorker in the 80's that matched my own knowledge of the topic from the little I had read.

I *knew* this--and there was still that momentary twinge of sinking horror when the first sign of illness crept its way into the text: this slap of the face: oh, no. I'm going to have to go there. With them--with the characters. I thought, Can I do this? Can I make that journey? And for a moment I wasn't sure if I could.

And then I thought of Jerry. Of his face that I can still see so clearly-- and for the first time in *years* the memory of that momentary fleeting look of gratitude when he saw me flooded over me. I remember in that moment, taking his hand, and feeling with utter shock that he had no strength with which to grasp mine at all--and in that sinking moment I *knew* without knowing how, because I had never known anything like this--that Jerry was going to die. And when I look back at that moment today, I realized suddenly that part of that look in Jerry's eyes was his own knowledge that he was never going to see me again.

I call myself a slasher, and I claim to want so much, to *be* so much and to do so much to make things better and leave the world a better place around me, but I'm sitting here, thinking of that fact that I was frightened to go there, to go to the places this beautiful, heartwrenching book is taking me--and realizing how easy I have it. I never had to go there with Jerry. That exchange of glances and I never saw him again. He was a memory and I got to look good by dedicating a play to him which he will never read or see performed. I made the governor of tennessee examine his principles for a moment, but it took my *best friend* coming out to me before i would examine my own. I claim to love writing and exploring gay issues, but I write gay fanfiction steeped in escapism where I will never have to write about characters who deal with consequences, never face the devastation of AIDS, never make me need to risk too much as an author.

My heart is broken that I hesitated in that moment to follow Peg's characters on their journey. My heart is aching that I would even think twice about it. All my life I have felt impelled to do something, be something for the gay community, without understanding it, without knowing what it means to my own sense of identity. I just know that I have to, I keep being drawn to it and *needing* to do something, immerse myself in this quest for a culture, for acceptance and understanding. But I have also done it in ways that kept me immune (ironically) from having to witness the nastiness of being gay, of coming to terms with the worst that gays and lesbians have had to deal with.

It's because of Peg's book that I even remembered that handshake, and that momentary look of surprise as I reached out to take Jerry's hand--as if he was astonished that I hadn't just shunned him.

And I wonder--in that moment, when I was too young and naive to know better, no, I didn't. I would write about that moment later.--in fact, I wrote about it as part of my entrance application into Governor's School the same month Jerry died. I would write about it, about the end of innocence--but I don't know if I ever really understood until this moment how the end of innocence was the beginning of accountability. In that one initial moment I didn't think, I justI reached out to him because I cared for and admired him and looked up to him, and didn't think twice. But then--"I guess he's got AIDS."-- shattered my illusions and brought me over into a new responsibility.

And yeah, I talk a good game. But I wonder if maybe a part of me hasn't been crossing over to the other side of the road ever since.


__________________________________
~ main ~ about ~ rants ~ nqr ~ livejournal ~ the armchair ~
Fiction: harry potter ~ hikaru no go ~ prince of tennis ~ other fandoms ~ originals ~