My Christmas Story

“I was born and raised in the sweltering hell of Phoenix Arizona.” That’s how I began all my college entrance essays. Growing up in the Grand Canyon state during the 60s and 70s had its pluses, but broad-mindedness and toleration for gawky, bookish, closeted gay kids wasn’t among them. I realized much later in life that my Goldwaterish center of “States Rights” was a fearsome, late-blooming Confederate territory — indeed, they had a Civil War battle just outside Tucson, fighting for Arizona slave cotton plantations.

In 1980, when given the chance to flee and head to Stanford University, I ran. California then had everything: excellent schools, humane weather, deep-green plants along freeways, and San Francisco: that otherworldly mecca teaming with bright, courageous, gorgeous gay men.

I came out slowly, lots of side stories there. But come out (at least to close friends) I did, and in the fall of 1983, I moved with 3 friends to a dreamy top-floor Victorian flat along Golden Gate Park’s Panhandle in the Haight Ashbury. Our landlord, nodding to Tales of the City, left us a mantle gift bag of pot brownies. I finally felt, if not free, at least on my way. AIDS of course was a new, growing menace, but my young mind didn’t really grok that yet. Afternoon cocktail parties at friends’ swanky Russian Hill apartments, kooky drag-enfused soirées, and Sunday Tea Dances at the I-Beam beckoned and enthralled.

It was my senior year and I only had that fall quarter in San Francisco. It was a luscious urban gay appetizer, for my suddenly nomadic life. I was leaving after Christmas Break to Berlin, the nexus of all things outré and gay. Bowie, Brian Eno, Hegel and Cabaret: a city on the edge of everything and nothing, trapped in the heart of Soviet East Germany, the wild intellectual heartbeat of Europe: I had to get there. Stanford had (and has) an amazingly wide-flung program of international campuses. Other friends were heading to England and Paris; but I knew the moment I matriculated that I had to get to Berlin. I could not wait.

And so, there I was home in Phoenix for Christmas, packing and fretting and dreaming about a vast new life. The Saturday morning of Christmas Eve, 1983, exactly 37 years ago today, I woke up early to a bustling kitchen just outside my door, my mother hurrying to make everything just so for the annual big family Christmas dinner. In a move that I still ponder at in its odd Freudian-ness, I slipped through the house to my mother’s side of my parent’s bed, to slumber off the rest of the morning.

Our mail always came punctually at 10:30 am.

At about 10:35, I was startled by my mother’s stricken face, tremblingly gripping a Christmas card and envelope, asking me: “Wayne, who sent us this??”

In her hands was the sort of bawdy holiday card available in any of Castro’s adult sex shops/card stores and, given its San Francisco post office date stamp two days prior, probably was. It was addressed to “The Sobons”. The sender knew my family’s home address.

The cover was what would have then been called a “cross-dressing” or “transvestite” hirsute, bearish man, drenched in tinsel and Christmas Tree wig, a gay sexy Santa Claus, surrounded by huge holiday packages. Entirely pedestrian for San Francisco 1984; a freakish, scary alien landing in Phoenix.

The inside had a set of check-off boxes. “’Tis the season to be — ” ( and I have remembered for 37 years exactly which boxes were checked)…“depressed”, “gay”, and “morbid”.

On the facing page, my heart rate now exploding, my face hot and ashamed, in an over-the-top, florid script, the writer addressed my family:

“I just want you to know your son is a despicable, slutty, evil, faggott [sic], snob. He stole my boyfriend and now I’m all alone. I hate him forever.” [emphasis in original…]

No signature. No return address.

I may have inhaled and betrayed the feeling of my face caving inward, but in a flash I replied: “Oh, I think I know who wrote this. He’s this crazy guy from school who’s been following me around and I don’t know what he has out for me, but I’ll handle this. I’m sorry.”

My thoughts were already tail-spinning down that familiar incandescent drain at the bottom of the closet, where a decade of bullying and fear, the screamed voices of Reagan, Anita Bryant, Phyllis Schlaffly, and so-called churches churned along with the sting of local rich ranch boys lassoing me for fun on my afternoon paper route; kids hiding around school building corners, just waiting to jump me and brand me a “faggot” (or “faggott”…); and most nauseating of all: the imagined horrified rejection of my parents, should they ever, ever find out. All of this collapsed onto and into me at 10:35 am that crisp, Phoenix Christmas Eve morning.

Adrenaline pumping, leaping out of bed, thrashing from one wrong task to another, I felt caged and helpless. I called some friends back at their homes. We pondered who might have done this to me. There was one improbable incident at a late-night party in Mira Loma (a thoroughly sleepy middle-class neighborhood just over the hill from where I now live), where two guys went at each other in the street, each claiming me as their boyfriend. A weird, crazy nightmare at the time, but maybe it was one of them? I had no idea.

What I did know is that I had to focus on my upcoming trip. I was leaving for Berlin in just a few days. But focusing was not something my reptile brain, riveted now on mere survival, could handle. One simple task, like packing clothes, lay out of reach. Sick to my stomach, mind racing, I used every sort of “fake it till you make it” trick I could muster just to get through our Christmas meals, exchanging presents, and family pictures.

