Guess Who's Coming...

GUESS WHO'S COMING TO THANKSGIVING DINNER?

I am not black.

I was a seventeen-year old, attending Normandy High School in St. Louis, Missouri, when I saw Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner. A groundbreaking film—yet still with its roots firmly planted in Hollywood—the Oscar winning movie dared to examine race relations as America at large was barely finding its footing.

I remember seeing the film with my Grandma Katie, the one relative I could trust throughout otherwise duplicitous familial machinations. During the late Sixties, she rented a room from a woman who lived in Ferguson, Missouri. I have no recollection of discussing the film although my grandmother took me to see Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner with specific intent.

I am not black.

I had met very few black people when I went to a virtually all-white high school; it was only when I ventured into gay bars in East St. Louis that I was exposed to gay black men. They were—to throw out the first of many politically incorrect words I will inevitably employ—exotic.

I knew I was gay in high school and so did almost everyone else including a gang of bullies who—in a militaristic maneuver between classes—captured me, threw me into one of the gymnasium showers and kicked me as I was drenched with cold water. The event would eventually fuel the fires of my activism.

The year I graduated from high school, poised to escape the fear and homophobia I experienced, was a year of mythic political activity: the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the Chicago riots at the National Democratic Convention, and the student protests over the war in Vietnam. 

I began to grasp the concept of Us Versus Them.

Ferguson, Missouri

On Thanksgiving, still reeling from the Ferguson debacle, my adopted black daughter and I go to dinner with a few of our “family” members (Carol and Art, who play the “grandparent” roles and “Uncle” Bill). Of the five of us, my daughter is the only one who is black.

I am not black.

About a year ago, Katherine called me from England, where she was at college, studying filmmaking. “You know something, Dad?” she asked rhetorically and straightforwardly. Then answered herself, “I’m black.”

It was a moment I’d been waiting for; in spite of all the Martin Luther King parades and politically correct children’s books; in spite of trips to Leimert Park and God-only-knows how many African-American-centric beauty salons; after how many movie showings (including Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner) and how many friends I attempted to cultivate, one truth remains: Katherine was brought up by a bunch of crackers.

And even though she’s only twenty years old, the color of her skin is saturated with the hues of more than two-hundred years of anti-black sentiment.

I am not black.

“But I know what discrimination is like. I’ve lost work—I’ve virtually been blacklisted in Hollywood [is "blacklisted" a politically incorrect word?]. I’ve been made fun of. I’ve been afraid for my life,” I insist, trying to suggest that my degree of empathy is pristine.

Katherine insists back, “Dad, it is not the same. It’s just not.” I take a lame stab at the marriage issues (even I know that’s not comparable—I don’t know of any gay lynching in West Hollywood).

I am not black.

Katherine gives me a few articles to read which happens concurrently with a Poly Sci class I’m taking that explores race in America, from the signing of the Declaration of Independence to the murder in Ferguson. While race is an issue that has been in the foreground of my work as a writer and an actor for decades, I suddenly felt like A Big Ignorant Honkie.

Katherine and her friend (to this day) Cassady 

Before we sit down to eat on Thanksgiving, Katherine flippantly says, “Well, I guess I should be thankful I wasn't shot by Darren Wilson.” Action; the camera is rolling—metaphorically. Wilson is the cop who shot Michael Brown—the teen who recently graduated from Normandy High School (which had become primarily a black school since my days as a student there)—not once, not twice, not three times, not four times, not five times, but six times.

Carol suggests that she knows what discrimination is like because she was taunted as a child for being unusually tall, having a childhood illness, and not fitting into normative boxes.

“Carol,” Katherine says, trying to reason. “You have to stop saying that. It’s not the same. It’s not the same as living in black skin. You cannot make those comparisons. I could get killed for being black—do you get that?”

I am not black.

The discussion escalated. I tried to keep my big mouth shut but did offer that I, too, felt like the perils of my marginalization as a gay person are comparable to those of a black person—until I really, really listened to Katherine.

“Carol, it hurts my feelings when you say things like that,” Katherine says, walking from the living room, out the front door.

Katherine begins to cry. Carol begins to understand. We can’t be the only family in America exploring Ferguson during a family gathering on Thanksgiving.

High School Graduation with Carol & Art

Carol loves no one on the face of the Earth more than she loves Katherine. She and Art have helped raise her—from changing diapers to navigating these changing times.

Uncle Bill, a therapist, has always watched with intimacy and objectivity.“It’s so good that you are able to say these things,” he assures Katherine on the evening of our family holiday dinner. 

Carol’s perception shifts.

As a new scene unfolds, I lie down in the adjacent bedroom within earshot of Katherine and Carol enjoying a conversation. Katherine explains how her racial identity is directly affecting her artistic life. She is determined to address what she correctly perceives to be a skewed vision of race in the television and film industry.

Now it’s my turn to cry, quietly, tears of thanksgiving for my daughter (who changed her name in honor of my grandmother) and our evolving mixed family.

I am not black.

MIDWEST RACE MIX

Protesters peacefully march in Ferguson, honoring the murder of Michael Brown. 

