I'm Coming Out

The time has come for me

To break out of the shell

I have to shout

That I’m coming out….

I want the world to know

Got to let it show

(From the song “I’m Coming Out,” from the Diana Ross album Diana, 1980, composed by Rodgers, Nile/ Edwards, Bernard)

I

 must have been six years old.  I walked into the bathroom and there was my father, naked and leaning over the sink, shaving. I looked up, saw his hairy ass, and knew that was where I wanted to be. He was musty and had a man-smell that excited me. It was my first memory of desiring a man. It wasn’t that I was sexually attracted to my father; he just represented the male figure I so longed to connect with.  I so seldom saw him as a child, since he was often away in the Navy and since he eventually divorced my mother, that my young life was spent in a world with a lot of adult women.

Kids, observant and intuitive as they are, would sense a different energy in Ricky and me and would pick on us and call us “sissies.”  But I never associated the word “sissy” with being gay because I liked girls and had girlfriends throughout my school age years.  I loved the look and feel of women; I loved their long pretty hair and liked to feel their breasts.  It was pleasurable for me to insert my finger into their sticky vaginas.

On the other hand, I also loved watching the other boys pee.  I got excited in gym class whenever they snatched towels off each other and ran around the locker room, naked. I was always thrilled when my classmate, Kenny, would turn off the lights and pull somebody’s dick. I wanted him to choose me so that I could feel his touch, but I kept that secret to myself.

By the time I was sixteen, all kinds of sexual thoughts were running through my mind.  My dad always encouraged my mother to keep open discussions with my siblings and me about sex. I actually discussed my first heterosexual experience at the dinner table and was even allowed to own girlie magazines like Oui Magazine, which was like a French version of Playboy.  My subscription arrived each month in a brown paper wrapper and my mother would browse through it before I got home.  It would begin a life long passion for porn that everyone in my family, except my father, would enjoy long into our adulthood.

One Saturday during the summer of 1974, I traveled to downtown Norfolk, Virginia with my neighbor, Combo.  We were both sixteen.  He was so light-skinned that people called him Boo, since he was fair like a ghost.  We had decided to get fake IDs at this place we’d heard about, then go to a peep show and see pornography in a booth and look at hard-core magazines.

For anyone reading this who has never traveled to the dark side of sexual curiosity, a peep show basically plays dirty movies in a booth for as long as your twenty-five cents will allow.  As soon as you get a good hard-on and the guy on screen is about to “put it in,” the movie stops and you have to deposit more quarters if you want to see more action.

At the x-rated shop, Boo was up front looking at dirty magazines when I ventured towards the back room to see what the booths looked like.  In a peep store, there is an odor that never leaves; how does one describe the scent of cum and cleaning fluid?  I still remember the movie I watched -- it stars a thick, sexy, black man who has kidnapped this woman and tied her to a chair.  He begins having oral sex with her, and she eventually gets so turned on that he unties her and they begin to have intercourse, mutually.

When the actor in the movie mounted the actress, I couldn’t figure out which of them was getting me hot.  I liked the penis, but I also liked the hole it was going into.  Before I could figure it out, things got interesting.

Usually when you enter a booth, you lock yourself in so you can enjoy some privacy while masturbating to an erotic masterpiece.  On the other hand, if you want company, you can leave the door unlocked so someone might follow you in, magic can ensue, and both of you can get it on.  Places that are still more sophisticated have a hole drilled through the booth, or even a two-way mirror so you can watch the person in the next booth masturbate without actually having to touch them. (Some people prefer this method.) 

I had left the door unlocked.  An attractive, brown-skinned man about thirty-years old, sporting a thick black beard, entered.  “Is it all right if I watch this movie with you?” he asked.

             “Sure,” I said. He sat next to me and dropped quarters.

“Is this getting you hard?”

             “Sure,” I replied.

He pushed forward. “Can I touch it?”

            “Sure.”

“Have you ever given a blow job?”

             “No.  But if you show me, I’ll figure it out.”

The stranger then taught me oral pleasure as he fed quarters into the greedy slot. I was soon on my knees with my pants down, enjoying the movie and giving my first blowjob.  I was getting it on like the porn stars in the video when Boo scared the shit out of me by opening the door I had forgotten to lock.

Shocked and embarrassed, I leapt up immediately and quickly slammed the door.  Then I tried to figure out what lie to tell.

I told Boo that the stranger had discovered we had fake IDs, and said that he was going to tell the manager if I did not do as he asked. I said I was so afraid and ashamed that I did not ever want to speak of it again.  To Boo’s credit, we never did discuss it again until twenty-five years later, when I bumped into him at a gay pride event in Washington D.C.  He told me that he knew I was lying that day, but had kept my secret.

I was in my denial, secure in the belief that my lie had worked on Boo.  He was the least of my concerns at that moment.  I wanted to experience more of the forbidden sex of the peep store booths.

I went home that night and dreamt of the sexual experience, relishing in the excitement.  How I wished I could have taken it further. The stranger had whispered in my ear how much he wanted to take me to his place and show me other things. I yearned to learn more about homosexuality.

