As Pride Week commences, Santa Feans stand up to tell their stories.
This year's Pride Week kicks off following a year of intense political polarization, both nationally and in Santa Fe. Long considered a gay-friendly community, the assault on James Maestas, as well as the anti-gay legislation at The Roundhouse, sparked new speculation about just how tolerant Santa Fe really is.
For organizers of The Life Monologue Project, this societal division sparked the drive to produce The OUT Monologues , a combination performance, video and photography show that is one of numerous events planned for this year's Pride. "What's important about these stories is we share the same DNA," says Life Monologue Board Member Elizabeth Martin. "We are all humans walking the planet."
Previous monologue projects have included The Cancer Monologues, The AIDS Monologues and The Pet Monologues . Director Pamela Thompson says The OUT Monologues was something she'd wanted to do for "forever. The mission of the project is to embrace life one
story at a time. It's not just about illness, it's also any life challenge. For a lot of people, coming out can be a very challenging experience and being gay, lesbian or transgendered in this society has huge stigma around it."
Unlike previous projects, OUT will combine live stories from four participants (including SFR's assistant editor and music writer Jonanna Widner), as well as six stories and interviews captured on video combined with portraits of the participants by photographer Gay Block (who participated in the workshop).
This week, SFR presents excerpts from a few of these stories. "It's almost like I'm not interested in queers coming to this event," Martin says. "I'm interested in their parents, or their grandparents, the people who otherwise think of this culture as something completely foreign to them, because this is about people standing up and saying, 'we are your friends and your neighbors.'"
Victoria Price
I was standing at the bar in West Hollywood, Calif.'s club of the moment one night in the spring of 1989, talking with a group of hip Hollywood women I hardly knew, when a blond woman with a wry expression came over to me and said, "You're Vincent Price's daughter. Your father's gay, isn't he?" I don't remember my mumbled reply-except that, sadly, it wasn't very witty- "I don't know," or, "He was married three times." But I do remember that I was shocked. Not because it was the first time someone had suggested that he might be gay or at the very least bisexual, but because, until that moment, I hadn't really understood the degree to which my 78-year-old father's sexuality, whatever it might be, had become public property to be discussed, analyzed, bandied about, as one might share a recipe or chat about the weather. I found it a discomforting revelation.
I came out to my father in my early 20s. We were driving down the hill from his house and I blurted it out in the car, eager to get to the other side of my uncomfortable announcement. "Oh, I know," he said, calmly negotiating a hairpin turn. "Coral already told me." My stepmother had, it seemed, guessed.
My father treated my bombshell with unruffled élan, tenderly solicitous of my well-being. He asked me about my partner, my lifestyle, my feelings. And after I had nervously delivered a heartfelt soliloquy, he quietly said, "I know just what you mean. All three of my wives were jealous of my friendships with men. But those friendships have always been very important to me. There can be a wonderful connection between two men or two women." Then he reached over and held my hand.
After I came out my father and stepmother were nothing but supportive. Vincent was asked to join the honorary board of Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, and accepted; Coral lent a sympathetic ear to my romantic troubles. Both were eager to meet anyone I brought home, though my stepmother rarely missed an opportunity to flirt outrageously with my girlfriends or to comment on their looks or style. One woman, she told me with a very knowing smile, "does it very well." I took that as some kind of compliment. In fact, my lesbianism was probably my most salient quality as far as Coral was concerned. My stepmother and I had always had a rocky relationship. Although she loved me, she was extremely jealous of my close bond with my father and often made all of our lives quite miserable as a result. When she tumbled to the fact that I was gay, suddenly she felt much better. In her mind, I was no longer a threat.
I have sometimes wondered whether, if my father had not been married to Coral when I came out to him, his response would have been different. Would he have worried about me or, like many parents of gay children, felt responsible in some way? But Coral's laissez-faire approach to sexuality had had a liberating effect on my dad. Born in 1911 to an upper-middle-class family in St. Louis, he was raised in a society still clinging to late Victorian manners and mores. As he made a life for himself in the London and New York City theater and later in Hollywood, he gradually shed the constrictions of his upbringing and moved through the world with an openness that was remarkable for his era. But it was not until he met Coral that he flung his last remaining inhibitions to the wind.
