Can We Talk About Queer Breakup and Heartbreak?
Tales of Loss and Disappointment: Lessons Learned About Coming Out
It began when my partner died of AIDS
I have two stories to tell. One where I told someone of my own loss and one where I engaged someone about their loss. Neither went well.
Both of these stories concerned the same event, the death of my gay partner in 1990. Wayne died of AIDS at a time when being gay and having AIDS made you doubly stigmatized. When he died, our friends and I had to deal most immediately with the indignity of two local funeral directors refusing to take him. It took a third call to find a mortuary that would serve us, though they took him in a body bag. So with that issue resolved, Wayne’s mother and father and our friends could start our grieving in earnest.
That is not one of the stories, though, only the context for them.
Story one: My parents, especially my mother
Wayne died in mid January and was cremated, but the plan was to wait for spring and hold a memorial service for him then. And so it came about. In the interim, I first visited my parents at their retirement home in Florida. It wasn’t a happy trip down from the D.C. area, and the loss seemed to get worse the farther I got from my home. On arrival in Florida, I was more tearful and sorry for myself than I was when I left.
Delayed grieving maybe.
My parents, mother especially, as good people as they were, had never taken to Wayne. There was a personality clash at their first meeting years earlier and, given the physical distance between us, that initial decorum breach or whatever it was never healed.
They of course knew that Wayne had died just ten days earlier, but my mother couldn’t manage to see its emotional significance. When she asked me why I was so tearful and down, I said it was because “the most important person in my life had just died.” Her response stunned me. She said, breaking out in her own tears, “I thought I was the most important person in your life,” and went crying out of the room.
My father comforted her, but didn’t question me as to why his wife was so distressed. He probably knew.
We did heal our own breach over my stay, me feeling regretful that I had denied her ‘her own moment’ of expressing her love for me, she not pressing the issue of who I might have loved more. I guess we forgave each other, but not in so many words.
Several months later when Wayne’s memorial was finally decided on and scheduled, I asked my parents to attend. It would have involved a plane trip up from Florida, and initially they said no. Some two years earlier my brother’s wife had died of breast cancer and the whole family, including me, had rallied to support him in his own grief. My parents especially were rocks to him and the four children, one five and one two years old, who he now had to care for by himself.
So when they declined to come, even granted that I needed less support than my brother did, I felt slighted. I relayed my hurt and annoyance to my sister and offered to pay for the plane tickets. The result? My parents got persuaded to come. And they did.
The memorial itself was over-planned, as these things tend to be. And thanks to the help of close friends, all of Wayne’s and my gay and lesbian family attended, and it worked out. The memorial accomplished its purpose of affirming Wayne’s life.
A friend picked up my parents from the airport the day before the event, and they stayed the night at my home. But they were ticketed to return to Florida on the evening of the memorial, so another friend drove them back to the airport on his way home. We didn’t have a chance to talk much about their reactions to the memorial, or about my reactions to them being there. My father for years after never failed to mention one of my lesbian friends he met there. He kind of fell in love with her, which given her personality was easy enough to do. My mother, to my recollection, never mentioned the event.
I was glad my parents came, and I believe they were relieved to find that a life they knew few details about seemed to be a good life. Which it was.
As to my initial disgruntlement about their equivocating and reluctance to attend, I took some responsibility. I had left my hometown years before, distancing myself from my family because I felt I needed the distance to exist more freely as a gay man.
Obviously, I was hiding from them.
In putting space between us, I could conveniently keep secret many of the details that would have exposed me as a homosexual in a seriously Catholic family. It wasn’t until Wayne’s death that I admitted to my parents out loud who I “really” was. It obviously wasn’t the smart thing to have done, because it starved our relationship of essential oxygen it needed to grow. Not knowing the truth left them conveniently able to assume I was living with a buddy, a housemate all those years.
But so be it. Spilt milk. Water under the bridge.
Story two: A business associate
Some years later, probably about six or so, the events of my second story took place. I was working as an IT specialist under government contract. I traveled a good bit, and on one assignment I was working at a Federal court in New York. The job materialized on the recommendation of another client in D.C., who happened to be related to my court contact. Word of mouth.
My contact and I ended up feeling some friendly vibes for one another, but being that it was a business association, I didn’t share much personal information. He, however, had a year earlier lost his wife to cancer. One evening over dinner we got to talking about decline and loss and death and coping afterward. He and his wife had been married for forty or so years, and he was still struggling with what to do with an unnecessarily large house and a fitting legacy for her and how to relate to his upcoming retirement.
It was all still relatively new to him.
It was a moment that called for bonding, when sharing the experience of someone who had and was still adjusting to his own loss could possibly help. So I told him that I had lost my own partner and that “he” had left me uncertain about how to go on.
Unfortunately, the unexpected pronoun abruptly ended our budding friendship.
I could tell by his body language and tone that it was presumptuous of me to assume my pain was in any way equivalent to his pain. Within fifteen minutes we ended the evening. I was not to hear back from him again. The long-distance evening conversations and the trips to New York ended along with the work.
All of that was okay. It was better to know sooner than later that there wasn’t a basis for a friendship, since the underlying foundation proved so unstable. But there was a lesson, and a valuable one. I needed in future to disclose the essential me to people, earlier rather than later.
For one thing, it’s a way to find out early on whether someone is predisposed by their nature to find you unworthy, or spoiled, or deviant, or whatever. You don’t waste your time then in the hope that they’ll get over it.
But, more important, you create opportunities for people to know you’re not fragile, that you’re comfortable and confident in who you are, and that you feel yourself their equal in your emotional makeup and your moral underpinnings.
You don’t consider yourself damaged goods, just gay goods.
This story is a response to the LGBTQ writing prompt, Can We Talk About Queer Breakup and Heartbreak?
