The Boxer/A Warm Forest
My earliest memory is playing Joseph in my preschool’s Christmas Play. The role was easy; I walked slowly, side-by-side with my classmate playing Mary who, in a rather progressive take on the role, made me carry the swaddled baby Jesus. “He’s so cute,” the audience decried in their reviews, adding to it a note that it was interesting that Joseph was smaller than Mary. And he carried the baby! Laughed at the irony of this role reversal occurred, all in good fun, of course. This was a tepidly religious, half-day preschool in the basement of an episcopal church after all, so no one took it that seriously that my classmate made the artistic choice to have the smallest boy in the class, cast as one of the most famous men in history, carry out the role with a feminine interpretation.
I’ve seen some photos and videos from this play in recent years and it’s painful to watch. I look pained. I was doing nothing, sitting next to Baby Jesus in the manger, and yet people were gawking at me. So cute, so small, so docile, so well-behaved. Some kids love attention, thrive in it, etc... but at that time, all I wanted to do was hide and avoid the scrutiny, no matter how (somewhat mindlessly) well-intentioned it was.
These refrains were repeated to me over and over throughout my childhood – by cashiers at the grocery stores, teachers, strangers at family parties, etc... and I loathed it. My cuteness, docility, and well-behaved nature felt like a product of my smallness. This smallness was celebrated, but never without a tinge of... is everything okay?
For a boy, especially one who, from a very early age refused to eat most foods and showed no interest in the activities that would require a more muscular frame, it wasn’t okay. The same strangers who would praise me for the qualities you would look for in a pet whippet would offer prescriptives to my parents: feed him egg white milkshakes, make sure it’s not diabetes, oh he’ll never get married if all he eats is chicken nuggets and carrot sticks, have you considered growth hormones?
My parents did their best to protect me from this criticism, hoping to do what they could to stave off society’s expectations for what a young boy should be like so that I could develop a healthy relationship with food and my body. Despite their best efforts, these critiques felt omnipresent around me. I couldn’t escape the fear that something was gravely wrong with me. I assumed that I would die young, wasting away from some uncertain illness like a Victorian-era child living in a tenement without sunlight or running water.
It was around this time, four or five years old, that I first realized I was queer. One Sunday afternoon my dad discarded a newspaper, and I came upon the image of a boxer. He was shirtless, with a scowl on his face. I cut it out of the newspaper and carried it around in my pocket. When my mom found it, I was mortified. I didn’t quite know why, but it was wrong to do such a thing. No one really said anything about it to make me feel this way. That said, I still felt sad knowing that I shouldn’t do such a thing.
Looking at the boxer made me happy; he was so strong and serious. He was probably never afraid and would live forever. I wanted to look at him endlessly, until I became just like him, perhaps. Of course, I knew that would never happen. I only had a couple years of my life left. I’d never have a chest as broad as his. I’d never be fearless. I’d never be able to protect myself from the world. I was going to die before I could do all of that.
I was born in 1993, when HIV/AIDS was still discussed with a hushed horror. I don’t remember anyone telling me what it was, explicitly, but I remember hearing the disdain of newscasters discussing the illness and its effects in a way that surely burrowed its way into my subconsciousness. Of all the negative impacts of these discussions, the most toxic of it was the inevitability. All gay men will get HIV and they will die of AIDS. They’ll never make it to their 30s. Their families will leave them and they’ll never have families of their own. That is, of course, other than the families they’ll create for themselves, which they will tragically watch die one-by-one.
The photo of the boxer flashed into my head again. Damn, I’m really fucked now, aren’t I? If I didn’t waste away from being small, malnourished, and un-boy-like, AIDS would get me. I didn’t quite know how – I was 4 or 5, after all – but I knew I was queer. This queerness wasn’t about sex, though. It was about identity, about feeling fundamentally at odds with all the models of what you should be. And it was going to kill me.
The expectation of an inevitable, very bad thing happening to me built within me. It nestled itself somewhere beneath my heart, pressing up against my stomach, creating a racing heart and an upset stomach that would last decades. I’m inclined to name it fear, but I actually think its closest relative would be some relative of dread and grief. If it had a sound, it would be a hushed, sustained groan, as to not draw attention to itself, and certainly, to not disturb anyone.
When I was 23 or so, I found myself in a place where I thought it would get me after all. I was broke, driving for a Rideshare app and watching strangers’ dogs while living in a sublet apartment. After a lunch with two of my perfectly kind friends who found quick success after college, I almost fainted in a Starbucks. My heart was pounding in my throat, I was sweating all over, my skin was white, I was behind on my car payments, I didn’t have health insurance, I probably smoked too many cigarettes in college, and these two friends I just shared a perfectly fine lunch with made all the right choices while I made all of the wrong ones.
