15 for 15 VI: The First Time, or I'm Finally Out!

The day had to come.

Earlier that day, I was agonizing, as I did every day, over the guy I was in love with but didn't, or couldn't, tell.  When he told me that he was in love with another guy, I told him how I felt about him, and there it was.

Out.

Finally.

I.

But the one to whom I am out and whom I love loves another.  I want to laugh and cry and vomit.
                                                                                                    --May 6, 1996

Those were the hardest years of my life, so far, both preceding and following that statement.

Since that time, I've come to think that emotional puberty, which happens around age 20, is harder than physical puberty.  I went into a cocoon, psychologically, and to some degree physically as well.

Like many young men of that age, I grew out my hair, on my face as well as on my head.  I actually had hair to grow out back then.

Along with this growth of hair around me, I continued growing barriers around myself psychologically to keep people out.  I became so good at it, that by age 21, I could say that I hadn't kept any friends consistently since I was a kid, and although I made friends in college, it would be some time before I worked on those friendships at all.  Mostly, I was insecure, overly-competitive, and didn't want anyone to know I was gay.

It all ended that night.

II.

My view of the world has changed so drastically, I can't.  This is the night I have been waiting for for so long...


I knew after that night that something more than my sexuality had come out.  I had come out, started to destroy the cocoon of secrecy that I'd built around myself with hundreds or thousands of "saves," putting my mind to work several moves ahead of where a conversation might be going so that I would not have to answer certain questions or lie.

The piano had been my adolescent lover, and the eccentric pianist Glenn Gould had been my "virtual" lover, long before the idea of virtual had come to my mind.  I was safely hidden behind an intellectual exterior in which I could be busy thinking about things, or practicing the piano.  I became enveloped in the works of Ayn Rand, who, from her physical and emotional grave, egged me on to be different and alone.  Being an individual was the most important thing to me, so much so that when I went to college, I wanted to do an "individualized major," which at the time was kooky, although has caught on since.

Through all of the nights that I had gone to sleep for 10 years wondering if I was hopelessly lost, or if I was "the only one," I knew in those moments, on that night 15 years ago, that I was never going to be the only one again.

The first time I came out was like returning from a long, lonely exile in a foreign land, whose customs I sort of knew, and whose language I spoke with great difficulty because I kept tripping over the words, but whose food I didn't enjoy, and whose oppressive culture I could not wait to escape.

This feeling of exile, of not being welcomed in your homeland, is perhaps common to a lot of people for a lot of reasons.  People can challenge this feeling only in the company of those who are "like" them, or perhaps in books, movies, other media, or characters of their own making.  But it's not the same as connecting in person, with real, live people whom you know are enough like you so that you don't have to mouth a barely familiar language that everyone else seems to know fluently.

My whole perspective on the world changed, because that night I no longer had to think in terms of dynamic equivalence, translating the lives of others, and particularly the loves of others, into something that made sense to me in my own mind and deeply felt experience.   My world changed that night because it finally became my world.

III.

I'm so confused and elated and nervous and sick and ecstatic.  Sleep seems light years away.

A million feelings went through my mind and heart all at once, so powerful that I felt like I was going to go insane or literally explode, internally combust, go up in the flames of gay fabulosity before I knew what those even could be.

I felt, in that moment, that I had crossed over a threshold of experience that I thought I would never cross, and entered a world I could only sense existed, but had been there all the time.  And what I wanted felt further out of reach than ever, because my feelings were not returned.

Feelings are a funny thing--substantial, but not quantifiable; ephemeral, but lasting; they are the ultimate paradox.

And feelings seem to give us permission to act in any way that we wish.  I did that, and was not proud of how my feelings affected the object of those feelings.  Objectifying another, especially one about whom we feel strongly, seems impossible to avoid, but in the cold light of long reflection, I would have acted quite differently.  At that time, though, I simply could not.  One learns not to repeat certain mistakes, even though some of those mistakes seem to fall into a pattern of action that, no matter how many times one tries to reason his or her way out of them, seems to keep coming back the same way.  It is almost like an addiction, and the effects can perhaps be just as harmful.

