It seemed to me that the period leading up to the election -- by which I mean the previous four years -- had been marked by intensifying dread, interrupted by moments of relief and a kind of willful, delirious forgetfulness, almost like a chronic joint pain that is temporarily soothed by a slight adjustment in posture before the discomfort begins to seep back in. I distracted myself by thinking about the book I mentioned in my last post about the childhoods of gay men who grow up on farms in the midwest, and -- although I was born a few years later than the men in that book and was raised in the suburbs -- how much I related to these stories. Like me, these men came from families for whom homosexuality was a completely foreign idea; if it was acknowledged at all (and it often wasn't), it was spoken about with mockery and disdain. The prevailing motivation for these boys was escape, both literal -- meaning a desire to live in 'the city' wherever that meant -- or metaphorical, in the desire to lose themselves in more artistic pursuits such as gardening, knitting, cooking, or singing. Many of these men as boys were compulsively organized; they collected things (rocks, insects, buttons) with passion. They were acutely attached to animals (and sometimes stuffed animals), which they viewed as individuals, and whose suffering they often tried to prevent or mitigate. Many of them had close relationships with their mothers, or at least they were closer to their mothers than they were to their fathers.
I was also struck by the way the families of these men, even after they had grown up and (in most cases) moved away, continued to resist and deny the idea that one of their own was gay. In many cases, the families would 'accept' the gay son (and sometimes a partner), but it was often not discussed, and in no instance was there any kind of reckoning of the past, by which I mean a sense of compassion for what it must have been like growing up in such a punishing environment, much less a desire to understand or atone. This is the reason, I believe, that most of these men -- and like so many gays -- remain not only alienated in some important degree from their families, but also the communities with which they would later engage after escaping their childhoods.
There's no doubt that a lot of gays make up for the loss of their biological families with 'found families.' It's a kind of trope perpetuated as much by gays who are looking for solace as it is by non-gays to alleviate their responsibility and guilt. 'Well, go find your own family -- that's what gays do, right?'
But a lot of gays don't want to find new families, because dealing with one was already enough.
My thoughts were interrupted by the sad realization that one of the American elms appeared to be dying.
The sun was beginning to set.
Lost in the twisting branches of the adjacent trees, I forgot that I was alone.
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