“IDOL”-ING AWAY

It’s rare for “American Idol” to make news anymore. I used to watch it regularly, even after it stopped being a watercooler talking point and we no longer had office pools with everyone selecting a different contestant to back. (Did anyone ever bet on Sanjaya?) I’d probably tune in a little this season, background fodder as I clean the kitchen or work my way through the Sunday New York Times crossword, but my 55” flatscreen leapt off my living room hutch back in July and could not be resuscitated. Maybe it fretted I’d start watching some incarnation of “Real Housewives” or discover “Wings” in syndication. (I haven’t ogled Tim Daly in ages.) I can’t seem to watch American networks on my laptop and I feel no sense of urgency to get another TV. (I took my flatlined flatscreen to an electronics recycling depot, but I still shake my head over all the plastic and whatnot that goes into those monstrosities.) Has the television gone the way of the VCR and the answering machine?

 

“American Idol” gained some attention over a week ago when Katy Perry broke down and ranted about the insanity of school shootings in the U.S. after one country singer trying out mentioned living through a shooting in Santa Fe, Texas—May 18, 2018; ten dead. How many of us had forgotten. They blur together. Insanity, indeed. I’m sure her diatribe wasn’t welcome in the living rooms of country music fans who seem to have stuck with the show in disproportionate numbers, but all the better. As incalcitrant as so many Americans are about their beloved right to bear arms, there need to be new forums for trying to shake them up.

 

But I stumbled on another moment from that week’s show, thanks to a filler article on Yahoo. It related to another male country singer hoping for a gold ticket to Hollywood. His name: Jon Wayne Hatfield, to which “Idol” judge Luke Bryan responded, “There’s no doubt, you’re from the country.” He’d traveled from Goshen, Ohio (population 652), arriving with his guitar and his own sad story, both essential items to get TV time during tryouts. The singer stated he’d been raised by his grandparents and, after his grandmother died, his grandfather, who’d “lost his best friend of fifty years,” shut out the world, including his grandson for a year and a half. Being a man of an older generation, it seems he internalized his grief. 

 

I was unfazed. “American Idol” has done deceased grannies to death. But there was more. Presumably primed by producers, Katy Perry told Jon Wayne to bring his grandfather in for the audition and in walked a thin man with a neatly trimmed mustache and beard, a tattoo showing on one hand, dressed smartly in jeans, a jean jacket and a simple gray fitted t-shirt.

 

The grandparents met when Ray was sixteen. He explains, cryptically enough to add television drama, “I told her about myself and she said, ‘I love you’ and that ‘It’s okay.’” Cue role reversal, with separate clips of grandfather and grandson: Ray comes out as gay; Jon says it doesn’t change a damn thing. Back to Ray: “It’s a big relief to stand here and be proud and and say I’m gay and there’s nothing wrong with it.”

 

As a cynic, which I often am, I might shrug and note how I’ve heard hundreds of coming out stories in my life. “Idol” aimed to draw viewers in, to get them to choke up. Mighty me, prone to crying over elephant documentaries and a certain version of a particular Joni Mitchell song—yes, cynics have an Achilles’ heel—did not tear up. Nontheless, I realized the moment was still important, for general viewers, especially those in red states where gays might be less inclined to make their presence known, for obvious reasons. Here, invading their living rooms, was a smiley, sweet soul, a man’s man who, like the odd cowboy, could get weepy…about his journey and about his love for his grandson. In spaces where the word gay is never spoken unless as with disparaging, mocking twist, a bit of sympathetic queer content got through the barricades, the word broadcast not once but twice in the segment. (Here's the full "Idol" clip.)

 

I suppose a Republican-run state legislature that’s already checked off banning drag queen story times and gender-ambiguous restrooms will take the lead in drafting something to strengthen television content warnings. “The following program makes gays seem all right or contains woke crap. Viewer discretion is advised.” Perhaps a dude stormed out of the family den or grabbed the remote—presumably he’s the commander-in-chief of that contraption—and switched stations to basketball highlights which is, sadly, all there is in the low season when there isn’t any baseball or football. Figure skating and “sports” with ski jackets don’t count. “American Idol” may have lost a viewing family, for the week or forever, but the kids still saw and heard a gay grandfather and heard a straight grandson say it’s all okay. Well done, ABC!

