"The world is white no longer, and will never be white again."

To add a counter-weight to my last, somewhat...negative post, I'd like to draw your attention to an incredibly inspiring "3am" column in this week's Austin Chronicle. The writer, Michael Ventura, argues that once the notion of an idea is released into the public, once the idea is in the air, "everyone inhales it."

What he's talking about is the idea of gay marriage, and the more the conservatives have to reiterate what it "should be" (as in, "marriage should be between a man and a woman"), the battle by the progressives has been won. It may take another generation to be fully integrated into society, but it will be integrated, and all this silly hand-wringing and non-comittment by politicians (we're looking at you, Clinton and Obama) will be a laughable trademark of the past.

Already it's legal in Massachusetts, it's on its way to being legal in New York; exact-replicas of marriage, dubbed "civil unions," but only in semantics, have been recently passed in New Jersey, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, Maine, California, and DC; new laws protecting the rights of transgender students (read: kids!) have recently been passed in Massachusetts, Minnesota, California, New Jersey, and DC; and sweeping new pro-gay (well, anti-discrimination) laws have been passed just in the last couple of weeks in Iowa, probably will pass in Oregon (including a civil unions bill), and the gay foster parent ban was killed in Arkansas; a federal bill was introduced that would make discriminating against gay people in employment illegal.

But I digress. He argues that as society becomes more and more accepting of the debunking of "traditional" marriage vales and gender identities, a whole, new, sexually pluralistic world will be ours to embrace however we see fit (and however we see fit to define ourselves and our relationships). It's an exciting concept that makes me giddy to think about.

My mom has been really putting a lot of pressure on me lately to move back closer to home. Of course, it's never going to happen, but whenever I sort of (as nicely as possible) shrug off her suggestions and cajoling, it kind of breaks my heart a little bit more, as I'm sure it does hers. It's frustrating sometimes, and the real irony of it all is that the life she's always wanted me to lead, and the life I've affirmatively decided I want, I could never have there.

I want a family (yes, including kids). I want a home. I want a fulfilling career, and to feel a sense of inclusion and community wherever I live. Everything that I want is so ordinary, so regular, so boring. But were I to do all of those things in Rogers, Arkansas (which wouldn't even really be feasible), it would be considered radical and provocative. This is one thing I've absolutely never understood about opponents of gay marriage, and by extension, gay rights: for years they've maligned, persecuted, slandered, discriminated against, and threatened gay people for upsetting the status quo, for corrupting children and society, for being hedonistic, selfish, narcissistic. But when a gay person says, "Hey, I want exactly what you want. I want a spouse, I want 4 kids to raise, nurture and love, I want a regular job that I go to, and to make money to take my kids on nice vacations and send them to good schools," the conservative world shutters (or shrieks) and accuses us of being evil.

I'm pretty good at being empathetic I think, and seeing other people's points of view, even if I vehemently disagree, but that just makes no sense to me. I mean, obviously it presents a threat, but I don't get why. I truly, truly don't. Like, my mom loves for my brother and his family to come to her church on Sunday, and she parades my nephew around, and brags on him, and shows him off to everybody. I wonder if I had a husband, and a child that we adopted, if she would be quite so willing to put herself out there and so eager to show off our child, and say, "This is my son and his husband's daughter," and have to endure people's looks, questions, and whispers. Somehow, I doubt it. No matter how proud she might be, I just don't think she would have the strength to do that.

And it's fine. That's why I'll never live there (well, one reason among many), but I wonder if that would make sense to my mom. She thinks gay people wanting to raise children is radical. If she's gonna freak out if I kiss my boyfriend goodbye in the driveway of her house (because someone might see), well, then I'm fairly certain she would be pretty uncomfortable with the idea of my bringing home someone I call a husband, and our children, and sitting together in a pew at her small, conservative-ish church.

It's not that she's not supportive, it's just that, well, maybe it is radical. But it shouldn't be. And I think that's what Ventura is arguing in this article: that someday, probably sooner rather than later, it won't be so radical. The generation that thinks gay people have to be single, childless and alone their whole lives will someday all be gone, replaced with a new generation who takes gay families for granted. When I mentioned to my mom recently that I did want a family, and I did want kids someday, she gave me an utterly perplexed look, and said something along the lines of, "Well, you're gonna have to find a woman in order to do that." Well, yes, I suppose so technically. It's just not something people of her generation expect gay people to do, thus, she doesn't understand why it would be so difficult for me to live in Rogers, Arkansas. Not to mention, I'd just kill myself from boredom.

