The Best American Essays 2016 (48 page)

Removed from the all-male context of those war photos, my uncle, in these Miami days, looks decidedly more manly, more heterosexual. If the war photos reveal one face of the confirmed bachelor, these college shots reveal the other: the bachelor as a happy figure of heterosexual excess and possibility.

And I’m reminded of similar photographic evidence from my own past, a picture that once made my parents very happy. I spent my junior year of college abroad, near London, and I was lucky to discover that a second or third cousin by marriage had a five-bedroom condo in Paris. He needed a house sitter for a few weeks around Christmas, and I leapt at the opportunity. Word soon got out that I had commodious digs in the City of Lights, and friends of mine from home and abroad descended, resulting in a Christmas feast of cheap wine and overcooked duck. My guests—some eight or ten—were all female, and when a photo of that Christmas dinner reached my parents, they must have celebrated. And I was happy to let them celebrate. I was still deeply in the closet—scared to death, in fact, of what I knew to be true about myself—and this picture of the promiscuous bachelor abroad was just what I needed to buttress an increasingly shaky heterosexual facade. It was also just what my parents were looking for. They captioned it “Mason and his Harem” and circulated it throughout the neighborhood.

We see in photographs what we want to see. When is a harem—on a beach or in a Parisian condo—the truth? And when is it a cover for a secret that’s hiding in plain sight?

I knew my uncle as a deeply religious man. In this he resembled my mother, whose attempts to get me to go to church were heroic, if ultimately doomed to failure. I’ve never been a believer, and this was the source of great and increasing stress in my family. At some point my mother gave up on getting me to church, having grown tired, I imagine, of my postsermon critiques. (I once caught the minister in a misquotation of James Joyce.) But the concern for my everlasting soul lingered, emerging in quiet, if indirect, ways.

Only a few years before he died, my uncle mailed me a copy of
Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days
, the first in the blockbuster series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins documenting the rapture—that moment when Jesus returns and the saved ascend with him to heaven, leaving nonbelievers, Jews, and Muslims behind to fight various end-time skirmishes. This gift was astute on my uncle’s part. He knew that I always had my head in a book, and what better way to save an intellectual’s soul than through a novel? I read it immediately. It was fascinating, in the same way that the white supremacist literature I had made the subject of my first scholarly book was fascinating. It was a window into a mind-set that was repugnant to me but that I wanted to understand. Of course, it didn’t have the effect my uncle had intended. Instead of pondering the state of my soul, I wondered why, when the believers were raptured, they left their outer garments behind but took their underwear with them. I wondered what it meant for my uncle to believe that when the rapture came, good people of other faiths would suffer the same fate as atheists. That, say, Gandhi and I, were we contemporaries, would both be doomed to hell.

I never spoke with my uncle about this novel, and he never brought it up. This was the way with our family. We preferred indirection, anything that allowed us to avoid confrontation: a letter mailed rather than a phone called, a novel that appears with no accompanying message, or, in a more dramatic example, a message from the grave.

Just such a message came three days after my uncle’s death—at his funeral service, in fact. I was seated down front in my uncle’s church—a country church, farther out of town than the one I had stopped attending so many years back. I was there with my father, my brother and sister-in-law, perhaps my niece and nephew. Halfway through the preacher’s sermon, I realized that his words were aimed at me—literally. He had found me in the second row and was looking directly at me. He made eye contact, and held it, as he talked about the tragic fate of the nonbeliever, and how easily that fate could be avoided, if only he surrendered his arrogance, his belief that he could think his way through the world. My uncle had spoken in his last days, the preacher said, of his faith in God, of his certainty of the life everlasting that awaited him. But he had also spoken of a heaviness of heart. He was worried, the preacher said, about those who lacked such certainty. He was distraught over the fate of people who weren’t saved, the hellfire that awaited them.

Although the preacher never mentioned my name, I’m sure that my uncle did, that my uncle’s last wish was for this man of God to accomplish what all others had failed at: the salvation of his nephew, whom he loved.