“’Black lives matter!’ the crowd chanted. ‘All lives matter!”’ reported the New York Times, referencing the recent protests in my hometown of St. Louis, two months after Michael Brown, a young black man, was shot by a white cop.

The Chicago Tribune reports: “A white Ohio woman is suing a Downers Grove-based sperm bank, alleging that the company mistakenly gave her vials from an African-American donor, a fact that she said has made it difficult for her and her same-sex partner to raise their now 2-year-old daughter [Payton] in an all-white community.”

Michael Brown and Payton share something that is deemed by many to be “wrong” in many of America’s racially complex neighborhoods: the color of their skin.

The white lesbian couple, disgruntled because they accidentally received the “wrong” semen share something with cops who routinely murder black men in the Midwest (and elsewhere): Racism.

I wanted a child, not a color.

Would mommy be suing the sperm donor if her baby had autism and she lived in a “non-autistic” community? I think not. Yes, the Midwest Sperm Bank made a grave mistake but the bigger mistake is a mother who is suing for $50,000 because of the “mistaken” race of her child.

And another question: Do Jennifer Cramblett and her partner, Amanda Zinkon, live in an all-lesbian neighborhood? Presumably, their gayness has not prevented them from surviving Uniontown, Ohio.

Please hear me—no matter what color you are or what your sexual identity may encompass or what fucking neighborhood you live in—being a parent does not come with any guarantees. And often what you perceive to be the presumed “negatives” turn into the glorious gifts.

According to the Chicago Tribune, Cramblett “did not know African-Americans until she attended college at the University of Akron.” Oh, my. And if that isn’t drastic enough, she has to take her daughter “to a black neighborhood” to get her hair cut. I have a picture of a distraught lesbian couple walking warily into a movie in which Eddie Murphy plays all the roles, including their 2-year old.

So Cramblett is forced, as most parents are, to make some big adjustments. Hire a moving van, honey. But please don’t say that you do “not want Payton to feel stigmatized” when you have engineered a public lawsuit that has placed your child’s picture all over the media, presumably to let us see how burdensome her skin color is.

If these two transparently disingenuous moms don’t know that they are the ones who have “stigmatized” their daughter, they are delusional.

Kearns with his daughter Katherine.

I can weigh in on this scenario because I—as a single gay man—raised a black daughter in a neighborhood that was not perfect in terms of its ethnic balance. I adopted Katherine twenty years ago—before the onslaught of gay marriage, before Ellen and before Modern Family.

It is, in fact, safe to say that there were no other families like ours, modern or otherwise, living in our neighborhood. And believe me when I say that we were subjected to impolite stares at the supermarket and asked some preposterous questions. Was I “the nanny?” some numbskull asked. However, by integrating into a mixed neighborhood, we found friends and allies of all stripes.

Get a van, honey. 

I acknowledge that the comparison is not entirely fair. I did not care what race my adopted child would be; I wanted a child, not a color. I was not confronted with a Big Surprise that shook my sensibilities. And I don’t suggest that every GLBT person (especially those who live in Ohio) has my stamina or particular purview.

What I do suggest, however, is that the child they brought into the world—however imperfect and unexpected the circumstances—is a magnificent human being just as she is. And to bring the color of her skin into a lawsuit that might benefit mommy’s bank account is a travesty.

I can’t imagine how much Leslie McSpadden and Michael Brown Sr., the paralyzed parents of the college-bound 18 year old from Ferguson, wish that they could recapture the birth of their dead son; see the promise in their baby’s eyes, caress the texture of his silken skin, hear his first words, recall catching him when he fell, hugging him if he cried. Remember seeing him turn 3 or 13.

But they won’t see him turn 19. They just won’t. 

I SING MYSELF ELECTRIC

WALT & ME (NOW)

Ryland

You know what I think is funny? That there was a point in my life I didn't know you. How weird. You are a permanent feature on my globe—like a continent. 

My friend Ryland

When I question my 31-year old buddy, Ryland, regarding any feelings he has about Walt Whitman, he asks, “Didn't the gay community claim him as their own, like their property?

“Make him a gay saint or something?”

“Okay,” I say to my artistic brother, “I’m going to suggest something that might be challenged—not by you, but if I publish these newfound discoveries. When I read Whitman in my teens and early twenties, I was obsessed with the notion of his homosexuality.”

It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists,

It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees, dress

 does not hide him,

The strong sweet quality he has strikes through the cotton and broadcloth,

To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more,

You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side

“I Sing The Body Electric” Walt Whitman

“The is-he-or-isn’t-he? question has become a non-issue for me,” I continue. “And that is partly because the word ‘gay’ is always thrillingly in flux and never more so than in your generation and the current crop, a decade younger—sorry, Ryland—than you.

“Was Walt gay?’’ I ask myself, and Ryland, as I attempt to tease it out.

“I believe that he loved men with erotically charged emotion, to a degree likely uncommon among his peers,” I say. “I believe there was likely some heartfelt and soulful canoodling and maybe some randy petting taking places with his buddies as the sun went down. But was there all-out fucking?”

I’m certainly not arguing that rambunctious man-to-man anal sex wasn’t transpiring in 1855 (or 1755, for that matter) but did Walt’s sexual repertoire and rapture involve insertion? Part of me thinks not.