I began to have wet dreams shortly after that experience. Every seven days it would back up, and on Sunday nights it would explode. I knew the pattern so often, I would prepare on Sunday night by wrapping my penis in toilet paper to avoid staining my underwear.

The only talk my mother had given us on the topic of homosexuality had been after we watched an ABC movie of the week called That Certain Summer.  It starred Hal Holbrook and Martin Sheen.  The story was about a husband who leaves his wife (played by Hope Lange) for his male lover, and the effect it has on his teenage son who comes to visit for the summer.  My mother explained that some guys like guys instead of girls. She never said it was bad or wrong.

At the time of my first homosexual experience, I was still involved with girls and had been pursuing Shari Rodgers, an amazing girl who was a year ahead of me in school at Manor High.  Shari was dark chocolate, with eyes like Bette Davis.  She was shapely and had beautiful, full breasts. I loved the way she smiled, and she had a gap between her front teeth that was slightly wider than my own, which captivated me. Besides her beauty, I was also attracted to her talent. She had a clear, beautiful, alto voice, and l loved to hear her sing.  Not only did she sing in the school choir, she was also in the school’s drama department. Consequently, we were in school plays together.

When I met Shari, she had a crush on an older guy and would not give me the time of day. I tried things I had seen in the movies to woo her -- I wrote her poems, sent her gifts, and romanced her by phone. I walked her home and made her laugh until I wore her down. She eventually became my first girlfriend.

My best friend at the time was Bruce Melvin, another student in the drama department. Bruce was cool, light-skinned, and had a huge perfect smile set in a handsome, square jaw. He had the deepest voice I had heard for a guy at sixteen. We both wore our hair in the huge Afros of the day, his in a square shape to match his face and mine in a fitting oval. He was ultra smooth with girls and had scored lots of sexual conquests. Whereas I had only been with three girls before I met Shari, Bruce had been with dozens.  Once, when we were engaged in a conversation with some female friends, Bruce made an argument in favor of oral sex; he reasoned that it was cleaner than kissing because fewer germs reached the vagina than the average mouth. It made sense to me at the time -- until I realized that it takes a mouth to perform oral sex!  But I could see that Bruce was really winning a few fans over to his side.

Being around Bruce was fun. We had been best friends since fourth grade, even after he took the lead away from me in the play No Man Is An Island.  He had played Bob Cratchit in A Christmas Carol the year that my voice changed and I almost lost the role of Ebenezer Scrooge. He gave me the nickname I had always wanted, calling me “Big D,” D as in “Dale,” not “dick.”  I was taller than him by half an inch; in stature he was a little guy, and I called him Lil’ Stud because he was such a ladies’ man.

Bruce, Shari, and I were involved in every school play during our years at Manor High. Our first production was Douglas Turner Ward’s Day of Absence. We followed that with Jean Raymond Maljean’s Message from Cougar and Bruce and I played brothers, one shy and one very aggressive.  Next, I wrote and directed a modern version of Romeo and Juliet with Bruce as Romeo.  My favorite line that Bruce delivered was: “Juliet, you are such a fine fox!”  By the time we did Jerome Lawrence’s Live Spelled Backwards, the three of us had a great rhythm on stage together. 

Live Spelled Backwards is a one-act play that tells the story of five lonely people who visit a bar in Morocco.  The bartender gives each a super drug, and it leads them to expose their darkest, innermost secrets.  Later, they discover that they did not receive a drug at all.  I played the bartender and Bruce and Shari played two of the patrons.  Before we all became involved with the play, I thought of Bruce as the outgoing brother that my own brother was not.  And I thought of Shari as the girl I would eventually marry. All of that would change as the performance drew near.

            One day after rehearsal, we were driving home after smoking a joint, and I found myself sitting in the car next to Shari but reaching my hand towards the back seat to touch Bruce’s manhood. He gently removed my hand from his penis and did not speak of it. 

Sometimes, Bruce and I would rehearse his big scene without anybody else around. His character’s name was “The Most Evil Man in Washington Court House, Ohio.” The scene required us to stand face-to-face as he recited his monologue. As I stared into Bruce’s eyes, I was completely lost in affection for him -- I had fallen in love with my best friend.  He was oblivious as he spoke his lines:

And so this man decided to go to the most wicked place he could find on the map of the world – and try all the things he’d been accused of, everything. And he hated them, they revolted him, they made him sick! He has tried every evil and he is sick of them. Doesn’t that make him purer than the people who never dare? The people who cling to their longing for sin, and hang on to it, and live with it all of their lives – aren’t they the dirty ones?

I realized I was one of those people, clinging to my longing for him. I had to dare to go for it.  The love I felt for him was very real.  “I need to tell you something,” I confessed one day after school.

“Just spit it out, Big D,” Bruce said with a huge smile.

“You never mentioned anything about that night I tried to touch your dick.”

“What’s there to mention? We were all high.”

“I was high, man.  But I knew what I was doing.  I’m gay, Bruce.”

“And you are my best friend and I love you.  Just not that way.”

“So, it doesn’t bother you?”

