Family

Family:
friend
or salt
on an open boil,
honeysuckle picked,
nectar sipped,
royal jelly,
thorny pricks of roses,
or do you come
in doses
of lasting love,
or quips
clipped too quickly
soon?

I once was a six-year old boy who lived with his family in the netherworld of southern New Jersey. I was Timmie then and I believe I still am. Perhaps part of me is still there, in the woods behind our house, where the idea of family first raised its multifarious head, sometime ugly, sometimes beautiful, but always there in the end with a (wry) smile and welcoming arms that said: you are loved, you little pain in the a-double-scribble.

The woods was the place where I dug cool holes in the ground to hide in during blistering summers. It was a land of moss on which I lay my head, careful not to disturb the caterpillars inching their way near my ears; where I built tree forts that inevitably fell to the ground. It was a place where I ran with my tatterdemalion friends trying to rediscover our secret spots, yelling when we found a clue such as a little stone, a twig, or laurel bush, “It’s this way, it’s this way!”

After any number of excursions in the woods, my family was whom I went home to when my friends and I started disappearing in the dusk, becoming only vague silhouettes. We were twilight woodland nymphs prancing around age-old oaks. We never wanted to leave, but our stomachs rumbled and our thirst was great, and at the end of day we were ready to go home.

My family was my mom, dad, my three sisters, although my two oldest sisters were both out of the house and in college by the time I was seven. More often than not we had a housedog of some kind, besides the beagles in the backyard kennels. Over the years, there was Sniffer the mutt, Bogey the Weimeraner, and Star the Brittany Spaniel. They were indelible parts of our family who left their pawprints on our hearts forever.

Some might say a family is where one’s home is, and hence, where the heart resides. It’s the physical manifestation of the innate need for love and nurturing that becomes something more than just the roof over one’s head and the people inside.

My concept of family changed when my parents dropped me off for my first year of college at Rutgers University just before the fall of1990. To me, New Brunswick, New Jersey was a big city. Now, living in New York, it seems quaint and sterile, like the anti-bacterial band-aids produced by the town’s Johnson and Johnson empire.

I said good-bye to my parents. They got in the truck and started to drive away. My mom cried as she waved. I think she knew that I was beginning a new chapter in the book of my life, and that chapter had less and less to do with her being in it. I was the last child to venture out of the cocoon and Mama Butterfly knew her baby had sprouted wings and was going to fly all by himself. I’m not sure if my dad thought about it that much, but I know my mom did. She was going to miss me and I her, but I was too excited about being on my own to think about that at the time. Looking back, my parents were also beginning a new journey in their lives – that of being childless at home, free to create new lives.

Events like the farewell at Rutgers scene are three-fold: exciting, monumental and bittersweet. The exciting and monumental part was because it was the first time I was going to be on my own, making my own decisions about my life.

Mommy waved, she cried, she knew what had happened. I had left, and perhaps there was a bit of resentment that her baby had gone to a school two hours away, instead of a local one five minutes from home. I can’t say for sure, because I don’t think my mom was capable of resentment, merely a passing heartache. That was the bittersweet part of the three-fold aspect of the parting that was going to redefine family for me.

My new family was the new friends I met in the dorm, and then later, in the many classes I took. There was Roman History with my flushed-cheeked, early morning inebriate professor; 18th Century Poetry with Professor Dowling who on the first day of class implored everyone to throw out their televisions; French Cinema; The Cold War; 19th Century American Lit; Creative Writing; et al.

My family of college friends grew, changed; some came and went, one died at the age of twenty of a heart attack while lifting weights, but the ones that have lasted are those I still keep in touch with, which are all of six people, something that seems to me pretty miraculous. They are still part of my family.

After college, my family grew larger when I met my first business partner, Kenneth. And after we opened our coffeehouse in New Brunswick, my family grew to an excess of hundreds. My family was the coffeehouse friends and patrons until we closed the doors, and I found myself with only one stalwart friend – Kenneth.

Nobody wanted to know me anymore in that town because my business had failed. Looking back I could say that the “family” failed us by not supporting our endeavors, for becoming jealous and petty, but I don’t want to do that. It all happened as it was supposed to and that family dissolved, as probably many other people’s families have.

I couldn’t stay in New Brunswick after that, so I found my way to New York City, and with Kenneth’s introductions, my new work in the film business, and a few years of cultivating friends, I had my New York City family. This became the most supportive, substantive family up to that point in my life and I can count over a dozen people that express their love and support of me, and I them.