I present Ryland with my heretofore cloistered conclusion: “I surmise that the way he navigated his sexuality was approached with more guileless sensually than rough-and-tumble sexually.”

Ryland speaks up, way up, “This is something I’ve been thinking about lately, as things keep evolving, minute to minute. Does it all come down to insertion?”

“No, it’s all up to insertion,” I say, as archly as possible. “I get it, Ryland,” I say, wondering if I really do.

“The gay community, per se, needed that identification to get where we are today,” Ryland posits.

What Ryland says is golden. No matter the specific acts Whitman performed sexually, he gave us voluptuous insight to the very renegade construct of men loving men.

Soulfillment

O the magnet! The flesh over and over!

Go, dear friend, if need be give up all else, and commence to definiteness,

          elevatedness,

Rest not till you rivet and publish yourself of your own Personality.

“To A Pupil” Walt Whitman

I had already begun publishing myself, as intimately as I possibly could, in hopes that my comrades did not die in vain. To have lived to be sixty-four years old, having adopted an African-American daughter, and continued to publish myself has to be credited, not only to the empathy-embracing acting teacher, but to Whitman.

Surely his message—as political as it was artistic—has guided me since my first reading (even though perhaps I infused it with more steamy sexuality than was intended). Whitman was also addressing—in all his poetry’s luxuriousness and sensuality—the art and diligence of achieving democracy in multi-layered specificity. My digestion of those tenets was more subliminal.

Was I aware of that when I was in my twenties, as a horny young gay men looking for someone to identify with? Doubtful. Nor did I likely see the full palette of Williams or Albee or Inge or Isherwood or Vidal; it was their sexuality that provided the portal to understanding something far greater. Call it spirit. Call it spiritual. Call it soul. Without those voices, on the printed page, staring at me with such empathy, I would not have survived to this ripe “old age.”

I believe it’s Whitman’s righteousness that I hold onto as a grown up man; his sense of being one of a crowd, and loving those members of the crowd—no matter what their status may be—is what makes me move forward with some sense of gracefulness and ease. Whitman’s empathy is his artistic achievement.

“The seminar,” I tell Ryland, “resulted in an overwhelming, almost otherworldly sense of soulfillment. Sorry, I mean ful-fillment.”

“No,” Ryland shoots back, without taking a beat, “You mean soul-fillment.”

“Did we just make up a word? I love it. I fucking love it: soulfillment.”

Whitman’s poetry often references “loafing on the grass” and our class found many meanings in this luxuriously enveloping image. Is he being thankful? Was he meditating? Was he finding comfort in nature? What he simply being present in his body/soul? Was he taking time to pay attention?  Perhaps all of the above, all lessons that I know I can learn from.

The nourishment I received from my week in Santa Fe is almost indescribable in its breadth. Not only did I leave singing a song of myself, I left with a sense of being reinforced in my mission as an artist and a human being.

Yet I must share this information with my peers and my younger brethren, for it to resonate. I must publish myself—on the page and in person.

“Keep on loafing on the grass, bud.”

An email from Mitch

This is part five of a five-part series.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This piece is dedicated to Steve Schulte who made my second trip to Santa Fe a reality. And special thanks to Zo Harris for her editing skills.

I SING MYSELF ELECTRIC

BROTHERHOOD

Was call’d by my nighest name by clear loud voices of young men as they saw

          me approaching or passing

Felt their arms on my neck as I stood or the negligent leaning of their flesh

          against me as I sat

Saw many I loved in the street or ferry-boat or public assembly, yet never told

          them a word

“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” Walt Whitman

While one of my esteemed classmates challenged Whitman’s boundary-less largess, I wholeheartedly believe that one can love someone without ever having exchanged words.

This was not the first reference to Whitman’s hyper-connectivity with every human being he encountered, saluting “all the inhabitants of the earth,” as he said. And that included prostitutes, prisoners, pirates, thieves, murderers, and lunatics among others. These humans comprised his chosen democracy and connecting to its manifold members didn’t require verbiage. Each is a metaphoric “leaf of grass”—distinct, important, part of nature, to be celebrated.

I am annealed to the idea of the body as a home for the soul and the soul as a conduit to democracy. Throw in a bit of homoeroticism and I’m there, baby.

Yet I am willing to question myself. Am I my own worst stereotype, a gay man who grew up on anonymous encounters and convinced myself there was emotion attached? I think not. In some cases, of course the sexual gymnastics were void of emotion. But in others, a sense of brotherhood, joined with a profound feeling of love, prevailed. With my soul, I was expressing something beyond the sexual act.

I do not believe this phenomenon is the province of gay men (or of men presumed to be gay) since I have also felt deep love for women; a woman that I silently exchange glances with just might result in an ineffable, instantaneous but fleeting love affair. And I feel certain that many heterosexuals, male and female, have shared this sensation.

When I first made love to Philip, I did not even know that his name was Philip. I also did not know his age, his occupation, his educational background, or where he lived. In those days, prior to the onslaught of HIV/AIDS, gay men often met in the darkened hallways of bathhouses where a communal desire to “only connect” (thank you, E.M. Forster) drove us into each other’s arms. We communicated but an abundance of words was not required. The uniformity of a white towel wrapped around one’s waist was the ultimate costume of democracy.