“I think I have always known. I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t had thoughts, but I don’t feel the need to act on them. So are we cool?”

“Yes, I guess so.”

“So Big D and Lil’ Stud still gonna tear up NYU come fall 1976?”

“Dayeem skippy,” I said.

 My confession did not seem to bother him one bit.  He had rejected me sexually, but that made me love him even more.

Bruce and I became even tighter after that incident.   Our plan was to go off to New York University, study acting, and become famous actors.  Along with Shari, we were always hanging out -- performing in plays, entering poetry contests, and immersing ourselves in any other kind of artistic extra curricular activity. I was so confused.  I loved Shari, but I also loved and desired Bruce. Everything started building up inside of me.  Then one day my father came to visit.

Somehow, I have to make them 

Just understand 

I got it well in hand 

And, oh, how I’ve planned 

I'm spreadin’ love 

There’s no need to fear 

And I just feel so good 

Every time I hear: 

I’m coming out

It was April of 1975 and I had just turned seventeen. My father had come to town to get my mother’s signature on papers that would give him equity in her family property, so that he could buy a bar in Baltimore. I was junior class president and my brother was leaving for college. My mother had refused to let me attend an honors program that would have allowed me to enter college a year early. Bruce had been considering that same program. We were anxious to leave Portsmouth and begin living in the real world, but when my mother nixed that program for me, we went back to our plan of just going to NYU in the fall of 1976.  I began to wonder -- how could I prepare myself for the future if I was stuck at home with my mother? What could she teach me about the adult world?  Not much, I figured. Most importantly, if I stayed in Portsmouth, how was I going to experience homosexual sex?

I devised a plan that would change the course of my life.  When my father arrived, I told him that a man had molested me in a Norfolk peep store and I had started smoking weed as a result. To sweeten the story, I told him that I had hidden a bag in the house. (Bruce and his new girlfriend had surprised me with a nickel bag as a gift for my seventeenth birthday, so the evidence was already planted.) I told him I was afraid to be in Portsmouth because I thought the man would try to come back and do something to me. My father took me out of school the next day and I packed my bags to go live with him in Baltimore.  Sadly, though, he flushed my weed down the toilet.

My plan was to learn the art of survival from my dad, complete my senior year in Baltimore, then head off to meet Bruce in New York when we both graduated high school. Baltimore would offer plenty of opportunities to meet homosexual men, so I could complete what had started in the peep booth.

Dad had a small duplex apartment, so I was forced to sleep on a rollout cot in the living room while he and his wife slept behind a curtain not more than ten feet away. My stepmom had also moved her grown daughter into the apartment, along with her daughter’s two small kids. Other things had changed since my last visit; my father no longer took me to Druid Hill Park to play tennis or jog. I had planned on it being just the three of us, but now there were six!

I would have had my own room had I stayed in Portsmouth, because my brother would have been away at MIT.  Instead, I was sleeping on a cot in a cramped living room in Baltimore, all because I wanted to find dick.  But at that time, I would not have had it any other way.

Shari, being a year ahead of Bruce and me, was planning to attend college that fall at Morgan State University.  So, she would eventually be moving to Baltimore as well.  Bruce was devastated that both of his acting buddies would be gone for his senior year.  I kept in touch with Bruce, Shari, and my mother by phone, as my father allowed me a few calls per month, no longer than five minutes each.  Bruce and Shari wrote me letters every week, and I was determined not to let my relationship with Bruce disappear.

 Bruce visited me during my first summer in Baltimore. I don’t know how my father allowed it, being that the place was so small. Bruce slept on my cot and I slept on the floor.  I remember his feet dangled off the cot and I gently touched them and inhaled his scent. I think that’s what started my love affair with the male foot.

That summer of ‘76, Shari visited me as well. During that summer, she gave me her virginity. It was romantic and magical, just like I had seen in the old time black and white movies. I bought her chocolates and flowers and we drank Boone’s Farm Apple Berry wine.  It was passionate but also erotic, like the porn I had seen. I mastered the art of licking pussy and when Shari climaxed for the first time, she was afraid she had suffered a heart attack.  It was an amazing feeling, bringing a woman to orgasm.

Since Bruce was a ladies’ man, I introduced him to my neighbor, classmate, and eventual business partner, Vanessa “Peaches” Mack.  She became enamored of him quickly.  Vanessa and I ended up taking a bus trip together to Virginia to visit Bruce and Shari. It was on that occasion that Shari and I secretly watched Bruce and Vanessa having sex, through a cracked door in my mother’s home. When Shari and I had sex later that night, the fantasies that played out in my mind had me even more confused.

It was during my senior year at Baltimore’s Northwestern High School that my sexuality really blossomed. I was still dating Shari, who was by then a freshman at Morgan State, and I was still involved in drama.  The fabulous Michael DeBoy, who would eventually cast me in the musical Godspell, headed Northwestern’s drama department.  The experience evoked memories of my sixth grade production of A Christmas Carol.  I had to learn the song “We Beseech Thee” for the role of Jeffrey and, while I was a great actor and dancer, my singing was not supreme.  Mr. DeBoy replaced me halfway through the production but later called me back, just as Mr. Brown had done in the sixth grade for my role as Scrooge in A Christmas Carol; he’d rather have an actor who couldn’t sing than a singer who couldn’t act. He made me join the gospel choir and take voice lessons to up my game. Though my singing was off tempo, at least my voice did not crack!  And making it through that production is what allowed me to get closer to Eddie Greene.

