We eagerly anticipate them; and we dread them. Reunions have the potential of stirring up old feelings of insecurity & resentment of long-forgotten cliques, but also the power to re-activate dormant friendships and stimulate new ideas. For better and for worse, high school is a crucible, a culmination of the attitudes, behaviors, ethics, and responsibilities we’ve learned at home from our family. We’re generally so eager to take that bold step out of the familial house once it’s over. Some have described it as a purgatory of necessary agony and awkwardness we all must endure to reach the bliss of college years and young adulthood.
But that wasn’t really the case for me.
During my high school years, I only had a slight inkling that I was gay. While all the male classmates I knew were just busy being guys, I was trying to figure out just what it meant to be a guy – how to do it – how to walk, how to laugh, how to socialize, how to talk. I think that a lot of people look at high school and college as a period of lost innocence – a time to understand the world, one’s self, one’s body (and the pleasures of the opposite sex). For me, those years weren’t really about the loss of innocence as much as they were about the loss of youth – or perhaps trying to find it.
For many gay men of my generation, life was an imitation game: Watch the “regular” guys, and see if you can be like them.
It would be another seven and a half years after high school graduation before I could come out to myself and my friends. By then youth was well past and even young adulthood was well underway. Emotionally and in terms of body-awareness, I was probably eight to ten years behind many of my high school classmates – at least in terms of ease with myself. Internalized homophobia, as we now call it, is destructive and rarely leaves one scar-less.
But curiously, the recollection of this does not make me feel sorry for myself. Something is lost; and something else is gained. Had I not been driven by an incredible desire for self-understanding, it’s likely that I would not have developed the spiritual life I’ve developed, nor had the concentration necessary to spend many thousands of hours practicing music – which of course would lead to my vocation. It was precisely the need to retreat that gave me the will and the courage to find my muse in the beauty of sound.
This past week was a week of contrasts. It was my first time in Provincetown, Massachusetts – a week surrounded mostly by middle-aged gay men; then I flew to Northern Virginia to attend my 40th high school reunion – and while I obviously don’t know this for a fact, I may have been the only gay (or, at least, married gay) man in a room of 175 people. Did it make me uncomfortable? Not in the least. But as I ended my trip, driving around my old high school campus (now undergoing a major expansion), I couldn’t help but feel the pangs of compassion for the hiding kid I was then.
Langley High School is actually a pretty amazing place. A public school, yet with all the resources one finds just inside the Washington beltway, I would guess that close to 50% of the students there have parents that are involved in the government in some capacity (some in a very significant capacity). We had access to culture, nature, intellectual stimulation, power and intrigue, and a certain level of opportunity and privilege that seems unique. The school was and is a magnet for dynamite teachers and students alike.
How refreshing it was, for me on this trip, to find so many of my old classmates/friends at a point in their lives when they are open to yet another beginning! In spite of the aforementioned privilege (and consequent expectations), I was struck by the complete absence of smugness. Nobody seemed to broadcast an air that they had their act together more than anyone else.
Humility is rarely a character trait of a kid in high school, and probably even less rarely of a young adult in college. I had naively frozen my high school classmates in the paradigm in which I last saw them; yet the opposite was true. Narcissistic self-confidence has yielded to genuineness. I daresay that much of that has to do with the way life has a way of knocking us around. Parents raising children are often stressed to their limits. People gain jobs and lose jobs. Parents die. Many successes are coupled with many failures. And the learning never stops…
I didn’t have the gift of raising children in my life (well, indirectly through the many kids I’ve taught), but the struggles of accepting myself as a gay man were probably similarly all-consuming – not to mention the other knocks and joys which life has set in my path. Using the “passive voice” in that last sentence is intentional. I do believe that some of our individual greatness comes from how we choose to play the hand we’re dealt.