 

Let me pause to repeat Ray’s words again: “I’m gay and there’s nothing wrong with it.” High fives, fingers snaps, back slaps and all that. By gosh, I’d almost forgotten that Katy Perry’s breakthrough song was “I Kissed a Girl.”

 

I can’t help but brush my cynicism aside and feel for Ray. The man is still adjusting. His speech is as much for himself as for anyone else. He’s building himself up after a lifetime of hearing people disparage gays. 

 

For the record, I'm partial to
Steven #1 (left).

Just like every person who has had to come out as something on the LGBTQIA+ spectrum, I clearly recall the pain, self-hate and angst within me while I kept a major part of my identity secret, fearing rejection and revulsion from people who mattered to me. For the most part, that dark chapter ended in my twenties as dramatic reveals became, if not old hat, safer as I’d by then connected with gay and lesbian friends and found varying levels of support from straight people who, if they didn’t suddenly share Bronski Beat mix tapes and ask me which actor I thought was the better Steven Carrington on “Dynasty,” still seemed content to join me for dinner at Chili’s or to play tennis. Gay was okay, even if it didn’t come up much in conversation. 

 

Breathe now, Ray. The man delayed this coming out process for half a century. I’m not going to speculate about his marriage or gay dalliances—isn’t that a lovely word?—but there’s no doubt being some degree of closeted weighed on him. There’s a degree of guardedness that comes when you’re not out. Letting people in risks having them intuit what you’re working so hard to deny, cover or ignore. Going on national television, his story used by producers in an attempt to get people to talk about a show regarded as passé, is quite a way to finally come out, once and for all. 

 

It’s done now, Ray. No more secrets. 

 

May this man now lead a fuller life. He can’t make up for lost time—those decades are gone—but let him live out his years feeling free, no longer worried about what a relative or neighbor might think.  

 

If it matters, which to me it really doesn’t, Jon Wayne Hatfield, done grandpa proud. He sang and strummed proficiently to a tune he penned himself, “Tell Me, Ray.” Good enough for a ticket to Hollywood. 

 

Tell it all, Ray. Only maybe just to your grandson and people who care about you. Your moment as a public service announcement is behind you. 

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER

We’ve all seen it or read it, a news story about someone coming out as queer late in life. It’s invariably cast as a feel-good piece, a tale with a long-delayed happy ending. Queer at last!

 

While perusing headlines on advocate.com last night, I clicked on an article about a Mexican Doritos commercial that ties in with the country’s much-celebrated Día de Los Muertos (Day of the Dead) and features a much-much-delayed coming out. I watched, I smiled. I watched again. Go ahead, watch it yourself. I’ll wait right here. Otherwise, the rest of this post won’t make much sense.

 

My initial happiness watching the ad became tinged with a sense of melancholy. Thoughts of If only and What might have been floated about in my mind. 

 

From a Doritos commercial?! 

 

No, not exactly. Really, if I were some dead dude and my loved ones showed up to honor me with an offering of a bowl of snack chips while one dear relative munched out of the bag, wholly disinterested in the act of honoring, I don’t think I’d dazzle them with my ghostly appearance. 

 

Instead of getting a case of the munchies, my mind drifted to the fact there are still too many latecomers to embracing their own sense of Pride.

 

I remembered reading about Kenneth Felts, a Colorado man who came out at ninety. At the age of twelve, he knew he was gay. While in his twenties, he fell in love with a man but opted to live his life as a straight man, marrying, having a daughter, divorcing. Felts acknowledged he’d lived “deep in the closet, behind rows and rows of clothing. I [was] way back there.” It seemed nothing could coax him out. He’d even cast off his gayness by attributing it to a separate part of him—“Larry,” not Ken. When his daughter came out to him as a lesbian twenty years ago, he didn’t come out to her. 

 

How lonely must that closet have been?

 

Now that he’s out, Ken proudly wears a rainbow hoodie most days and connects with a queer coffee group that meets online due to COVID, a reality for many of us and our groups, but sadder in my mind for Ken whom I wish so much to have that open, communal experience of just hanging out with others like him. What if he’d come out in 2019 at eighty-nine? He’d have had a few in-person coffee chats before lockdown.

