Living Beyond the Shirt

I thought I was used to wearing labels.

For years, I've worn a big, brown one that cannot be removed. I thought that made me savvy, that it gave me the know-how to manipulate the labels people tried to pin to me, to use them, to challenge them.

Or to hide them, like I tried to do my first weekend on the beat. I wanted to chat up the locals and root out tales about the area. But I decided to travel incognito, initially concealing the fact that I was a journalist probing for stories. I thought the ruse would allow me to dig deeper into people's lives, preventing them from giving me the kind of superficial, uninteresting details people tend to think journalists will find useful.

I went to Ferg's Sports Bar and Grill, the only place where a fair crowd of people had congregated to talk. Shortly after I'd arrived at the bar and ordered a drink, a man sat down on my right, so I began talking to him, asking him questions, trying not to make it seem like an interview.

In retrospect, the flurry of inquiries with which I bombarded him probably seemed a bit queer, because quite suddenly, in the midst of talking about the Devil Rays' dismal showing in that evening's baseball game, he asked:

"Where are you living?"

"Coquina Key," I said.

"Well," he drawled, leaning back in his chair and furrowing his brow.

I felt my veneer slipping. I had asked too many questions, and he'd seen through me. I'd have to expose myself as the journalist I was.

He got me one better than that:

"That sounds gay."

Where did THAT come from?

I ran back through the conversation in my mind, looking for cues I'd given that had caused him to conjure this label, one I was not prepared to discuss. In alarm, I tried to steer the conversation in a different direction, but he pressed on: "And I'm not gay."

Some trigger in his mind had been pulled, and for another unbroken series of minutes, he fired off every hackneyed, homophobic bromide I'd heard during 12 years of fundamentalist Christian schooling, taking care to repeat the fact of his unimpeachable straightness over and over.

I uttered a dripping congratulations and turned away.

Minutes later, after I ventured to look at a television screen located on my right, on his side of the invisible line that divided us, he asked why I was looking at that television.

The commercial being shown on that TV had caught my attention.

He pointed to a screen on my left and began speaking at length about its superior merit. I wondered at first whether he was giving me an elaborate object lesson in which the left screen represented the superior lifestyle of heterosexuality, and the right screen symbolized my inferior path. His bigotry knew no such nuance. He was merely trying to instruct me not to look in his direction.

He leaned over the counter after this exchange and shouted something to the bartender that I could not hear. But I could distinguish her response, pushing me further into the margins and affirming this man’s prejudice:

"It's all right,” she said. “You're safe, sir. He's not here normally. We get all kinds."

I was livid. Having resided in an overwhelmingly liberal city for the past five years, I was shocked by such open displays of homophobia. I boiled at the thought that this backwoods, beer-addled, pot-bellied Howdy Doody lookalike old enough to be my father had the audacity to presume I had fixed on him with some sort of sexual design.

Buried beneath the anger, however, was another more ambiguous emotion. Whether by accident or through some suspiciously astute “Gaydar,” Howdy had hit upon the label that I guarded most carefully: Gay.

It was the label I imagined I had mastered most, the one I thought I could don and doff at will. I took pride in my ability to seamlessly adjust my behavior between groups. Depending on the situation, I could be a cosmopolitan, pansexual roué, or draw on years of Bible school experience to affect perfect sexual neutrality. I had enough control over it to completely negotiate the awkward, tiresome process of coming out to new groups of people on my own terms, doing so only when it was convenient and comfortable.

Beyond mere social adaptability, however, my skill at sexual maneuvering was vital. It allowed me to sidestep the suspicions of my very sexually conservative family.

But in 10 minutes, this rube had figured me out.

I felt newly vulnerable. After a week of seething and seeking counsel from friends, the initial sting of the experience had worn away, leaving me with only the memory of my reaction. And weeks later, I was still bothered by that sensation of having lost control of the label.

