Every four years the Winter Olympics roll around, to remind us all of something we try to pretend does not exist: figure skating. We watch, horrified, as each outfit gets more hideous, the death-spirals get too real, and, as the judges reveal their scores, all dignity finally disappears. Watching Evan Lysacek sob after winning his gold made me want to sick Tonya Harding on him.
Of course, what I dislike in figure skating is what I dislike in myself. Figure skating brings me back to the absolute worst Christmas morning of my wonderful life.
I was 12. I had recently and finally quit playing Little League. This, let me tell you, was no small feat, with a father as devoted to baseball as mine. Sundays, we attended the Church of Baseball: Breakfast at the Homeplate Diner, followed by my father's over-30-league games in Deering Oaks Park. Dad and I had season tickets four rows behind home plate at the local Minor League franchise, the Seadogs, and we never missed a game. Ever.
The previous summer, my father and I had even taken a train-tour of the East coast, stopping only at baseball parks. Things had been different, though, on that trip. I brought my books. I read in the stands, instead of watching the game. By the time we reached Baltimore, I had decided I liked Fitzgerald more than Hemingway and didn't much care one way or the other about Cal Ripken.
That was also the summer, while watching MTV's "The Grind," that I decided I liked boys more than girls.
And that was the year I quit Little League. I was so hyper-competitive that I would cry if we lost, which broke the cardinal rule there's no crying in baseball and didn't make me many friends. I couldn't reconcile the graceful game I grew up on with the ugly, off-pace excuse we played in Little League. And I was bored. When I said I wanted to quit, Dad (aka coach) was quiet, but he eventually told me it's just a game, and if it wasn't for me, then it wasn't for me.
And that brings us to the awful Christmas morning. I unwrapped a gift from my father: a pair of handsome black figure skates, with an envelope, promising lessons.
I have never been so embarrassed. I knew, immediately, that my father was trying to suggest something athletic that he thought I might like, and I knew, with my 12-year-old, chestnut-sized brain that I could hardly be mad at him for it. But with that tiny brain I was also certain that figure skating is for the kids they call fags.
I was horrified. I refused to have anything to do with those skates. I hid them in a back corner of our disastrous garage and pretended they did not exist. I asked to take karate instead of figure skating lessons: crisis averted.
In the years that followed, my father was always finding ways to tell me that he accepted what I was not yet willing to accept about myself. In high school, his life advice referred to "partner" never "girlfriend." Despite how anti-climactic I knew the conversation would be, it was not until Thanksgiving break, after I'd been at Dartmouth for a few months, with my Facebook and Bored@Baker broadcasting my sexuality to anyone, that I finally had the guts to tell my own father. The hugging ensued, and the telling me loved me, and how proud of me he is, and all of that embarrassing nonsense.
With a father and family I knew would be as supportive as mine was and is, what I wonder is why I fought it for so long. Especially in those high school years. I knew I was gay, but I was determined not be "gay" with air-quotes. I captained or co-captained three varsity sports (not baseball, of course) and I never participated in chorus or theater. I wanted to be a painter but writing seemed more masculine. Choosing Dartmouth was part of that mentality a frattier, dirtier school than prissy Yale, or whatever.
I guess I was still in the mind-set that I could choose what would and would not exist.
Last year, I was playing "The Game of Life" with my 10-year-old brother, Davis. When he hit the "Stop! Get married!" square, he chose another blue, boy peg to put in the passenger seat of his little plastic car.
"Maybe I feel like being married to a boy. That would be okay too, right Matthew?"
"Of course," I lied, as my little sister Julia giggled.
That moment keeps coming back to me.
The truth is, in real life, it's not okay for a boy to be married to a boy. In fact, it's against the law. And it's against the rules for a boy who likes boys to donate blood to the Red Cross, and it's against the rules for a boy who likes boys to serve openly in the military. At Dartmouth, it's okay, but Dartmouth is not real life. In real life, the truth is no it's not okay.
I'm the lucky one. I know I've had it incredibly easy. But sometimes I get tired of pretending that everything's okay.
But that's how you keep going. You tell your little brother, "Of course it, is" because you tell yourself that things will change soon, maybe by the time he's 20 even as state after state repeals their gay marriage rulings, and everything seems to be slipping back. You tell yourself that your dad, or your family, or whoever it is that loves you, loves you.
You choose the game for you. Baseball, skating, Life, whatever. You learn how to win, and, maybe more importantly, you learn how to lose. There's no crying. You learn how to play by the rules.