 

Those of us who are queer and have come out to at least one other soul know, when the process goes okay (or, fingers crossed, better than okay), there is so much relief, a burden lifted, an end to lies, an acceptance of self, further boosted by the acceptance from another. Even if our coming out stories are from decades ago, we can recall what whirled within us before then—all the angst, the self-hatred, the bargaining and wishing we weren’t who it seemed we were. All of us would probably say we dealt with those thoughts and emotions for too long. I took my first tiny steps out of the closet at twenty, then retreated when things didn’t go so well, and didn’t try longer strides until moving 1,400 miles from home at twenty-four. I thought I was late for the party, but I got there sixty-six years ahead of Ken.

 

Happy for Ken, for sure, and all the other seniors who finally come out in an era when it’s easier to do so. Still, I think about those other news stories of men who’ve spent decades in prison for crimes it’s ultimately proven they didn’t commit. Freedom now, yes. But they can’t make up for lost time.

 

I wonder about all the Uncle Albertos in the world who go to the grave still closeted. I ache for them. Even if they were to meet a Mario in some afterlife, hatred and intolerance along with fear and self-preservation radically compromised life on Earth, possibilities deemed impossible. 

 

I think of my great uncle who died a “lifelong bachelor” in his late eighties. He had a long career as a pilot in the Royal Air Force and was held as a prisoner of war by the Nazis. He was tight-lipped about his war experiences, only once opening up ever so slightly while sipping a third scotch. Those of us in the cottage that day listened with mouths open, eyes bulging, imagining how this very proper English gentleman got through it all, wondering about other horrors of war he would never share, no matter how freely the scotch was poured. 

 

I suspect so much of his life was suppressed. This bachelor never ever dated a woman. He lived with and took care of his mother, a longtime widow, until she died. He was apparently quite close with a German “friend,” with whom he went into business, but something went wrong…with the business or the friendship or both. My family has never talked about it.

 

After I came out to my parents, I once asked if maybe Uncle Phil was gay. My mother went so far as to say, “We wondered” and mentioned his “friend,” but the conversation puttered out. Maybe there was a bowl of Doritos that caught everyone’s attention. If there were French onion dip set out as well, no wonder I never got a real answer.

 

Around the same time, my mother fretted about how public my gayness might become. “Don’t tell your grandfather,” she said. “He thinks the world of you.” Stupidly, I honored her request. Quite frankly, I think my grandfather, a sports-loving, beer-drinking man who worked on the railroad his whole life, would have taken it far better than my mother. He laughed with joy every time I showed up for a visit and cherished our one-on-one time as much as I did. He had that same happy laugh whenever my great uncle—his brother-in-law—dropped by. When they were both in their eighties and my grandmother died, the two men grew even closer without having to cater to her every demand. They were best friends, the rough-around-the-edges Canadian railroader and the dashing, immaculately dressed English chap. 

 

I’m certain I could have come out to my grandfather. I’m certain Great Uncle Phil could have, too. It’s lovely imagining for a moment Uncle Phil with his own partner in some more accepting parallel universe. But that’s a flight of fancy. The reality is that there really is a time when it is too late to come out. My great uncle is buried alone at Beechwood Cemetery in Ottawa, one of the finest cemeteries in Canada, I’m told. I don’t know how that amounts to anything.

 

 

CAREER VERSUS FREEDOM

Time flies. I think that more and more as I get older. Fifty years ago today, In the Night Kitchen, a children’s picture book written and illustrated by Maurice Sendak, was first published by Harper & Row. It’s probably Sendak’s second best known book. Nothing could possibly match the notoriety he gained from his wickedly imaginative Where the Wild Things Are.

Why am I bringing up Sendak here? Occasionally, I’ve blogged about a gay picture book. (Here, for instance, or here.) In the Night Kitchen is not such a book, although it created controversy and has been a mainstay of banned book lists due to the fact that main character Mickey is naked in much of the story, his genitals even shown on a page or two. It shouldn’t be scandalous. The images remind me of cherubs in Raphael’s The Triumph of Galatea or Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo or The Creation of Adam. But people do like to make a fuss over both art and books...or art in books. Especially for kids. (I’ve seen images online where Mickey’s genitals are covered by various colors of underwear. As Neil Gaiman noted of In the Night Kitchen, “It scared adults.” Never mind that young children frequently run about naked at home, in the yard and at the beach. I’m not a nudist advocate but we have a way of making natural unnatural.)

