Visability and Erasure

Anyone who’s ever been othered knows what it’s like to live with the tension of being who you truly are, and the impulse to hide it. My personal experience with visibility and erasure shaped the characters Tony and Jake in Blood and Soil. The way Tony mimics the straight preppy culture at Columbia for his social survival; how Jake cannot fully be himself in his hidebound mountain world—each yearning to connect, hamstrung by fear and an earned mistrust. 

I remember at age 13 being secretly smitten with the olive-toned Greek artist in my class, and the built blond Dutch boy next door, but I couldn’t admit to my own feelings. Then one day after school, I stopped at the candy store and saw it on the paperback rack: Dr. David Reuben’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex. I snuck home the bright canary paperback, and had my formal introduction to homosexuality. 

I read pages filled with accounts of cartoonish, sadistic, depraved men through history, pseudo-clinical condemnations, and the sweeping pronouncement that queers were doomed by their biology to a miserable existence. Who was I to argue? Reuben was a psychiatrist, and his book a massive, worldwide bestseller and cultural phenomenon. 

That was the same year that a three-day gay riot erupted at an obscure bar in Greenwich Village. Though it was only a train ride away from my home in Queens, I was so lost in self-loathing that this seismic event in LGBTQ history might as well have happened on the moon. 

That sex bible had its insidious effect on me. Terrified I’d be damned for all time, I buried this terrible Thing deep inside of me, and cloaked myself in a pale imitation of everyone else. Self-monitoring became an unconscious habit: The clothes I wore, the way I moved my wrists and hips, how I spoke, gestured, laughed, where I placed my gaze in locker rooms, swimming pools, and bathrooms—none of it escaped my scrutiny and approbation. 

I stumbled my way through a decade of unrequited crushes on straight men, and several lustless liaisons with women, plagued by guilt, remorse, and despondency. Ultimately, with the support of my intimate circle and a queer therapist, I learned to embrace all of me, and live authentically.

In my lifetime, I have seen LGBTQ people rise from social pariahs to full participants in our national life. Now all of that progress is in question, with powerful forces arrayed to erase us again. More than ever, we each must fight that old, closeted impulse to be invisible. 

Like Tony and Jake a generation before me, I overcame the censures of church, law, science, and society to find hope and pride in myself, and create a life on my terms. We have fought hard for too long through all of the pain of our individual journeys to wholeness—and our collective rising from invisibility to full presence—to let anyone take it away. 

As part of our struggle today, we must keep telling our stories to the larger world—not for anyone’s approval, but as a reminder of our shared humanity. It is my privilege to use the power of storytelling to keep queer lives visible—and visceral—page by page, one character at a time. Like our queer selves, our stories are here to stay, and will not be erased by any tinpot tyrant.