Gay Goodbye to Hollywood

In his latest film, Alexander Skarsgard continues the unfortunate tradition of Hollywood’s Gay Minstrel Show – this time substituting black leather for black face. 

Wag The Fag

In early 1994, I sat in a movie theater watching the film Philadelphia.   I knew it was a good movie, and an important one too, but something about it just didn’t feel right to me.  I had recently finished college and come out myself, and watching a known straight actor like Tom Hanks play not only a gay man but one who was dying of AIDS, just gave me a little nauseous feeling in the pit of my stomach.

My discomfort continued a few weeks later as I watched Hanks’ acceptance speech at that year’s Academy Awards ceremony.  First came a joke comparing his onscreen gay lover (the equally straight Antonio Banderas) to his own ‘lover’ (Rita Wilson, who was already his wife of several years by then, but hey calling them both his lovers made for a better joke, right?).  That nauseous feeling started stirring.  Then came his tribute to a former teacher and classmate whom he described as two “gay Americans” who were very important in his life, although he admitted to speaking to them for the first time in years just nights before the ceremony (likely to get their approvals before name-checking them as gay on national television).  That queasy feeling kept getting stronger, but the worst was still to come.  Hanks finished his speech with some melodramatic rambling about a heaven overcrowded by AIDS angels; complete with overwrought references to specific symptoms of the disease (fevers, skin lesions, impaired vision) that were now being healed by God.   While I do believe Hanks was being painfully sincere, I couldn’t help but find it all sincerely painful; made even more so by the camera’s constant cuts to an adoring audience of other straight Hollywood elites hanging worshipfully on his every word. 

By then, Hollywood was already starting to get criticized for films about other minority populations told through the eyes of a “white savior,” whether in plot perspective or casting choices or both.  Was Tom Hanks trying to be our “straight savior”?  Was I wrong not to want his salvation?  I did understand intellectually that Philadelphia was an important film that likely would not have been made at all – certainly not by a major Hollywood studio and director – without a star like Hanks attached.  And I also intellectually understood that even the histrionics of his speech brought visibility to the gay community and awareness about AIDS, both of which were very much needed at that time.  So I swallowed all that accumulated stomach acid, kept my discomfort to myself, and moved on.

Over the years, as more examples of gay-for-pay Hollywood continued littering the screen and consuming the spotlight, that kept getting harder to do.  Flash forward to last Sunday.  I’m sitting in another movie theater, watching Alexander Skarsgard in black leather fetish gear giving flashes of his private parts while simulating gay sex with a younger man in an alleyway. 

Pillion is certainly not as good, or important, a film as Philadelphia.  Its tone is confused at best, vacillating uneasily between titillating sex comedy and sentimental melodrama.  And yet these two films, and many others, are similar in a profound way.  Whether a generational crisis like AIDS, an inspirational figure like Harvey Milk, or a subculture like the LGBTQ leather community, there is no part of our story too personal to be coopted by straight Hollywood.  The very things that are most unique to our collective gay experience – our tragedies, our heroes, our intimacies – all get taken from us and fed back to us onscreen by straight men wearing our sexuality like drag.

Even worse is when straight actors play more effeminate gay men.  Watching straight actors put a lisp in their speech and a swoosh in their walk (Michael Douglas playing Liberace and Bradley Cooper playing Leonard Bernstein come to mind) is as offensive to me as a gay man as Old Hollywood’s fondness for white actors artificially darkening their complexions, or white actresses donning exaggerated makeup to mimic a slanted eye, must have been to black and Asian audiences.  And I don’t buy the comparison that mimicking a lisp is just like an actor portraying an accent, because even the latter should come with some boundaries.  When Meryl Streep pulls out one of her many accents to play Australian or European characters of Caucasian descent, that’s great.  When she does it to play a Chilean woman (see, or maybe don’t see, The House of the Spirits)?  It’s not the same thing.  And I would hope the 2026 Streep would know better than her 1993 self. 

But when it comes to playing gay?  Hollywood knows I am in the minority of my minority here.  Pandering can only happen when there is an audience to pander to, and most gay men are there for the taking.  Just as women get pressured into impossible standards of beauty and femininity, we are programmed all our lives that the masculine, straight man is the ultimate model of maleness; and we finally believe it.  So we come up with all sorts of reasons to justify straight actors playing gay, when the fact is that – whether as a function of fantasy or jealousy – most gay men just like it better that way.  Everyone feels pressure to fit in sometimes.  But as members of a minority, the pressure to fit into the majority is so omnipresent that we strip ourselves of what is most uniquely us in an effort to assimilate.  We spend so much of our lives trying to see the world through eyes that are anyone’s but our own.     

Hollywood taps into that damaged part of our collective psyche and exploits it. When Brendan Frazier gets hired to put on a lisp and a fat suit to play an obese gay man in The Whale, Hollywood is not only saying there are no gay actors good enough for the role but no fat ones either.  And, like Pillion, that was a small indie film that would’ve achieved the same de minimis box office results with or without a celebrity heterosexual in the lead.  But again, Hollywood knows its gay audience and that casting decision sadly tracks.  If you want proof, just fire up some gay hookup apps and count the profiles that include some variation of “no fats or femmes please.”  Hollywood may not use the same language, but they sure deliver the same message.  And, like the real gay S&M biker slaves hired to fill out the background cast of Pillion, we obediently eat it up; happily ceding a place at the table just to stay in the room.         

This all comes with a very dark undercurrent of gay-baiting, especially when sexually charged gay screen roles are contrasted with the very privileged and very heterosexual lives led by the actors playing them.  That is not about “outing” anyone.  You don’t have to come out when you’re already the in-crowd, a point that is even more obvious for the straight Hollywood in-crowd because of how publicly they navigate their straight lives in a straight world.  They’ll play gay men in a movie but then march down the red carpet of its premiere with a beautiful wife or girlfriend dutifully in tow.  I often imagine thought bubbles over the heads of actors like Skarsgard and Cooper: See how talented I am?  I am a hot straight alpha with a supermodel on my arm everywhere I go, but I can still play a convincing fag.

Not that thought bubbles are always required.  Skarsgard is a particularly notorious gay-baiter; frequently playing homoerotic onscreen roles and then dropping deliberate inuendoes into the offscreen interviews he gives to promote them.  After making some provocative statements to Variety a few months ago, where he mentioned past relationships with both genders, it was widely and understandably assumed that he had used the interview to come out as bisexual.  That viral assumption apparently crossed his own line in the sand, and he was compelled to give a new interview in Vogue asserting that was not the case and that he couldn’t even remember what his earlier comments had been intended to mean.  The thought bubble there?  Hey, I’ll play gay for you boys, but please don’t forget I’m still the straight man you want and can’t have. 

I imagine it must be at least as problematic for gay women, with even fewer roles of substance on offer to them that still often get scooped up by heterosexual actresses.  I know Jodie Foster can’t play everything – she at least needs someone else to play her own love interests, right?  But watching Annette Bening butch herself up to play lesbians when she spends her real life as the glamorous trophy wife of Hollywood’s most notorious womanizer?  I won’t apologize for finding that gross. 

A popular contrarian view is the assertion that limiting straight actors from playing gay roles would mean the reverse is true as well; that gay actors couldn’t play straight roles.  That argument is attractive to some because it gives the illusion of cover under the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion; when in fact it misses the point entirely and is a complete inversion of those principles.  Look at it this way: If Viola Davis gets cast in a role written for Nicole Kidman, that would be an example of DEI in action.  If a role intended for Viola gets reimagined and given to Nicole?  No. 

Others point to the fact that many of the biographical gay figures who have been depicted in films, like the above-referenced Liberace and Bernstein or Freddy Mercury, sadly spent most or even all of their lives publicly declaring their heterosexuality; and so having them portrayed by heterosexual actors is not only fair but adds additional irony and pathos to their characterizations.  I call BS on that thinking too. These were people who couldn’t live freely as gay men during their lifetimes, and in death they can’t even be played by gay men?  That is not an echo or an amplification of their tragic closets; merely the reinforcement and continuance of them.  

Then there is the 2022 film Bros, which got a lot of attention for being a major studio production with an equally major budget and a majorly gay cast (including Billy Eichner and Lawrence McFarlane as the romantic leads).  When the movie failed at the box office, it became another bullet in the ammunition against openly gay actors fronting feature films.  But I find that argument as hollow as I found the film.  Bros was just a standard romcom where, forget straight or gay, the two leads may as well have been played by Kate Hudson and Owen Wilson (whose own box office resumes are littered with far more misses than hits).  But these were gay actors, so they weren’t given second chances.  It was back to YouTube for Eichner, back to the Hallmark Channel for McFarlane, and back to square one for gay actors in Hollywood. 