In the Eighties, when I was in my thirties, I was confronted with death (after death after death after death after death), my commitment to the art of acting transitioned from the narcissistic dreams of onscreen stardom to the day-to-day realities of depicting something (HIV/AIDS) only my soul could express. My soul, my body, my voice, and empathy: all aligned with purpose, to write as well as act.

Through the prism of that wrenching reality, I found purpose. I was able to rivet. In fact, I’ve been unable to stop: riveting, riveting, riveting. With all of my being, I related to Whitman’s deepening expression of democracy as he sat by the beds of dying soldiers in the Civil War. Death is the great democratizer.

The seeds of my blossoming had been planted early on, as a child in St. Louis, Missouri, with a grande dame of an acting teacher, who insisted that her young wards learn, above all else, the art of empathy. It was not a word that she employed but it was a powerful tool that was implanted in my consciousness and would manifest in my work.

“Do not see yourself as different than,” she intoned in a distinctive diva baritone. “You are the same as everyone you see. Always, always, look for yourself in others.”

Embracing otherness is the wellspring of great art. To be given this gift as such an impressionable age was a gift that somehow overshadowed a childhood that was fraught with the perils of familial alcoholism and mental illness, passed from one generation to generation like a broken baton.

Philip—the man with whom I shared museum walks in Amsterdam, romantic dinners in Paris and even a trip down the Nile—died at age 42 after our brief four year marriage.

Found you in death so cold dear comrade, found your body son of responding

kisses (never again on earth responding,)

Bared your face in the starlight, curious the scene, cool blew the moderate night-

          wind,

Long there and then in vigil I stood, dimly around me the battlefield spreading,

Vigil wondrous and vigil sweet there I the fragrant silent night,

But not a tear fell, not even a long-drawn sigh, long, long I gazed,

Then on the earth partially reclining sat by your side leaning my chin in my

          hands,

Passing sweet hours, immortal and mystic hours with you dearest comrade—not

          a tear, not a word

“Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night” Walt Whitman

This part four of a five-part series.

I SING MYSELF ELECTRIC

THE HEALER

Who is that lady? Aurora, that's who.

And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul?

And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?

“I Sing The Body Electric” Walt Whitman

To quote another poet whose unapologetic sexuality is part of his palette, Leonard Cohen says, “My body aches in places where it used to play.” I wonder if his soul aches as well?

Without enumerating the tedious specifics, my body has—since my HIV diagnosis more than a quarter of a century ago—been ravaged by various insidious offshoots of the virus and the sneaky side effects of the life-saving drugs. In some instances—like the vicious peripheral neuropathy in my feet that is incrementally sneaking up my legs—the verdict is out on whether the condition is a symptom of HIV or a byproduct of the multitudinous drugs I’ve been ingesting for these many years.

And now, even though I’m in my sixty-fourth year (“Will you still love me” the Beatles asked, “when I’m sixty-four?”), I tend to blame everything on HIV —from an ingrown toenail to cataracts—when the real culprit is age.

So I arrived in Santa Fe with a case of sciatica that has been lingering for nearly two months (officially not HIV-related, by the way). I’d gone to my regular doctor, to the chiropractor, to an acupuncturist—all providing temporary relief from either drugs and/or the human touch.

But in Santa Fe? Where are as many “healers” as there are turquoise bracelets? I set out to find one of the town’s preeminent in the field. Her name is Aurora which immediately conjures the glamorous but decidedly witchy character that Agnes Moorehead embodied in the popular Sixties television series, Bewitched.

Mitch agreed to drive me since it’s about a twenty minute ride from campus and a bit off the beaten track. But even his GPS was able to identify the “dirt road” that Aurora instructed would precede our entrance through the turquoise gates.

Mitch and I howled in laughter all the way there. What was I doing? What did I expect? Would it be all airy-fairy or would Aurora actually perform a magical massage and rid me of my sciatica? By the time we traversed to the dirt road, which contained a small, opaque lake, we had written several scenarios, most of them veering toward the lurid. We had arrived at the blue gates which were a bit rusted but nevertheless opened and beckoning.

Since we arrived early, I insisted that Mitch drop me off and not linger. “I’ll read a bit of Walt while I wait,” I said, pointing to a rickety chair situated in the blazing sun.

Mitch was no longer laughing. “Hey, man, just in case,” he said, “take my phone number and give me yours.” As we did the phone exchange, I glanced up at the huge curtain-less window on the second floor of Aurora’s isolated dwelling.

“Mitch! Look at the very center on the ledge of the window.”

As if determinedly placed by a propmaster, for optimum theatrical effect, was a bottle of lotion, glistening in the Santa Fe sunshine.

“Dude, you are in for it,” Mitch proposed. It did faintly resemble the cinematic opening shot of a Stephen King movie. I insisted my buddy leave; I was ready for my closeup.

Santa Fe Clouds

“What is the pain saying to you?” Aurora asked, looking at me with mystical intensity through oceanic azure eyes. And it went from there—for the next three hours, I was both psychologically (spiritually, if you will) examined and physically contorted.