So I decided to push myself, to relinquish all the control. On a blistering Saturday, with the threat of rain looming overhead, I wrote the word in large, bold letters with a black Sharpie on the front and back of a T-shirt. GAY. I wore the shirt downtown.

In my mind, I prepared to meet the scandalized looks of parents and the curious gazes of their children. I pictured the kids asking their parents, “What does that word mean?” Good, I thought. I figured if they were old enough to detect that the slogan was out of the ordinary, that it meant something different from Tommy Hilfiger or FUBU, then they were old enough to hear the meaning.

That it meant men loving other men. That was beautiful, innocent and true enough for any child to handle, I thought. I would be helping the parents teach their children from an early age that homosexuality is normal and common, ensuring that it doesn’t become a crude, adolescent punchline for them, as it was for me and my friends.

I considered other eventualities, good, bad, exciting and mundane, but I made a promise to myself that I would not try to provoke people in any way, nor would I avoid the places I would have gone without the shirt. All I have to do, I told myself, is go about the business of a day downtown as if my shirt had a P on it instead of a Y.

At first, it was easy. Ordering lunch from the cheery, accommodating employees at Fortunato’s was a pleasure, and on the way out, I passed two men dressed in medieval tunics. I felt less odd.

But as I walked toward The Pier, the self-consciousness that I could never completely lose as I wore this label thundered louder in my head.

A man saw the word coming and waited for me so he could hand me a tract as I passed. “What would Jesus do?” asked the glossy brochure. A group of boys on bicycles laughed as they rode by, exuberantly shouting, “Gay!” as they peddled into the distance. These things drew attention to my label, but they did not unsettle me.

What unnerved me as I approached The Pier was the thickening crowd of parents and children, the scene of pastoral, familial innocence that the label I wore threatened to corrupt. I pictured the kids again, asking their parents, “What does that word mean?” and I suddenly dreaded the response.

Here, confronted with the real possibility of the moment, the rest of that imaginary dialogue crystallized for the first time in my mind.

Men loving other men?

That only touched off a series of other questions, none of which were very beautiful or innocent: “What are men?” “Why do they love other men?”

All the answers to these questions pointed beyond the squeaky-clean idea of “love” to more lurid issues of gender, romance and sex. By wearing this label, I was confronting these children with knowledge they shouldn’t yet have to face, calling their attention for perhaps the first time to sexual difference, to an abnormality.

With this label on, I was that abnormality.

I rode the elevator to the second floor of The Pier, the aquarium, which trembled with the happy buzzing of parents and kids on a day out. I stood completely disarmed, most likely unnoticed, in a corner of the room, a puppet to this label that was now wearing me.

I walked toward the counter where two high school girls sold souvenirs, rubber seahorses and decorative ballpoint pens. I wanted to ask where the stairs were. One cashier was helping a grandmotherly woman with two young girls, the other somehow did not see me -- although I stood in front of her -- and did not hear me when I called out, “Ma’am?” I walked behind the grandmother and waited with my arms crossed, until the thunder in my head grew deafening. I skulked back out the way I’d come and left The Pier.

As I walked away, the guilty thunder grew quiet. A couple of men smiled warmly as they walked by.

“A member of the family,” said one to the other.

They were living the truth of my shirt.

There was nothing abnormal about this.

I walked west through the more deserted quarters of First Avenue North, past the raucous jeering of a group of men unloading something from a truck. The thunder was gone. I walked on.

When I arrived at home that evening, I took the shirt off because it was wet with sweat and rain. I didn’t feel any different from the way I had when I was wearing it, but I barely recognized the man I’d been before I put it on.

I know now the guilt I felt did not merely stem from a bigot in a bar. Or from the families at The Pier. Or from my family. Or even from a shirt.

It came from my perception that with the shirt off, I’m somehow different. That’s wrong. Just like the suggestion I’ve heard all my life that “gay” is something I can choose or reject. Just because my sexuality is not as visible as the color of my skin, that doesn’t make it any less indelible.

It simply means it’s tattooed even deeper.