Gay, gay, all the way

My husband and I just watched an HBO documentary called "The Out List," which appeared quite by chance after something with Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda which  he has a penchant for and I am trying to learn to love.  This other piece was riveting, a series of interviews with gay and lesbian persons and their life experience.  Riveting is one word for it, painful was another, at least for me.  The world has changed so completely since my youth.  I never knew another person who was a homosexual, never knew the term, did not even know what the sexual experience was.  As I grew into some dim awareness I also learned that same sex experience was punishable by prison terms.  What a shocking awakening that was!  As I have written in my memoir I was exceedingly blessed in the youngsters with whom I went to school who for the most part casually shrugged it off as my eccentricity rather than the work of Satan or some other more disease.  The same was not true of my mother, nor I suppose for her cohort; she made me feel truly awful and unloved, and that never changed.  I could never redeem myself.  Ah, well.  What this documentary made me realize was that the generation who were interviewed are all comfortable with themselves in a way that I shall never be.  Ever.  I am not comfortable with other gay persons either, unless they are presenting themselves as rather plain under the radar guys.  Drag queens, wildly effeminate guys, guys who wear lots of bracelets, guys who put their sexual orientation out there pure and simple, no, I run away.  I cannot claim them as my own.  Suddenly in the film there appeared Larry Kramer, eighty years old and almost my exact age, who was one of the founders of Act Up, and he is describing a group demonstrating at the high altar at St Patricks in NYC.  It was 1989. He was putting himself on line.   Where was I?  Well, as a matter of fact, in Athens on a sabbatical, but I know that if I had been here I would not be demonstrating with Act Up.  There was the fact of my parenthood and four children.  I was divorced as of 1975, yes, and my children were still too young, in my judgement, to tell them. But that HBO documentary made me realize that my life has been entirely disfigured because I have never come to terms with being gay, or really bisexual, a better term for me.  I really never went to gay bars, I never acted out gay, I am always an alien on the alert, never relaxed despite my famous wit and charm.  Well, I am not sure that it absolutely true.  I think so when I am alone in my room.  I just don't know how to act.  The odd fact is that whenever I meet young straight males I am completely at ease.  Whenever I meet straight males older than sixty I am instantly wary, close mouthed, withdrawn--unless they are with a female companion and then I can chat her up and it's all okay. Older straight American males, I just don't get them.   The film is a heart warming account of men and women who have found their place in society and in their family and are happy and comfortable.  That is what the film is all about, but I watched if from some place where I was shut off from the ease and comfort and joy I was watching.  Sad.