Eddie was chubby and light-skinned with big, full, beautiful lips. He had long eyelashes and wavy hair, cut in a “shag” style.  The Afro was beginning to play out, and the shag haircut was what guys were transitioning into.  The best way to describe it is that it was the black version of the mullet haircut.  Eddie was playing the lead of Jesus in the production of Godspell. Every time we would rehearse his death scene on the cross, you would have thought the real Jesus Christ had died up in that theater. He was loud and talented; in fact, he was voted “Most Talented” out of the senior class. We started going out and began a torrid affair. He had his own car and seemed to come and go to school whenever he felt. His dad had died a few years earlier and his mother spoiled him terribly, basically letting him do whatever he wanted. I’d spend the night at his house and learn the ways of gay sex. I also bought the book The Joy of Gay Sex and taught myself everything there was to learn about gay sexuality.  Eddie took me to my first gay bar on my eighteenth birthday, The Pink Hippopotamus, located on the corner of Charles Street and Eager Street in Baltimore City.  (The name of the club is now The Hippo, and it is still in the same location.) My stepmother started getting suspicious because of all the time Eddie and I spent together, but my father was living in a state of denial because I was still involved with Shari.

Being a boyfriend to the most popular kid in school made me feel special. Our affair was very passionate. Eddie and I would cut class and make love in his car, or slip away to the park or spend the afternoon in his home when his mother was at work. In those days, kids who were having sex would wear their hickeys on their necks, (or wherever else on their body!), as a medal of honor.  It was an advertisement that told all your friends, “Hey, look at me -- I’m having sex.” It was like all those broken blood vessels were actually something to be proud of or a source of pride.

 One day I came home and my dad asked, “Which girlfriend put that hickey on your neck?”

I proudly responded, “Or boyfriend?”

My arrogance surprises me to this very day.  Foolish high school love makes a person feel like Superman.  I felt like nothing could hurt me because I had the love of Eddie Greene.

My father walked out of the house. When he returned twenty minutes later, he told me that I had to move out of his home. My life changed in that moment. I knew I did not want to move back to Portsmouth, Virginia. I had four more months of high school. My dreams of going to NYU to study acting had just flown out the window.  With my father disowning me, I wouldn’t be able to get his financial information to provide to NYU for consideration for financial assistance.  In addition, I had to figure out where I was going to live.  While my friends would be preparing for the high school prom, I would be shopping for an apartment and just trying to graduate.

I also had to face Shari and tell her that her boyfriend had a boyfriend. That MTA bus ride to Morgan State was one of the longest I had ever taken. That girl had given me her virginity. She could have had any college guy on campus, but she had been committed to me, a high school senior who was about to tell her he was gay. I don’t know how she ever forgave me, but she continues to be one of my closest friends to this very day. Now that’s a real life “Will & Grace.”

The next seven days were a living hell.  Each night, my father had to walk past my cot in the living room. One day he confessed, “If I had a gun, I would have shot you in your sleep.”  I knew I had to get out of there quick. When I told Eddie about the scene with my father, he became so scared that he dumped me immediately. He was afraid of getting caught in the crossfire. “What a bitch,” I thought. In the gay teenage world, don’t count on your boyfriend to stand up to your father.  It ain’t gonna happen.           

Earlier in the school year, Vanessa had helped me get a job at McDonalds.  So, I asked my manager to change me from part-time to full-time and I quickly found an apartment near by. It was a one-room efficiency, located in the basement of a row house off Garrison Boulevard. Everything was included for one hundred and twenty dollars a month. It even had a kitchenette with bar stools and a red sofa bed. The down side was that whenever it rained, I’d wake up to a sea of water bugs. In retrospect, I should have planned to go ahead to college; I should have devised a way to get there on my own.  But it was 1976 -- I was eighteen and could go to clubs.  It was legal for me to drink, the draft was over, and I could party and live my life without anyone telling me what to do.  I did not want the added pressure of figuring out how to pay for school.  It was easier for me to just live each day at a time.

Fate must have known that NYU was just a dream, because Bruce ended up going to Syracuse University that fall.  The week before he was to leave for college, he came to visit me at my little ghetto apartment. We shared my fold-out sofa bed, never touching, but I craved his body. We hung out every day and went to see movies. We saw the film Cooley High, the African-American version of American Graffiti, complete with Motown music. I imagined that it was our story up on the screen; Bruce was ladies’ man Richard “Cochise” Morris, and I was nerdy Leroy “Preach” Jackson, who left town to become a writer.

When I would leave for work at night, Bruce was never at a loss for meeting females. He would meet some girl and bring her back to fuck in my bed!  I came home one night and he had fucked some girl who was on her menstrual cycle. The sheets were so gross that I had to throw them out.

