Even if you didn’t grow up in the Deep South as I did, you’re probably still aware of some of the great Southern traditions—among them: frying things, speaking English in a dialect that eliminates a few cumbersome verb tenses, and affixing to your automobile (excuse me, truck: pickup truck) stickers depicting your favorite cartoon character urinating onto the logo of your least favorite college football team. In my family, however, the most hallowed Southern observance is periodically listing for the benefit of your descendants and younger family members the various things you were deprived of growing up. The more gruesome the deprivation, the better.
My list: the Internet, parental disdain for corporal punishment, and gays.
I’m quite sure that, statistically speaking, there were some openly gay people in suburban Alabama in the early 1980s, but I never saw or met them and continued to live gayless until the age of eighteen when I shipped myself off to college and away from Wetumpka, population 6,102. Inasmuch as they existed, suspected gay men were spoken about in hushed tones. Christian conservatism run amok was the obvious culprit, and by extension, the local conventional wisdom that homosexuality went hand in hand with child molestation. In the paranoid minds of my neighbors—and let’s face it, family members—there were legions of predatory homosexuals just waiting for the right opportunity to touch their children inappropriately, I suppose for lack of better things to do. And as any politician will tell you, there is no more powerful rhetorical device than the threat of child endangerment. Protecting The Children is the only universally accepted bipartisan platform in existence.
But despite being one of the potentially endangered children, I failed in my earliest years to internalize the widespread fear of supposedly hostile gay men. That gay men would be interested in molesting little girls didn’t seem plausible for obvious reasons. (Violent predatory lesbians, if you’re wondering, were not a concern. The conventional wisdom was that like unicorns or the tooth fairy, lesbians didn’t actually exist in real life; they were merely fantasy creatures produced expressly for heterosexual pornography.) But more to point, no one who ever warned me away from gay men seemed to actually know any.
My earliest understanding of what “gay” meant, as best I remember, occurred at an age when I wasn’t entirely sure what “sex” meant, and was still driven by the impulses of the average elementary school child—you know, the ones that cause them to throw hard objects at other kids on the playground, burst into tears over the repossession of a plastic figurine, or say the meanest things they can think of to the most helpless kid in the sandbox. We romanticize them because they’re cute and they love us, but children are nasty, brutish, and short. I was no exception.
But as kids do, I grew up a bit. And with growing up came limited sex education and moral instruction at the hands of my Southern Baptist church. The former was as nonspecific as possible, mechanically speaking (the what goes where?), while pointedly specific about the participants (heterosexual couples, exclusively) and their motivations (marital love and reproduction, exclusively). The latter was as specific as possible about the interpretation of the primary text (literal) while as nonspecific as possible about the rationale for that interpretation (the text, if interpreted literally, states that it should be interpreted literally). So while I wasn’t quite sure how homosexuality worked mechanically, I was told repeatedly that it was wrong because the Bible said so, literally. The English version that had already been interpreted, misinterpreted, translated, and reinterpreted countless times, that is.
Swallowing the Bible literally was only slightly more difficult than swallowing the literal Bible and I had problems with it from the beginning. But I made an effort, if only because I feared hell, the existence of which, ever the pessimist, I found slightly more plausible than heaven. Hell was hard to swallow, too, but on the off chance it existed, I wanted to be on the right side of the bet.
Around the same time, I remember hearing the first rumor of an adult I knew being gay; that this rumor came from other adults gave it more credibility. There were the usual ominous insinuations. The subject of the rumor was a local hairdresser, no less. Originality is rarely a prerequisite for gratuitous mockery.
By that time, my classmates—all Christian and culturally conservative—knew enough about homosexuality and how it was perceived locally to turn it into an epithet. Gays, faggots, and queers, while noticeably absent in a literal sense, were all over the middle-school playground, manifesting themselves in anyone who happened to be the object of the day’s regularly scheduled bullying. Queer was just another word for assorted varieties of “unpopular.”
A few of the bullied middle-schoolers at the tiny kindergarten-through-twelfth-grade school I attended were, as it turns out, actually gay. Not one of them came out of the closet before moving out of their respective houses post–high school graduation, and some of them, not before moving out of the state entirely. If they had outed themselves earlier, the environment would not have been welcoming, and sadly, there’s a not insignificant possibility that the response could have been violent.
In the years following, I attended college in North Carolina, where I had gay friends who were open about their sexuality in a way that wouldn’t have been possible in my hometown. When I moved to New York after graduation, I worked for a few years in finance, almost exclusively with men, all of whom were, as far as I could tell, exclusively straight. Then I met a guy named Nick Denton, who became a close friend. Nick was gay, but I didn’t realize it until the second or third time we met. To be fair, I’m not the only one who has made that mistake, though certain of our friends insist that it was obvious—obvious!— from the beginning.
Nick and I started a Web site called Gawker.com in late 2002 and it quickly became an extremely popular media gossip blog. As the site’s profile grew, there was a bit of speculation online that Nick and I were a couple. And amusing as that was, I had to admit that on some days it felt like it. I was certainly spending more time with Nick than I was with anyone I was dating and we were in each other’s space constantly. It was a stimulating (ah, the conversations!) and sometimes tumultuous (oh, the arguments!) relationship and has stayed that way in one form or another since then. We’ve fought and made up a million times, both publicly and privately, and the third-party commentary is always the same: God, you two have such a bizarre relationship. And they’re right: We do. And though I’d never admit it when we’re fighting, my life would probably be far less interesting without it.
In the course of writing Gawker, I changed careers without fully realizing it and ended up in what is categorically termed “media.” I was writing for various publications on top of writing Gawker and almost all of my editors were gay men. As you’d expect in any industry, some work friends invariably become nonwork friends because they’re too fun to leave in the office and before you know it, you’re at the Tuesday night Beige party at the B Bar picking out future husbands for people who are not your girlfriends.
I haven’t made any conscious decision to prefer hanging out with my gay male work pals more than my straight male work pals, but if I actually log the hours spent with whom, it seems to work out that way.
It’s an issue, certainly, of how I feel about the individuals, but if there’s one common thread, it’s that my gay friends are some of the most independent and fearless people I know and I’ve always been attracted to people with those qualities. Most of them have had to struggle with their sexual identities and, by extension, their identities as adults earlier in their lives and with less support from friends and loved ones. They are where they are now because they made hard, sometimes painful decisions and followed their hearts. I’ve never had doubts about my sexuality, but I alienated a lot of friends and family by openly admitting to atheism, making career and educational decisions of which my family disapproved, and moving to what certain relatives of mine unironically call the “City of Sin.” In both cases, What Didn’t Kill Us Made Us Stronger and, at the very least, provided fodder for an endless succession of painful-stories-turned-funny, best retold over drinks within ogling distance of attractive men of both persuasions.
As for my still nearly gayless hometown, I’m slightly heartened to report that it’s not as bad as it was when I was growing up. My own parents, who would object to the term “homophobic” on the basis that they’re not afraid of gay people, they merely disapprove of them, have seen and enjoyed enough Will & Grace (Jack is their favorite character) and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy episodes to know that when the malevolent predatory gays do come, it won’t be for their children. It’ll be for their appalling interior decorating, their Dick Cavett–era haircuts, questionable food preparation routines, and pleated Dockers from 1989. That’s not, perhaps, the optimal portrayal of gay America’s agenda, but it’s certainly an improvement. Baby steps, I suppose. And I look forward to the day when kids there can grow up with the Internet (check), no corporal punishment (working on it), and openly gay friends and classmates.
After all, every straight girl in high school needs a boyfriend—to ogle the baseball team with.