Trying to shop calmly with my sister Sandy at the mall, I couldn’t stay in my body.

I felt my young, hidden, ashamed life falling apart just when I thought I was getting it together. All because some hateful man-boy sent my family (and me) a tawdry, angry, misspelled Christmas card. How did I bring this down on myself? What do I do? Rudderless in those early 80’s, I had no adequate guidebook, and no wise mentors.

I spent the rest of the week before flight darkly ruminating and talking to myself. I don’t remember how I exactly reached the conclusion, but I somehow decided that I had to come clean. I had to at least tell my mother the truth about me. I couldn’t bear to leave this unresolved and just go. I felt trapped between two boulders of easy lie and hard truth. So, I decided to write a coming-out letter that I would leave for her. Drafted in long-hand it was several pages.

But then, in a decision I still marvel at, I figured that I would actually hand it to her directly. One night my parents had gone to a dinner party. I stayed up waiting for them. I fixed myself the biggest, tallest Johnny Walker Black-and-soda of my life, in a super-sized orange plastic cup used mostly for iced sun tea. The more I drank the more sober and scared I grew — and they came home much later than I had planned.

It was now or never.

I asked my mother to come to my bedroom, that I had something to talk with her about.

She followed, clearly nervous. None of this was like me. We sat down on my bed (still blue fake fur — I had decorated my entire room red, white, and blue for the ’76 Bicentennial). Maniacally sipping my stiff drink, I handed her the letter and watched her slowly read. When she got to the critical sentence, I watched her gulp, stop, look again, and then continue reading. I lost sensation in my body. She finished, and wiping a tear or two away, looked up at me and said: “oh honey, of course I love you. I’ll always love you.” I think she asked me some questions (about my general safety given the hatred even she knew about (let alone AIDS…), and other motherly, tender concerns) and then just as quickly said: “Don’t tell any of this to Daddy or your sisters. They might not know how to deal with this.” I said “Ok” (what else was I going to say?). We hugged and I thanked her so much and she kissed me goodnight. I slept well for the first time since the card arrived.

I left for Berlin a day or two later. Just as I had envisioned, it became one of the peak experiences of my life, changing me forever. But a week or so after I arrived, I got a heart-stopping blue thin aero-post from my mother: she wrote that she had shown my coming-out letter to my father, and in words that chilled, said she had never seen him this way. That he cried non-stop for days. And in that long-ago time of wispy-thin letters, hyper-expensive international calls and no such thing as text or emails, I just had to absorb that news. And wait.

Sometime later, I got a similar blue aero-post from my dad. I shook when I opened it. But what it said inside changed everything. He told me the news came as both shock and also somehow already known. But that seeing it in print was something else (perhaps a bit like me too, seeing it all in that lurid script in that Christmas card…). That it was hard for him to take. But that he read my words and when I said I was actually happy, and that I loved my life, he supported me and was just happy I was happy, and loved me no matter what. Waiting for the bus, I remember just crying and crying on a wintry Berlin cobblestone road. My worst nightmare had come true: I had told my parents my darkest truth.

And they still loved me.

37 years have gone by, to this very Christmas Eve day. I’ve made a life for myself beyond any wildest dream I dared to dream as that scared, young man back then. I have thought about that Christmas card from time to time. And would tell certain friends about it. A few weeks ago, when I was looking in my storage locker for my ski boots to get ready for this season, I didn’t find them, but I did spy my banker’s box of college mementos. The thought of that card hit me. I sat on the concrete floor carefully pulling out each layer from the box (majoring in physics, I am always concerned about entropy…), pictures of the time in San Francisco, postcards from long-gone bars, amazing flotsam and jetsam from my life.

And then, there it was. I recognized the script on the address. Envelope and card. Kept and preserved.

I sat there, reading it over and over again. Studying it. And then a wave of joy swept over me. I just gazed at it, wonderfully happy and contented.

Look at me! Look what became of me!

I got home and texted the pictures to some close friends. They marveled.

I then got online to order some things that I had seen in my mind’s eye, and immediately found them: two large, magnetically coupled Lucite 8"x10” block frames — -so I could protect and display the card and the envelope, and they could be picked up and examined on all sides.

I put the two artifacts on the mantle in my living room.

And I put a candle in front of them. An altar to my transformation. A memorial to that strong, sensitive young man who somehow had the courage and the thought to do what I had done.

A memorial to whoever sent that card to my family. I now know a lot more than I did then. I know that the same internalized hatred that afflicted me, afflicted him then as well. That the card was a wild stab and cry in the dark. That it was intended to fling whatever pain he had at me and my family, hoping to throw his inner sting at and into us.

But poisons can also be potions. And that strange medicine thrown my way did its magic. And instead of hobbling me under morbid, depressed gay-ness, his Christmas message had set me free. Free to traverse life and continue shedding old shame and taking on new love. Free to be my essential self.

That card is the best Christmas gift I’ve ever received.

Thank you, whoever you are. I hope you now understand that you, me and all of us deserve love and are loved.

Namaste, my friend. And Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, everyone.