Because I worked the night shift, our time during the day was limited because I had to sleep part of the day away. As the week drew near its end, I played hooky just to hang out with him on his last night.  I told him again how much I wanted him, and he told me again that he could not and would not be with me in that way. In a final act of desperation, I swallowed a whole bottle of aspirin and refused to speak to him. Bruce called an ambulance. The medics told him that I wouldn’t die from an overdose of aspirin, but that I’d be very nauseous. They kept me a few days for observation at the hospital. When I returned home, Bruce had left for college.  I would not see him for many years after that.

Years later meeting the stars of Cooley High

My first year of “out” gay life had held its share of dark moments. I was young, inexperienced, and did not have a mentor to talk to about what was happening to me. There were no gay talk groups or community centers to go to where I could find other young gay people out on their own.  I was out of high school and soon to be out of a job for calling off work, even though I eventually ended up in the hospital and thus had a valid excuse for my absence. My mom, living in Virginia, was going through menopause and dealing with my budding baby sister starting to date.  My brother was away at college in Boston. I was not speaking to my father, who lived less than two miles from me.  I had made an enormous step out into an unfamiliar world and I wasn’t quite sure what to do next.  I was living on instinct, determined never to live life in a closet. 

Even today, my friends know that I leave all closet doors open in my house.  It became my personal mission to teach all straight people that gay people are basically no different from them. We don’t have three heads.  Most of us aren’t even recognizable.  What is there to be afraid of?  We just have sex with the same sex instead of the opposite sex. Everything else is pretty much the same.  I don’t dislike heterosexuals just because they have male / female relationships.

 A buddy of mine, not knowing I was gay, once went on incessantly about a hot lap dance he’d received from a busty female at a strip club.  Instead of pretending that women were my sexual interest, I shared with him an experience I’d had with a male stripper at a gay bar. After he picked his face up off the floor, he had to admit that he respected me for being open and for treating my gay life just as normally as he treated his straight life.  Yeah, that’s me, spreading universal acceptance by teaching one straight person at a time.

The year 1976 represents more for me than just the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence or the year I turned eighteen, the year I took my first legal drink, voted, or moved out on my own. It was the year I stumbled out of the closet and fell on my face, got up, knocked the dirt off and said, “Hey, look at me.  I am gay and I am proud.”

There’s a new me coming out

And I just had to live

And I wanna give

I’m completely positive

I think this time around

I am gonna do it

Like you never knew it

Ooh, I’ll make it through

 “Being honest with oneself may be painful, but the pain of denial is even greater.” 

I'm Living in a Shame

(MAMA, MISS LOVE)

I’m livin’ in shame

Mama, I miss you

I know you’ve done your best

Mama, I miss you

Won’t you forgive me, mom

For all the wrong I’ve done

I know you’ve done your best

I know you’ve done the very best you could

But I never understood

(From the song “I’m Livin’ In Shame,” from the Diana Ross & The Supremes album Let the Sunshine In, 1969, composed by Henry Crosby/ Pam Sawyer/ Frank Wilson/ R. Dean Taylor/ Berry Gordy)

How can you not love someone named Love?

O

ld pictures of my mother and father to me look like photos of Dorothy Dandridge with Smokey Robinson. I used to imagine I was the child of a fabulously famous and beautiful couple. In reality, my father was a hot-headed, hot-blooded, well-traveled navy man with a child in every port.  My mother was an uneducated farm girl who made her children the center of her life.

           

Born the seventh daughter on September 7^th  and with only a seventh grade education, Lovelean Smith, daughter of a tobacco farmer in Farmville, Virginia, seemed like an odd match for the street savvy Baltimorean, Wilton Richard Madison. Nevertheless, they made a striking couple. Bill was a light skinned, freckled-faced man of the world, and Love was a brown-skinned beauty with the sweet sexiness of the girl next door.

            Although she only had a seventh grade education, my mother always made sure we did our homework, even when she herself could not understand it.  She saved every penny of her monthly allotment check so that we could get the latest encyclopedias, and she kept the house filled with books.  She exposed me to the classics, like Edgar Allan Poe, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Homer.  I became familiar with the Greek mythologies, such as Antigone, Hercules, and Medea, and was excited to see the nude paintings that accompanied them.  Lovelean would frequently take us to the library, and we’d spend hours just browsing the stacks. 

Everyone always thinks his or her own mother is the most beautiful woman in the world. I am no different. Lovelean had a natural beauty, achieved without a lot of makeup.  And she knew how to dress.  When she stepped out of the house for church, couldn’t nobody touch her in the entire congregation!  I thought she had the sexiest legs! She also loved her high heel shoes and her fragrances.  Every Mother’s Day, Ricky, Gee and I would give her a gift of Jean Nate body splash.  She used it every time she took a bath and the house would smell of its sensual aroma.  After I became a teenager, I refused to go to church; my mother would take my brother and sister to service and leave me alone in the house, at which time I would sneak into her closets to put on her high heels and play with her jewelry.  As I looked at myself in the mirror, I felt sexy and pretty, just like my mother was.