But the most significant aspect of Aurora’s approach was her concentration on the coexistence of the soul and the body; this mergence is where, she feels, one needs to put their energies in order to heal. Yes, the synchronicity between Whitman’s mantra and the healer’s was stunning. The soul, she said, sometimes “wobbles” outside of the body and needs to be allowed inside if we desire wholeness. 

She astutely suggested that I have taken on the pain of others. “You might be carrying their pain in your hip and leg where the sciatica attacks,” she said. I could not disagree; my daughter, my brother, and even some of my students come immediately into focus.

“Give it back to them. They need to experience the pain, not you. You are getting in the way of their healing and learning movement forward.

I admitted that I compound the pain by blaming myself, ruminating that I've done something to deserve the sciatica. Interestingly enough, I never blamed myself for getting HIV—maybe, in part, because I likely seroconverted from negative to positive before there was much information as to how one becomes infected. There remains, more than twenty-five years later, contradictory opinions on that subject.

“Don’t blame yourself,” Aurora said, in a soothing but emphatic voice. “Be curious.” Hmmm. “Ask yourself, ‘Why am I feeling the pain? Is there something my body—or soul—is saying to me?’” I wonder—no, I am curious—if what I’m experiencing is a manifestation of soul-sickness.

Her massage technique is masterful, verbally defining the body-soul geography while elaborating in detail about each of the areas that she physically manipulated. In that regard, it was the most specific treatment I’ve ever received.

I realized, however, that it had grown much later than I had anticipated and asked if I could take a moment to call Mitch and assuage any anxiety that he might be feeling.

“Everything is cool, I’ll be in class on time,” I said. “Aurora is driving me back.”

(Only in Santa Fe would your healer also graciously act as chauffer.)

I made it back to the seminar, a bit discombobulated, feeling like I’d been lobotomized rather than healed. Little did I realize that I’d need my brain, my heart and my courage (all those goodies Dorothy got on her way to Oz)—not to mention my soul—for the next “chapter” of my Whitman saga.

This is part three of a five-part series. 

I SING MYSELF ELECTRIC

THE BROMANCE

I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you,

All is recall’d as we flit by each other, fluid, affectionate, chaste, matured,

You grew up with me, were a boy with me or a girl with me,

I ate with you and slept with you, your body has become not yours only nor left my body

mine only

You give me the pleasure of your eyes, face, flesh, as we pass, you take of my beard,

          breast, hands, in return

“To A Stranger’ Walt Whitman

My soon-to-be twenty year old daughter dismisses the word “bromance” as the relationship between two straight guys who love each other but are afraid of being perceived as gay. I don’t entirely agree. I feel that sometimes we have to provide a phenomenon with a word in order to define something that makes people uneasy; by naming it, we often demystify it. (She’s way beyond the simplicity of semantics; “It just is, dad,” she says. “You don’t need to label it.”)

And she’s right. Perhaps what Walt was describing in all those fervid lines about his male-to-male encounters were, indeed, the first recorded bromances. The Urban Dictionary defines the word as “a relationship between two men that are unusually close” while several mainstream dictionaries suggest it’s a relationship specifically between two heterosexual dudes.

“What was the name of the poem you mentioned in class today?” Mitch asks. Not only are we in the Whitman class together, his room is directly across from mine in the dorm. Mitch possesses that television star virility with an accessible sexiness rather than movie star hauteur. In addition to his physical prowess (athletic, confident stature), he is intellectually muscular as well.

How can I not hope for a bromance? Yet, that part of me that is often distrustful of being drawn to a straight man was on alert when I reminded him of the name of the poem. A lot of my hetero buds would not be able to wrap their pretty heads around the complex nature of Whitman’s “To A Stranger”.

But Mitch got it, responding with a certain masculine ease that assured me were destined to the George Clooney-Brad Pitt stratosphere of bromancehood.

This was confirmed by our enlivened chats about what went on in the day-to-day seminars and our burgeoning reflections on Whitman. In addition, we intimately bonded by sharing details on the roller coaster ride each of us values and struggles with on a daily basis: fatherhood.

Katherine with her dad Michael

As the father of a nine-year old, it was clear that Mitch (mid-forties) was a spectacular father and part of that praise I heap on him is derived from his anxiety about being a good dad. He’s listening to his boy; he and his wife are paying attention to the world that his son is growing up in. These details all swirl in the orbit of Whitman’s passages.

And Whitman does stress the gloriousness of conception—above all else, in fact. And please, my fascistic gay friends, don’t tell me that’s homophobic. Whitman is celebrating the miracle that is each new life. I feel certain that he would applaud the soulfulness of “conception” in all configurations of the Twenty First Century.

When you rivet on the same subject for several days, you inevitably come up with alternative words to describe them or their trademark beliefs and behavior: “Whitmanesque,” “a Whitman moment ” or, perhaps, “ Walt would like that.”

Mitch’s relationship to his son is Whitmanesque and, according to Mitch, they share what I would identify as “Whitman moments”: every morning when Mitch drops his kid off at the school bus (“Be kind and smile,” he encourages him) and every night when he tucks him in (“Dream big,” he says).

