Marriage – Page 9

Dear Mom,

We are on our way to Mark’s house right now, regrettably driving away from the Outer Banks after a week with Patrick’s family. We spent mornings at the beach, afternoons at the pool, evenings sharing dinner (a chaotic, delicious feast prepared each night—for all 28 of us—by a different family) and managed to dodge the hurricane. We laughed a lot and caught up on each others lives.

I was able to sneak in some summer reading, and finished up a book I had started this spring called Double Life: A Love Story, by Alan Shayne and Norman Sunshine. It is, in essence, a long-running conversation between these two men who fell in love in the 1940s while living in NYC and have been together ever since.

Alan was an actor who later became a stage manager and casting director, and then went on to produce TV shows and movies after the couple moved to Los Angeles. Norman worked in advertising and as a graphic artist and designer. Over time, he became an accomplished painter. The book is full of anecdotes recounting their relationships with celebrities from the last half of the 20^th century (Lena Horne! Gore Vidal! Linda Carter!). But it was how their relationship played out against the backdrop of LGBT history from the same time period that I found most interesting.

While moving up the career ladder first on Broadway then in Hollywood, Alan writes about having to hide his relationship with Norman, attending parties, work functions, and awards ceremonies with women friends instead of his partner. Norman mentions an expectation in the 1970s and 80s that gay men should have multiple partners and promiscuous sex. Both men discuss early relationships with men that were fraught with shame and even violence, and how lucky they felt to find comfort and a sense of belonging with one another.

I couldn’t help comparing my life to theirs. I empathized with the feeling of shame, the hiding, and being a member of a community obsessed with physical beauty. AIDS became a huge concern for any gay man who lived through the 1980s. However, there are definitely many differences. For my generation, although we certainly knew people who were HIV positive, and many who died, I never felt like I was losing a whole generation of friends like Norman describes. Also, coming of age in a post-Stonewall world meant that we had had less hiding, more openness, a growing number of out and proud celebrities, and a media culture that—albeit slowly—embraced them.

The love story at the book’s core is its most compelling aspect. Our culture is saturated with love stories of straight people. Tales of love between men and women dominate novels, fairy tales, movies and television shows. Alan and Norman never had the benefit of hearing stories about other men who fell in love, made a commitment, and lived happily ever after. They had no gay role models to look to for inspiration or to inspire a possible course for their future. They were busy hiding, pretending, and trying to figure it all out on their own.

As we were coming of age, Patrick and I never had the benefit of hearing a story like Alan and Norman’s. There were a handful of gay characters on TV and in the movies, but there were no TV shows, movies, or novels that told stories exploring the ups and downs of loving relationships between men. Most of the messages we received were confused and conflicting—on the one hand, the assumption that gay men were designed to screw around remained, but on the other hand messages that sex could kill were coming through loud and clear. There wasn’t much about love, commitment or family.

Alan and Norman loved one another, and they created a family of two. They never discussed children; precious few did in their generation. They spent a great deal of their time together traveling the world, buying multiple homes and vacation property, and switching gears at the drop of a hat to do something completely different with their lives. We have friends—both gay and straight—who do the same thing. There are certainly times when I’m filled with envy, thinking to myself “Might we have been happy with that path?”

But, most times I am filled with gratitude that I have the opportunity to live the life I choose instead. Small moments when I am putting a band aid on a scrapped knee, or big moments like this week, watching Jordan score two holes-in-one at mini-golf, and jumping in the surf with Isabella and loving every moment of the huge smile on her face not unlike I remember enjoying myself at her age.

We’re on our way to you later this week. On our way to chaos, laughter, shared meals and sharing each others lives. If you get a chance at some point, I do recommend reading Double Life. Enjoy it for the behind-the-scenes peak at the lives of celebrities from yesteryear, but don’t overlook the inspirational love story at its core.

Love,

Christopher

Chris,

We sat looking at each other across one lonely candle that night in 1991 when you first told me you were gay. In my memory you were a few days into your visit to my village in Zaire, and we finally had a night to ourselves to talk. The mud hut where we sat wasn’t exactly spacious or inviting, but it was a sanctuary from the perplexing challenges of negotiating village life in another culture and language. Every morning we could cook coffee and pancakes over the charcoal grill.

(As momentous as the occasion was, it wasn’t the only memorable one from your visit. There was the trip to the isolated river where we body-surfed through rapids; the dugout canoe we took up another river in search of hippos; the rooster you decapitated; and, the bike ride across the charred savannah that so dehydrated you we had to take refuge with a missionary nurse.)

People ask me now whether I knew you were gay, or even had an inkling. I really didn’t. But I think that’s mostly because I was so wrapped up in my own thing during high school and college, I wasn’t paying close attention. Your bedroom door was closed quite often, but it never clicked that something important was going on.

What exactly you said, or how you phrased it, I don’t recall. What I remember now is how wrong I was then, a pattern that sadly repeated itself. What I think I said was that being gay would make your life so hard. I thought of holidays and family meals back in Buffalo, and imagined that all of that would be outside your reach. It didn’t seem like a family with children was possible. Having a family that would be a part our larger Buffalo clan was inconceivable.

Wrong.

Later I would counsel you not to tell our grandparents that you were gay. Keep the secret and spare them the difficulty of grappling with it.

Wrong again.

Instead, you chose a path that required much greater courage and determination. You had the chutzpah to talk through the very difficult issues of sexuality not just with your parents, but with your grandparents and other family members. I think we could guess with great certainty that Mom and Dad would support you no matter what, but the farther the circle went out, the less sure the response would be. You never disguised anything, and that was both brave and the absolute right decision.

Later, at your third wedding (hey, but they were all to the same man!), you talked about watching brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles “falling in love, facing our doubt, and then making a commitment.”

“We could not wait until we grew up and it happened to us. We couldn’t wait, and yet we did, never imagining this day, this celebration of marriage equality would happen in our lifetime.”

I love that line, but I think it understates things more than a little. You weren’t waiting. With each simple declaration, be it to your grandfather or to one of your classes at school, you were tweaking the universe just a bit. Chris, your decisions to celebrate your love, made us all learn and grow (and realize our wrongheadedness). The universe is bending toward justice because you did it.

Love, Mark

Category: Marriage

Recommended Summer Reading: Double Life, A Love Story

Facing Our Doubts: Guest Blog