Free The Wedding: A Family's Coming Out Story by Doug Wythe, Andrew Merling, Roslyn Merling, Sheldon Merling Page A

in fact, addressing only a part of
me - my “queerness” - and ignoring the whole, it was possible for me to deny
the accuracy of their base observation. Labeling someone “queer” implies that’s
all they are. But I knew, in my heart, I wasn’t one of “them.” Until I
connected with Mark, I somehow convinced myself that, since the bullies were
wrong about me in whole, they were also mistaken about that one specific area,
my sexuality, as well. I’d managed to isolate my desires into a separate
compartment. If I ignored them, I thought, they wouldn’t exist.
    I walked a fine line in my relationship with
Mark, aware of my consuming desire, yet fearing he didn’t want me the same way.
When I finally stumbled over that line, it yawned into a gaping rift that we
could never cross again. We were listening, funnily enough, to Queen, in his
bedroom. Santa Ana winds had kicked up on a November afternoon, heating the air
with the hint of electricity. Mark was lying on top of his bed, wearing only
his shorts.
    “You won’t believe what Steven did on Saturday
night.” Steven was his next-door neighbor, and best friend from earliest
childhood.
    “I was sleeping over on Saturday night, and I
was on this folding cot across the room. The lights were all out. I thought
he’d gone to sleep, and then I felt something land on my lap. When I reached to
feel it, I couldn’t believe....”
    “What?” I tried not to sound too eager.
    “His underwear! I looked over, and I could see
him in the little bit of light from the porch lamp that leaked through the
slats in his blinds. He was lying there totally naked, and I could completely
see his dick. Then he asks me to take mine off, and toss them to him!”
    “Yeah?”  My own fantasy life seemed to be
spilling into somebody else’s hands, and I was anxious, excited and jealous
over what he might say next.
    “Yeah, what?”
    “What did you do?” I hissed, impatiently.
    “What do you think! I said ‘What the hell are
you doing?’ He says ‘Do it, come on.’ So I get up, throw my clothes on real
fast, and come home. Is that bizarre or what?”
    The story left me so conflicted - awkward,
confused, and exhilarated - that I didn’t respond. Then Mark sprang out of bed,
went across the room, turned on the television, and sat down on the floor, his
back against the side of his bed frame. As usual, I sat down next to him, and
settled in to watch TV. But this time I edged in a little closer than usual.
Perhaps I looked at the story, subconsciously, as some kind of repressed
foreplay, and as we watched Happy Days , I reached behind Mark and tentatively
brushed my hand across the back of his arm. No response. Moments later, I tried
it again, a hint more obviously.
    “Excuse me, but you’re making me sick.” As he
said it, he glared ahead at the television.
    Well, at least he was to the point.
    I backed off, but it was too late. After I’d had
dinner with his family, I heard the hum of my father’s station-wagon as he
pulled into their driveway.
    Peering through the shutters in Mark’s room, I
saw my father step onto the pavement. I turned away. I was wounded, flushed
with disgrace, unable to conceive that Mark might have betrayed me. ‘My face
burned, I went lightheaded, my fingers tingled. Consumed by a desperate need to
disappear, I suddenly felt enormous, a gigantic object of contempt and scorn.
My father stowed my bicycle in the back, and we drove home silently, never to
speak about why he’d been called on to pluck me out of Mark’s house and cart me
off, like a criminal.
     
    After high school I was enrolled in U.S.C.’s revamped
acting conservatory. Despite the achievement of being admitted to the
competitive program, news of my decision was greeted by my family with a
resounding cry of foul. This had become, it seemed, my greatest transgression,
a slap in the face of the family’s reverence for higher education. Never mind
that I considered the mastery of the