Be Nicer to All the Sad Young Men
Read the full column online at thegavoice.com
When I was 21 and just out of college, I took a newspaper job in a Southern Gothic town. I was dizzy all the time — to the extent I went to the emergency room one day and they told me I had the “common problem” of blood that was too thick. I drove home to Atlanta to see my doctor here, who handed me two prescriptions — one for Valium to curb my anxiety-caused hyperventilation and one that said, “Get out of that hell hole.” Which I did.
My plan was to enroll in grad school at UGA, so I headed there one day to look for a place to live. I stopped by a tiny weekly newspaper in Oconee County to ask if they needed any part-time help. “We don’t need any part-time help, but you could be editor, if you like.” Sure, why not?
Did I mention that I was married at 20? My wife, Lulu, wasn’t happy when I rented a small house on a barely traveled road that sat in front of a chicken house three times its size, next to a pasture full of goats. After a year, we moved to Athens, but we soon needed more money. So, we moved to another small town for two years.
My parents said from the start, “You were awarded a fellowship to Yale. We sent you to live in New York, and you were offered incredible jobs. You rejected the fellowship and turned down the jobs. Why are you living in these hell holes?” Honestly, I wasn’t really sure.
When we were living in Athens, Lulu and I went to an Italian restaurant and piano bar every Friday night. One night, the pianist sang the strangely melancholic “Ballad of the Sad Young Men.” I’d never heard it, and I can honestly say very little has ever engulfed me with so much grief so quickly. My blind heart’s yearning suddenly broke into full view.
The song describes the lonely life of gay men, sitting in a bar, at a time when gay love was all but impossible. It became a gay anthem of grief that paradoxically drove the hedonistic ’70s. The song opened my eyes to myself. I knew my gay “impulses” were forbidden enough to get me into big trouble, but I never understood the toll their denial took on me. Eventually, I realized my entire life was built around avoiding the truth of love.
The song obviously answered my parents’ practical questions. I ran away from Yale, from New York, and much more because I was invariably confronted by my yearning for unlawful love. After I found safety in marriage, I for a time waved this away as impulse — like craving a candy bar now and then. It was two years before I really understood that I married and dragged my wife, an immigrant, to a place where I thought I could hide from everything. It didn’t work, of course. Our marriage ended after barely five years.
Why am I telling you this story? It’s about history. I wrote a column a year ago about the pleasure of nostalgia, constructing memories of what it was like to be gay in years past. I love that, but it too often comes with the grueling complaints of the elders about the youngsters: They don’t appreciate how hard we worked for the freedom they have. They don’t even know how much incredible fun we had. The bars are all closing so they don’t have any sense of community. They shouldn’t call themselves queer. On it goes, substituting so much toxic amnesia, fabrication, and envy for real inquiry and support.
The story of queer people still often begins in isolation and pain: standing alone on the playground, being bullied, or forced to conform. And, most depressing, we too often treat our own kind, like the queer young, much the way we were treated. That makes us blind as well as old and far from wise.