            Since my brother was not much into his appearance and since my sister was such a tomboy, I felt it was up to me to impress my mom.  I loved it when she complimented me on dressing nicely; I shared her love of clothes and I liked to make her proud of me. Having children is a weird hybrid experience.  When I look at my brother’s physical features, I can see my father.  When I look at my sister’s physical features, I can see my mother.  When I look at myself, I can see the best of both my mother and father -- his smooth voice and her knockout legs!

After my parents’ divorce, it was just the four of us living in a single household. We always ate dinner together as a television played in the background. Lovelean wasn’t a good cook; she fried a lot, whether it was chicken, hamburgers, or hotdogs. Miss Love could boil the hell out of some canned foods, which usually meant they would be overcooked!  Her turkeys fell apart and her cakes always collapsed.  When I first had a cake that did not fall, I couldn’t quite appreciate the taste because I was so used to the heavy thickness of her fallen bakery attempts. However, what she lacked in cooking she made up for with her housekeeping.  I remember many days of her dusting Venetian blinds and ironing clothes.  Somehow, I was the first of the three children to learn how to wash dishes.  On Friday nights, she had a ritual of lining the three of us up to receive a tablespoon of milk of magnesia.  I hated the chalky taste, though Lovelean emphasized the importance of a good bowel movement.  As a kid, in my head her words always sounded like “bower move.”  It took me years to figure out what she was saying.

            Lovelean did not have close girlfriends.  She was pleasant to the women in the neighborhood but kept a safe distance.  She made us her friends.  She was close to her sisters, but they lived in other cities. At night, we would talk across our rooms to each other, like the Waltons.  One night she had a nightmare and I ran into her bedroom and shook her awake. She thanked me and I remembered feeling as if I had really done something important. I felt like I had saved her life.

            Our favorite family pastime was watching soap operas. I remember the series that were on at that time, like Love of Life, The Edge of Night, and The Secret Storm. I was watching television with my mom when we saw the live broadcast of Joan Crawford replacing her real life daughter, Christina, on The Secret Storm.   I recall how Crawford could not remember her lines; she looked so foolish, trying to play a young wife in a mini dress, when it was apparent that she was old enough to be somebody’s grandmother.  To this day, the favorite family soap opera is The Young and the Restless.  It is a common bond that unites us.

            Our family laughed a lot during our TV watching sessions.  Lovelean would pass a fart while we were all gathered together and then blame it on one of us, which always cracked us up.  Watching soaps is what first made me realize I wanted to be an actor.  I used to practice crying in the mirror so that I could cry on cue like the soap actors did. 

            When we were very young, Lovelean would smoke cigarettes. She kept a carton of Salems all the way up in a kitchen cabinet, but she only smoked after breakfast or during her morning constitutional. (She would crack the bathroom door and enjoy her cigarette as she watched us play up and down the hall.)  I never remembered her smoking at any other time, unless she was having a cocktail with her sisters.  By the time I became a teenager, she stopped the habit.  Ironically, I picked it up.  I started smoking Salems.

We did not have a lot of money coming up, but Lovelean always scrapped and saved to do special things for us.  We would see a movie together as a family once a year. The very first movie I remember her taking us to see was Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine, starring Vincent Price. I don’t remember much about the movie, except that the Supremes sang the theme song.  My mother was very progressive, now that I think about it.  We also saw the films The Graduate, which dealt with adultery, and Something for Everyone, which dealt with bisexuality. She was protective of us but did not shield us from the realities of life.

            Mother was very relaxed about her body.  We seldom locked the doors in our home and, as children, we would see her naked.  It was never an issue.  I took after her in that I was more comfortable being without clothes, more so than Ricky or Gee, and I wore as little as I could during the hot summer months in Portsmouth, Virginia. When Georgette started growing breasts, however, we all became a little more discrete. 

Once, Lovelean found some nude drawings I had hidden and she spanked me.  For a minute, I resented her for this.  In order to appease her, I drew bathing suits on the male and female body parts.  Years later, as we watched porn together as adults, I forgave her for the incident.  When you get older and look back over your childhood, you realize that parenting has never come with a guidebook.  Lovelean had done what she thought best for the moment.

            Of course, there were things she did that really irked me. I used to hate the fact that she never allowed us to accept food from other kids’ moms.  I was curious to taste other people’s cooking.  I did not taste broccoli until I was seventeen. God forbid we eat anything another kid would offer us at school!  Even when we traveled and visited relatives, she was particular about whose food we could eat.  My brother was extremely allergic to seafood, so she had the rest of us avoid it too, probably out of convenience. Other than her mother and a few of her sisters, we simply did not eat from other people’s kitchens. It was as if she thought somebody was going to poison us.  It was so instilled in me that I could hear her voice in my head saying, “Don’t you dare eat that food!” even when she wasn’t around. As a result, we ended up being very picky about our food.  Our cousins referred to us as “spoiled,” and we did not eat southern delicacies like chitlins, pig feet, or black-eyed peas.