Ventura ends the article (and this is where he really won me over) with a quote from my favorite writer, James Baldwin, and a little nugget of real hope:

In 1953, James Baldwin, a gay African-American, wrote the most telling sentence of the 20th century: "The world is white no longer, and it will never be white again." He was right; the primacy of white power was soon to end. Now marriage and gender are no longer defined strictly by heterosexuals. Heterosexuals will not cease to be the majority, but – an enormous sea change in human history! – they have ceased to be the sole "official" definers of sexuality. Eventually this will expand our relationships in ways we cannot imagine. We've embarked, as a species, upon unmapped spectrums of sex. Baldwin would be pleased that half a century later his sentence could be refashioned to read: "The world is heterosexual no longer, and it will never be heterosexual again."

Prologue (Beginnings)

The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.
James Baldwin

I started having panic attacks the summer I was 28; gripping, terrifying, wish-I-was-dead panic attacks. I’d always been a nervous person, and in the past year, my anxiety levels had increased exponentially, but this was something altogether new. This was something that seemed totally beyond my control, something that threatened my sanity, and maybe my very existence.

I was curled up on my bathroom floor in my underwear at three in the morning. I had to be at work at eight. I was sobbing, my stomach hurt, my head threatened to pound right through my skull, and none of it would stop. As soon as I thought I had a handle on my torrent of tears, they would start right back up again. My body was releasing years of pent-up frustration, rage, panic, repression, and fear. Like the levees in New Orleans that gave way that same summer, wrecking an entire city and countless lives, my own personal levees had held strong and done their job for the past 10 years, but after this last storm, they couldn’t hold anymore. They burst, and I had no idea how to handle the resulting flood.

These attacks of mine were becoming more frequent. This was before I discovered Xanax, and realized I could swallow one of those bad boys, along with a glass of wine and be as good as dead. Which is the way I liked it. I could lie on the couch and start watching TV after swallowing it, and within 10 minutes I would feel my arms start to go numb. I would try to lift them, to change the channel perhaps, or to take another gulp of my wine, but the effort would be too much, and I’d decide everything was just fine the way it was.

Everything was just fine the way it was.

I would no longer be able to control my eyes and decide it was time to curl up in my bed, the covers wrapped tightly around me, and just imagine that this was the End. I would literally have to lift my legs off the couch using my arms; they were that heavy and useless. I lived in a studio apartment, so my couch was only about five feet from the bed, but nevertheless, once I stood up, I would inevitably fall down walking only that short distance. So I crawled to bed, and giggled a little bit.

I liked this; I liked this very, very much.

The drugs would not only numb my body and turn it to dead weight, but they would cloud my brain, so that I couldn’t form a coherent thought if I had to. This was what I wanted, this was the peace I’d been searching for, this was the rest of ages I’d been craving; all through the miracle of pharmaceuticals, with only the slightest bit of tweaking with alcohol. I could sleep for twelve to fourteen hours straight, and nothing would wake me up: not the phone, and only sometimes my alarm. I’d been a horribly light sleeper my entire life, and for the last few years, a very bad sleeper. Xanax gave me what I needed: deep, dreamless, immediate, peaceful, amazing sleep.

Of course, Xanax only masked the problem, it didn’t fix it. Without it, I was still a wreck, I still couldn’t sleep, and on those nights when I had to go without, the panic was even worse, because I anticipated it. I’d inevitably end up again on the bathroom floor, or punching the shower wall so hard that my knuckles would split open and I wouldn’t be able to type at work the next day. I would call people (at 1 or 2 am on a weeknight) and no one would answer.

Jesus, what if there was a fucking emergency? I’d think to myself. And then revise my thought: This is a fucking emergency!

