Wicked Man Lives: Allen RIP

The blues

How is it that when hearts break there is no sound.. How can it be that God gave sound to almost every other thing and function, yet for emotion there is just mind numbing silence. You would think a heart breaking would sound like a thousand angels softly weeping... but I suppose the world would be a very noisey place if emotions had sound.

I came out to my therapist at last.. it was just as scary as I thought it would be. She is a really fantastic lady, and said it was an honor to her I finally trusted her enough to let her in. I've been going over in my mind for days this long trek of mine.. so many twists and turns. Little more than a year ago I started seeing a therapist to help me summon the strength to end a relationship that was slowly killing me. The topic was love, and the fact I feel so unworthy of it. I can give it unconditionally without reserve yet I find it so difficult to accept.

For so long love has been a razor strap, something that has been used against me. When I was a child our house was an emotional vacuum, my mother was far too sick to be able to convey love, my father way too busy. Hugs and kisses were things I saw on TV, there were none in that house. I thought I had done something terrible to be so ignored, I was a sad lonely child, and life was very solitary.

I had my first gay lover when I was 13. Allen and I had been friends since kindergarten. Funny, cute, articulate and a romantic.. he saved things from everytime we were together, something I would later do for silly things with my kids.. ticket stubs, game tokens.. things that bring back that moment.

We were in a parochial grade school.. a place where such things were looked on as mortal sins. It was hard to reconcile going to hell for accepting his love. I was gay and in love before I had ever even heard the term, let alone understood it. I knew he loved me back, and to me that was just such a miracle.. so inconceivable. It seemed so impossible to me.. accepting his love in the face of religion that was drilled into us on a daily basis, a religion that taught that such things were greeted with eternal damnation. Fire and brimstone.. for the love of this boy, it left me in tears when I was in the dark and alone.

In the circle we traveled in at the time we were careful never to let on, often flirting with girls to keep the suspicion away.. then clandestine meetings in the woods behind the ymca and making out. hot, naked, tumbling in the grass. He wanted to go further than I was ready to go, in my head as long as I didn't let him do "that".. I had technically not completed a "Mortal Sin".

He was always the bolder one, and when he decided he had to come out, despite my begging him not to, it caused an explosion of a magnitude he never expected, his parents hatred and disgust was such that they shipped him off to some dirt track in Wyoming to "become a real man". It changed the course of my life forever, and we would never be together that way again.

In the days after he was sent away, his father and mother persisted in the hunt for the boy who had turned their son gay, phoning the parents of everyone of us who hung out together. Not a day seemed to go by in our circle that the subject was not front and center.. I was terrified. Fingers were pointed back and forth, and yet somehow they were never pointed at me. I felt awful for not coming forward and at the same time relieved everytime the target moved away from me.

Weeks later when I thought I was in the clear, walking home from a friends I ran across the older brother of another friend of mine in that woods. As I walked I could hear his steps quicken behind me, as I turned to see where he was a blinding pain shot across the back of my head, I went face down, and turned over as he kicked me in the face, and then again repeatedly in the chest and stomach.

I don't remember much else other than being dragged off the path by my shirt, the collar nearly turning to a garrot.. the whole way he ranted about knowing all about me, called me a dirty little cocksucker, and he knew what I liked. It seemed like hours but the whole thing lasted maybe 10 minutes, he left me there bloody and half naked.

I would see him repeatedly throughout my school years, one look from him made me want to run. He said if I ever told he would be sure everyone knew "my secret" but actually we existed under an implied mutual destruction, I could just as easily have destroyed him. I heard he died in a drunk driving accident in the 80's. I always hoped it would be more painful and lingering.

If I felt like a Judas for not having stepped forward as the boy who would be queer, I accepted what happened as my punishment for not having been brave enough to stand up, and God's punishment for having sinned, falling in love with a boy. I spent the rest of my teen years going out of my way to be sure nobody would ever suspect I was gay. See the post "100 things" to see where that landed me.

Allen returned shortly before I married in 1979. We spoke briefly before the wedding and he tried to talk me out of it. He came to my wedding under protest, and shortly after moved away. We never spoke again. His man at his side, April 14th, 1995 he died of Aids. He took part of me with him.. it kills me to that our last words were tearful and bittersweet.

He is in every kiss.. I can still smell his hair.