I was always so afraid that

My uptown friends would see her

Afraid one day when I was grown

That I would be her

Lovelean came from the south and had odd ways, in my opinion.  She came from that generation of blacks who believed that being dark skinned was not a good thing.  She married my dad, a very light-skinned man, and my brother had turned out in his complexion.  I was a shade darker and my sister was the darkest. She always shielded my sister from going out in the sun to play.  I used to laugh at this because my sister was so rebellious; she would venture out into the sun anyway.  If Lovelean looked out the window and caught Gee basking in the sunlight, we would hear, “Stay out of that sun before you turn black!”

            When my mother and father divorced, they said that they had separated.  I did not quite know the difference between divorce and separation because my father had spent most of his time away in the Navy.  Many of the kids in Cavalier Manor also had fathers in the service.  For the most part, it was a naval town.  What I thought odd was the fact that my siblings and I were not allowed to use the word “divorce.” 

When I was in my teens, Lovelean began to date a man in the neighborhood. He was a nice guy. He used to cut our hair and I liked when he would “edge a part” on the right side of my head.  (His haircuts were always so much better than my mom’s soup bowl efforts.) 

One afternoon, my mother’s boyfriend came over and saw me playing with my Captain Action figure.  I really loved that doll.  He had two changes of clothes and could change into Superman or Batman.  I used to make fashion clothes for him out of old socks and scraps of fabric that my grandmother had given me.  My favorite outfit was a furry vest similar to the one that Sonny Bono wore back in the heyday of Sonny and Cher. 

When my mom’s boyfriend saw me with the action figure, he made a nice comment about it.  However, later I heard him say to my mother, “Don’t no boy supposed to be running around playing with no dolls.”

            When I came home from school the next day, my Captain Action was gone.  I was crushed.  I vowed to get my doll back one day. Twenty-five years later, I found a Captain Action doll at a collector’s show and paid over one hundred dollars for him.  Then I started collecting more rare action figures, like O.J. Simpson, Mr. T, M.C. Hammer, Dennis Rodman, Billy Dee Williams, Michael Jackson, and any black G.I. Joe or Ken doll. I usually only purchased black dolls, but on one occasion I ran across a white doll made in the 70’s called “Gay Bob” that I had to have. He had a blonde Afro and was anatomically correct. By the 90’s, there emerged a collection of male dolls with penises called “Billy.” The dicks on those dolls were a bit more pronounced in comparison to those on the Gay Bob dolls.  From the Billy collection I added “Tyson” (black) and “Carlos” (Latin) to my stable.  (See what your boyfriend made me do, mother? If I had just been allowed to keep my doll, I wouldn’t be collecting action figures as a grown man!)

            When I would sleep walk as a child, Lovelean would never wake me up. She would just turn my head around and guide me back to bed.  One time I woke up in the middle of the night and heard her with her boyfriend.  I walked out to the kitchen where they were standing naked together, having a drink.  I had seen my mother’s breasts before, that was no surprise, but I had never seen a grown man with a hard-on.  I was fascinated.  When he turned and saw me standing there, he almost dropped his glass of Johnnie Walker Red. 

            “Love,” he said, “Look who just wandered out here.”

 “Sometimes he sleepwalks,” she responded.   “Just turn him around and he will walk back to his room.” 

Her boyfriend’s huge hands turned me around and walked me back to the bedroom. I pretended to be asleep and did not say anything.

“You sure he’s sleep?” he asked my mother, walking back to the kitchen.

“He’s done it before,” she assured.  “His eyes will be open and he’ll be dead asleep.  He won’t remember a thing in the morning.”

I tried to get a peek at that erect, grown male body one more time, but they closed my bedroom door and went back to her room.

            The next day, I could not even look her in the eyes. I hated her.  My doll was gone and there she was having sex with this man who seemed to be able to get her to do whatever he wanted.  She behaved as if nothing had even happened the night before.  I went to the breakfast table in silence. I spoke to my brother and sister, but did not say a word to my mother.  I had decided that I was never going to speak to her again; I didn’t even care if we lived in the same house.  Later, I told my brother what I had seen. Ricky was always the levelheaded person of the house, never making decisions based on emotion.  He thought logically like the character Mr. Spock on his favorite TV show, Star Trek. 

            “Ricky,” I told him, “I saw ma and Mr. B. naked in the kitchen last night.”

            “And?” Ricky sounded like he did not care.

            “And I am not ever gonna speak to ma again.”

            “Why? It’s not like we didn’t know what was going on. You finally saw it.”

            “Well, she shouldn’t be doing stuff.”

            “Why?  Because she is your mother?  Because she is trying to live her life?  You know daddy is living his own life the way he wants. Let it go, it ain’t your business.”

            He was right.  Funny thing is, I don’t think she even noticed I was not speaking to her.

            When I turned sixteen, I started visiting my dad in Baltimore, who by then had retired from the Navy.  It was around this time that we learned he had remarried.  Whenever Lovelean had to reach him, she would always make one of us call in case his new wife answered the phone.  Lovelean would tell us to ask for “our father,” and then she would get on after he picked up.  She hated to hear his new wife’s voice, as if it was some awful reminder that she was no longer married to him. 

