My sister saved me. From childhood we have been close, with similar values. Her good cooking has gotten me through many a heartbreak: it’s amazing how much good biscuits, potato salad, and soup beans can mean when you’re lonely and upset.
My tenth-grade biology teacher Jo Davison saved me. She and the circle of other young nonconformists to whom she introduced me provided me with a critical support group, letting me know that my love of poetry and music, my enthusiasm for black-bearded country boys like myself, were all fine by them. She came out to me as a lesbian, and then she lent me Patricia Nell Warren’s The Front Runner, a novel about an Olympic athlete and his love affair with his coach, the book that made me realize I was gay. Gently she introduced me to the gay world, sparing me years of confusion and self-doubt. The openness I demand of myself now—an attempt to give young LGBT folks some sort of honest role model—I owe to her.
My friends saved me. For many years, as I moved from one unreciprocated passion to another (I had an amazing knack for falling in love with the wrong men), friends reminded me of what pleasures can be had in the absence of romantic or erotic success. Cin and I played guitar, Allen and I compared notes on men and danced at the local gay bar, Laura and I drove cross-country to San Francisco, exploring the Rocky Mountains, Mesa Verde, the Grand Canyon. These days, settled as I am with John (June 2007 will be our ten-year anniversary), spending time with friends is one of our great delights. Tiffany and Andrew whip up a complex Chinese feast, Dan and Phil join us at a gay-friendly guesthouse in West Virginia, Laree and Cindy show us around D.C., Joe and Charlene stay over for a winter weekend abrim with good wine and ethnic cooking.
In particular, my friend Cindy has saved me. I have known her since Autumn 1979. Our lives have run along odd parallels: in love with difficult, hurtful people at the same time—Susan and Thomas—and then in love with supportive mates—Laree and John—and now comparing notes on the ups and downs of marriage. We have been lonely together, reveling in what small pleasures we could: eggplant parmesan, walks about the herb garden of the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. We have hated together: George W. Bush, car stereos, obnoxious children bred with incompetent laxity, and, most especially, religious fundamentalists. We have pointlessly hankered together: I for country-music star Tim McGraw, she for actress Jessica Lange, a woman whose beauty makes even me, six on the Kinsey scale (i.e., completely queer), perfectly comprehend heterosexuality. Thanks to our long history, Cindy understands, without hesitation, who I am, as crazily contradictory and ambivalent as that often is. When I’m with her, I often think of French philosopher Simone Weil’s saying, “The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, ‘What are you going through?’"
Literature saved me. I see myself, my passions and sufferings in Wordsworth, Keats, Yeats, Eliot, Whitman, and so many others. In particular, Sylvia Plath gave me a black-glass mirror in which to study my own dangerous intensities. When I encountered her work my senior year in college at West Virginia University, her late poems fascinated me. They showed me how art could be made from desolation and rage. Her work inspired me to attend graduate school and become a poet. Expressing my internal storms in writing has been one way to make sense of them and so to weather them. Though she and other fine poets I admire—Anne Sexton and John Berryman—ended as suicides, their poetry and my own artistic attempts have helped keep me from a similar conclusion. Reading and teaching Appalachian literature and Gay and Lesbian literature have also helped me understand my convoluted self by encountering in books the “hillbilly” and “queer” aspects of my identity.
Music saved me. The music my father raised me on—Beethoven, Brahms, Puccini—as well as the popular music I listen to these days delights, invigorates, and redeems me. Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon, Melissa Etheridge, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Tim McGraw, Kathy Mattea, Keith Urban: their voices have lent me fire and transcendence on the most ashen and miserable of days, and the lyrics of their songs show me refracted versions of my own troubles. Playing guitar, piano, or mountain dulcimer soothes and centers me. Singing along to favorite CD’s, I, to quote Joni Mitchell’s “Hejira,” “see something of myself in everyone / Just at this moment of the world / As snow gathers like bolts of lace / Waltzing on a ballroom girl.”