The gay escape - frames of mind - Brief Article

So much ink gets spilled about the prejudice and trauma lesbians and gays experience while coming of age that hardly a word ever gets written about the fact that, frankly, many of us ought to thank our queer lucky stars for getting us out of town in the first place. I am endlessly uncovering this, whether chatting with old friends or new ones from different cultures and classes: It was our unacceptable sexuality that freed us from the small-town, big-family trap that caught most of our classmates and siblings in its iron grip. So cut the victim shtick for a minute and consider that there's an overdue acknowledgment to be made here. Our fabled gene or lifestyle or identity or whatever is a blessing as well as a curse. That's the well-kept secret that accounts, often, for a passport for crossing borders, a great impetus to world travel, and the quickest route to big-city glamour.

You know it's true. Would Gertrude Stein ever have left Oakland for Paris if she hadn't lusted after girls as well as art? I bet not: She'd have grown portly right there in Oaktown with a banker for a husband and a passel of kids and this fabulous cook named Alice. Instead, she was compelled to travel 6,000 miles away to reinvent herself and, along the way, the English language. That's the beauty of it: Once we break that first rule, the act opens the door to a whole host of other rules that can be broken; social conformity is jettisoned, and whole new spheres of political activism and cultural movements (OK, and drag acts too) get established.

Take my newest Canadian pal, David Walberg, for instance. He grew up in Thunder Bay, way at the top of Lake Superior, due northeast of Duluth. Not your basic hot spot, the area was first settled as a trade route for fur trappers. David and his lifelong best friend gaydar-bonded in Cub Scouts and were soon so ostracized that they joined a track and field club just to be able to get out of town. David remembers feeling that if only he could get a scholarship, he could escape; so he studied like crazy, made the student council, did whatever he had to. The day after graduation he boarded a plane to Toronto, where today he's a newspaper publisher, performer, and aspiring filmmaker.

Being queer made him do it. "Instead of going out to get drunk on Saturday nights, we'd stay home, do wild fantasy drawings, and write new lyrics to pop songs," he tells me. "It was enforced creativity." And he eventually realized, "You start out thinking that you're the freak, but as soon as you get a glimpse that there are other people who think differently, you discover there are other possibilities, and you really run with it."

A couple of years ago, a terrific documentary premiered at Sundance called Nuyorican Dream. It told the stow of Robert Torres, who grew up in Puerto Rico and New York City, then became the only one in his family to break the cycle of poverty, drugs, and crime. Why did he break out and become a school teacher and administrator, an upstanding (and handsome) citizen with no prison record or crack habit? Torres puzzles over why this was so, even as we watch his siblings sinking ever further and, on the other hand, his queer pals celebrating his birthday in the Village. I wanted to shout at the screen, "It's because you're gay, Robertito!"

I like the idea of queerness as a sort of magic carpet ride to get away. In Kerouac's day, if you were cool, you had to go "on the road." In the Age of Aquarius, people hit the road in order to "find themselves." All of that was supposed to stop 20 years ago, around the time Reagan got elected. But it's still a coming-of-age ritual for queers. We're not just running away from restriction but also racing toward the unknown, the unacceptable, the socially aberrant. We're the unrecognized immigrants, off for a better life, a new name, a new language. We may have no Ellis Island, but it's still a journey that can fill the traveler with fear and courage. No wonder there are so many queer travel agents still left in the world.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Liberation Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group