Unlike most people I’ve met — and especially unlike most gay people I’ve met, for whom adolescence was an excruciating ordeal — I was looking forward to my high-school reunion. I’m not saying that my adolescence wasn’t also terrifying. I couldn’t imagine how I would ever express what I actually was, and I hated myself for being like this, but at least I wasn’t ever bullied. When I went to boarding school in tenth grade, I had no problem adjusting to the ‘private school’ curriculum. I made friends with a lot of different kids: Mark D and Kip on the hockey team; Aaron on the soccer team, who introduced me to Scott and some of the other day students who were into the Smiths and R.E.M. and Heaven Seventeen; Taylor, Richie, Jay, and Steve in the dorms, who loved playing pranks (‘carding’ into someone’s room and filling containers with water, and so on), sitting around playing backgammon, and listening to ‘Live Rust’; Denise, who invited me to a party her sister was having at her parents’ glass-facade modern ranch house where juniors and seniors were lounging around on Eames chairs, drinking wine, and listening to David Bowie (my first New York City party in the suburbs of Detroit); the ‘fac brats’ Marian, Amanda, and Za, who had a kind of supernatural aura because they had grown up on campus and knew things about it that nobody else did (secret tunnels); Liana and Nicole, who invited me to sit at their lunch table and proclaimed themselves to be ‘losers’ and ‘outcasts’ in a way that was shocking to me at the time, but was an attitude later embedded in Gen-X culture by way of ‘My So-Called Life’ and ‘Anywhere But Here’ (the book) and similar works that presented the absurd, tragic sense of alienation so many of us felt growing up in the 1980s, which is a decade that forty years later we can safely/unfortunately say never ended. In some ways, it would be a reunion; in other ways, I had never left.
The campus of my high school is preposterously beautiful, littered with architectural and sculptural masterpieces. Confronting it again, I found it hard to believe that I had spent three years here. Had I ever lived anywhere so beautiful? Probably not. I wondered if it had formed me, and I wanted the answer to be yes. It occurred to me that, no matter how lost or alienated I might feel, the earnest beauty on display here is always worth remembering and striving for (to see, to witness, maybe to make, both literally and metaphorically to the extent that we are artists of our own lives).
As a teenager, I was largely oblivious to this beauty, because I was too busy being terrified of my hockey coach and too busy trying to be a perfect student/athlete/friend/brother/son to compensate for the major, unspeakable flaw I knew resided inside of me. But in defiance of my father, I quit playing hockey in my senior year, which was the beginning of a long ‘coming out’ process that never stopped. I’m also sure that living in this kind of beauty helped me to understand — or at least created a spark of understanding — that being gay was not as terrible as I feared, that perhaps the beauty of the surrounding landscape was not so different than what I was beginning to cultivate in my hockey-free life (through music and pottery and writing and admitting myself that I would rather be with boys and than girls).
Did I remember this hot gay statue? I wasn’t sure, but maybe it, too, had exerted a similar kind of unconscious influence over me.
The reunion itself offered no surprises. I went to a few parties, I posed for class pictures, I went on walks and runs with various groupings of classmates. I avoided Republicans. Something about a bronze kangaroo became a running joke. I loved spending time with these friends. Over the years, I had sometimes felt the urge to disown my past and those who inhabit it, reasoning that I was ‘living a lie.’ But at this reunion, I felt no shame or regret; my classmates knew a core version of me that still exists, just as I recognized this same thing within them. Some are married; some are divorced; many of us have lost parents; a surprising number of them have children who are queer or transgender. For a few seconds, I could believe that the world is going to be okay. All of us have gone through changes, but in some important way, we are still the same. This will always be true, and it is comforting to consider.
With luck, I will see these friends again in five more years, when we can once again remember when we were young and formulating a belief that still exists.