I thought about killing myself. I thought about calling an ambulance and telling them I was dying, just so someone would come over and give me something to calm me down. I thought about putting myself in a state hospital so doctors would be forced to talk to me, and I could get lots of drugs. All I really wanted at that point was to be able to disappear, to not have to live my life, and slip into oblivion, but still be able to come back whenever I chose. But I couldn’t afford to go to a psychiatrist to get a prescription for Xanax, so I bought them, pill by pill, from a friend of mine who had a prescription. Or I traded her my Vicodin left over from my surgery that same summer, because Vicodin, sadly, did nothing for me. Even if I took three of them and chased them with whisky. Which I did. I think I had a faulty bottle. But my friend seemed to like them, so she was more than willing to trade up her Xanax. And then my Vicodin ran out, and then I panicked. And then my friend wasn’t as eager to share, even if I was paying her for the stuff, because she couldn’t get so many refills. I hated her for being so selfish and I was tempted to call her at 3 in the morning on a weeknight when I thought I was dying, but I didn’t. Because we weren’t that close, and it wasn’t her that I needed to hear from.

So the attacks continued. Not every night, but many nights, and even on the nights where I wouldn’t end up a sobbing, terrified, writhing disaster, I wouldn’t sleep. I’d toss and turn for an hour, two hours, get up, watch some TV, feel my eyes get heavy, go back to bed, and still not sleep. Most nights I would finally fall asleep around 4 or 5, just in time to get 2 or 3 hours of sleep before I had to be at work. I was a zombie during the day. I sat in the bathroom stall at work and sobbed. Once I ran into the bathroom with tears streaming down my cheeks, my heart threatening to beat right out of my chest and rip me in half, and my boss was standing at the sink, washing his hands. I hated him, and avoided him whenever possible, but today, he wanted to talk to me, and started some bullshit conversation about something I don’t recall. I answered a couple of his questions, with him pointedly ignoring my bloodshot eyes, and the stray tears, until finally I just turned and locked a stall door behind me and let it loose. I couldn’t have sucked it up if I’d wanted to. My emotions and their physiological manifestations were taking on a life of their own and turning against me.

What in God’s name was happening to me? I’d suffered pain before: knock the wind out of you, think-you’re-dying pain, but nothing like this. Nothing had so completely taken over and hijacked my entire life and emotional responses like this before, and threatened to derail every single thing I knew and believed in. I’d always been emotional, I’d always felt very deeply. I had no idea why now, at this juncture, I’d lost complete control. It was a certifiable nervous breakdown, and there was nothing I could do about it.

In the front of my mind, I thought it all had to do with a boy. A boy I was deeply in love with, a boy with whom, after a year-long relationship, I had broken up with. A boy I wanted to spend my life with, and about whom I had fantasies of building a life, starting a family, traveling the world, and with whom, I knew, ultimately, none of those things would happen. I blamed him for everything, I accused him of being immature, I flailed, I screamed, I cried, I begged, I manipulated, and still, he remained untouched and unmoving.

But I suspected there was more at play here. There was more than just having a broken, disappointed heart. I’d had a lot of broken hearts in my day, and none of them felt like this. None of them had induced this kind of panic, this kind of hopelessness, this kind of rage.

I started therapy with a counselor that I adored, but to whom I still couldn’t open up the way I needed to. I was guarded. I often just sat on his couch and giggled nervously, or blushed, or stared out the window, embarrassed. I avoided his most pointed questions by giving non-answers, or saying “I don’t know,” or laughing inappropriately.

I started finding other sources of Xanax. I started smoking pot on top of it, on top of alcohol. I really didn’t want to die, but I was pushing my limits, I was testing just how far I could push my body, how deep into sleep I could tumble, and still eventually wake up. I was deliberately tempting fate, and thus far, I was winning.

I didn’t want to die, but I don’t think I cared if I did. After all, I’d just be dead, what difference would it make to me?

One night, I’d finally had enough. I had no drugs, I’d already downed a quarter of a bottle of whiskey, it was three in the morning, and there I was, feeling it coming on again, that old familiar panic, the tightening in the chest, the racing heart. I screamed into my pillow, I used my own fist to punch myself in the side of the head to relieve the pressure, but it only hurt like hell and gave me a throbbing headache, which made me cry harder, which only frustrated me more. I was sweating, I was soaked, I couldn’t lie still in my bed.

When this happened to me, for some reason I usually gravitated to the bathroom. It was there that I would stare at my face in the mirror and spit on it. The face that, at 28, looked so fucking old and worn out to me already. I had bags under my eyes, with dark circles around them; I hadn’t shaved in days and it was growing in unevenly; I needed a haircut, my skin was dry; I had two cavities, that while remaining invisible, I knew were there, and just made me feel more disgusting, old, and like I was falling apart.