In getting to know each other, I told Mitch—keep in mind, this is a man who teaches at a private school in Connecticut and wears black turtle necks five days a week—I was going to go to see a healer because I have been suffering from sciatica.

“A healer?” he asks, intrigued but without a whiff of judgment.

I admit that I don't really know what a healer does exactly but I feel Santa Fe is where they would likely do it best. He agrees and offers to drive me to Aurora’s.

This is part two of a five-part series.

I SING MYSELF ELECTRIC

Part One

WALT & ME (THEN)

As Adam early in the morning,

Walking forth firm the bower refresh’d with sleep,

Behold me where I pass, hear my voice, approach, Touch me, touch the palm of your hand to my body as I pass,

Be not afraid of my body.

“As Adam Early in the Morning” Walt Whitman

At our first seminar (St. John’s College, Summer Classics), we were asked why we chose to spend a week deepening our understanding of Walt Whitman.

The answers ranged from “I know very little about poetry in general” to “I know virtually nothing about Whitman.”

“I read ‘To a Stranger’ when I was in my late teens or early twenties,” I said, “and it remains my favorite poem of all time.”

For a young man on the cusp of embracing his sexuality, it was as if Whitman was whispering into my ear while strands of his white-white beard tickled my neck. His poetry allowed me to embrace my queerness. It often made me hard. Walt was not only a poet; he was one of my first sex partners.

As a high school kid, I had been bullied. I was ostensibly popular, starred in all the school plays, even had girlfriends. But none of that mattered to a group of homophobic hooligans who had labeled me (rightly so) a “queer,” a queer to be thrown into the locker room shower in the middle of the day and mercilessly  kicked.

Is it any wonder than Whitman soothed my battered body/soul?

As life unfolded, I would learn that Whitman was gay, wasn’t gay, had to be gay, couldn’t have been gay, was out and proud, was in the closet. I also learned that Whitman indeed celebrated male physicality but that this recurring theme was only a fraction of his expansive palette. And Whitman’s celebration of the body was inextricably bound to his celebration of the soul; in fact, the two are, in Whitmanese, inseparable.

And as our initial seminar revealed, the manifold parts of Whitman poetic palette extended far beyond those of his (or anyone else’s) body.

Democracy, for instance is paramount to Whitman’s voice. In fact, he considered the words “America” and “democracy” interchangeable. And it is, Whitman felt, the duty of the poet to identify our democratic impulses and nourish them. “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem,” he said in Preface 1855 –Leaves of Grass, First Edition.

We are not better than or greater than anyone—whether you’re eating at the Russian Tea Room or shopping at the 99 Cents Store. You deserve equal treatment, respect and—yes—love. That expression of intimate identification, in my opinion, can be as simple as a smile or as charged as offering someone a few bucks with no strings attached. Do these random acts of kindness feed the soul? You betcha.

And where is the soul? Is it floating outside of our body, encircling the crown of our head, like a halo? Or is it inside our body, snuggling up against our heart? Maybe it is in closer proximity to our brain? Our sexual organs? Maybe it has the ability to traverse at will.

My classmates were a fascinating assemblage of personalities. There were two undergraduates who were attending St. John’s, both with a sense of the world—and their place in it—that extended far beyond their years. There was one grand woman, likely in her eighties, who spoke with such dignified and good-natured gravitas that everyone in the room become instantly entranced by her every utterance. Then there was the lawyer in all his quiet yet brilliant thoughtfulness and the judge who spoke through the prism of fairness.

Wendy, one of my favorite classmates, was as open and as curious as a newborn; that is not to imply a lack of insight or intellect. Rather, it is to her credit to be able to process chunks of information that may have not previously been part of her lexicon, approaching them with a willingness to alter her perception.

Among my peers, I was the least educated, likely the poorest, and probably the loudest.

And I love Walt with all my heart.

I also love Mitch—there, I said it—a fellow student.

This is part one of a five-part series.

THE AWARD IN MY STARS

THE LUCK IN MY STARS

“That's the thing about pain. It demands to be felt.”

                                                                    Gus, The Fault In Our Stars

I suppose my pain, seemingly an endless reservoir that deepens with age, was being its demanding self when it read the New York Times review of The Fault In Our Stars. If you asked, I would say that I need some good head more than I need a good cry but my pain receptors ordered me to get to the nearest movie house and purchase my ticket (at a painful senior discount) to the new cancer movie.

I chose to go alone rather than subject someone to indulge my histrionics which I knew would be as predictable as the filmmakers incorporating a gooey montage of the sweetest moments of the movie as the final moments unravel (along with the audience).

I find watching a film to be so subjective. I suppose any artistic experience is but—positioned in that darkened space with human emotions magnified beyond any sense of reality—my “material” (as they say) ineluctably merges with the material that those larger-than-life characters are manifesting.

I’m less emotionally rickety watching something on the small screen, residing in a less heightened state; that’s why I’ve avoided The Normal Heart like another colonoscopy. But The Fault In Our Stars is being compared to Love Story—good pain, not the torture chamber of AIDS in the Eighties.