I ran away from my hometown and attended a college I couldn’t afford because I was too afraid, too cowardly, to try to come out and be myself around people I already knew. I probably partied too much in college and found myself focusing on understanding myself more than developing a marketable skill set, so now all I had was student loan debt, a car at risk of repossession, and realistically only a slightly clearer idea of how my queerness fit into the world. But, for better or for worse, none of that would matter — I was about to die in a Starbucks. How fucking bleak!
Well, needless to say I didn’t die in that Starbucks, and this thing hasn’t killed me. I’ve learned to acknowledge it, live with it, tame it, and heal it. I’ve even learned to thank it, in a weird way, too. I wouldn’t have a lot of the things inside of me without it; my empathy, my openness, my joy, my appreciation for things that help me understand it better, etc...
For the longest time I viewed it as something that was life-taking; something that prevented me from having any of the experiences I thought I should be having as a teenager, the ability to follow the steps of everyone I ever knew in the order they should be climbed. But now I see it as something life-giving; it was once a barren thing within me, a swirling, jagged rock made of dread and grief, but as I’ve nurtured it, it’s changed. Into something lush, soft, perceptive, and warm.
It feels like the floor of a forest after a rain storm in early autumn. The sun is shining, but it’s not reaching you. The forest floor is damp but not wet enough to prevent you from taking a nap under a shaded fern. You fall asleep as quickly as you did as a child in your mother’s arms. You’ve created a home for yourself. It’s a beautiful warm forest, where you can experience grief and dread in the measured ways that any person living in this world must experience those emotions.
That rock has given way to a flora made up of elements you never knew existed. They’re peaceful ones – gratitude, mainly. Awe at the things you can experience when you don’t judge or hate yourself. Love in its many forms. And the joy of doing for the sheer purpose of sustaining your life – like standing up in the kitchen with your friends eating cold spaghetti after a nap on the beach, or asking your mom if it’s okay if you close your eyes for a few minutes while you drive home from a visit with your grandmother while the radio drones on silently, or listening to the same song over and over again.
When I think of this warm forest within me, I am mindful that it’s not just for me. Part of queerness is a responsibility to the collective. To the people who don’t have as much access or privilege as you, or to put it gravely, the ones who didn’t live long enough to get to this place. I turn 33 this week, and I can’t help but think of the rest of my life in parallel to the over 40 million lives who died of AIDS-related illnesses and never had the chance to combat the things that made us hate ourselves and give back to the world. I think of artists like Andy Warhol and Arthur Russell who never had the chance to teach us about illness and survival. I think of the countless people who were buried on Hart Island off the coast of New York City in unnamed boxes, with no family to claim them. I think of Ryan White and his family, who used the legacy of his death to attempt to educate the populace on HIV/AIDS while investing money in ensuring the most vulnerable people in our society impacted by the illness have adequate resources to live long lives.
Perhaps, most strikingly, however, I remember the long-term survivors of the AIDS crisis who I had the privilege to work with briefly as a housing advocate for those living with HIV a couple of years back. In particular, I remember a man who would spend hours upon hours telling me the stories of his youth living between Massachusetts and Texas. A tribute to his life in Texas, he never went anywhere without a cowboy hat. He told me how he once ran with a bathtub held high over his head while his blonde lover sat on the hood of a truck and laughed so hard he cried. “I was very strong once,” he remarked. “You’re strong,” he told me. “You’re very, very lucky, you know that right?”
There’s a trope among gay men that you’re not desirable after you turn 27 or so. Twink death, some people call it. When I was 27 I started to go bald and I gained weight in my mid-section. This idea of twink death was always in the back of my head, especially as I ridiculed my body and head in the mirror, remarking the changes to my appearance and how I’d never be desired in the way I once was.
A harmless joke, this idea of twink death is, I guess? But it’s impossible for me not to make the connection to the AIDS crisis. When so many queer men were lost as they entered their 30s, how can you not see it? I think of the cowboy who survived it all, how tasteless it would be to explain this joke to him. He was one of the lucky ones who was able to imagine that life for himself, but not without being impacted by so much chronic destruction. He eventually found love after the man who cried at his bathtub trick died of AIDS. His partner never contracted the illness, but they never allowed themselves to be physically intimate in the way either fully wanted. His partner died tragically and he was left alone, eventually finding a community in a support group of elderly gay men living with HIV/AIDS, but constantly expressing a deep sadness for what was lost.
I don’t know what has come of him, but I’ll never forget his words: I am very lucky.
I’m 33, I’m strong, I’m healthy, and I have an entire life to live, to imagine, and to live in honor of those who had their imagination taken away.