The best "coming out story" I have yet heard is one that is not
about gay people at all. It was related by Geoffry Cambridge, in
character, in a movie I have otherwise forgotten (The
President's Analyst?). His character relates a childhood
story of how when he walked to school, the white boys would run in
front of him, shouting "Run, run, here comes the nigger!" And he
too would run along after them shouting "Run, run, here comes the
nigger!" until his older brother took him aside and told him what a
"nigger" was. That moment—that moment in which you first
realize you are a fag or a bitch or a nigger or a kike or whatever
it is, is the essence of the coming out experience. Coming out is a
process that begins with discovering who you are, and often that
discovery comes in the unpleasant terms that society has for what
it thinks you are.
Coming out stories are a mainstay of gay literature because they
touch on several timeless themes. They have much in common with the
mainstream coming-of-age novel (bildungsroman), stories
which usually have some aspect of sexual awakening, either as overt
as that of Tom Jones or as subtle as that of To
Kill a Mockingbird. A coming out story necessary involves in
the beginning, a secret identity. Nowadays the theme of secret
identity is most likely to call to mind comic-book heros and spy
thrillers, but it has had better treatment in the short stories of
Richard Wright and numerous folktales of changelings and demigods.
So long as character development and issues of identity are the
stuff of literature, coming out stories are likely to remain a
fixture of gay literature, pretty much regardless of the status of
gay people.
Patrick Merla's idea for Boys Like Us is, then,
something of a natural. He asked twenty-nine gay writers, who with
one exception had not recounted their own coming out in memoirs or
autobiographies, to write up their experiences in the form of short
stories. The twenty-nine included luminaries such as Samuel Delany
(the exception who had written a memoir) and Edmund White and
little-known writers, who are still too young to be supposed to
have done their principal work, and a number of writers in
between.
The results are as varied as any assignment to nearly thirty
brilliant minds might produce. Stephen McCauley invents the
second-person-hypothetical viewpoint: "Let's say you're nineteen
years old, a sophomore in college …." Others chose a more
direct narrative style. Some of the differences are the result of a
lack of agreement on what "coming out" is—Is it when you
acknowledge it yourself? When you tell one other person? When most
of your straight friends know? Perhaps half the offerings take
coming out to mean when you tell your parents. Merla has arranged
the stories in chronology order, according to when the events
related occurred, and insists in an introductory note that they be
read in that order. He has picked a ethnically diverse group of
writers (although in keeping with the title, no women are
represented).
Yet, for the differing times, the differing cultural
backgrounds, the differing definitions of coming out, and the
twenty-nine brilliant minds working independently, the remarkable
thing about this collection is the similarity of the stories. In
coming out there are two possibilities: it goes well, and it goes
not-so-well.
When it goes well, it is almost trivial and often anticlimactic.
The response to The Big News is something like: "Well, of course,
we knew. We figured you would tell us when you were ready for us to
know." When it does not go well, it is like watching the
same train wreck, over-and-over, as if recorded by different
cameras from different vantages: you may see something a little
different, but it is the same wreck. For the most part, in those
stories in which the writers have treated coming out as meaning
when they told their families, things have gone well. A few parents
have sulked or been temporarily overcome with hysterics, but for
the most part, the reception of The Big News has been accepting, if
not entirely joyous. For this reason, those who have taken coming
out to mean the self-discovery, have written the livelier
entries.
The similarities in the self-discovery stories from 1949
(Delany) to 1995 (Carl Phillips) are explained, I think, in one of
Steven Saylor's attempts to keep me up-to-date on the thinking of
young gay men. He tells me that such progress as had been made by
the modern gay movement is toward toleration and acceptance of
homosexuality in others. It is okay, he says, now to have
gay friends, to know gay people, to accept homosexuality as part of
human diversity. But as for the discovery that one is oneself gay,
it is still the same train wreck or trivia as it ever was.
Even so, there are not that many train wrecks here. And little
wonder. These are the accounts of writers—some of whom are
undoubted geniuses, all of whom are exceptional in many ways, the
issue of sexuality laid aside. No one's father drives him out of
the house with a shotgun. No one is beaten unconscious by a
homophobic older brother. Only a few are talked into or talk
themselves into therapy or a suicidal gesture.
In other words, this book has an inherent bias. While it is
readable, interesting, and valuable for what it is, the measure of
progress toward human rights for anyone is not going to be had from
the stories of the most remarkable people. For the example of
Elizabeth I one might think there never was patriarchy, or from
Frederick Douglas one may learn that racism could be overcome. The
gauge of human rights cannot be read from the position of the
brightest, the strongest, the best looking, the best situated, the
most affluent. It is not for the Luther Burbanks, the Harriet
Tubmans, the Edmund Whites, the Helen Kellers, the Marie Curies,
the Truman Capotes, or the Samuel Delanys of the world that the
struggle for human rights exists. It is by how the ordinary, the
common, the everyday person fares that progress can be measured: to
be handicapped and not the bravest, strongest person any one has
ever met; to be gay and not a great artist or a brilliant writer;
to be black and not a great scientist or a gifted athlete; to be an
ordinary woman—neither Super Mom nor top executive. In coming
out stories, the action, if any, is in the coming out of a gay
stevedore or a gay janitor, not in the coming out of a gay writer
or a gay set designer.
Somewhere, yet to be written, is a fine companion piece to this
excellent volume, though it may take a bit more editing.
