Out There :: Talking Gay Turkey

This week Out There finds ourselves back in Washington, DC, and environs, where we grew up, came out, and spent our wild youth. We're glad we're here before the Reactionary Right-Wing Apocalypse transforms this town and the new nightmare Administration takes over, because we're not sure we'll be returning any time soon. Would we have wanted to visit Berlin on a pleasure trip in the 1930s? Johannesburg during the Apartheid era? We think not.

We spend Thanksgiving in the bosom of our straight family, and you can just imagine how that goes. When we go around the dinner table and say one thing we're grateful for, most of our relatives will cite spouses, children, or family elders. Here's what OT will say:

"Thank God I was born gay! 100% gay! I knew I was gay when I was a very young boy. So I also knew that I wasn't headed for a straight, suburban, heteronormative life, because I knew that wouldn't make me happy. I would need to light off for the territories. To put it into a Talking Heads lyric, I'd have to 'find me a city to live in.'

"Of course San Francisco filled the bill (after stays of various lengths in Philadelphia, Provincetown, Palo Alto, those three pulsating P's). Not only could I be my true self there, I'm surrounded by people who are similarly liberated. And it's a melting pot: I'm as likely to hear Spanish, Mandarin or Tagalog as English on the street, with plenty of Russian, German, French and Italian thrown in, too. I know folks of all different kinds of sexualities, backgrounds, and purposes in life. Thank God I'm not stuck in some suburban monoculture.

"Thank God for my crazy gay friends! In my 20s, when my pals and lovers were dropping like flies all around me, while straight America yawned and looked away, while the straight President refused to say the word AIDS, it was gay people who supported me, and who mobilized for action. The gay world got me through the worst of the plague. In my 30s, broke, broken-hearted and temporarily homeless, it was my gay family who let me couch-surf and found me a place to live. Gay colleagues helped me survive as a freelance writer until I got back on my feet. Gay love gave me something to live for.

"Thank God for our incredible partner Pepi and all the gay loves of our life.

"Thank God for gay writers, musicians, and artists of every kind. For gay culture, which surprises and sustains me. For gay community intrigues and in-fighting, which never cease to amaze. Thank God for the gay press, making sure our voices are heard.

"Thank God for gay pot dealers!

"Thank God for gay sex! Thank God I found my fun fooling around with other boys from the neighborhood, beginning when I was nine. Thank God we baby gays had the ingenuity to create a rotating sex club, based in our basements, and were ready to move on whenever we were in danger of being discovered. Thank God for the prepubescent sex drive. All true.

"Perhaps that's a topic for the next family dinner. Meanwhile please pass the mashed potatoes."

Then we scrape the family off the floor and carry on.