This is why it’s so important for smaller stories and films, which are never going to be big box office regardless of casting, to give gay roles to gay actors.  But that’s also the conundrum.  Precisely because they are free from major studio expectations, indie films can explore more unique and provocative subject matter, which is like catnip to the acting egos of straight celebrities.  Skarsgard doesn’t want to play gay in the innocuous Bros.  He wants to do it in the more uniquely gay indie film Pillion, where he can really get down and dirty and maybe even give a performance that gets called (gulp) “brave.”  It’s nothing more than identity appropriation disguised as thespian artistry, and it is vile.    

I don’t think anyone could say with a straight face (pun intended) that there aren’t enough gay actors in Hollywood; many of whom have been devoted to the craft since their high school drama clubs gave them some first glimpses of self-worth and belonging.  But for all its liberal posturing about equality, the Hollywood drama club is not as welcoming or as inclusive.  Only a few openly gay leading men are the chosen ones, and even they are mostly relegated to stage and television roles (at least when a Hugh Jackman or an Andrew Garfield is not piggishly taking those away from them too).  And the rest fight it out for the funny gay friend roles (except when the producers think a straight actor will get a bigger laugh for flaming it up).  Who could have known that high school was the easy part? 

Now we have the hysteria surrounding Heated Rivalry, the Canadian series airing on HBO in the U.S.  I would have gotten around to watching it, until the extent of its manipulative promotional campaign reached new heights on the gay-baiting meter.  Pronouncing their refusal to discuss their sexualities, the two stars of the series proceeded to go on a whirlwind marketing tour; wearing flamboyant fashions on red carpets, giving titillating interviews side by side about their “freak chemistry” on and off camera, and even getting matching tattoos that say “sex sells”.  How is that not the very definition of gay-baiting?  And it was confirmed as such on none other than Valentine’s Day, when one of the pair did come out – as having a girlfriend.

Early on in their marketing blitz, the show’s creator Jacob Tierney had gone on the strategic offensive by issuing a statement comparing the viral speculation about his stars’ sexualities to an unfortunate incident a few years back when an actor on the Netflix series Heartstopper shared that he felt publicly pressured into coming out.  This was a red herring for two reasons.  First, that actor was still a teenager at the time, while the Heated Rivalry stars are both working adult professionals in their mid-twenties.  Second, the Heartstopper actor wasn’t engaging in any of the wag-the-dog antics of the gay-baiting Heated Rivalry crew.  Wag the fag might be a better descriptor of their accumulating titillations.    

Tierney’s hovering involvement lends another disturbing element to the Heated Rivalry roadshow.  It has often been said that Hollywood has an even bigger casting couch for men than for women, partly because of the number of gay men driven into creative or executive roles behind the camera when their own on-screen ambitions go up in smoke.  Tierney is a former actor, is openly gay in his mid-forties, and apparently loves to give interviews as much as his younger stars (and they are both more than two decades his junior).  It’s uncomfortably reminiscent of the way Harvey Weinstein once inserted himself into the spotlight with the younger starlets who appeared in his movies.  We of course all learned later what Weinstein was doing, and I have absolutely no information to assert that Tierney is capable of anything even remotely similar.  But he is giving that same creepy, puppet master energy.  It may be telling that his next project is scheduled to be a Netflix production chronicling the relationship between Aristotle and Alexander the Great; possibly the historical prototype for the trope of older ‘daddies’ being sexual with much younger ‘twinks.’  I think I’ll wait to find out who’s playing them before I decide if I’ll watch. 

Because I will no longer support Hollywood projects that don’t support me.  Tom Hanks conceded in a 2022 interview that Philadelphia had been of its time but that it would be “inauthentic” for him or another straight actor to play that role today.  I obviously agree, but it’s just as obvious that Hollywood still doesn’t.  There have been a long line of straight actors taking his place (or, rather, taking our place), and I’m not playing anymore.  I am no longer spending my money to watch straightwashed images of myself and my community.  I am no longer willing to see my life through anyone else’s eyes, even the baby blues of Alexander Skarsgard.   

I am willing to let go of some thirty-year old resentments, though.  There is no denying that Hollywood was critical in positively advancing the gay community and especially in raising both awareness and money for AIDS.  So maybe we did need Hollywood to save us then, and I can even be grateful to Hollywood for answering the call.  But in 2026, I feel like we deserve a chance to save ourselves.

And that starts with getting the chance to play ourselves. 

BEHIND THE MASK

~ a Halloween reminder that some hauntings are happy ~

With all respect to fathers everywhere, it’s often our mothers who make holidays so special.  They’re usually the ones doing the cooking, shopping, decorating, and everything else that sets the stage for family celebrations and the memories they inspire.  That’s why for those of us who have lost our moms there is that little extra ache that comes with the heart of special holidays.  Some of us feel it most on Christmas, or at Thanksgiving, or of course on Mother’s Day.  It always feels a bit dark for me to admit that in my case it’s hands down Halloween. 

My mom loved Halloween, and she passed that down to my siblings and me.  She decorated the house from top to bottom, both inside and out.  Nothing electrified, no animatronics; these were paper and plastic decorations she bought at the nearby (and long-gone) Five & Ten store on Avenue U in Sheepshead Bay near our house.  Inside there were skeletons with long legs that would touch my head when I sat in certain chairs, and cobwebs with spiders that dangled from the entryways of each room.  From outside you could see the witches, vampires, ghosts and goblins she placed in every window.  Each day when I came home from school, I would swear some of them had switched from one window to another.  I still can’t say if that was my childhood imagination, or if she actually moved them around while I was out, but I was fascinated.      

I remember the lion costume she made for me in second grade, when she sewed her faux mink stole into a headpiece to make a convincing mane.  And the scarecrow costume she made for me in third grade, replete with straw hat, pipe, painted nose, and even strands of hay sticking out from a matching shirt and trousers.  Were my consecutive costume choices of two characters from The Wizard of Oz a coincidence or an early tell?  If she suspected the latter, she never let on.  At least I didn’t ask to be Dorothy, which I guarantee would not have been as easy for her to indulge. 

She did indulge me in the later years of elementary school when I wanted store-bought costumes like the other kids.  In those days (late 70s/early 80s), store costumes were either hilarious or sad depending on your point of view.  They were basically just sweaty plastic bags that covered your body with a picture of the character you were supposed to be, accompanied by a cheap mask with tiny slits for your eyes (that you couldn’t see out of) and your mouth (that would cut your tongue every time you tried to talk).  They were a complete waste of money, money that in retrospect we probably didn’t have, but she bought them for me anyway.  I honestly can’t remember what any of them were; likely random superheroes I picked to fit in with the other boys.  It’s funny how I forget those but can vividly remember the costumes she made for me when I was much younger.   

I also vividly remember the games she would play with us after we finished trick or treating.  These included bobbing for apples, which terrified me because for some reason I was convinced that I could drown putting my head in what was literally inches of water.  Another and more legitimately frightening one was apple swinging, where an apple was strung to the ceiling and then swung aggressively at your head to see if you could catch it... in your teeth.  I don’t think that one is recommended any more, but this was back when many dentists advised against flossing because they thought it created gaps in your teeth.  My favorite game was the penny push, where a penny was placed at one end of a table and you had to push it with your nose to the other end.  Whoever nosed their penny to the other side in the least number of pushes, without it falling on the floor, won.  In the event of a tie, you nosed it back to the other side and then kept going back and forth until there was a winner.  There was some uncomfortable nose friction involved in that one, but it never felt as imminently dangerous as the apple games.  

As years passed, it was a joy to see my older sister and brother play those games with their children, and now a new joy to see those children as adults doing so with kids of their own.  In the crazy, circular tapestry that is life, I even had the privilege of switching roles with my mom when Alzheimer’s disease reverted her final years to a second childhood before claiming her life.  All the mystery and magic of Halloween – and indeed of childhood itself – I was able to give back to her because she had instilled it so lovingly in me.  Love is the ultimate, eternal ghost and when we keep traditions alive, we are inviting our loved ones back to haunt us again and again in the best ways possible.  Tradition is what keeps their spirits active and present, rather than receding into the past tense of memory.

My mom must have felt that way too.  Those games were traditions passed down to her from her Irish mother, and undoubtedly to her from generations before, and which – like all of Halloween – have origins in the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain.  This festival coincided with the autumnal harvest of apples, which figured prominently in the feasts of the day, and so the apple games are derivatives of that.  The penny push is a reference to another practice in the early times of Ireland and other regions of Western Europe and one that dates back even further to ancient Greece.  The dead were buried with two coins as payment for transport between worlds.  Because there were two, this often gets misrepresented in modern literature and cinema as one coin to cover each eye, when in fact both were placed inside the deceased’s mouth for safekeeping.  So why two?  Well, one was for passage to the other side.  The second was in case they found a way to come back.       

Maybe it’s not so dark that Halloween is the holiday when I most feel both the heart of my mom and the ache of her loss.  Samhain represented the time of year when our loved ones could find their way back; when the boundary separating life and death became blurred and the veil between worlds was at its thinnest.  Tombs were reopened and surrounded by candles embedded within hollowed turnips (a precursor to pumpkins) to preserve their flames and light the way for the dead as they exited their graves.  People dressed in costumes – it was called guising – not to scare the real ghosts away but to make it possible for them to blend in and walk freely among the living again, if only for a day. 