Yes and no. Death is death—whether it’s in Venice, New York City or the emotional terrain occupied by two teenagers in love. Hazel and Gus share scrumptious faces—as likable as they are lickable—and cancer. The inevitable Who-Will-Kick-First? leitmotif is one of the art-mirroring-life subplots that hooked me before the opening credits rolled by.

While many friends and I played that game—replete with campy repartee (“If you go first, I promise to get rid of the dildos under your bed before your parents arrive from Iowa”)—it wasn’t until my relationship with Philip that the theme became deadly (sorry) serious.

Speaking of heart-rending movies, a startling realization struck when Philip and I were seeing Longtime Companion at the Vista Theater. About halfway through the routinely labeled “AIDS movie”, Philip went to the bathroom. Feeling the suddenness of his departure, like a throbbing jolt—in that very moment—I thought to myself, wanting to scream it outloud to the actors on the movie screen: “He’ll die first.”

One of the most defining aspects of my relationship with Philip had been travel. Like the star-crossed lovers in The Fault In Our Stars, we chose Amsterdam, not in search of a famous author (like the lovers in the film) but rather in honor of the one-hundredth anniversary of Vincent Van Gogh’s death. Nearly a quarter of a century prior, yet like our filmic counterparts, Philip and I assumed that we were both approaching a fated finish line.

Hazel & Gus

Perhaps the most jarring scene in The Fault In Our Stars, the one that most shockingly mirrored our peregrination to Denmark, was the unexpected visit that Hazel and Gus take to the Anne Frank House, complicated by the fact that our screen heroine is gasping for breath, lugging her oxygen tank, navigating the steep, narrow stairways to the attic as Anne Frank’s words are spoken in voiceover: “Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.”

Philip and I trudged up those same stairs, both of us likely thinking something akin to what Gus and Hazel were thinking, something about the impermanence of life and the gift of having fallen in love before the fault of our stars would separate us.

At this point, during the movie, I was blowing my nose with my cardboard popcorn container. Philip would die less than two years after we visited Amsterdam. A gooey montage, capturing the sweetest moments of our short history together, blurred sequentially in my memory as he was carried away in a body bag.

The day after I saw the movie, Katherine—my daughter/the filmmaker—came home from her first year of studies abroad. Since her taste in film is infinitely more finessed than mine, I knew she would be appalled that I saw The Fault In Our Stars.

“Oh, dad,” she groaned. “You’re such a teenage girl.” I didn’t deny it—even though I did point out to her that I got a senior discount at the box office.

What I didn't tell her is that the tears that dampened my popcorn were also tears of ineffable ecstasy. A couple of years after Philip died, the award in my stars resulted in the adoption of a five month old baby girl.  

In a couple of months, Katherine will no longer be a teenage girl; to be alive for that? I cannot fault my stars, only thank them.

That’s the thing about joy. It also demands to be felt.

Katherine & Dad

MOMMY IN ME

Graduation at Idyllwild Arts Academy

Michael with his daughter Katherine

Nearly twenty years ago, I took my baby for a walk, pushing her stroller, breezily sauntering up and down the streets of our Los Feliz neighborhood, one of Los Angeles’ enclaves applauded for its progressiveness and hip pedigree. But to suggest that we turned heads —a white, forty-plus year old man and a six-month old African-American baby—is not hyperbolic. 

One woman simply had to stop and ask me, “Are you the nanny?”

There were several assumptions inherent in her insensitive query: daddies (without a mom in attendance) didn’t steer strollers, single men (especially those who appeared unaffectedly gay) didn’t have children and what’s a white dude doin’ with a black baby, anyway?

“I’m her father,” I said, employing restraint. She looked absolutely befuddled, as if she had just encountered two aliens.

As the single, gay dad of a black little girl, alien is how I often felt. Even in liberated Southern California, mommy and daddy gender identities were fairly inflexible at the end of the Twentieth Century. So were the vicissitudes of families whose skin color didn’t match. I felt like an intruder at Mommy and Me; I was often the only male in a group of female parents who thought I should be at work; asking for ethnically specific hair products for my little girl resulted in profound looks of consternation.

I was once the lone male in a room full of moms at a meeting about various school challenges that had to be met on a daily basis. “It’s the moms who pick up our kids. We’re the ones who have to keep them safe on the parking lot,” one of the females said, intimating the collective female gender. Not only was she suggesting that it was the moms who did the daily afternoon chauffeuring of their children; they were also the protectors.

“Uh,” I said, waving my hand, a tad histrionically. “Do you see me sitting here?” There was uproarious laughter, the laughter that emanates from a gay man’s brittle delivery. I was being heard for a quick second, but not necessarily being taken seriously.

I was taken seriously when fundraising drives came around (flagrantly so when decorating was involved) but I was inevitably the only man in the midst of a gaggle of over-achieving mommies.

Before adopting Katherine, I had soldiered through several trial runs as a foster parent (one four-month stint with two brothers, three and six years old), and decided that —in spite of the laundry list of things that didn’t appear to be in my favor—I had to become a full-time father. Being gay wasn’t even at the top of my (supposed) flaws: I was HIV-positive (this was before protease inhibitors), I was old (in my forties), most of my income came from being a solo performer (you can stop laughing), I was single, and I grew up in a family setting that would give Tennessee Williams pause.

I had to be a father.

