I grew up with two older brothers. As Dad was away at sea and Mom had many of her own issues, Paul and Robert raised me. Robert, 3 years older than me, got me up in the mornings, fed me, and hustled me off to school. He taught me to make an omelet when I was 8-years old, standing on a stack of phone books. Paul was 11 years my senior and always existed in a space between father and brother, neither wholly one yet both. When we wouldn’t go to bed, Mom, sitting on the couch next to the wall that separated the living room and Paul’s bedroom, would pound the wall with her fist and holler, “Pauya! Come fix these kids!” with visions of Paul in overalls and a tool-belt, I high-tailed it to my bedroom each time before I ever found out what “fix” entailed.
When Paul was hired at the nursery, he took Robert and me out to movies every payday. Every other one was my choice. Even when Cinderella and Time Bandits released the same week, and, despite Robert trying his hardest to convince me Time Bandits was the movie of the day, Paul insisted, “It’s Vi’s choice!” So we saw Cinderella.
At some point Paul disappeared, his Pink Floyd posters gone from the cheap wood paneling along with his melted, green, Coca-Cola bottle on the wire hook. His record player that I would sit in front of with my father’s mini-cassette recorder to copy an entire Queen album with my finger turning white on the record button, all the airplanes he hung from the ceiling, the models I sat on his bed and watched while he painstakingly built and painted, the air in his room tinged with the scent of modeling glue, even my favorite, the one made from paper and balsa wood—all gone. I have a memory of finding him crying at his desk, but he wanted to be left alone. I didn’t know why. It felt so strange to see him cry: it made the ground beneath my feet shift. Then he was gone with his models and posters and records.
On my fifteenth birthday, two years after he suddenly dropped out of my life, Paul appeared. He was taking me out for dinner and a movie. Like old times, only it was just me. But I still got to pick the movie. After the film, sitting in the parking lot of The Keg, he said, “I told your brother when he turned fifteen and I promised I would tell you.” Paul told me he left not because he wanted to but because he was kicked out. When he had told our mother he was gay she said, “You can live here, but you can’t be gay.” Paul told her, “Love all of me or none of me.” She told him that night to pack up and go. I sat and listened looking my hands in my lap, his image shifting in my mind as I tried to fit together the new pieces of him he was handing me. Then he was looking at me, expecting something. Paul had said I could ask him any question I wanted, any at all. He just gazed me in his quiet, sober way. I thought, “oh, God, now I have to come up with something.” I said the first and only thing that popped into my head, “Did you choose it?” Paul shot back, “Why would I choose something that makes me different from everyone else?”
In the restaurant while waiting for our food, Paul looked around us and remarked, “Look, they think we are a couple. See? They sat us in a dark corner. They don't know that I’m GAY!” shouting the last word and sending me into a blushing fit of giggles.
I grew up in a household where at the age of 10, while living in a foreign country where I barely spoke the language, I had to hunt down my drunk mother and find a way to somehow coax her home, then hide the knives, so she wouldn’t cut herself. I grew up in a household where my mother openly told my friends that gay people should be lined up and shot, a household with a father who didn’t help matters when he used his fists to shut her up, a place where, when I asked, “Please don’t call me stupid: I’m starting to believe it,” I was threatened with being sent to foster care.
I had only one dream then, and it had nothing to do with being a writer or an artist. All I cared about then was finding my own place, a place where only my thoughts and feelings filled the corners. I didn’t care how I got there. I just knew I had to go. I stashed maps, train schedules, and bus schedules in the bottom of a drawer, and one night, when I was told, “If you want to keep those friends of yours, then you can leave,” the decision was easy. I left. I was not gone long before police carted me back home. My mother bawled loud as possible and refused to acknowledge the presence of the officer or me. The next day was filled with, “You are ruining the family” in as many ways as it could be yelled, preached, or sobbed. Paul was the only one who never pointed a finger. He just came into my room and hugged me, telling me through tears, “God damn it, next time, you just come and stay with me.”
After Dad passed and I lost my fiancé within two years of each other, I stopped trying at holidays. I would take time off for Thanksgiving to pick Mom up off the floor where she would collapse, drunk and bawling. A couple years ago, I told Paul I couldn’t do it anymore. Too much sad. He said, “You come to my house then: we’ll make our own tradition.” So now, everyone gathers at Paul’s house. Instead of picking our mother off the floor and hiding the wine, we laugh and tell stories and watch movies. He doesn’t build model airplanes anymore. He builds covered patios for climbing grape vines and porch-swings that fold out to futons, and greenhouses, sheds, and a barbecue hutch with built in sound system and LED lights. He flips cars and gives them to family.
Do I believe in marriage equality? Fuck yes. It saddens me it has taken this long. Anyone has the freedom to disagree with me, but I have the freedom to tell those that do disagree that “putting your personal beliefs into law for the rest of the country is inhumane and cruel. And I invite you to take a look at the state of things in a country where being gay is illegal and tell me how it helps anybody.”