And as the preacher was doing this work, his eyes on me and only me, I became angrier and angrier. How dare he use the occasion of my uncle’s funeral to proselytize. How dare he intrude upon my grief to alert me to the dire state of my soul. And I worried, in the days that followed, that this anger would seep onto my uncle, that I would always resent him for such a cheap trick, the hijacking of his own funeral for one last attempt at my salvation.

But instead of anger toward my uncle, I felt sorrow, and this was much worse. For the first time, I tried to put myself in my uncle’s place. I tried to imagine what it would feel like if you knew—
knew
, not merely
believed
—that someone you truly loved was doomed to the worst fate imaginable, everlasting torment. Because that’s what my uncle knew, that someone he had known and loved since his first cry was damned. And knowing this must have killed him, in much crueler fashion than the congestive heart failure that merely took his life.

I looked for solace anywhere I could find it. I latched on to the fact that my uncle had never once said or implied that I was damned because I was gay. I was damned because I didn’t accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. And while this may appear to be a distinction without a difference—I was damned either way—perhaps it meant that, in my uncle’s eyes, my homosexuality wouldn’t keep me from heaven. Maybe, then, he knew this about himself as well, that, whatever he may once have felt for J.P., this feeling could sit alongside his faith and not trouble it. Maybe he could be himself before the Lord, if not before the rest of us.

Or maybe there was no solace to be found. Maybe he was so worried about my soul because he still worried about his own. Did he carry with him, like a cancer, what he had once felt for that baby-faced soldier? Did my uncle worry that he too had committed crimes that would keep him from the kingdom of God?

In the years since my uncle’s death, my life has come more and more to resemble his. And yet the commonality I now feel most urgently isn’t the name we share, or even the presumed if unacknowledged bond of our homosexuality. Rather, it’s our experience of being single. Like him, I’m a bachelor, and with the birth of my nephew, and then my niece, I became a bachelor uncle as well.

And what I’ve found is that history repeats itself. The silence of one generation carries over too easily to the next. I finally came out to my brother and sister-in-law ten years after my parents had asked me not to, but the topic has rarely come up again. In an email, my brother wrote that he doesn’t approve of my “lifestyle,” but he understands it. My sister-in-law has been better, inquiring once or twice over the years about my romantic life. As for my niece and nephew, we’ve never officially had “the conversation,” though surely they know. How could they not, when the signs are so much more legible than they were in my uncle’s day?

My niece and I, in particular, seem to have a tacit understanding. In a recent exchange of texts, she mentioned how much she liked Chick-fil-A. I told her I loved their chicken but hated their politics. She wrote, “Oh yeah, the whole homophobic thing. I’m weak, and eat there anyway. The fact that they’re closed on Sundays is a bummer. I boycott them on Sundays.” She continued, “My gay friends eat there too. I’ll just assume it’s okay.” This casual reference to her gay
friends
from a girl raised in the same religious climate I fled so long ago—that’s the most promising bit of indirection my family has ever produced.

But this indirection is possible only because I occupy the same position as my uncle: the mysteriously single adult. Absent the provocation of a shunned partner, why spoil Thanksgiving dinner with explicit declarations, with demands for respect? I dated off and on (more off than on), but I was never very good at it. Maybe I got too late a start, having been closeted in the years when you get your first practice in merging and compromise. Maybe my independence had become too entrenched, my autonomy too comfortable. Or maybe I simply never met the right guy in the right moment. Whatever the reason, the most I was able to muster with someone would be a few weeks, or, in a handful of cases, a few months.

Eventually, though, I came to appreciate the freedom and opportunity that a single life afforded. I could do what I wanted, when I wanted. I loved not being responsible to another person. I came to cherish, even to hoard, my time alone. A friend might ask what I was going to do on the weekend. “Sit quietly,” I would say.

