Thirty years ago I had my first kiss with a man.
Thirty years ago I felt the fiery prick of getting burned.
Thirty years ago I sat in the dying sunlight of a fall afternoon of my dorm room at Brandeis, painted cement cinderblocks glowing behind me, the final gasp of a day heaving release and a maddening lack of resolution, and tried to make sense of what was happening to me.
Thirty years ago to this day, Madonna released her song ‘Secret’ and it still brings me right back to that moment in time.
I remember obsessing over everything about the ‘Secret’ single – the photograph by Patrick Demarchelier, the artily-crowded font and its soft colors, the little dog that suddenly was part of the Madonna proceedings – and all in eager anticipation of the ‘Bedtime Stories’ album which would follow. That fateful and ill-fated September would go up in flames, and as fall ripened into October and November, Madonna sang of learning to love yourself. What strikes me more and more as the years pass is how absolutely and utterly alone I was during such a pivotal and tender turn of time. Just coming to terms with kissing a man was tumultuous enough – compounded with a reckoning of one’s own assumed sexuality, and being entirely without someone with which to share it or ask questions (that guy wanted nothing to do with educating or helping an 18-year-old gay guy find his way, and no family had a hand in helping either). Being gay was different then, especially if you weren’t out to anyone because you weren’t sure how they would accept it.
Having grown up without any mention of the notion that some men fell in love with other men or some women fell in love with other women, or that it was ok, my own acknowledgement of my sexuality was not something that came easily or with any sort of blueprint. And so I had to forge the way alone, which seems lonelier now that it felt at the time. My ignorance on that point may have proven to be my inadvertent path of survival; not having any sensory memory of how unnecessarily lonely I could have felt may have been my saving grace.
Happiness lies in your own hands
It took me much too long to understand how it could be…
My one constant companion during those days was a journal in which I wrote out my thoughts and ruminations and worries, attempting to figure things out on my own, because no one had ever thought to tell me that it was ok, that it was all right, that nothing was wrong with me. In silence there was doubt. In quiet there was concern. In all the ways I was brought up to be, there was an unsaid condemnation if I strayed but a little off the prescribed path. I didn’t see that then – I simply did as I thought I was supposed to do. That first kiss with a man broke the spell.
It almost broke my heart too, but I survived, living to tell the tale, living to understand how wrong it had all been, living to find the compassion and empathy to forgive myself everything I simply didn’t know yet.
And living to see that it never should have been that way.
After thirty years, I finally see: it never should have been that way.