So look closely this Halloween.  You never know who might be looking back from behind a mask.   

GALAXY GIRL

~ celebrating the silver anniversary of a golden summer ~

Tennis players usually get attention by winning big and winning often.  But legends operate on an entirely different plane of existence.  Legends need only appear. 

Which is what Venus Williams did last month when, with little notice, she accepted a wild card into a tournament in Washington, D.C. after not playing in more than a year (and playing only sporadically in the two years before that).  She still did some winning too; not big but not that it mattered.  At 45 years old she split two matches with quality opponents both ranked among the top 40 players in the world.  She even entered the doubles draw and won a round there as well.  All her matches were played before frenetic crowds who lived and died with Venus on every point.  And that’s not counting the many more, like me, who did the same in front of our television sets.  She was at it again this week in Cincinnati, saving a match point before falling to another player more than two decades her junior.  By the time she arrives in New York for the upcoming U.S. Open, fan frenzy for Venus should be at a fever pitch.     

By coincidence or design, we are enjoying this renaissance of Venus in what turns out to be a very special silver anniversary for her.  In the summer of 2000, Venus was getting attention the usual way by winning big and winning often as she produced the most dominant stretch of tennis in her long and illustrious career.  An electrifying 35-match win streak saw her claim six tournaments in quick succession: including Wimbledon, the U.S. Open, and the Olympics.  She was nearly as dominant the following summer when she became only the third (and still most recent) woman in professional tennis history to defend titles at both Wimbledon and the U.S. Open in the same year (it’s not Venus’ fault the Olympics aren’t annual). 

Television producers at the time invariably cued up the song “Venus” as her personal summer soundtrack, foregoing the 1960s original by the band Shocking Blue in favor of the 1980s Bananarama remake for that little extra girl-power-oomph.  It was an obvious choice, even if I had another anthem playing in my own head as I watched Venus roll through the tour.  Like any child of the 1970s and 80s, I had loved the series of animated vignettes known as Schoolhouse Rock!  And of all the cool characters that populated the series, none was cooler than Interplanet Janet; the galaxy girl from a future world mistaken for a shooting star as she traverses the universe.  As Venus hopped countries and continents scooping up all those trophies and medals, Janet’s song was the one I couldn’t stop hearing.       

Not that I was the only one making intergalactic connections to both Venus’ name and game.  When covering her wins, journalists could never pass up a good, celestially inspired headline (think She’s Out of this World! or Venus Rising!).  But there was one thematic detail we all overlooked and that turned out to be eerily prophetic; one that Janet herself points out on her guided tour through the galaxy: Venus, after all, is the second planet from the sun.  

While little sis Serena had sprung a surprise by taking the Williams family’s first grand slam singles title at the 1999 U.S. Open, Venus’ statement summers of 2000 and 2001 seemed to have restored order.  Heading into the 2002 French Open, her grand slam haul had risen to four while Serena remained stuck at one.  If I had been told then that one sister would win another three, while the other would go on to win another 22, I know where I would have placed my bet.  And I would have lost.  Because starting with that 2002 French Open, Serena completely flipped the script of the inevitable movie unfolding before our eyes.  She won four consecutive majors to sweep a non-calendar Grand Slam and, most amazing of all, she met and defeated Venus in the final of all four.  In doing so, she reclaimed the lead in the family grand slam tally; and this time she would never relinquish it.

As hard as it is to speculate on the dynamics of any family, we have all had unique front row seats to the Williams sisters.  We have seen them on court at their most intense in the heat of battle, and we have heard them in interviews at their most emotional in the immediate aftermath of dramatic victories and painful losses.  From all that anecdotal evidence, Venus saw her role in their relationship as one that was infinitely more protective and possibly more selfless.  I’ll never forget the sight of Venus, after losing that watershed French Open final in 2002, running to the stands for her camera so that she could take up-close photos of Serena at the trophy presentation.  And that’s just one of many moments where, win or lose, Venus had Serena front and center in her mind.  Don’t get me wrong.  Venus, like any other champion, loved to win and hated to lose.  She could be gleeful in victory and bitter in defeat…. when she was winning or losing against anyone other than Serena.  But Venus always found a way to limit her celebrations and mute her disappointments when it was her sister’s feelings that were involved.   

Serena?  Not so much.  She could be gracious and complimentary toward Venus as long as she was the one winning.  After she lost to Venus in the 2008 Wimbledon final, a win that remains Venus’ last major title, Serena rolled her eyes through a tense post-match press conference where the best she could muster, with some prodding, was a begrudging acknowledgment of happiness for her sister.  When a journalist remarked that she didn’t look so happy, Serena snapped back “I wonder why” and promptly walked out.  Even mom Oracene, usually the quiet one in the family (especially when compared to boisterous dad Richard), didn’t like what she observed that day and was unusually candid with the press herself when asked about Serena’s reaction to the loss.  A clearly exasperated Oracene sharply replied, “Well, she’s just going to have to learn how to suck things up!”  The only person who didn’t mind?  Venus, of course, who several times during her own press conference made a point of diverting attention from her victory by reminding everyone that Serena still had the better record overall.   

Much is made of an early interview from Venus’ childhood, where Richard harshly scolds a journalist for his line of questioning.  Now circulating on YouTube, and memorably recreated in the film King Richard, the moment plays out like a lion defending his cub.  Not so well known, but I think just as compelling, is a moment that reveals big sister Venus at her lioness best, and you can also track it down on YouTube.  It’s from a 2009 U.S. Open press conference with Venus and Serena after they had just won the doubles title as a team.  It was a routine victory for the sisters, but not so routine was the backdrop.  Less than 48 hours earlier, Serena had been eliminated in singles when she lost her cool after a controversial call had set up a match point against her; with the penalty that was then imposed for her outburst effectively ending the match. 

Serena was sharply criticized and heavily fined for her behavior but was allowed to remain in the doubles draw with Venus.  Facing the press after they won, the media pounced on Serena with question after question about her singles controversy.  As Serena was struggling to answer yet another, this one from a particularly condescending reporter, Venus politely stepped in and started speaking to give her sister some breathing room.  When the reporter dared to retort “I was asking her,” Venus tightened her shoulders, narrowed her eyes, and said, “Are you getting aggressive with me?”  She hadn’t even raised her voice, but it was as if she had changed the molecules in the room.  The reporter, who had been so rude just a moment earlier, was now the one stammering.  But Venus kept going: “Because I was about to say something and you interrupted me.  I let you say what you needed to say.  Thank you.”  Venus then proceeded to articulate a thoughtful statement on how the incident was both a commentary on the pressure of professional sport and an opportunity for personal growth.        

Serena is now among the most recent of many iconic female athletes, including other tennis greats like Chris Evert, who have spoken publicly about how it took motherhood for them to finally prioritize someone else after the necessary selfishness demanded of a life in competitive sport.  But Venus always seemed to have that instinct preternaturally.  She wasn’t the mother; she is in fact little more than one year older than Serena.  But that still made her the big sister, and she has spoken eloquently and lovingly through the years about just how much that has always meant to her.

None of this is to say that Venus should have won more, or Serena less.  Venus has always approached her profession the way she has lived her life; on her own terms.  First, she only played when and where she wanted to.  She didn’t chase ranking points and accepted the penalties when she skipped mandatory tournaments at the height of her career to better manage her own time and her own body.  Even when she was dominating in 2000 and 2001, the tour’s computer did not show her at the top of the sport.  After two consecutive (and frankly embarrassing) years of watching Venus win the biggest titles in the game and still finish no higher than number three in the world, the tour tweaked its points system to more appropriately weigh grand slam results (allowing Venus to finally, if briefly, reach number one in 2002 before Serena surpassed her). 

Just as importantly, Venus always played how she wanted to.  While she certainly improved and evolved her game over the years, she never strayed from her devotion to all-out aggression, which could mean a cavalcade of powerful aces and winners in victory or a landslide of double faults and errors in defeat.  Serena would develop the more nuanced technique, thanks in part to a greater willingness to utilize outside coaching resources.  Venus employed hitting partners and traveling coaches, but she mostly preferred to keep her tennis a family affair and always left the formal coaching titles to mom and dad.  One also gets the sense that she might not have loved the game as much if she had retooled her strokes by adding greater safety margins.  A self-described “big hitter” to this day, she loves playing fast and playing hard.  Watching Serena, I always had the impression that she just wanted to win the point by whatever means necessary.  But watching Venus, I had just as strong an impression that she would rather lose a point by staying aggressive and making an error than by getting back a safe shot that could set up her opponent to score an easy winner.  She has brandished her tennis racquet like a sword, living and dying by it.  Her life, her career, her terms.