And then, just when I had everything figured out, I met R., and everything changed. My much-cherished private time felt like a waste of time. My quiet nights at home felt suddenly lonely. I fell quickly in love with R., and, remarkably, he fell in love with me. We made it almost three years, until a job took him to New York, and our attempts at a commuting relationship failed. He understood this failure sooner than I did, and when he ended things, I was devastated. And in the aftermath, I was adrift. I had forgotten how to be single. I had forgotten how to appreciate the advantages of an uncoupled life, the freedom, the comfort, the ease. And in those difficult days, I turned once again to my uncle’s memory.

I remembered that question he had asked: Would you ever want to bring someone home to meet the family? And I heard again the longing in his voice, but now I was sure that the longing was on my behalf. Whatever he had missed, whatever he had given up, this was what he wanted for me. And I had failed him, had squandered the opportunities my proudly gay life afforded. Yes, I had met the person I wanted to bring home. I had met the person I wanted my family to know. But these things never happened, first because of my parents’ prohibition against speech and proximity and my cowardly submission to it, and then simply because lost opportunities are lost forever.

After my mother died, and as my father was, some ten years later, making the moves I’m sure he wished he could have made earlier, he said, “Tell me about R.” He knew of him only because I had stopped spending Christmas with my family. If R. wasn’t welcome, I said, then neither was I. But after a couple of years of this, my father worked up his courage, and he broke his own rule. “Tell me about R.” Not exactly an invitation to a homestay, but perhaps a prelude to it. Of course, R. and I had broken up not long before this, and, my heart broken, this was the last thing I wanted to talk about. Doors open, and then they shut again.

But in the years that followed, my father would occasionally summon his courage and ask me if I was seeing anybody. I appreciated his efforts—they had cost him a great deal, and were motivated only by love—but the answer was always no. I had settled back into my singledom, learned again to value its rhythms. I had created a life that felt full, one that could fairly be described as promiscuous, though the promiscuity was more social than sexual. There are the friends I dine with, the friends I vacation with, and, yes, the friends I sleep with. And there are also those friends—a smaller number, surely—who provide that thing we hope to find in a lifelong partner: the ability to be my truest self, with no fear of abandonment. Call it a division of labor if you will, but that makes it sound like more work than it is. Maybe it’s a division of love. It’s what can happen in that space outside, the space my uncle inhabited.

In that respect, and despite whatever differences he felt between us, my life looks not unlike my uncle’s. I’ve never been to war, and he never marched in a gay pride parade, but we’ve both been bachelors. In those days after his death, snooping through his photographs, I tried to turn my bachelor uncle into my gay uncle. At the time, that was what I needed: an antecedent, a version of myself that sat securely at the heart of our family. And there’s a good chance I found it. I still think that photo of my uncle with J.P. tells the truth—or, at least, a truth. And I can’t help but mourn the life he couldn’t bring himself to live. I mourn his lost opportunities, his lost loves.

But then I catch myself. Would he want my pity any more than I want it from those who view my single life as half a life? Would he even recognize himself in the story I’ve made for him, the story of a gay man who kept his heart a secret? Would he reach across the silence, and the years, to claim me as one of his own, a queer misfit on that Island of Misfit Toys?

I’ll never have the answers to these questions. So, not knowing in what ways he might claim me, I choose to claim him. For however much I needed a gay pride uncle, it was the closeted uncle whose example still guides me—the uncle who had, for over fifty years, and at whatever cost, carved out a space of possibility, carved out a life. In a world where the social pressures toward coupling can feel even greater than the pressures toward heterosexuality, I need his example, and his name, now more than ever.

THOMAS CHATTERTON WILLIAMS

Black and Blue and Blond

FROM
The Virginia Quarterly Review

In 1517, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, feeling great pity for the Indians who grew worn and lean in the drudging infernos of the Antillean gold mines, proposed to Emperor Charles V that Negroes be brought to the isles of the Caribbean, so that they might grow worn and lean in the drudging infernos of the Antillean gold mines. To that odd variant on the species philanthropist we owe an infinitude of things.