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An Unspectacular Life, Part 1
02/21/09

In 1978, my parents owned a small corner store. The neighbourhood was working
class teetering on low income. The houses were solid two and three story
brick that had since been sided over. The trees were impressive. Almost every
house had an oak or maple lording over the front yard. The neighbourhood was
only a few blocks from the library and downtown. There were four churches, a
Catholic, an Anglican, a Presbyterian and a Christian, all within two blocks
of the store which was called, "Andre's Variety", after my father. A gospel
church opened a block away a few years later which really has nothing to with
painting the scene for this story. I mention it only because the preacher's
daughter, Ruth, was my first non-just-like-me friend. This neighbourhood,
like all the neighbourhoods that I lived in before this one, was white. I
only knew that there were other races from watching t.v. and family vacations
to Ohio. My family lived above the store in a three bedroom apartment .

My best friend when I was thirteen was John Dillon. His family was in a state
of turmoil after his mother's nervous breakdown and his fathers subsequent
divorce from her. Things were not good for John at home so I asked my parents
if he could live with us. My parents had a history of opening their door to
troubled kids. John moved in.

John was a couple years older than I was. We had met a few years prior in a
youth organization. We were both members of The Bluewater Buccaneers Drum and
Bugle Corps. John played soprano and I played the snare drum. We would both
end our drum corps' careers on the colour guard. The colour guard was a sissy
magnet. It was show business. The colour guard was all pizazz. We felt like
Broadway performers. My mother was heartbroken when I told her that I wanted
to switch from the drum line to the colour guard. I'm sure that she still
believes that those two years of dancing and twirling a flag on football
fields to songs like Copacabana and the theme from Rocky were the deciding
factors of my sexual fate. I don't think that there was a gayer activity for
a teenage boy to participate in other than say, the ballet. The colour guard
was the domain of girls and gay boys.

John and I shared a small bedroom. I had an oak captain's bed and John had a
folding cot. We listened to music and watched t.v. together and of course we
always had drum corps practices and other related social activity. We both
still maintained girlfriends. My girl friend's name was Penny Shmiedendorf.
She lived in a different city a few hours from me. She was a member of a
competing drum corps. We met on the road while we were on the same
competition circuit. John's last teen boy-girl experience was conjured up to
save face after a tape recording of him propositioning another male drum
corps member on the phone was secretly made and played at local high schools.
I never heard the tape but friends who had told me that it was indeed a
legitimate recording of my room mate asking Chris Robinson if he would like
to "get together". It really was a big scandal and I had to distance myself
which was difficult because we slept a couple of feet from each other. For a
time, I stopped all social activity with John. Two years after he moved in
and not long after the recording was made, John moved out. He moved in with
his lesbian sister and her girlfriend. In spite of or maybe because of the
scandal, John and I remained best friends despite his brief social black
listing. I hung out at his apartment, always. Being in that apartment was my
first experience as a young adult. We didn't drink or smoke pot. We listened
to Styx and Air Supply and read GQ. My parents forbade me from visiting John
at his adult free apartment but I was past listening.

There was a lot of coming out going on. John had come out to a drum corps
friend of ours, Drew, who then came out back to John. John was secretly
seeing Brandon, our colour guard instructor. One weekend, well into my
sixteenth year, John, Drew and I went to visit Brandon. Brandon lived an hour
away in a significantly bigger city. That Friday night, they took me to my
first gay bar, my first anything bar. I was gravely disappointed. It was not
at all as I had imagined it. I had endlessly fantasized about my gay bar
debut. I knew that they were out there, these vortexes of gayness. In 1981,
in a small town, it was almost impossible to know where to begin. These
almost mythical meeting places were a shining beacon of hope. I thought that
my first gay bar experience would be like a song and dance number from,
"Fame". The bar was empty. There were two gay bars in this town and the other
one was busy on Friday. My friends, who were all older than I, thought that I
wouldn't get past the doorman at the other so we ended up at the bar with
laxer security and no people. The bar was called, "Whispers" and apparently
it was more a club than a bar. I got drunk and danced to music I had never
heard before. Though completely unspectacular in itself, this night was the
first of a fifteen year run of shaking my ass in night clubs. No official
coming out discussion happened at the bar. The unspectacular revelation took
place back at Brandon's apartment. They just asked me and I said yes. They
had come out to each other six months earlier and John and Brandon had been a
couple for two months. I have no emotional memory of the event. I was really
drunk.