In the spring of 1993, my friends and I decided to go to the march on Washington. On our second night in DC, we gathered around a pay phone and called my dad. We described the festivities and the fun we were having, and then we laughingly said that we wished he could have paraded down the streets with us, all waving our rainbow flags. His voice already ravaged by the illness that would take his life, he said, "I wish I was there."
After my father's death in 1993, I was asked to write his biography. I agreed, but with much trepidation, because once again I found myself facing other people's myriad theories about my father's sexuality. "Are you going to discuss your father's relationships with men?" one old friend asked me. "I know someone who has proof that your father was gay," said another acquaintance. But after a year of reluctantly chasing paper trails and interviewing supposedly airtight sources, not only had I uncovered nothing, but I also realized that I was searching for an answer that I did not wish to find.
In the end, it was Roddy McDowall who best summed up the "question" of my father's sexuality. "What we don't know," Roddy mused, "is what sex meant to him. If we don't know that, we don't know anything." Roddy was right. I will never know the most intimate details of my father's sexuality and, to tell the truth, I'm glad. Because what I do know is so much more important. I know, for example, that he cherished friendship and love between two people, whatever their gender or sexual preference; that he never judged people on the basis of their sexual choices; and, most important, that he accepted me, my partner and my friends for who we were-with nothing but love. That was the father I knew; that was his legacy to me. That is the life I have written. And in doing so, I can only hope I have treated his life with as much understanding and compassion as he treated mine.
Michael Piotti
I grew up in a large, strong family. My father is Colombian, Cuban and Italian and my mother came to this country when she was 16 years old from the island of Puerto Rico. My parents met at a Latin dance party and it was love at first sight, or rather first dance. My father was a widow who had lost his first wife to cancer only nine months earlier. He was 28 years old. This dance party was the first social event he had attended since the loss of his wife. He was introduced to my mother who was dancing the merengue with her sisters and her friends, and the first thing my parents did together was dance. My father told me recently that he will never forget the life and warmth emanating from this beautiful, young girl and he felt a healing come over him. During that first dance, he knew that this was the woman he would spend the rest of his life with.
And then came me. I was the first of five children and my father's namesake. Of the five children, four of us are gay. My parents are remarkably loving and supportive, despite the many insulting comments I am sure they have endured over the years.
But I was the eldest and the first to come out and I didn't really have anyone that I could talk to about the growing feelings inside me. I was about 15 and couldn't understand. All my friends were dating girls and actually having sex but I wasn't. What the hell was wrong with me? I would kiss girls but feel nothing. Deep inside, I knew I had feelings for men. I was 15 and I remember going to Jones Beach on Long Island that summer with my family. I would purposely lay my towel to sunbathe right in front of the lifeguard's booth just so I could look up at him. He was fine: swimmer's body, lean, muscular with his Speedo clinging to his beautiful physique. I was adoring this Adonis. I would stare up at him but I didn't want to make it too obvious, so I would lay on my stomach, pretending that my eyes were closed. I was actually squinting and I had my focus on this gorgeous young man, who was probably only a few years older than me. I began fantasizing about him. I thought, "What would it be like to have my first sexual encounter with this man?" Thinking about him, about us, made me feel alive, on fire and like a man myself. While deep in this fantasy, somewhere on the periphery of my thoughts, I could hear my mother calling in the distance, "Michael, Michael, it's time for lunch," and with that I was ripped out of my dream, finding myself back on my towel, with sunburned shoulders, and the reality that I was just a boy at the beach with his parents.
Gay Block
It broke my heart to betray my husband by falling in love with a woman. Gus was honorable, a man with more integrity than anyone I know I'll ever know, and neither of us ever expected that we wouldn't live our whole lives together. I was astonished that I fell in love with a woman; it shocked me as much as it did him. And it was heartbreaking in many ways.