Venus may be the second planet from the sun, but Venus Williams teaches us that you are always number one in your own story as long as you never lose sight of what you want that story to be.  Or, as Interplanet Janet might say, we are each the center of our own universe, which may sound selfish but is merely self-defining.  Just as she understands the geometry of a tennis court, Venus understands the geometry of success.  She knows that we are at our best when we are giving our best to the people and the things we love the most.  For Venus, those loves have always included being a big sister and being a big hitter; and she has been unwavering in her commitment to both.       

Serena needed to be the best.  Venus needed to give her best.  While both are admirable approaches to life, the latter is infinitely more replicable; more achievable.  Only one person in any given field can be the best, but everyone can give their best.  Everyone can learn from Venus. 

As she makes this latest appearance in the summer sky, however long it may last, let’s continue to appreciate Venus as the legend she is and will always remain.  And let’s also pause to remember the golden origins of that legend 25 silvery summers ago, when all the stars aligned for the tennis player with the heavenly name to both give and be the best.  A new century was dawning, old Pluto was still a planet, and Venus Williams was running faster, jumping higher, and hitting bigger than any woman in the world.  Make that in the entire galaxy. 

And most impressive of all?  Even in her own house.    

Long Distance Winners

As New York City prepares for this year’s marathon, I look back on last year’s and remember that among fathers and sons……

Races Are Run

The leaves are falling, the weather is blowing hot and cold, and 50,000 long distance runners from 150 countries around the globe are descending on New York City for this year’s marathon.  I knew at least two of those athletes, from one of those foreign countries, who ran last year’s edition.  My friend Marty, who had moved to the U.S. from Ireland eight years earlier, decided to train for his first marathon so that he could run it with his dad.  His dad is an accomplished runner in Europe, but this would be his first NYC marathon and Marty was determined to run it with him.  They were also running for his dad’s brother, Marty’s uncle, who had died of leukemia. 

My own dad was nearing the end of an even longer race, in his final lap after 96 years on the planet.  I’m not sure if I was inspired by what Marty was doing with his dad, or perhaps jealous.  It was probably a little of both, but I found myself starting to train with the same vigor, gradually increasing both my distances and my speeds.  Not that I was ever going to run the actual marathon.  I have way too much anxiety to run in big crowds like that.  But I thought maybe I could just keep topping my own personal bests and getting closer.  I had always been a casual runner as part of my workouts, and I got more serious about it after COVID shut down the gyms.  But I really pumped up the volume on my runs once Marty started training for the marathon with his dad.    

Marty’s younger than me, and his dad is actually closer in age to me than to my father.  But our dads did have at least one thing in common: they had each endured and survived particularly harrowing times in history.  Mine had dropped out of high school, first to work menial jobs to help support his family through the end of the Great Depression and then to serve in the U.S. Navy during World War II.  Marty’s dad lived through the violence and terrorism that claimed thousands of innocent Irish lives in the many years prior to 1998’s Belfast Agreement.  This is a period that gets sadly overlooked in historical discussions about terrorism, but during which a climate of fear became so pervasive that entire decades are referred to in Ireland merely as The Troubles; as if a name more descriptive of the actual atrocities involved would be too painful for the nation's collective memory to bear.   

It may have been his first marathon, but Marty is a lifelong athlete; an accomplished boxer and mixed martial artist.  My dad and older brother were not runners either, but they were also athletic.  My dad had a body sculpted by years of old school push-ups, sit-ups, and pick-up games of handball.  My brother got a blackbelt in judo and had inherited my dad’s athletic genes the way Marty must have inherited his dad’s.  But me?  Not so much.  I joined a gym and started working out as an adult as a means of managing my weight and anxiety, but as a child I had no athletic ability or interest whatsoever.  I had a very disciplined upbringing; I liked to joke with Marty that I probably had an even stricter Irish Catholic family than he did.  But no words struck more fear into my heart than my dad’s voice saying, “C’mon, let’s go play some ball.” 

I tried as hard as I could, if for no other reason than that I could see the disappointment and embarrassment in his eyes when I hopelessly flailed my arms at whatever sport he tried to share with me.  Baseball after baseball landed on my head instead of in the catcher’s glove.  It was the same thing on the handball court, where that little rubberized ball found my face far more often than my hand.  He even tried replacing handball with racquetball and bought us racquets – and my dad was not one to spend money – thinking it would provide a bigger target for me to connect with.  It turns out there was no racquet big enough.  Probably afraid of my mother’s reaction if I had landed in the hospital with a self-inflicted head injury, he finally just gave up.  I remember feeling both relieved and sad when those words – “C’mon, let’s go play some ball” – slowly disappeared from his vocabulary. 

My best runs were those where I fell into such a groove that my mind went completely blank; a naturally induced state of Zen where ideas and memories roamed freely through my thoughts.  On one long run last year, I got stuck in a thunderstorm near Battery Park City.  As I found shelter under a restaurant awning, I could feel time and space giving way beneath my feet.  I was 12 years old again, and Battery Park had become Central Park.  Not uncommon for a gay kid of my generation, I had been a huge Diana Ross fan growing up.  The summer before I started high school, she gave her first free concert on the Great Lawn.  I had begged my parents to take me, and it was my dad who agreed.  A dangerous storm, with bolts of lightning blasting ever closer to the large monitors and sound equipment on the make-shift stage, caused the concert to be cut short after only a few songs.  I kept hoping the rain would stop and the concert would resume, until my dad literally dragged me out of the park. 

    
It's interesting to think I didn’t want to run an actual marathon because of my anxiety about large crowds.  That anxiety would certainly peak for me many years later after my experience on 9/11, but all my life it had been a struggle; except for that one night in Central Park.  It was utter pandemonium, with endless rows of people running for cover.  The most conservative estimate I can find of the attendance at that concert is 350,000 people (with several sources putting the number much higher) – which is literally seven times the 50,000 runners expected for this year’s New York City marathon.  But one of those 350,000 people was my dad, and he was next to me.  He liked to joke that he took me because it was free, and there may have been some truth to that.  But I can see now that he was also trying to connect with me.  He was still trying to find a racquet that would be big enough to make contact.       

        
It is sad but also comforting when you realize that the absence of someone reveals more about them than their presence ever did.  When you start piecing together the clues of love and understanding that were always there even if they could never be spoken for any thousands or millions of reasons.  I can accept the fact that my father would’ve preferred another son like my brother, or a son like Marty.  But I can also acknowledge that he figured out how to love the one he had in me.  Contrary to popular belief, love is not always unconditional.  It often comes with qualifiers.  Perhaps my dad loved me despite who I was, and perhaps I loved him despite knowing that.  I can be hurt by the qualifiers it came with or just grateful that the love was there.  I have certainly felt both sides of that blade, but I now choose to lean far more into gratitude.  Maybe that’s the wisdom of age, or a lesson of loss, or merely the acceptance that running further into love and further away from resentment is the only road to a happy life.

I sometimes wondered where Marty’s and his dad’s minds took them when they hit that ‘runner’s Zen’.  Perhaps his dad was processing the childhood he lived in the shadow of The Troubles; or filtering the grief of losing his brother through memories of happier times they had shared.  And Marty?  Perhaps he was revisiting the challenges he faced when he first moved to the U.S.; completely alone and forced to take construction jobs when his vast athletic achievements and qualifications in Ireland were initially unappreciated here and lost in the vacuum of our Instagram-ready fitness culture.  Marty would prove soon enough he was better than all of them and become one of New York City’s most elite personal trainers and coaches.  I know he and his dad are proud of that, and they should be. 

Sometimes you get to the end of a long run and can’t believe how far or how fast you made it.  There may have been moments of pain or exhaustion along the way, but they get softened by the pride you feel looking back.  Life is like that too.  Time has a way of collapsing in on itself, and experiences from long ago can feel closer than ever, and better than ever too.  Pain is immediate and so it’s of course what we focus on when we are going through difficult times.  But from the comfort of distance, we just get an amazing view; the kind you see from a plane or the top of a mountain where everything looks so breathtaking it’s hard to imagine there could be anything but beauty below.  We just have to travel those emotional miles to get high enough and gain that perspective.  Easier said than done, but so worth it when you arrive. 

I did finally work my way up to a marathon-equivalent, 26.3 mile run – I call it a Quinathon because I basically just ran up and down the Huson River until I hit that goal – and I did it in under four hours.  It’s admittedly much easier than an actual marathon, where you are navigating hills and valleys along the way rather than running a mostly flat, even surface like the one along the river.  Marty liked to teasingly remind me of that, but I was still proud and I know he was too.  Walking home gingerly to stave off cramps, he was the first person I texted.   

Days later I got to cheer for him and his dad as they completed the actual marathon, running together as father and son to bridge the generation between them and shrink the globe that separates them most of the year.  There were some brief moments of panic when they became separated but they found each other at the finish line, just as my dad and I had eventually found each other too.  Little more than a week after the marathon, my dad finished the final, 96^th leg of his life’s race and we laid him to rest the day before Thanksgiving.  Marty was one of the first friends I texted that news as well, as I waited with my sisters in our childhood home for the funeral staff to collect the body. 