I’d lived through the AIDS deaths of dozens of my male comrades including one man I’d loved more deeply than any of the others. It was his death in 1992 that forced me to admit the one desire that I’d determinedly buried for more than a decade.

I had to be a father.

While most of my gay male buddies said I was “crazy” or “selfish,” not one female friend or associate ever discouraged me. When I told people that my entire body ached with longing when I saw a dad with his kid(s), most gay men thought I was being theatrical; most women (no matter their sexual proclivities) shook their head “yes” in acknowledgement. This “biological urge” phenomenon I experienced is almost exclusively attributed to women and has been determined to be psychological rather than innate or instinctual. No matter, it consumed me.

Even though Katherine’s mother abandoned her at the hospital and no blood relative initially came to the rescue, the process to adopt my daughter was a daily nightmare for nearly three years, coinciding with the most joyous days of my life as I balanced becoming a father with the relentless threat of losing my little girl.

Why? The grandmother of one of Katherine’s half-brothers had decided to wage a battle as soon as the courts began moving our case from foster care to adoption. Spouting vehement suppositions, she questioned why a single, white man would want to adopt a black baby.

If her team could verify a birth father, she could stall the process further so several possibilities were suggested—ranging form a wealthy lawyer to a dude in prison. At the final court appearance, the judge laughed out loud when the family desperately tried to conjure the identity of yet another potential birth father.

It was decided by the Los Angeles Superior Court, shortly before my child’s third birthday, that I was her sole and legal parent.

The good news was that her health, after a tumultuous entry into the world—no prenatal care, born two months premature, weighing less than three pounds, addicted to crack—was virtually indefectible. And with the advent of “miracle” drugs for HIV, so was mine.

Our family history continued to reveal itself even though the vagaries of being a single male parent could be disconcerting.

“Where’s mommy?” insensitive strangers at the grocery store would ask. “Who does her hair?” was a popular question, especially asked by black women we’d never previously met. Often after establishing the irrefutable fact that I was her father, someone would invariably ask, “Who picks out her clothes?” (Trust me, honey, no one trumps a gay man in choosing toddler apparel.)

I was mommy, too, encompassing all that implies, primarily the emotional and physical attentiveness that femaleness seemed to suggest far more than maleness—even though parental roles were decidedly evolving.

In the fifties, fathers changed tires, not diapers. My dad never kissed me, never held me when I was sad, never spoke to me about things that were considered intimate.

Did the shift begin with feminism? When moms decided to join the work force and pursue a career outside of the home, were daddies compelled to put on their mommy hat and share parental responsibilities? Or, in spite of skewed media depictions, did the feminist movement, in reality, create more Supermoms than Mr. Mom’s?

According to the 2000 Census, there was a considerable increase in the number of single-parent families headed by fathers during the 1990s, escalating by more than 60 percent, to 2.2 million. While many of those dads are likely gay, most are likely not, and the statistics aren’t including gay men who are partnered. Those facts confirm that a considerable part of America’s population in 2014 includes men who are raising children.

As someone living this double life of mom/dad full time, my perception is that the mommyizing of dads has become even more prevalent in the Twenty-First Century. In my neighborhood, there are now men (of indeterminate sexual persuasion) pushing baby strollers than there are women. They are demonstratively affectionate, expressing love with intuitive gentleness.

I sometimes wonder if the gay male baby boom (lesbians were way ahead of this curve) has anything to do with our straight brothers feeling more comfortable playing in both gender pools? With the blurring of sexual identity—for example, British diver Tom Daley who “fancies girls” while he’s in a relationship with a man—are men simply more at ease with expressing their female side, whether on the playground or in the bedroom? Just as straight men have copied gay male fashion—plaid shirts and cowboy boots in the Seventies, bald heads and muscles in the present—perhaps we have also inspired, as single dads and dads in partnerships (legal or not), an invitation to embrace a more connected, less rigid, fatherly stance?

Our friends on the right have politicized this softer version of maleness as part of the “feminization of America.” Their targets include homosexuals as well as millions upon millions of men who rebuke hypermasculinity in favor of something more completely human. Many of these “feminized” men are stay-at-home-dads who have switched gender stereotypes as the world turns. These guys take their kids to yoga classes, not shooting ranges. To insist that the feminization of men is unnatural is to imply being female is somehow less than. Only macho men need apply to the party of male white dominance.

Our indestructible father-daughter bond is characterized by deep understanding, mutual respect and inordinate amounts of fun. We've had the HIV talk, the period talk, the condom talk, the death talk—amidst laughter and tears.

We’ve traveled all over the world. In Madrid, while I was directing a play, she was in dire need of pads one morning. I’ll never forget my urgent trip to the Pharmacia. Unable to speak Spanish, I was forced, ala Lucy, to pantomime the meaning of “sanitary napkin.”

I recently spoke to my now nineteen-year old daughter, who is attending Bournemouth Arts College in England, on my cell phone while a friend hovered in close proximity. “My God,” he said, when the call ended. “You go from being mom to dad and back again with such agility.”

These dual roles have defined me—more than performer, writer, lover, friend. Sure, I’m admittedly a drama queen, but my life depended on being a mom/dad.