1986, San Francisco

By Darrick Meneken

Under December skies in the Silicon Valley, mom told me she was gay.

It was 1986 and I was 10. Earlier that day she picked me up from school, which in itself was rare since she worked an hour away and I typically rode my bike. I don’t know where my younger sister was at the time. With an aunt maybe. What I do know is that during the ride home I talked about school. A friend told me something on the playground and I repeated it to mom. “Did you know Michael Jackson is a faggot?” I asked. I don’t recall her immediate reaction, but what happened soon afterward I’ll never forget.

Inside the car my palms sweat. I didn’t want to be here but I couldn’t run. I could barely move. Then she told me. “Darrick, I’m gay.”

Truth is, I already knew. I’d known for a long time. Kids always seem to know things before their parents think so. I had, after all, spent half my young life living with mom and her changing lovers. And though the announcement wasn’t groundbreaking, it did confirm with solemn weight something I didn’t want to admit, even to myself.

Later that night mom wore a bright red jumpsuit and rhinestone earrings. I donned my first tuxedo: red cummerbund and bow tie, and a matching handkerchief that rose from my left breast pocket in a crisp triangle. In an array of candles and carnations, the Christmas party spilled across a banquet room at the San Francisco Hyatt Regency. I, you see, was mom’s date.

From the hotel windows we looked out at the white cathedral-like clock tower of the historic Ferry Building, the backside of the red-lighted sign that glows “Port of San Francisco” in capital letters, and east across the water through a frame of gray steel that is the Bay Bridge. It was my first fancy party, and I understood perfectly that I was playing the beard for mom.

For the next eight years I lived in the closet, sitting quietly through class discussions about homosexuality and lying about my mom and the boyfriends I said she had. When friends joked or put someone down by saying they were “gay” or “queer,” I laughed.

Perhaps my elementary school friends knew, too. After all, they spent plenty of nights at my house and, just like me, saw my mom and Sadie or Bev or Reenie — her three lovers of that era — close the bedroom door behind them as we kids fell asleep in the living room watching Teen Wolf on a rented VCR or playing Pac-Man on the hulking Commodore 64 my sister and I shared. Whether my friends knew or not, I certainly never told them.

Once, we found a Playboy magazine inside a wicker basket in mom’s bathroom and I quickly claimed it belonged to an uncle. Seated on the plush bathroom carpet, my friends and I carefully flipped through the pages, then gently put it back. I can still see Brigitte Nielsen wearing a black rubber dress on the cover.

A year and a half after the Christmas party my sister and I moved 100 miles away to live with our dad and stepmom. We quickly made friends. Dad taught elementary school and we’d spent every summer at his house following our parents’ divorce, when I was three and my sister was not yet one. Years later, I rarely talked about mom. When people asked if she ever remarried, I replied with a simple “no,” “uh-uh,” or even said “not yet.” Usually, no one pushed the discussion. If they did, I lied and said she had dated other men but no one worth marrying. I can only assume my dad and stepmom also told lies, if only in the interest of protecting my sister and me.

As I grew older and entered high school, my lies also matured. I often felt angry about mom’s homosexuality. I wondered if she’d only married my dad to have a daughter. After all, she left him shortly after my sister was born. I blamed mom for many things that went wrong in my life. Her failure to let me play sports was the reason I didn’t make the high school basketball team. Growing up around lesbians was the reason I was awkward with girls while other boys began to date.

By sophomore year I stopped visiting mom every other weekend. I once went into a fit of anger when she threatened to move north to be closer to me. I was certain I’d be an outcast if my friends ever discovered she was gay. I kept inventing “boyfriends,” a fabrication that was easier to keep when her real lover was Faye and I could simply say that was a man, not a woman with dyed red hair who smoked menthol cigarettes and with whom mom shared a Victorian apartment one block above Polk Street in San Francisco.

Mom was out of the closest by then, perhaps freed in a way by no longer living with my sister and me. She had no more need for the beard, a term many lesbians use for the men they bring along as cover and a role I played more than I care to admit. I, however, was not out. In retrospect, maybe I hid for too long. A top representative of PFLAG — Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, a group I have never joined — recently told me that the closet is a horrible place, one that leads to sadness and depression. I felt both during those years. He also cited studies that indicate the most important thing for children is two parents engaged in a loving and committed long-term relationship, same-sex or otherwise. With my dad and stepmom I finally had that.

Mom and I have come a long way since that December day in 1986. Late that evening she found me playing with a toy train under a large decorated tree inside the Hyatt. When she kneeled to join me it may have been our closest moment for the next decade.

Recently, she began dating a woman with a teenage daughter. Had she found a long-term partner with children of her own during my youth, perhaps I would have had an easier time accepting her homosexuality rather than resenting and denying it. Were she more open back then, maybe I would have been, too. And were she not gay, maybe my life would be better.

Mom and I still have our highs and lows, but lately there are more good times than bad. We recently spent a wonderful day together on the Monterey coast, sipping wine while watching steel-gray waves surge under the cement pillars of Cannery Row. Mom seemed happier than she’s been in a long time.

On the West Coast it’s now common to see lesbian couples walking around with their own young children. Knowing what I went through, I have mixed feelings about it. I still don’t think it’s as healthy as the nuclear family, nor do I want to live in a society where it’s outlawed. Besides, these women, many of whom are having babies through artificial insemination, could always play straight with a man for a few years, then split for a life of lesbianism once the children are born. Why create laws that support heartbreak and broken homes? Why put others through my pain?

It wasn’t until a few months after high school that I finally decided to open my own closet door. My best friend and I drove through downtown in his silver Volkswagen Jetta. We first met as five-year-olds in Sunday school. Now we were 18 and home on winter break from different colleges. Small white lights lined the shops around our historical brick and stucco plaza, a place where Anglo revolutionaries first raised California’s Bear Flag and a two-century-old Spanish mission stands in adobe on the northeast corner. I felt happy, introspective and, well, I was stoned. Then I said it. “My mom’s gay.”

He told me he already knew, that he’d know for a long time.

Darrick Meneken writes from the West Coast and can be reached through his website, www.darrickmeneken.com. He is currently accepting assignments.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Tuesday, October 24th, 2006 | Email This Post

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