Blocks away from that house still stood the catholic elementary school I attended as a kid.  Every year they had a mandatory ‘activity day’ that parents had to attend with their children, kind of like a school fair without a budget.  One of the inevitable activities was the awkward, two-legged potato sack race that was often set up in father-son combinations.  My dad and I certainly never won any of them, for which I assume full blame.  I mean, I wasn’t going to win any athletic contest as it was; did they really have to add a simulated disability?  But I like to think we made up for it when it counted.  Life and death are the ultimate two-legged race, and perhaps the only one we can both lose and win.  Nobody beats death of course, but a life well-lived most certainly outlasts it. 

    
The universe also tends to place people and experiences in our paths when we need them most.  I sadly can no longer run due to a severe hip injury.  When I first received the diagnosis, I was angry and blamed myself for pushing my body too hard and too fast.  But I’ve realized I ran enough of those emotional miles to right-size that perspective.  I looked in that magical rearview mirror and saw just how much running had given me.  It helped me through the isolation of COVID.  It helped me see the beauty of the lower Manhattan skyline for the first time since it had been obscured in my mind’s eye by the events of 9/11 more than 20 years earlier.  It helped me feel powerful and calm all at the same time, even in the face of grief.  How can I be anything but grateful for all of that?  Maybe running is no longer part of my life’s journey, but it was there for me when I needed it the most. 

And so was Marty.  He and I don’t see each other as much anymore; the roads of life have a way of diverging and taking people in different directions.  But we are still in touch, and we will always have that uniquely shared experience from last year when all those roads intersected.  The leaves were falling, the weather was blowing hot and cold; he was running with his dad, and I was running for mine.  And we all crossed the finish lines we were meant to.  We all were, and still are, long distance runners.

  
And winners.     

Grieving Room

If a heart breaks in the forest but nobody hears it, did it make a sound?  The answer is always yes, but sometimes we’re not even ready to hear it ourselves.  How lucky we are to have the worlds of art, film, music, and dance – which provide a safe but cathartic release for our grief until we are strong enough to face it head on. 

The Safety Dance

I can’t even recall which museum it was, but more than a dozen years later I can still see myself on the other side of one of those red ropes intended to separate great works of art from clumsy fingers like mine.  Museums and art had never really been my things, but sometimes in relationships you have to give a little.  My boyfriend at the time, Roger, was an artist and avid art lover, and I joined him on several museum outings where I usually made best efforts to conceal my boredom with varying degrees of success.  But that day – that painting – was different.  It was part of an exhibit of works by Winslow Homer, a prominent 19^th century painter who was best known for his seascapes.  The painting that had so mesmerized me was clearly one of a mother making her way, with great care but great determination, down a rocky sh ore with an infant in her arms as the wind and sea raged in their efforts to thwart her.  I remember the power that emanated from the other side of the rope.  Uncontained by the borders of the painting’s frame was the incredible will of that mother to protect her child.   

 At the time, my own mother was in the final stages of Alzheimer’s disease and would be gone within the year.  Maybe it was her determination I was seeing, or my own; another mother and child locked in battle with nature itself but determined not to let each other go.  I verbalized a far less articulate version of what I was experiencing to Roger, sure that he would respond with some professorial oral history of the painting (in fairness, something he probably didn’t do quite as often as I remember).  But instead, he just nodded and squeezed my hand. 
 
Whatever I was seeing that day, it wasn’t what Homer had seen and painted 120 years earlier.  I discovered this only recently, after moving into a new apartment that had a lot of wall space.  I thought of that painting and wanted to get a reprint of it on canvas.  I texted Roger, no longer a boyfriend but happily still a friend, who replied with an image and a link to a website where I could buy one.  I was about to do just that, when I noticed under the image was the title “Summer Night” followed by a brief description which read “ladies dancing by moonlight.”  I called Roger and said it looked like the painting but must have been a different one – most of old Homer’s stuff were seascapes after all – and reminded him I wanted the one we had seen of the mother and child. 
 
“No, that’s the one,” he said, “look at it closely.”  I stretched my fingers across the image to make it as large as would fit within the frame of my phone’s screen, and suddenly I saw it.  What I had seen as the head of an infant resting on a woman’s back, was in fact that of a second woman leaning on her shoulder.  Obscured by shadows in the night sky was another set of arms folding into an embrace.  Suddenly the wind and sea were no longer raging; there was a breeze blowing in time with gentle waves in the background.  “Why didn’t you tell me I was so wrong?” I asked, half accusingly and half laughingly.  “I didn’t have the heart to,” he said, “You had created this whole story around it.  And besides,” he added, “you weren’t wrong.  You were just seeing what you needed to see.”
 
There is something particularly dislocating about the grief you feel watching someone die from Alzheimer’s or dementia, because you find yourself in the surreal position of missing someone who isn’t gone yet.  And that almost makes you feel guilty because you know that while part of you wants their suffering to end, another part of you wants your own suffering to end too.  And still another part of you doesn’t want to let go at all.  There are so many conflicting and conflicted emotions that it’s little wonder my connection to the painting was as confused as it was profound.  It gave an outlet to a grief I could barely acknowledge, even to myself. 
 
While that was a singularly unique experience for me, it reminded me of other times in my life when art in all its forms – music, theater, film – provided a catharsis for a specific source of grief I wasn’t yet ready to process.  I remember watching the film Marvin’s Room and crying uncontrollably.  The film focuses on sisters; one played by Diane Keaton, who has devoted herself to caring for their elderly relatives, and another played by Meryl Streep, who returns home after a long absence when Keaton’s character becomes seriously ill herself.  The movie is a little clunky in the way that a stage play transferring to the big screen can often be, as it tries to open up scenes originally intended for intimately staged sets.  But the dialogue and performances are powerful.  Keaton has a heart-wrenching monologue, after being teased by Streep for never being in love, where she confides that she did have a secret young love but had never recovered from his tragic death by drowning.  Keaton recounts the events with as much detachment and even humor as she can muster, but the ache is still there in her eyes.  By contrast, Streep’s eyes widen with awakening horror as she gradually realizes what her sister had endured without her ever even knowing.  It’s a brief scene but their respective pain flickers across their faces like shadows falling across the screen.
 
I first saw the film in the mid-90s, at which point I hadn’t yet started to navigate the challenge of caring for elderly parents with my siblings.  Nor had I lost a love to drowning.  Or had I?  I had been in a secret, closeted relationship for nine years which ended when he married a woman.  Keeping the relationship a secret had been hard enough, but I was carried through that by my hope that it would one day work out and we would be together.  But losing him secretly came with no hope to offset the pain, and it did feel like a death by drowning; with all those years crashing in like waves around me.  If a heart breaks in the forest but nobody hears it, did it make a sound?  If nobody knew that relationship existed, had it even mattered?  Could it even count as love?  I told myself for years that it didn’t.  I couldn’t even bring myself to discuss it in therapy until many years later, and even then it felt like a disloyalty or a betrayal of him somehow.  My therapist looked at me sadly and said, “But it was your life too.” 
 
Grieving silently, even retroactively, is a tragically common experience among members of the LGBTQ+ community of a certain age.  And with Pride month in full swing, in addition to the celebratory parties and political rallies, it’s also a time when deep personal wounds often get reopened.  Sometimes forgotten in the years since marriage equality became the law of the land is the communal pain of entire generations who could not love – or even lose love – freely.  For me, it was a love lost to the closet itself; a partner who chose to create an alternate universe for his life that could not even include his own true self let alone me.  Many others managed to build lives of love together only to have the final privilege of grief stolen right out from under them; denied access to hospital rooms or turned away from funeral homes.  And make no mistake, grief is a privilege every bit as much as love.  They are intertwined in the arc of any life’s story, with grief the inevitable denouement.  Grief should be love’s final lap around the sun, burning and intense but out in the open like the elements themselves.  When even that is taken from us or forced out of the sun and into the shadows, there is no resolution.  A heart can never start healing if it never stops breaking. 
 
There is a climactic scene at the end of Marvin’s Room where Keaton’s character asserts that she is not afraid of dying because she has had so much love in her life.  Streep agrees that their family loves her very much.  “No, I mean that I love them,” Keaton replies, “I’m so lucky.”  Tears flood my eyes no matter how many times I hear those words, and I now understand why.  My relationship mattered because it mattered to me.  I thought for years that I resented this person, maybe even hated him, when the truth was that I loved him.  The truth is that, to this day, that long-ago relationship nobody knew about is still the love of my life.  How he remembers me, or if he remembers me at all, is none of my business.  I could never really move past the grief of losing him because I could never accept or admit how much I had loved him; and therefore, just how much I had lost.  It was love because I loved him.  It was my life too.  But before I could come to terms with all of that, Diane Keaton and Marvin’s Room were the safety valve that allowed me some emotional release and relief. 
 
