Happy Birthday To A Certain Someone…

Once upon a time there was a gay teenager, who fell in love with a beautiful high school classmate.  But at first, he didn’t know that the wonderful thing he was feeling, that he’d never before felt in his life, was love.  The days were more beautiful then before.  The wind at his face was sharper and sweeter.  The sunsets were a little more brilliant.  The stars shone a little more intensely in the night sky.  He felt more alive then he ever had before in his life.  But he did not know it was love that he felt.

For one thing, the gay teenager had been taught that gay people don’t love.  Gays, he was taught, just have sex.  Ugly, monstrous, murderous, sordid and twisted sex.  He was taught that gays often killed the people they had sex with.  He was taught that gays usually mutilated the bodies of the people they had sex with.  He was taught that gays raped children.  He was taught that gays hated themselves, because deep down inside, they knew how sick and twisted they were.

His teachers taught him those things about gay people.  The newspapers and magazines he read said those things about gay people.  The TV shows and movies he watched told him stories about the ugly things gays did to normal people, and to each other.

And since the gay teenager knew deep down inside that he wasn’t any of those horrible, evil things he had been taught that gays were, he believed he couldn’t possibly be one.  His family thought he was a lazy dreamer.  His grades in school were barely passable.  His teachers and his mother scolded him constantly for not doing his homework.  But he knew he wasn’t a monster.  So he couldn’t be in love.  Because to be in love with another male would have meant that he Was a monster.

All through his junior year, and through most of his senior year, he could not allow himself to believe that it was love he felt for the beautiful classmate.  He could only glance silently, and then quickly away, as they passed each other in the hallway, feeling a terrible longing deep in his heart that he couldn’t understand, because he knew it could not be love.

But the classmate he was in love with had a good heart.  He worked hard in school, and at home, and treated all his friends well, and he was trusted and loved by all of them.  One day he spoke to the gay teenager, and soon after they began to talk to one another as they met throughout their schoolday.  They began finding times and places they could be alone together.  In the library.  In certain empty classrooms, or certain empty corners of the school, at certain times of the day.  Wherever they knew they could be alone.  And they would meet at the end of their schoolday at his locker, and walk together into the world outside their school, where they would part company…the gay teenager to his mom’s apartment across the railroad tracks, his classmate to his parent’s house in the nice neighborhood across the street. 

And one day…one bright beautiful day the gay teenager would never forget…he realized that he Was in love, and that to be in love with another male was beautiful after all.  Because he saw that he had fallen in love with someone who was as beautiful within, as they were without.  Because he saw that he had fallen in love with someone whose heart was as good as his smile was beautiful.  Because the one he loved was smart, and worked  hard, and treated his friends with love.  And the gay teenager saw it was all of that which he had fallen in love with; not merely the surface beauty his eyes could see, but also the inner beauty his heart saw as well.

And because his classmate studied hard, the gay teenager also began to study hard.  His grades went up and his teachers and his mother were pleased.  And because his classmate worked after school, the gay teenager got a job and worked nights too and earned money for himself and his mother, and his family who had thought him nothing more then a lazy dreamer were pleased.  And because his classmate was bound for college, the gay teenager, whose own father had never graduated from high school, decided he must go to college too.  And he did.

And whenever they met for the rest of that last summer together, whenever his classmate smiled at him, the gay teenager smiled too.  And for the rest of his life, the gay man the gay teenager eventually became would smile whenever he remembered it.  And he never hated himself.

He never hated himself. 

He had been taught that to be gay was to be a terrible monster.  He had been taught that to be gay was to be human garbage.  He had been taught that to be homosexual, was to never know love.  But because self understanding had happened to him in just that way…and because of who it was he had fallen into first love with…he knew at once, as soon as he saw it, that he had been taught lies.  He Did know love.  And it Was beautiful.  And it Was good.   And the gay teenager saw the truth of it, and how fine and beautiful it was.  And he never hated himself.

And because of that, he never did any of the self destructive things that ignorant people taught him that gay people do.  Oh for certain he partied it up like all of his boyhood friends.  But he never tried to destroy his mind with drugs or alcohol because he knew there was nothing wrong with the person he was.  And he never sought out sex with strangers in the alleys or toilets or empty parks, because he knew his heart wasn’t ugly, and that his heart’s desires weren’t terrible, but noble and good and decent, and the love he was looking for, that his heart needed, couldn’t be found in the toilet, and didn’t belong in the gutter, and wasn’t to be given away to strangers.

Because he never hated himself.  Because of that first love.

Happy birthday.  I wish for you all the best that life can bring your way, and everything your heart holds dear.  Life took us in different directions as life will do, and there is never any going back.  But the boy is father to the man and you are still that decent, good-hearted, hard working person I knew way back when, and a lot of what I am today I am because of that.  It could have gone in so many different directions for me back then, taken so many hard and cruel and ugly turns like it did for so many gay guys of our generation and it didn’t because of you.  

Thank you. 

And… 

Alles Gute!  Alles Gute!  All the best!  All the best!

Love
-Bruce