He actually was the first to confront me, saying that he KNEW what was happening. I was such a coward-would I ever have been honest or would I have just gone on that way forever?
Several months after he told me he knew, he said he could no longer live with me like this-would I ever have ended the marriage? We began living in this creative way he dreamed up. The kids stayed in our home, we bought other homes and he and I moved in and out every Monday.
We did this for two-and-a-half years.
I remember one day sitting on the edge of the bed, in the afternoon, alone in the house. Looking at his things on the night table I realized I would never again feel this kind of security, the security I had felt with him. It seemed he had always taken care of me, taken care of all the business of running a life and a house. My father and mother loved him from the moment we were engaged to be married. We married when I was 19.
And then another time, on a Sunday that he happened to be at the house on "my week," I asked him how he was doing and when he said "Great!" I burst into tears. I told him it felt like death. I missed him and I couldn't help what I was doing. I was so sad and it seemed as if this were very confusing to him. Of course, it was confusing to me, too.
I have another heartbreaking story which at the time, didn't break my heart, but now, thinking back, knowing what I now know, it breaks my heart. One day my mother asked me if I was having a relationship with a woman. I lied to her and said "no." I now know that she actually had been told so she already knew this was a lie. I wish she had told me she knew. She so often didn't say what she was thinking.
Many years later she told me she knew I'd lied. What I had done was I denied myself her comfort.
Would she have comforted me? She was the person who had always said that she didn't care what others thought about what she did. I learned I was more like her than I had thought.
Jerry Richardson
Maybe I should have figured it out when, at age 5, I developed a crush on Fess Parker, who played the role of Davey Crockett in the newly released Disney movie. I thought he was the handsomest man in the world. But I didn't have a clue what sexuality was, let alone, homosexuality. It wasn't until I hit puberty and became aware of my sexual feelings that I became aware that it was males that sparked my raging hormones. By that time, I also knew that it was sinful and totally unacceptable to be homosexual. It was the early '60s and there were no positive role models of happy or successful homosexuals to be found anywhere in popular culture. To be called a sissy or a queer was the most potent pejorative boys used on other boys. It was my deepest and darkest secret. Especially because I tried to be a good boy and please my parents, I couldn't let them in on my secret. In my search for information to help me understand this aspect of myself, I finally got my hands on a book written for parents to coach them on how to explain sexuality to their children. There was a short chapter on homosexuality. It basically said that it was not cause for great concern if you found Johnny messing around with his best friend Timmy. It was usually just a phase many boys go through as they explored sexuality with their most available source. So, I kept my secret and vowed to be good. I resisted the temptation to experiment myself and prayed secretly every night that I would grow out of it over time.
My horror at the concept of being homosexual only grew as I became more aware of the depth of the scorn society had for homosexuals. I remember a Life Magazine article in 1964 covering the homosexual underworld of New York. It was full of black-and-white photographs of men in dark alleys who were either in leather and chains, or in drag, and were addicted to heroin. I thought, "I can't be homosexual! I'm not like that!" I prayed more fervently that I would change. I avoided situations where my sexuality could come into question. I only dated "good girls who didn't," and thus maintained my pose. That worked until the summer after I graduated from college and a woman asked me to her bed and I had no excuse not to. I'll spare the details, but it was clear to me that my prayers and self-denials had been to no avail and I was in crisis. My worst fears had come true. I wanted to be successful in my life pursuits but I thought nobody would hire a known homosexual and I feared rejection by my friends and family. But I also knew I could no longer continue living the lie. I went inside myself and journaled, seeking answers. I knew that I could either live as a celibate or I could come to terms with it. Over time, a growing sense of indignation arose from within. I was a good person. I had not chosen this. Indeed, I had tried my best to change myself. I knew I did not deserve society's ignominy. My strong sense of injustice gave me the power to start accepting myself for who I was. I was a year in this internal process, and I was ready to start having experiences with other men. When I did, it was like a dam bursting. All of those years of pent-up desire came crashing down and I experienced the joy of sexual union with another human. I knew that I had become fully the person I would be.