Singer-songwriter Greg Brown has a song called “One Cool Remove” which this listener interprets as a meditation on the phenomenon of art as catharsis: “One cool remove away from the things that hurt me,” he sings, “… See it all in a passion play, one cool remove away.”  Shawn Colvin and Mary Chapin Carpenter covered the song and when Colvin met Brown afterward, she was anxious to know what he had thought about it.  “Is she [Carpenter] saying, “like a Buddhist breathing?” he asked her, referencing another lyric in the song.  When Colvin confirmed that she was, he replied, “Well, it’s supposed to be ‘like a Buddhist bleeding.’”  Colvin retold the story in an interview after that meeting and said, “So we got that wrong, but I’m glad we said ‘breathing.’”  Maybe she had heard what she needed to hear as part of her own cool remove from something in her life.  Or maybe it was just a mistake that someone else needed to hear.  Her and Carpenter’s cover is the first version of the song that I heard, and I’m glad they said ‘breathing’ too.
 
Because just like love and loss, grieving and breathing are inextricably intertwined.  Without release, grief gets stuck in the fibers of our bodies in much the same way we hold our breath too long when we are anxious; or the way we psychically force tears back into the deepest recesses of our foreheads when we are too proud to just let them fall.  The arts give us cover to cry, to exhale, to grieve.  And it does all of that without ever giving us away.  We get to rewrite or repaint an artist’s work and fit it into our own narrative; to spill it onto the canvas of our own lives.  Whatever hurt you are feeling, I guarantee there is a painting to frame it or a song to give voice to it or a dance to help you, if even for a moment, soar above it.  Unhealthy behaviors in response to loss, from isolation to addiction, tend to wall us off even further and keep us in a perpetual state of grieving.  The arts are not a wall but rather a cushion; an access point to deeper pain waiting to be unraveled when we are strong enough.   I’m so lucky that I have had Homer, and Diane Keaton, and Shawn Colvin, and the countless other artists who have provided such soft landings for my pain through the years.  Even when my heart wasn’t ready to heal, they at least helped me keep it open.        
 
I do have that Homer canvas hanging prominently on my wall, and I’m glad that I can still see in it the mother and child I saw all those years ago.  But I’m glad that I now also see the two ladies dancing.  I can see both joy and struggle – the full arc of a life.  I wish that for myself and for everyone.  No life deserves anything less. 

--
 
*If you or someone you know is feeling overwhelmed by grief, and not currently under medical care, please start by contacting the National Mental Healthline which can be reached by calling or texting 988.

Higher Resolution

How can you be comfortable in the world when you feel like a stranger in your own skin?  Look deeper and aim higher:
 
No Body Is Wrong

 
January always settles in like the aftermath of a severe storm.  When the holiday lights come down, the emotional dissonance that was always lurking beneath the glitter is illuminated.  Maybe we are coming off our first holiday season after the loss of a loved one.  Maybe there are lingering resentments toward loved ones still among the living, about slights real or imagined.  Did someone not appreciate the effort we made?  Did someone else not make enough of an effort?  Like a child who sees that tree coming down without ever receiving their most-hoped-for gift, we are all managing emotional vacancies of different kinds and sizes.  But at least it’s over, right?  At least we can start picking up the pieces.
 
Not so fast.  December was rough, but at least then we had the distraction of the glitter.  We may not have liked what someone said at a party, but it was still a party and we had to get through it.  We may have been missing someone ourselves, but we had to put our game-face on to cheer up someone else.  There was always something pulling our attention in another direction.  And while we are now left facing whatever aches and pains the holidays had distracted us from, January has one more to pile on and it’s a doozie: the dreaded and inescapable new year’s resolution.  Because why wouldn’t we take this moment in time, when we may be at our most vulnerable, to torment ourselves even further with the burden of exacting expectations and punishing demands?  It’s about as good an idea as bringing an alcoholic to their first AA meeting while they are still in the throes of a painful hangover (which, from other personal experience, I can confirm is not a good idea at all).  Make no mistake, we are not in the aftermath of the storm.  We are in its eye.       
 
This is perhaps especially true for the millions of Americans like me who suffer from eating disorders.  According to a global consumer survey by online data platform statista.com, each of the top three new year’s resolutions made by Americans in 2022 revolved around our bodies: exercising more, eating healthier, and losing weight.  Bringing up the rear were spending more time with family and friends (fourth place) and saving more money (fifth).  Good to know we have our priorities straight.    
 
Yes, for those of us with eating disorders new year’s resolutions are like an annual celebration of our secret torture; when the demons we usually suffer with in silence get trotted out in public disguised as inspiration.  These resolutions are the ultimate lines in the sand separating our ideas of what’s good and bad, what’s beautiful and ugly, who has the most value and who has none.  We draw those lines for ourselves every day, and then we keep moving them.  Our sand becomes quicksand.  Like any addict, no low is too low and no high quite high enough.  I’m going to stop eating after one more pop tart.  My leg is starting to hurt but I know I can squeeze one more mile out of this run.  We already expend so much of our energy criticizing ourselves and judging our bodies that every day feels like its own set of resolutions, when what we really want is to be free of them.  What I really want is to go meet a friend for dinner without worrying the whole way there about what I’m going to order.  What I really want is to be able to look at myself in the mirror – no, not even – I want to just be able to walk past my reflection in a store window without stopping to consider if I look too fat.  In a bulky coat.  In the dead of winter.   
 
In my mid-40s, after finally getting more honest in therapy, I was diagnosed with Binge Eating Disorder (BED) with bulimic tendencies.  BED is defined as recurrent binge eating episodes characterized by a loss of control and marked distress, but usually without a subsequent purging phase.  That’s where my bulimic-tendency qualifier comes in.  While my binging dates back to childhood and I never purged by vomiting my food, as an adult I started practicing the abusive arts of other purging activities: an overuse of laxatives and enemas, obsessively tracking and hyper-restricting my caloric intake, and taxing my body with punishing periods of over-exercise; all to be followed by still more binges.  This endless rat wheel (hamster wheel feels far too gentle) has caused my weight to fluctuate by as much as 40 pounds in either direction, which is a lot by any standard let alone for someone like me whose height falls just short of 5 foot 5.    
 
According to the National Eating Disorders Association, 9% of the U.S. population (close to 29 million Americans) will suffer from an eating disorder at some point in their lives.  Studies demonstrate how those with such disorders are at amplified risk of virtually every health condition imaginable, both physical and mental.  These ultimately include mortality, not only by illness but by suicide.  And while research remains limited, several studies show that members of the LGBTQ+ community are even more likely than the general population to suffer from eating disorders.  The Duke Center for Eating Disorders acknowledges the need for more research particularly for those members of the community who identify as transgender or nonbinary, citing a recent study which demonstrated that an extremely high proportion of such individuals answered questions in a way that revealed patterns of disordered eating.  For clarity, disordered eating is a behavior while an eating disorder is a medical diagnosis.  And while a behavior does not necessarily lead to a diagnosis, it is an indicator of greater risk.       
 
Duke points to the prevalence of gender dysphoria among the transgender and nonbinary population.  Gender dysphoria, for which I also received a later-in-life diagnosis, impacts transgender and nonbinary individuals (I identify as the latter) who suffer significant distress due to an incongruence between their assigned sex and their gender identity.  The connection between gender dysphoria and eating disorders is that both often involve an unhealthy relationship with our bodies and a resulting obsession with our appearance, including our weight.  If my alcohol issues kicked in at 14, shortly after puberty had left me confused (or perhaps clear) about my sexuality; I can trace my body issues back much earlier when I first became aware on some level that I was at least confused about my gender.  From a very young age and for so much of my life, I have felt allergic to my own skin.    
 
I had been a skinny kid until around the third grade, but I can remember already indulging in food binges.  There were two large drawers in the cabinetry of our kitchen, both of which for some reason were called “breadboxes” even though you would only find bread in the first one.  The second was where my parents stashed “the sweets”; boxes of whatever store-bought pastries and desserts had been picked up during the week’s food shopping.  I could always tell which of them had been to the store based on what I found there.  My mom would pick up the more expensive brands like Hostess (cupcakes and twinkies), Drake’s (yodels and ring dings), and Entenmann’s (donuts and cookies).  My dad was more economical and so I knew it was him if I opened the drawer to find Tastykake or Little Debbie products (which had cheaper versions of all of those).  While my preference was for the former, I didn’t discriminate against the latter.  We didn’t have a cookie jar, but I was often caught with my finger in that breadbox.  I was too embarrassed to bring them out of the kitchen and eat them in plain sight, and so I would instead stand directly over the breadbox and shove as many in my mouth as I could until I heard someone coming.            
 