Still, I came to value those feelings only by finally experiencing them, and putting them out there in the world.  If they are returned, that is somehow a bonus, but there is no way in which one can or should force another person to feel what one does not feel.

Being forced into feeling what one does not feel is precisely the aim of the closet.  It is not only a place of privacy and safety, but it is a place that often compels people to feel that that is the only place in which they can be safe.  And that is not right.

IV.

Many first times have come since that one those many years ago:  first lovers, first boyfriends, first poems, first culinary delights, first times being without a home, being on my own and unsure of what to do next, first trips to Europe and Africa, first times walking the streets of Paris and New York and San Francisco, dreamlike places that I never thought I'd be, but that have come to define my personality and my life in ways similar to this lived sexual orientation.

First times are indeed very special, even if they aren't anything special in and of themselves.  I remember the first time I changed a headlight on a car, the feeling of accomplishment that I had, and the feeling of empowerment.  First times can, but do not always, empower us to try for higher levels of experience, and  make us realize that what never seemed possible actually is something we just haven't tried yet.  Of course, that doesn't go for everything.  Like eating liver.

Tonight, I celebrated these many years of being out, and all the gifts and challenges that have come with it, at the lovely Nicollet Island Inn restaurant in Minneapolis.  Here was one of the fabulous courses with which my table was adorned:

The colors, the flavors!  This was living.  And this is what life can be like:  a colorful, delicious feast.

For we are called to the great feast, to the Gospel feast, to the feast of honesty and integrity that adds all of the flavor to life.  Facing one's areas of pain and struggle honestly, and for a long time, can yield much greater treasures that can be bought and paid for with money.

And you are always welcome at my feast.

Glenn Gould: Queerly Normal

Glenn Gould was the wizard of my adolescent years.

His playing first blazed into my imagination through a rebroadcast on CBC's "Sunday Arts Entertainment" of his performance from the 60s of Beethoven's Tempest Sonata, which I was then learning, which he played without notes and so crisply, cleanly, and inexorably that I grabbed a VHS tape and got about 2/3rds of the first movement and the rest of the second and third. On the same program, perhaps, or soon after, his performance of Beethoven's Op. 69 Cello and Piano Sonata in A major with Leonard Rose was aired, again with him playing from memory, somewhat involved in theatrics, and playing with a deep passion that seemed to reach beyond the music. This reaching has inspired in me a life-long search for what it was he saw, what any true artist sees, just beyond the edge of our perception, yet firmly grounded in our abilities and capacities as humans.

I don't know at which point Gould crossed the line in my life from a performer to something akin to a soulmate, a personality preserved in film and recording and written and spoken words, which seemed more alive to me than some people who actually were alive.

In his projection of alienation there was intimacy, an intimacy of the kind that I was denied through the social convention that said boys had to date girls and vice-versa that was prevalent when and where I grew up. Gould transcended the need for such relationships by bringing you so close to the center of music that it was like opening a beating heart and seeing a level of reality that was astonishing, ugly yet enticingly beautiful, different from conventional representation, and life-changing in its realization.

The artificiality of his playing was yet honest, deeply probing, and provoking in a way that merely another lovely, let alone a so-called "correct," performance could never have been. Music lived for him and through him in a way that bewitched some, enraged others, and cheered still many more.

The ecstasy of his playing, so clear in even his latest recordings, seems to rise to a new, reaching level just as his star was eclipsing (listen to the Brahms Ballades Op. 10, recorded in February of his last year, 1982, especially the middle section of Op. 10 #3).

And yet his personality was paramount for me.

II.

Perhaps for years I figured that Glenn Gould was gay too. There was little evidence to the contrary, and those who knew him best guarded his privacy like good friends would, denying any such rumors that he was gay. The reality of Gould's relationships came out to the broader public only very recently, in the last few years, and most recently in a recent broadcast of a fairly new documentary about him, Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould.

I first saw this documentary in a theater a few months ago, and many things were revelatory, such as his relationship with Cornelia Foss, not something that was part of the broadcasts on Sunday Arts Entertainment years ago.