            During the summer months before school started, I was elected to go shopping with my dad to get my school clothes and to get the money for my brother and sister’s clothes.  We never traveled as a trio to visit him. I don’t know whether it was because my mother did not want to be left alone or because he could not afford to send for all three of us at one time.  Either way, I visited him multiple times but my brother never went.  I believe my sister went once.

            After spending time with my father, I grew to blame my mother for their divorce.  During one of our visits, I asked him why he left.  He explained that things had changed during the course of their marriage.  She was beautiful when he was a young man and their families had known each other when they were children.  He knew from the moment he saw her that he would marry her.  But as he grew up in the world, traveling all over, my mother did not “grow” with him.  He told me that she made her children the center of her world, the same way her mother had done before her.  She was never an independent person.  Whenever dad would leave for a tour of duty, my mom would have my grandmother come live with us.   He said he never felt like he was in his own home, because when he would return he would find his mother-in-law living in his space.  He never got a chance to feel like he and his wife were having their own marriage because somebody else was always there. 

I was determined not to let my mother influence my life. I was in the ninth grade, already two grades further than she had gotten in her life. What did she know?  I was so ashamed of her, viewing her as uneducated and ill equipped to teach me what I needed to know about being a man.  In my mind, I began to plot a way to get out from under her.  My efforts were successful, and I eventually moved to Baltimore to live with my father.

Mama, mama, mama can you hear me

Mama, mama, mama can you hear me

I'm livin’ in shame…

            I am sure my behavior also influenced my sister after I left home.  I believe she rushed into a marriage so that she could get away from my mother too.  Around 1980, Gee was given the family home and it was decided that our mother would move to Baltimore to live with Ricky and me.  Ricky had just left MIT and was looking for work in the Baltimore / D.C. area.  I was living on my own and had been out of my father’s house for about four years.  

            Lovelean proved up for the challenge.  She surprised us all by going back to school and getting her GED. She also got a part-time job at a local bakery in the heart of the gay community where my brother and I also worked, part-time.  “Miss Love,” as she was called, became the darling of all our gay friends.  Lovelean put all my fears to rest as she proved that she was an independent woman, determined not to become a burden to her children as her mother had done. What I learned in that moment and in the years to come was this -- my mother may not have read a physics book or discussed Plato, but she had good common sense.  She also had an open ear and an open heart that allowed her to see people for who they truly were, accept differences, and learn from those around her.  I felt so ashamed for having allowed my father’s fears to run my life.

Won’t you forgive me, mom

For all the wrong I’ve done

I know you’ve done your best

I know you’ve done the very best you could

But I never understood

In 2004, I was at work in Los Angeles and got a call that my mother was in the hospital. It was the first time in my life that I ever thought I would lose my mother.  Gee told me that she had been in the hospital for two days and, since she did not have any of our phone numbers on her at the time, she could not notify us. I felt so helpless being three thousand miles away. The doctors had found a blood clot in her lungs. Fear took hold of me as I remembered all the stupid things I had done as a child, and I prayed really hard that she knew how much I loved and appreciated her.  Fortunately, in time, they treated the blood clot that was causing her problems.  She would be fine.

            As I sat on a plane headed off to see her, I remembered that Dorothy Dandridge had died from a blood clot.  I thought about how beautiful my mother had been in her youth and how much she reminded me of Dorothy Dandridge.  I thought about the countless times I had not kept in touch and how I failed to include her in much of my life.

I then vowed to God to call her every Sunday, wherever I might be.  Whenever we speak on the phone, she always ends our conversations with “I love you.”  Sometimes the only thing we may talk about is what happened on The Young and the Restless that week.  It has become such a Sunday ritual that if I don’t call, she worries.

One weekend she asked me, “Have you seen that show Brothers & Sisters?”

“No,” I said.  “I usually change the channel after Desperate Housewives.”

“When I watch that show, it reminds me of us as a family,” she mused.

“Why is that?” I asked.

She responded, “I see so much of myself in that Sally Fields character.”

Well, she got me hooked. I started watching the show and recorded all the past episodes on TiVo. I could see her point. The show was about a father who cheats on his wife and the family learns about the other brothers and sisters.  Factor in a gay son, a strong willed daughter, and a son who abuses drugs, and it all adds up to various moments in the Madison history. I called her the night after I saw an episode about a family therapy session.

“Hello, Sally Fields,” I teased.

“Don’t say anything, Dale. I know what you’re thinking!”

We burst out laughing. We were both thinking that a scene from the episode had closely resembled my own experience with psychotherapy, a dark time we had not spoken of in over twenty years. During that conversation, I thanked her again for loving me unconditionally. I thanked her for teaching me the true lessons of being a man. I thanked her for never giving up on me. I asked her to forgive me for having been such a selfish asshole. “Forgive who?” she said. “For what?”

              I have a mother named Love who has taught me more about love and life than I could have ever imagined.

We are a family

Like a giant tree

Branching out towards the sky

We are a family

We are so much more

Than just you and I

We are a family

Like a giant tree

Growing stronger

Growing wiser

 “Lessons aren’t always taught by schoolteachers.”