This is not to disparage my own biological family, but the connections I have intellectually and spiritually with my New York City family are different than with what I’ll call my “first family”. The meaning of family has become not only my first family, but my friends – people who love me unequivocally and let me be myself, especially when I came to terms with my sexuality.

With my first family’s explosion of anger and confusion over my apparent “choice to become gay”, my NYC family was there to support me and get me through the transition. For my first family, I had changed for the worse into a new Timmie they didn’t know or understand.

My first family has come a long way in this respect. Well, some of them. My oldest sister simply loves me and accepts me for who I am without any judgment; the other two think I’m a sinner and can’t fathom how I chose to be this way. One of those two think the Lord will do something to me to show me the error of my ways. I have to say that their intentions come from a place of love, albeit, a place of love that I feel is misguided. To them I would say I think God’s got better things to do than go around striking down queers, especially since we’re the ones that design most clothes, create timeless art, decorate homes in the hopes of saving Middle America from gingham checked doom, and basically make the world a more beautiful place like we have been doing since the first gay caveman painted on a wall his wooly mammoth-hunting lover Og. What would our world be like without Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, Lily Tomlin, Sergei Eisenstein, E.M. Forster, Tchaikovsky, and all the other countless queers who have defined our collective history?

With my dad, we simply don’t discuss my sexuality – at all. It’s better that way.

My family grew once again when I explored the world of Cherry Grove on Fire Island. A bastion and enclave of gay people from all walks of life, I found a new family of friends who were like me, had gone through their own closeted experiences, and could commiserate with me about the lessons we’ve learned and how to find recompense with our loved ones that didn’t fully acknoweldge us for who we are.

Would I like my first family to accept me and my life completely and be able to share in all the wonderful experiences that they’re missing out on, things I can’t share with them because they don’t want to hear them? Yes, however, my oldest sister is there with me and I tell her everything about my life with F. She’s right there with me and is unrelenting in her commitment of support. I thank her for that.

I love my first family very much. They’re a part of me and there’s nothing I can do to annul that, nor do I want to. I’d simply like them to take a leap of faith beyond what they’re told from the pulpit, make up their own minds, and take a concerted step forward into the fold of forward thinking Christians who fully understand the love, kindness, and respect for all living things that Christ preached. I’d like them to live up to the label they’ve given themselves, the moniker of Christian.

F. and I talk about this often, and the only answer to our relationships with our families is to come from a place of unconditional love. There is no other recourse except discounting and alienating them, and I won’t do that.

In the big picture of my life, I’m truly blessed. I have my first family, my family of friends around the country and world, and I have my family at home with F. and Gio. I resolve myself to the fact that my first family loves me dearly and cares for me; I have to accept them and pray for the day when they accept me as Timmie. I’m still the Timmie that they knew growing up, I’ve just gotten to know myself a little bit more.

When I reflect on my life so far, I see that the first twenty-nine years were about getting to know my true self – I was figuring out who Timmie really was. Now, it’s just a matter of living that life and continuing to evolve and grow, taking new ideas and experiences into my life, and holding fast to what the great sage, Walt Whitman, wrote: “You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, / You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.”

I’d like to expand my vision of my family, whether they be friends or relatives, and look at family in a universal sense of the word. My spirit, that which is connected to my Source of Being and thus connected to my soul (which I consider my personality), is part of a family that extends across the spectrum of species. I belong to a family of everything that lives in the universe. Stanley Kunitz writes, “I feel I’m not only sharing the planet, but also sharing my life.” With a family this large, how could I ever be lonely?

My family’s changed again this past year. With F. and Gio I have a new part of my family. The house is now filled with the clicking of Gio’s high heels on the wooden floor and F. painting in the sun-dappled kitchen. Books, art, expression in food, meaningful and sometimes intense conversation, films, laughter, tears, sadness, and love fill the apartment – it’s a palpable energy that says life is happening constantly in all its forms of expression and emotion.

Life is beautiful, life is dirty, and life becomes more sanctified as I realize that my family grows every day like the garden in my backyard. All the members of my family, both close and extended, biological and spiritual, are my lighthouses that warn me of impending danger or joy; they light up the night with hope. They are my solace. They are my compadres on this wacky, mixed-up trip. I sometimes get caught in the muck and mire of it all, but suddenly find myself extricated with the helping hands from my family. They’re on their journey with me, and I with them, and we might just find a little stone, a twig, or a laurel bush like so many years ago when I was a child, one that can change our course so we can turn around and yell, “It’s this way! It’s this way!”