Clothes shopping as a child was both a fascination and a nightmare.  From my youngest memories of it I would linger in the girls’ section where my sisters were shopping, letting my hands brush the soft fabrics of dresses and skirts with longing and envy while hoping nobody noticed.  But inevitably my mom would march us to the boys’ department when it was my turn.  And once I had started gaining weight in the third grade, it only got worse.  I can remember bursting into tears more than once when a saleswoman would respectfully approach my mother and politely direct us to the “huskies” section.  Yes, that’s what larger sizes for boys were called (and to my horror what they are still called to this day by several major retail chains).  Without understanding it, I was already upset and confused that I had to be in the boys’ department at all.  But to be a husky boy?  Just how much was I expected to take?  And my mom would pile on the shame by harshly telling me it was my own fault and too late to cry about it now.  She suggested I would be better off crying at home instead of eating, and that then maybe next year I could shop in the “regular” section.  

In fairness to my mom, I of course understand now that she was trying to help me with what she thought was tough love.  But I don’t think a child’s emotional intelligence is developed enough to comprehend the two simultaneous and conflicting motivations that are wrapped up in tough love; I know mine could compute only one.  When it came to my body, she may have been sending tough love, but I was receiving all of the tough and none of the love.  “Husky” became part of her vocabulary for fat-shaming me whenever she thought I was eating too much: “I guess you want to be back in the huskies section next year too, so don’t cry about it then.”  It’s hard enough being called fat at school or in a store; it hurts more when it happens in your own home.  When I felt fat, it wasn’t just that I didn’t want to leave the house.  I didn’t want to leave my room.  My family would get upset if I didn’t come downstairs when we had company, but I felt paralyzed even if the guests were close relatives.  I just didn’t feel like I deserved to be seen at all.           
 
From 4^th grade on, gym class was a nightmare of bullying.  Tough love being a theme in my household, I remember almost being happy the few times my father took the toughness with his belt too far.  Awful as that was, I knew my mom would at least have to write a note excusing me from gym class as Catholic school gym uniforms in the late 1970s and early 1980s included absurdly revealing shorts that would have showcased the welts as much as my flab.  Not that my parents needed to worry about being reported to child services, as would be required of any school today.  The nun who was our principal was more likely to have called my parents and congratulated them for their commitment to discipline.  No, it was more about keeping family business in the family, which became a new rat wheel of shame that isolated me even further.  I couldn’t talk to anyone at school about what was happening at home, and I couldn’t talk at home about what was happening at school.  If I said I was bulled for being fat, I already knew I’d just be told that I was and to lose weight.  And if I said I was bullied for being gay?  Something I didn’t even really yet understand other than that it couldn’t be anything good?  I could never, and back then I don’t know if anybody did.  After all, what if someone asked if it were true? 
 
Things would get even worse in high school.  By then I guess I had gotten a little too old for my dad’s belt, and so it was up to me to fake whatever illnesses I could think of to get out of gym or just miss school completely.  I would carefully calculate the number of classes I could miss without failing.  Bullying is not the right word for some of the experiences I endured in that school and especially in the gym locker room.  The most extreme of those would now be classified as assaults, as gay bashings, as hate crimes.  But this was the 1980s and just as nonbinary had not yet worked its way into the mainstream consciousness and conversation, nor had the concept that violence against gay students could be anything more than ‘kids will be kids’ bullying.  I walked through the halls a rigid collection of exposed nerves, my body in a constant state of tension to better absorb whatever blows might be coming from the front, the side, or the back (or more rarely but even worse, the coordinated attacks that involved all three and for which I at least had to give them credit for their planning).  The knots in my stomach, the tightness in my shoulders, and worst of all that awful feeling you get lodged in your forehead when you are refusing to let yourself cry.  That hollow burning behind the eyes was the worst feeling of all, because what that devolved into was the absence of any feeling at all.   

I learned to completely disassociate my body from my feelings just to survive.  Alcohol and closeted sex, which I discovered in sophomore and junior years respectively, ultimately only abused my body further and left me more confused about it.  But, like the rush I got from my food binges, at least they provided some new anesthesia to soothe the constant pain of surgically separating my physical and emotional selves.  I started staying up late at night and getting by on less and less sleep.  I told myself I was just being a night owl who enjoyed the peace after the rest of my family had gone to bed and when I finally had some quiet hours to myself.  While there may have been some truth to that, even more true was that I spent those hours in a constant state of anxiety over what was waiting for me when the morning alarm went off.  Sleep deprivation creates an odd high of its own; there is the sensation of being exhausted and wired at the same time.  It became something else I learned to weaponize against my body, and it’s an issue I still struggle with today.            
 
When I think back to those years, I genuinely harbor no ill will toward any of the other kids at school or in the neighborhood.  I understand as an adult that abusive kids are often also abused kids.  I am less kind in my assessment of the school administrators and teachers who let it all happen by looking the other way, or sometimes even smirking to give a subtle stamp of approval.  One history teacher would periodically collect our notebooks to read over our assignments and then return them with his comments.  He was one of those teachers who would always hang out with the popular kids.  I can’t remember if he actually coached any teams or not, but there were always assorted jocks and cheerleaders hanging around his office during their free periods and after school.  I got back my notebook one day but the comment that struck me wasn’t one he had written inside about my work, but rather one I found scrawled across the back cover.  The writing had been lightly crossed out, but it was still very easy to make out my name followed by the words “is a fat fag.”  Clearly one of the kids hanging around his office had written it, and of course I was accustomed to being called that and worse to my face.  I remember what hurt more was the way the teacher had so lightly crossed it out; a fake gesture to spare my feelings that was in fact a genuine effort to hurt them.  He could have easily blacked the comment out entirely with a dark ink marker.  He could have just ripped the back cover off completely and told me he spilled coffee on it.  But he wanted me to see it.  And all these years later, I can still see it.  And I can also remember being uncertain about which of those “f” words inflicted more pain and shame.  Was it worse to be a fag or to be fat, I wondered.  I could only conclude that worst of all was to be both.      
 
If I was already experiencing confusion about my gender and my body, by now I had started the process of dividing up the rest of my identity in the way many teenagers did (and most certainly still do) regardless of their orientations and backgrounds.  I’m not saying that as teens we have split personalities, exactly; more that we learn to bifurcate the full personality we each should be developing into different divisions of possibility and impossibility.  For me some of those buckets were: I can be smart, but I can’t be strong.  I can be creative, but I can’t be attractive.  I can be a good student, but I can’t be an athlete.  And even this one: I can be an alcoholic, just not a popular one.  We learn to limit ourselves at the very time in our lives when we should be feeling our most limitless.       
 
While my younger self – the husky – had only binged, by college I had already started adding some cyclical purging behavior.  At first these would mostly consist of crash dieting: Nutri-System.  Weight Watchers.  I tried them all and would start each one obsessively; dropping a lot of weight quickly only to gain it all back (and often more) just as quickly.  My drinking also worsened, and that often added a bloated appearance to whatever my actual weight was.  After college, and living on my own, I discovered more purging activities.  Laxatives and enemas became usual items on my shopping list.  I even shifted the foods I binged on to cookies and ice-cream with sugar substitutes like sorbitol and mannitol, once I discovered that these often carried warnings in their ingredient list that excess consumption may have a laxative effect.  They may not have tasted as good but, just like I had done as a kid at the kitchen breadbox, I was still shoving it all down my throat so quickly that the taste often didn’t register much anyway.  To find foods I could binge that were effectively also laxatives?  That felt like a win-win.  I discovered an even more dangerous win-win when a freak accident resulted in a first painkiller prescription.  About ten or fifteen minutes after taking the first pill, that familiar anesthetic feeling came over me.  It was as though I had discovered vodka without calories.                  
 
I soon added compulsive exercise to my behaviors and started spending most of my vacation and entertainment budgets on personal trainers.  I remember and have genuine respect for all of them, many of whom whipped me into incredible shape.  It’s not their fault that much of what I was using them for was as a buffer between myself and the gym because, aside from the cardio machines (I was always good at running), I still had an almost pathological fear of navigating the gym floor on my own.  I was still disassociating myself from my body; lifting whatever weights and doing as many reps as the trainers told me to without ever being fully mentally present and paying attention so that I could learn how to do any of it on my own.  They became the bodyguards I wished I had back in high school. 
 
The ironic thing is that sometimes the more muscular my body became, the more disconnected from it I felt.  My then-undiagnosed gender dysphoria had decided that a feminine aesthetic was thinner and more streamlined, and so I thought I looked my best when I was binging on the painkillers (or as I called them, appetite-killers) and hovering around what I know now was an unhealthily low weight.  When my body would get more muscular, I liked the attention it got me from other men and yet it felt out of place for myself.  Dating was also confusing.  Personal ads that included qualifiers like masc for masc only or no fats or femmes please felt unbearably cruel and yet perhaps no more so than I was being to myself.  By then I knew how to get myself out of being one of the fats, at least for periods of time, but the femmes (another vile “f” word)?  Giving up my place in their ranks wouldn’t be so easy, and I had tried.  I had tried to walk with a broader gate, to talk in a deeper voice.  None of it had ever worked and only further poisoned my relationship with my body as I became self-conscious about literally every move I made and every word I uttered.  I remember once dating someone for several months who always seemed to be running hot and cold with how interested he was in me, and so I finally asked him about it.  I couldn’t blame him for his answer necessarily, because in a way it captured all of my own internal confusion.  But his delivery and choice of words were hurtful nonetheless: “Look, I’m really into your body,” he said, “but then you open your mouth, and it’s like a purse falls out”.  Yes, this was someone I was dating.  I’ve learned that having a low opinion of yourself is a surefire way to attract others who’ll be more than happy to agree with you. 
 
