Letters To The Past
Andrew Sullivan noted a few days ago, a letter Stephen Fry addressed to his 16-year-old self…
Oh, lord love you, Stephen. How I admire your arrogance and rage and misery. How pure and righteous they are and how passionately storm-drenched was your adolescence. How filled with true feeling, fury, despair, joy, anxiety, shame, pride and above all, supremely above all, how overpowered it was by love. My eyes fill with tears just to think of you. Of me. Tears splash on to my keyboard now. I am perhaps happier now than I have ever been and yet I cannot but recognize that I would trade all that I am to be you, the eternally unhappy, nervous, wild, wondering and despairing 16-year-old Stephen: angry, angst-ridden and awkward but alive. Because you know how to feel, and knowing how to feel is more important than how you feel. Deadness of soul is the only unpardonable crime, and if there is one thing happiness can do it is mask deadness of soul.
Sullivan adds his own reaction to the film, History Boys…
A line it from the lonely gay schoolboy was almost too much to hear: "I’m Jewish. I’m homosexual. And I’m in Sheffield … I’m fucked." Somewhere in my mind in those teenage years was a similar refrain: "I’m Catholic. I’m homosexual. And I’m in East Grinstead … I’m fucked."
But I wasn’t fucked, of course. And not-to-be-fucked, not to turn into the tragic homosexual figure, memorizing "Brief Encounter," constantly chasing unrequited love, seeking refuge in the great worlds of Hardy or Larkin or Auden as a substitute for life: that was my goal.
See…I didn’t make that my goal. I just assumed it wouldn’t happen to me, because I didn’t buy into all the crap I was told about homosexuality.
That was a mistake. It was nearly impossible to grow up in that world, and no absorb some of its contempt for gay people. And it did its work on me all the same I realize now. Which is what makes it a good idea for gay folk to write these sorts of things…these bear your soul to the world letters. It seems very self absorbed, but it isn’t necessarily. It can be useful, not just for making peace with your own past, but also as a kind of message in a bottle to other generations in other times.
Gay kids have very little to no blood connection to past generations. You kind-of pop up in your family as gay, and everyone else isn’t. Maybe if you’re lucky you have a kind gay older uncle or aunt who can tell you a thing or two about what it was like for them, how to protect yourself from the tribulations they faced, and work toward the better world for us all. But more likely if you do have older gay relatives they are terrified to be seen as being too interested in you, lest they be accused of pedophilia. So you find yourself disconnected from the past, other then as history. And that history is still mostly being taught to each new generation of gay kids, by heterosexuals. Some gay-friendly, some not. We need to tell each other our own stories, in our own words.
So a letter to your younger gay self can be useful, not just to you, but to others who need to know what it was like for those of us in the previous generation. So that, hopefully, no gay kid will have to grow up in a world ever again, where everywhere you turn, literally, someone is putting a knife into your heart…telling you that you are pathetic…ridiculous…grotesque…sick.
I’ve had a letter to my younger self percolating somewhere inside of me for quite a long time now, so it’s probably time to get it out of me. But I have a few other letters to post before I get around to The Kid I Was. I’m going to start, with a Letter To A Straight Friend. I have some others that need writing too. And then I’ll write to Bruce. There’s a lot I’d have liked to tell him.
[Edited a tad…]
