Two
Decades of Decadence:
Note: There has been some robust discussions taking
place on the Facebook page from my high school graduating class and it has
brought back some rather unpleasant memories. One of my classmates recounted
the bullying he endured in high school and many thoughts I believed gone came
back to the forefront. I was a writer for the Midwest Ursine, a now defunct
online journal for the Great Lakes area which focused on Bear and Leather
culture. I wrote the article in the spring of 2002, several months prior to the
reunion and three years before we had kids. This is the edited version of the
article from 2002.
The letter came in the mail, and my hands nervously
opened the envelope. I could not believe
what I was holding. Was the awful reality of what I was about to read
true? Could it be that it had finally
come to pass? Was I really ready to read
this horrible news enclosed? The answers
came back as a resounding yes... I was being invited to my 20th
class reunion. Was I really that old?
Could it be that 20 years have
slipped by since I glided across the stage in the field house of Whitmer High
School (home of the Panthers), eagerly accepting my diploma, and condemning my
school’s choice of maize and blue?
Really now, we were in Ohio... shouldn’t we be scarlet and gray? Yes,
the reality that I was now two decades out of high school came at me full force. I brought up this fact to one of my classes
at the college where I teach, and one of my students asked what year I
graduated (obviously not a math major) and I replied “1982”, and she perkily
responded, “Wow... that was the year I was born!”
I plan on flunking her.
Many memories came flooding back;
including the image of my smiling face in the 1982 Oracle yearbook (we will not
discuss the hair or the glasses please).
I was full of optimism and eager to get the hell out of high
school. I went to a rather large urban
school in Toledo, Ohio, so the horror stories that some of my friends who went
to small rural schools shared with me were news to me. We didn’t have a Gay/Straight Group at our
high school, we had a Thespians Club, does that count? We mockingly called it the F.F.A. of Whitmer,
“Future Faggots of America” as the membership had quite a few gay members. My
friends and I ran a small collective of homos and their supporters. We hung out
together and shared our lives with each other.
AIDS was still out of the picture
at this time, and our future seemed bright.
If you were eighteen, you could get in to the bars in Toledo, and we did
with gusto, diving into gay culture and all that it offered with abandon. Whenever I hear Blondie’s “Rapture” I am
taken back to the Scaramouche Bar and all the glitz and pseudo-eighties glamour
it offered. “Rapture” was the first song
I ever heard in a gay bar, and it changed my life. I realized that there was a
world of music out there that didn’t involve guitars and long hair, but rather
whipped the listener into an orgasmic frenzy of movement and sound. Our parents
didn’t understand, nor did we really. We
were fledgling homos, testing the waters of what was ahead. We shared stories
of new boyfriends, crushes, and the latest music in the clubs. 12” singles were all the rage at the time,
and we snatched them up at Boogie Records or the Shed whenever we could. While our friends were jamming to the J.
Giles Band and whatever else was playing on FM 104, we were bopping about the
house to the sounds of YAZ and ABC.
Sylvester was our hero, and Donna Summers was our unofficial Diva.
Madonna...? Who?
In 1996, my partner and I
traveled to Washington to view the Names Project AIDS Quilt, and the awful
reality of AIDS hit home. I passed a block of names, and realized that this was
my unofficial high school reunion. Six
of the eight names were guys I grew up with or went to school with. It was all I could do to stand up right. I had moved out of Toledo several years prior
to the visit to the quilt, and had lost touch with many of my friends. Through the tears, I choked out, “so, this is
what you have been doing since high school.” We didn’t know about AIDS when we
graduated, herpes was our biggest worry, so we played, and played without a
care. It became obvious that our ignorance
had a price.
But on to the reunion...
A high school friend contacted me
via email once I registered at the reunion’s website, and we began an email
discussion, talking about all that we had been through. She had been friends with many of my friends,
some of whom were closeted in high school, but were now out and gay. She shared this fact with her mom, and her
mom quipped “well, that’s probably how you remained a virgin through high
school!”
Yep, us homos
are good for something!
I began searching the website for
who was coming and what they were up to now that we were adults and out in the
“real world”. I was glad to see that my
high school crush from the football team would be there, as well as his best
friend in high school. Many adolescent
fantasies were played out in my head, as I imagined what they did with each
other when they weren’t practicing football, practicing misogyny, or beating up
freshmen in the halls. Alas, my dreams of them being gay were dashed once
again, as their bios mentioned that they were happily married (no, not to each
other...) and planned on bringing their wives to the reunion. My biggest question was how would they look?
Would they have the lean,
athletic bodies that so entranced me in high school? How would they look now that they were officially
middle aged? I remember going in to an
appliance shop with my folks on a visit back to Toledo... and found that one of
the clerks was one of the football players from my class. He had always caught my eye, as he had a sexy
mustache and appeared to be rather hairy, even in high school. But as we waited for our order to come down
the chute at the store, I realized that the guy of my high school fantasies was
now an overweight sales clerk who was balding and eagerly munching his power
lunch: a bag of chips and a Big Gulp.
Reality hit once again.
I have gone through many changes
in the past two decades myself, and I have many painful pictures that document
every bad hair style and wacky eyewear choice.
Now my workouts have a new meaning... I want to look good come the
reunion, and I want to show the class that I have made it. I have risen above
all the crap that was high school... the names, the taunts, and the
harassment. I have become someone;
someone many thought would never materialize.
I remember my mom asking me a question shortly after I came out to her
and my father, “what do you have to live for if you are gay? There is nothing out there but pain and
disappointment.” It seems that these are
universal problems, and ones that are not exclusive to the gay community. Yes, there has been pain, and yes, there have
been disappointments... but I have survived, and I have become a better person
because of that, and I can’t wait to share that with my classmates.