Tonight, I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t turn on the light in the bathroom, I couldn’t lie on the cold tile and beat my fist on the ground, or take another shower.

I crawled out of my bed, and for the first time since junior high, I kneeled at the foot of my bed, and I prayed. I prayed to a God that I barely believed in, and had no hope of actually being touched by. I begged God, if he was up there, to please take away my suffering, to please heal my loneliness, my desperation, to please help me make sense of what was happening to me. I’d never been so scared in my entire life, and if angels had appeared at my door to take me away that instant, I would have gone with them without a moment’s hesitation.

And then in therapy, something clicked, some things started to make sense. I started sensing a pattern of behavior. This was about more than just a boy and a broken heart. Much, much more.

I began diving into the deep, black heart of my repressed and tortured psyche. I start seeing things I didn’t want to see. I started understanding things that were far more painful and frightening than any broken heart. I started to understand how broken, incomplete and terrified I’d been for years, for my entire life, and could never acknowledge. I realized that rather than feeling so deeply, as I’d always thought, I’d barely felt anything at all, for almost 15 years. I was shut down, cut off and completely out of touch with my inner emotional life. I was a fraud and had everyone fooled; but now, I was starting to crack.

And it was all downhill from there.

I Love Books

So, I totally stole this from someone that reads Collier's blog, and he tagged her, so now I'm doing it, even though no one tagged me. I'm not going to tag anyone either, because there are too many people I know who have blogs, so I think everyone who reads this, who also has their own, should do it.

Book that:

Changed my life?
The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck, MD. My grandma bought it for me when I was 17. Or 18. Little did she know that it would kick-start my interest in psychology and (inadvertently) lead me to where I am today. Also, I learned a lot.


I've read more than once?
There are lots, but my favorite books are:
Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin (3 times)
The End of the Affair by Graham Greene (2 times)
The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck (all the way through at least twice, and skimmed countless other times)
The Secret History by Donna Tartt (2 times)
Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis (2 times)
The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis (3 times)
and some random others:
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo (2 times, abridged and unabridged)
The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux (countless times in junior high!)


I'd want on a desert island?
Something about survival, but past that, probably Selected Stories by Andre Dubus.


Made me laugh?
Eighty-Sixed by David Feinberg. It's about AIDS. And hilarious. I know; but it's true.

Made me cry?
Honestly, I don't know that a book has ever made me cry, but some of them have made me incredibly sad and just look up from the page and stare at the wall for ages, comprehending their brevity of wisdom and pain. Three of those top ones are:
Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin (This, really, is my favorite book of all time.)
Another Country by James Baldwin (He, really, is my favorite author of all time.)
We the Living by Ayn Rand.


I wish had been written?
Well, a couple of weeks ago I finally found the book I've been searching for for years. It wasn't written until 2005. Hmph. If I hadn't found it, I would have written it eventually, but it's called The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the pain of growing up gay in a straight man's world by Alan Downs, PH.D.
Yeah, it's got a hokey title, but it's amazing, and incredibly smart. And I can think of a few people who should probably read it. Come to think of it, I cried reading this book. So I amend my answer to the last question, but I'm not going to actually change it.


I wish had never been written?
I think everything has its place, and it would be incredibly snobby of me to say something along the lines of anything by John Grisham or whatnot, so I'll go with one book that I know has been the scapegoat for horrific suffering in the world and that is The Elders of Zion, by whatever asshole that wrote it.

I'm currently reading?
I'm really schizophrenic when it comes to books, and I'll often pick something up, read part of it, then go to something else, read that, then come back to the first book, and so on and so on. I'll often also have several books going at once, so right now, what's lying next to my bed:
My Dark Places by James Ellroy, which I'm devouring at the moment.
In September the Light Changes, the Stories of Andrew Holleran, by, duh, Andrew Holleran.
One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate by Tom Segev.
The Wheel of Life: A Memoir of Living and Dying by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, M.D.
Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism by Temple Grandin
The Garden of Eden by Ernest Hemingway.


I've been meaning to read?
Their Eyes were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. I've started this book, like, 3 times.