I’ve
struggled with getting my coming out story down on paper. Although I’m a
lifelong writer, the words just seem elusive and fleeting. How do you condense
volumes’ worth of material – a lifetime, really – into an accessible format
that people can read, grasp and understand? Now more than ever though, I feel
stirred to action and motivated to at least attempt to get my story out there.
Not because my story is any more important than anyone else’s; but because if
there is the slightest chance that it could provide inspiration, insight, or
just let a young LGBT person who’s struggling know that someone else has been
there, then I had damn well better get the thing written.
I grew up
in a religious conservative Southern Appalachian family from Chattanooga, TN. My
father was a structural/civil engineer (later in his career he would attempt to
start his own firm and strike out on his own as a builder/developer; when the
housing crisis hit, he used his political connections to take a position in state
government). My mother worked in the offices of TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority)
and also had a stint as an educator before leaving her career to homeschool us.
Keeping up
appearances was very important to my family. As viewed from the outside, we
gave every indication of being an affluent, gracious Southern family with polite,
charismatic parents and adoring children that placed “traditional Christian
values” above everything else. Inside our own walls, we were a dysfunctional,
abusive, unhappy group of people that sometimes barely felt related to each
other, let alone having relationships built on love or trust.
From the
earliest age it quickly became apparent that I was a creative, artistic and
bookish type radically different than my sports-jock younger brothers. I also
quickly learned that this basically demoted my place in the pecking order to my
parents’ least-favorite son who was overlooked and ignored at best and at worst
used as an object of wrath to heap frustration and abuse onto. My father and I
never had a good relationship from the beginning. He would pass directly over
me and focus his time and attention on my next brother John, who was growing up
to be just like my dad and enjoyed war, guns, GI Joes and building model tanks,
trucks and cars.
My
relationship with my mother was much more complex and nuanced, but included the
same elements of abuse and violent behavior, which combined with her
depression, unstable moods, mental illness and abuse of prescription medications,
made for a pretty wicked soup sometimes. Since I couldn’t trust, rely on or go
to either parent with my problems growing up, I turned intrinsically to
escapism and my wild, creative imagination to fill the void. I lost myself in
reading anything and everything that I loved: Hans Christian Anderson fairy
tales, a wonderful series of books from the 1920s with gorgeous illustrations called
My Book House, the World Book Encyclopedia (I pored over the article on New
York City from cover to cover and back again so many times that I wore down the
pages), the Hardy Boys series, The Ghost of Windy Hill, the Frog & Toad
books, Sherlock Holmes, the Chronicles of Narnia, and anything with an element
of mystery, fantasy or beauty that captured my imagination.
I also
wrote and drew prolifically. I hammered out my first short book by the age of
8 on my 1930s Remington typewriter (the keys punched holes through the paper wherever there were "o"s), illustrating it and having it bound to give out as a Christmas present that
year. My brothers did sometimes collaborate with me on projects and we would
work as a team to create and sketch characters, come up with detailed story
lines and dialogue and then finally act out and record the stories on cassette
tape, complete with music and sound effects. We called this “production company”
of ours “Nice Studios”. Some of my best memories come from summer afternoons acting
out Nice Studio stories with John and Josh and laughing harder than I’ve ever
laughed before at the delivery of a punchline or how our voice sounded when we
slowed down the tape while recording (to make monster-sounding voices) or sped
it up (to make shrill chipmunk-sounding voices).
As I got
older and entered my preteens and teens, I discovered a passion for clothes,
textiles and fashion, partly out of necessity (it often fell to me to make sure
the kids had something decent to wear when they got up in the morning, and they
needed someone to match their outfits and help them look presentable) and
partly out of a maturation of my artistic sense and abilities. I realized that
for me, fashion was a perfect, more “grown up” adaptation and translation of my
artist’s fire. And the further I got into my teens, the more I just knew,
somewhere in a deep, settled place inside, that this was what I had to do for
my career. I also knew that this career choice in and of itself would put me at
odds with my parents. I didn’t care.