Yet the reality of Gould's sexuality does not detract from his fundamental queerness, or his fundamental normality--he was a man whose eccentricities got the better of some of his relationships, and yet was one who, surprise!, craved human connection despite his growing need for electronic space.

Yet see, nearly 30 years after his death, just how much electronic space has come to define our relationships? This medium of self-publishing random thoughts to random people, the connection to social media that was never even a glint in Glenn's eye during his lifetime, yet would have served his lifestyle well, have become the norm. Electronic space, via computer platforms, social media, Skype and other modern versions of telephony, gives each of our lives a distance and an intimacy that now defines a new, perhaps queer, normality.

Perhaps our whole era has attained a level of eccentricity through all of these new means of communication and social organization that makes each of us queerly normal in relation to those who have gone before.

III.

Another element of Gould's personality was the power of it to bring me through what easily could have been a time of extended despondency in those dark and frustrating teenage years; this seems to be something that he also unwittingly did for many. During my sophomore year of high school, when I was most frightened about people in my class, home, and elsewhere finding out that I was gay, and most frustrated that nobody else seemed to be like me, I listened to Gould's 1981 recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations nearly every night, it offering me 50 minutes of peace and structure in a life that felt chaotic and uncertain, the Variations beginning, growing, changing, and coming back to home base at the end.

Anyone who knew me in those years would recall my obsession with Gould, which I had hoped at the time might play out into a biography, as there was only one available in those years, Otto Friedeich's "Glenn Gould: A Life and Variations," which, though extensive, still left me wanting to know more. I voraciously ingested every fact, anecdote, or even reference to Glenn Gould that I could get my hands on. The biography never materialized, but others followed, both biographies and more creative works based on Gould and his personality and musical life.

During my senior year of high school, I used the proximity of Christmas and my birthday, as well as my graduation from high school, to wrangle a trip to Toronto in September 1992 as a "student delegate" to the Glenn Gould Conference, one of the most amazing weeks of those years and one of the more memorable weeks of my life. Not only was it my first time all on my own in a city, but it also put me in contact with dozens of people who knew, worked with, studied with, and even were related to Gould.

His assistant, Ray Roberts, was there, along with some of his fellow piano students from the Toronto Conservatory, some musicians with whom he'd made music, and, perhaps most poignantly, his father Herbert, then 90 years old. I will never forget, in particular, the day that we all went to Glenn's grave in Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto. I had the opportunity there to pay my respects to Mr. Gould, and he graciously accepted my condolences on the death of his son 10 years earlier.

Later that year, I submitted a series of questions to Mr. Gould through Ray Roberts & Glenn Gould's lawyer, Stephen Posen, which related to Gould's childhood and experience in school. I've never shared these answers with anyone, not out of a sense of privacy, but because I never thought they would particularly interest anyone. If they might interest you, please let me know.

IV.

I don't know if Glenn Gould was conservative or liberal when it came to sexuality. One story related by one of his friends remembers some random stranger showing him porn in a restaurant once, and Glenn being quite undone by the experience. Who knows. I can imagine that his confidants, who denied that he was gay long before this recent documentary came out, might not want him to be labeled "queer," even though, in a very extended way, he was.

But at the same time, he was not quite in the same way "normal" as society still somewhat expects people to be. He could not become legal brothers with a close co-worker and collaborator. Yet why not, but for social convention not reaching that point of realizing that we're all cousins at some distant point in the past, and if cousins, why not brothers and sisters?

Perhaps "queerly normal" goes as far towards describing Glenn Gould as can be done. He didn't have to be eccentric, or distant, or isolated, or ecstatic to be who he was, yet all of those things contributed to who he was and became even as his problems with things that he did not want to state were problems grew in his last decade. Some have said, notably the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, that if he had married like most people do, and taken some of the energy he put into music and thought into a family, he might have lived longer. Who's to say?

I'm still turned on by Gould's playing, by the personality that made it what it was, which still in its strange way makes for a feeling of home.