Maurice Sendak, born in Brooklyn in 1928 to Jewish-Polish parents, lived until a month shy of his eighty-fourth birthday. In addition to publishing many of his own picture books, Sendak was also prolific in illustrating children’s books written by others. Speaking with pride about his work in children’s books, Sendak said, “I was more honest than anybody.” With one glaring exception, the man didn’t seem to censor himself out of fear of losing work or being rebuked. One week after Sendak’s death, Gaiman wrote, “I devoured interviews with Sendak: he was a grumpy, Jewish, brilliant, wise contrarian and he didn’t mellow as he aged.”

Before writing this, I perused Sendak interviews and profiles on YouTube and, not knowing anything about his personality, was startled at the outset as the children’s author says in with first minute of the first clip I watched, “People say, ‘Why don’t you do Wild Things 2?’ Go to hell. Go to hell. [I’m] not a whore.” Nope,...didn’t mellow at all.

What was that one exception, that topic Sendak consciously avoided? It pops up in a 2008 New York Times article (which, incidentally, described him as a “curmudgeon”): “Was there anything he had never been asked? He paused for a few moments and answered, ‘Well, that I’m gay.’”

Eighty years old and he finally came out. True enough, people are rarely asked if they’re gay. (It only happened to me once while I was in law school. I laughed with delight and answered yes. How wonderful to not be the one to make a potentially dramatic disclosure!) But it wasn’t just that Sendak was waiting around to be asked.

“I just didn’t think it was anybody’s business,” Sendak adds in the same article. His prerogative. Then, he says, “All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy. They never, never, never knew.” Three nevers.

It’s a reminder of how much progress has been made regarding LGBTQ acceptance in North America and how any gains made are harder for many older gays and lesbians to trust and embrace, having grown up when discretion and repression were the norm. In a 2011 interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, Sendak says:

Finding out that I was gay when I was older was a shock and a disappointment. I did not want to be gay. It meant a whole different thing to me — which is really hard to recover now because that's many years ago. I always objected to it because there is a part of me that is solid Brooklyn and solid conventional and I know that. I can't escape that. It's my genetic makeup. It's who I am.

For fifty years, Sendak lived with his partner, psychoanalyst Eugene Glynn until Glynn’s death in 2007, the year before Sendak publicly came out. While I believe that a public figure has a right to (try to) keep whatever he wants private, I wish we knew more about the shared life of Maurice and Eugene. I wish Sendak had felt a sense of freedom to talk about Eugene the way some other oft-interviewed writer/illustrator might speak of a spouse of the opposite sex. Curious—nosy—me would love to know more.

From what I’ve seen in video clips, Sendak remained tight-lipped about his relationship with his partner even in his three plus years as a publicly out gay man. In my favorite clip, called “Maurice Sendak on Death (And Life),” he talks more effusively about his housekeeper and caretaker of thirty years, Lynn Caponera, and his long-deceased canine companion, Jennie, than he does of his partner. Eugene gets a mention; that’s all. Old habits, I suppose.

That 2008 Times article offers context, of which I’m well aware. “A gay artist in New York is not exactly uncommon, but Mr. Sendak said that the idea of a gay man writing children books would have hurt his career when he was in his 20s and 30s.” And yet this outspoken man continued to keep mum about this part of his identity into his 40s, his 50s, his 60s and 70s. My heart aches. Popular children’s author/illustrator Tomie dePaola (Strega Nona), who also came out as gay late in life (1935-2020), said something similar: “If it became known you were gay, you’d have a big red ‘G’ on your chest...and schools wouldn’t buy your books.” True, perhaps. Neither Sendak nor dePaola had the will to test things, to potentially break down a barrier. My gut says Sendak could have done it. My brain understands why he didn’t.

Man, how far we’ve come.

 

Just as I was about to post this, I stumbled upon the song “Eugene and Maurice,” by Canadian indie band The Burning Hell, known, according to Wikipedia, “for their literate—often literary...lyrics.” It’s a whimsical tribute, worth a listen.