Village People

I trekked to the big city last weekend to see a rock show, Geri X and the geriatric, Ronny Elliott, a longtime Florida favorite. Ronny’s songs are full of luscious imagery, but too many are about whores who just want sex and won’t give him any love. I had trouble mustering compassion. Geri X, with her long green hair and skinny tattooed arms, is a walking luscious image herself. But this has nothing to do with my point.

During the break between bands, a young woman stood up to make a plea for Impact Florida, a marriage equality organization. “We need straight people,” she said, “Oh God, we need straight people to join us.”

How sad, I thought, that they need straight people to validate their right to love. But oh so true. Being straightish, or at least relatively sure of my place on that famed Kinsey continuum, I took a card and signed up at www.impact-florida.com.

My capacity to remain stunned at people’s limited notions of family is itself limitless. Getting married is about starting the basic family unit: 1+1=2. The equation is infinitely repeatable. It’s about love, nurture, and got your back. It has nothing to do with hetero-normative pair bonding, and who’s doing what to whom using which orifice and which phallus. The only time I care about that is when my own orifices and phalluses are involved, or when someone else invites me to watch.

I grew up with a great family, a huge extended, “it takes a village” family. The only damage inflicted upon me came through socially reinforced hetero-normative pair bonding. My home was “broken,” folks said. We needed a man to “fix” it. Every man that came through left it in further disrepair.

Let me just say for the record that I don’t hate men. One of my best friends is one.

Back to broken homes. You read about Grendel in “Motherless Child.” He really did leave things broken – doors, hearts, limbs. Before him came Frankenstein – the one who said I needed to have a normal childhood experience and thus took me to Disney World. He drank, gambled away our money at the dog track, and came back to our hotel room ranting and slinging luggage about. Sympathetic staff snuck mother and me to the airport, where sympathetic flight attendants smuggled us on to the plane while keeping the monster at bay. (These were the pre-9/11 days, when security was a lot less strict. This was actually difficult. He worked for the Feds and had the right I.D.) If this is how you define “normal childhood experience,” then you can keep it. I’ve hated dog tracks, airplanes, and Disney World ever since.

Finally there was the Wolfman, filthy rich and egomaniacal, who believed personal hygiene was for the proletariat. After the usual rounds of emotional, verbal, and physical abuse, he moved on to break up my uncle’s family by moving in with his wife, while my uncle was recovering from open-heart surgery. At least there was some broken home payback. Said uncle once pistol-whipped the Wolfman after he got too violent with a female family member. Wolfman lost a couple of teeth in the bargain. Kept them lost too. Dentists were for the proletariat as well.

That same uncle, now deceased – a saint then and now – set the family tone when another relative was the first to come out. “I love her,” he said, “and I love the woman she loves. End of conversation.”

Family, again, means love, nurture and got your back. After every man-monster who was supposed to fix my broken home passed through, a motley assemblage of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and neighbors came in to pick up the pieces. Bandaids, blankets, bread, buckshot, beds, boards, beer: whatever my mother and I needed to heal, retreat to, defend ourselves, or repair the damage got produced like magic. Some of these folks came in hetero-pairs. Some came in singles. Some of them, I later figured out, were closeted queers. They all kept me as safe as they could, given the circumstances. And none of them – none – ever let me stray from the path of righteousness. Believe me, I tried.

A woman from an "intact" family once asked me, “Didn’t you feel incomplete growing up without a father?” I looked at her like she was a three-eyed cat. No, to be honest, sometimes I felt too full. I’ll take the motley village that raised me over a man-monster any day.

Her question begs a question of its own: where was my bio-dad has been during these fiascos? But that’s a story for another time. For now let’s say that if Impact Florida needs straight people, I’m there. Love is about a whole lot more than orifices and phalluses. I urge all you other straight folks out there to join them and say the same.