Prostate cancer would feel like another betrayal by my body, but it ended up being a breakthrough.  The decisions that had to be made about my male body were the final catalyst for a painful but honest self-examination of my gender identity issues.  I did this first with my therapist, who then referred me to another who specialized in gender identity.  I slowly started unwinding years of tangled confusion, which I learned was part of gender dysphoria.  Was I transgender?  The therapist explained it as a spectrum with cisgender on one end and transgender on the other.  After several sessions we decided that I was pretty far along on the spectrum in the direction of transgender but perhaps not quite all the way there, and so we landed on nonbinary.  But he stressed that ultimately it was something only I could decide, and something I had the right to change my mind about.  As I was starting to feel some first glimpses of understanding in one area, my body obsession went into overdrive again.  The surgeon had entered through my abdominal area to remove my prostate, and it left a visible scar.  This surgery successfully rid my body of cancer, and I was upset because a scar was interfering with my attempt at a six-pack.  How vain, how small, how ungrateful could I be?  Or how sick.  All of that looped back to the dysphoria.  If I let my body hair grow longer, it covered the scar.  But then I felt more ‘masculine’.  If I shaved or closely trimmed the hair, I felt more comfortably ‘feminine’ but then the scar was visible again.  I had found yet another rat wheel.  Meanwhile I had gotten completely sober and kicked the painkillers, but my cycles of binging and purging food got worse again.  The old rat wheels were still there too.  

 

Last year, I finally checked myself into a treatment facility that had both an eating disorder specialist and a gender specialist in addition to other therapists for trauma and mood disorders.  I was so excited to be finally addressing all those different but painfully intertwined issues in an immersive and supportive environment.  Unfortunately, problems with my insurance company cut my stay disappointingly short, but I have been able to continue the work with my therapist and doctor back home.  I in fact had only one session with the rehab’s eating disorder specialist, but it was a meaningful one.  She started by dissecting and deconstructing the various tools those of us with eating disorders use to measure our self-worth and beat ourselves down:  Scales?  They are not calibrated the same (especially those that purport to generate an entire health profile because you step on it), and neither are cardio machines that spit out estimates of alleged calories burned.  Clothes?  The same size in clothing means something very different from brand to brand.  Calorie-tracking apps?  Even experts struggle to estimate calories with any accuracy, as studies asking licensed nutritionists to identify the caloric values of identical meals have yielded wildly varying responses.  It was all tough to argue, and the therapist seemed pleased when I offered that I had already stopped keeping a scale in my home.  But she shook her head when I followed that up by sharing that I had instead started taking numerous before and after photos of my body on my phone, which had invited even more constant comparisons and self-loathing than any numbers on a scale.  “Your mind made a healthy decision to get rid of the scale,” she said, “…but then your disease found another way.” 
 
I tried explaining all the ideas in my head about my weight, when my body was too fat or too thin, when it was too masculine or too feminine.  She quietly took it all in and just replied, "Wow.  That's a lot".  She then leaned in asked me a simple question: “What if your body was just your body?”  My initial thought was that in fact it was simple to the point of meaning nothing, and just as I was about to open my mouth and say so I felt a lightbulb turn on.  Far from simple, it was deeply profound.  What if my body is just the vehicle that is carrying the real me through the world?  What if all the energy I have put into my body all my life has just been distracting me from learning to love myself?  Not my body, but myself.     
 
This month I did start a new fitness program, but it was not a resolution.  Typical of someone who is body obsessed, I have followed many online fitness accounts on social media.  One always seemed to really go out of its way to discuss fitness more holistically instead of posting the usual photo barrage of hot trainers in speedos.  Part of their daily accountability process, in addition to workouts and food logs, is a gratitude list.  There are weekly weigh-ins and progress photos, which I discussed with my therapist in advance and which we agreed to try with certain parameters.  The new scale stays in the closet except for those 5 minutes once a week.  Instead of agonizing over photos, I take a quick video as I turn around in a circle, snap a few screenshots, and upload them to the platform before deleting everything from my phone.  Is my disease setting another trap?  Time will tell, but the advantages so far are that I have the benefit of guidance but not the buffer of a trainer.  There are demos of the exercises, but I am responsible for following them, executing the proper form, feeling out the appropriate weight per set, figuring out how to adjust the machines for my height, etc.  I am being mindful and staying present in my body rather than detaching from it.  I am navigating the gym floor for the first time without a bodyguard, and I am finally owning the part of myself that is – and always was – an athlete. 
 
My body is not wrong because it is too masculine or too feminine, or too fat or too thin.  My body is not wrong at all.  It’s also not right.  My body is just my body.  Even if I were to change my mind and decide that a gender transition is the right choice for me, it wouldn’t be because my body is wrong.  It would just be another journey my vehicle will take me through to arrive at a destination closer to my truer self.  And with all respect to the body positivity fans out there, for me I don’t have to love my body.  But I don’t have to hate it either.  I don’t have to think my body is beautiful, but I don’t get to call it ugly.  Basically, I don’t need to attach any qualitative descriptors or emotional values to it at all.  Because my body is just my body.  I need to respect and maintain it only because it transports all the parts of me that really are beautiful and allows me to share them with the rest of the world; the parts of me that are kind and loving and smart and, yes, strong.  That’s a big responsibility.  It’s true my body also carries some parts of me that are pretty ugly; the parts of me that can be fearful and negative and sometimes as judgmental of others as I have been of myself.  But that’s an important responsibility too.  I need those parts to stay safe so that I can keep improving them.  The better I maintain my body, the more time it will give me to work on those ugly parts and hopefully smooth them into the beautiful parts. 
 
My body is just my body.  Repeating that mantra, and believing it, is my higher resolution for 2023.  Nothing less and nothing more.  But if you’ve been punishing yourself with some other new year’s resolutions, the silver lining may be that you’re statistically likely to abandon them by early February and so the end is almost here.  Just don’t look at that as a failure; embrace it instead as the freedom from failure.  And then look into the deepest, most beautiful part of yourself – the part you won’t find reflected in a mirror or in a store’s glass window – and ask that part of you what will bring you joy.  Not results or outcomes, just joy.  Whatever answer comes back, that’s what you should dedicate more time to, not as a resolution or as some line in the sand but simply as a gift to your own soul.  That’s why I started writing again; that was the answer that came back for me.      
 
Since I shared about some of the misguided tough love I received from my parents as a child, I’ll end by sharing something they did that was just love.  They had a beautiful tradition on Three Kings Day, which for many Catholic households marks the close of the Christmas season every January 6^th.  Santa Claus would take away our tree and all the decorations overnight but, in their place, he left behind one final gift each for me and my siblings.  It always eased the sadness of Christmas ending and all that glitter fading.  Maybe that’s a way we can reframe the dreaded new year’s resolution.  Instead of drawing a line in the sand and catapulting ourselves out of the holidays and into some self-imposed punishment, what if we just gave ourselves one last gift?  One more wish?  Something that soothed our souls and eased us out of the holidays and into long-lasting joy.        
 
And if you are (or think you might be) someone struggling with an eating disorder or gender dysphoria, or for that matter any other physical or mental health challenge, give yourself a second gift and seek professional help.  Friends and family can be important sources of support, but they are out of their depth here and good intentions (like tough love) don’t always translate to good advice.  These are medical issues that require medical intervention.  If you don’t currently have a doctor or therapist, The National Eating Disorder Association (NEDA) has a terrific website (nationaleatingdisorders.org) and helpline (1-800-931-2237) to start exploring resources and referrals.  Overeaters Anonymous has meetings that embrace not only overeating but the full spectrum of compulsive food behaviors (meetings can be searched online by zip code at oa.org).  If your city has an LGBTQ+ community center, most provide free or low-cost counseling either on site or through referrals.  If you don’t have one nearby, the LGBT National Help Center has a website (lgbthotline.org) and hotline (1-888-843-4564) to assist anyone of any age who has questions about sexual orientation or gender identity.  For anyone with general mental health questions or concerns, try The National Mental Health Hotline’s website (mentalhealthhotline.org) or their call center (1-866-903-3787).  I know that it can all be overwhelming, but we don’t have to suffer alone.  As someone who is learning to face these challenges relatively late in life, if nothing else I hope I am an example that it’s never too late to choose love over fear.      
 
No body is ever wrong, but sometimes everybody needs help.