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

acting craft a worthwhile goal. I wasn’t
so naïve as to expect my parents to weep with joy. But neither did I see my
choice as tantamount to family treason.
    A rotten carrot was dangled in front of me: If I
chose to study law or accounting, my grandmother would foot the bill. If acting
was to be my choice, I was on my own. The bitterness I hear in my own
description is only a trace residual; it doesn’t weigh on me, or my feelings
for my family, any longer. But for at least ten years after college, I felt
keenly their abandonment, imagining them as the rabid fans of an opposing team,
salivating at the prospect of my failure.
    In the end, I received enough scholarships and
school loans (this was pre-Reagan education slashing) that I was able to wait
tables and scrape by for the four years. But the injustice I felt had been done
to me has left a peculiar mark. Reading the morning paper will always be an
exercise in frustration, because any social injustice rankles me to the core of
my being. Every story of a little guy who gets the short end of the stick makes
me seethe.
    The wrongs and betrayals I perceived caused me
to feel something akin to an orphan. And my parents had moved to Florida soon
after I graduated high school. For much of the next ten years I rarely saw
them. While I was in college, my sister had given birth to her daughter,
Michelle. I spent a good deal of time at their house, occasionally babysitting.
However, the friends I made at U.S.C. became, to an extent, my family, and an
emotional safety net. If I crashed, they were there.
    In our junior year, a few new faces joined our
small program. One belonged to a bright-eyed, charismatic, curly haired,
swaggering good-old boy from Alabama. For a sturdy six-footer, Charlie had a
child-like charm, tinged with a taste of black-Irish wickedness. We were
instantly inseparable.
    Since I’d moved to college, the background noise
of my desires had increased steadily until it became nearly impossible to hear
above it. Yet I continued to try to ignore reality. I still attached myself to
heterosexual guys, hoping that their companionship would suffice. After five
weeks with Charlie, this promised to be more of the same - the latest in a long
string of straight-boy crushes.
    We spent weeks together, staying up late, eating
at all-night downtown dives, hanging out between classes, catty gossiping, and
laughing over my pathetic attempts to cheat at gin rummy. I’d already slept
over at his studio apartment a half-dozen times. He was the first friend I’d
made who lived alone, without a roommate to navigate around. In two full years
of college, I couldn’t claim a single sexual experience, a dubious distinction
that hardly any of my classmates could match.
    As far as I could tell, Charlie was straight as
an arrow. I imagined our attraction was because we were two people who shared
much in common. I had already had several other intimate bonding experiences
with other young men and women in our class, and none of them involved sex, so
why should this one?
    We’d been up till one playing gin, and drinking.
I made a move to grab my backpack, but Charlie gave me orders.
    “Put that down. You’re stayin’.” I smiled,
dropped the bag like it was poison, and walked over to the pull out couch I
usually used.
    “Forget about it, I don’t feel like makin’ it.”
As he walked through from the kitchen to the bathroom, he turned down the corner
of the bed, which I took as a signal to hop in. It looked big enough to
comfortably hold the two of us. It still looked like any other night.
    Once we were in bed, and the lights were out, I
turned over, away from Charlie, toward the barred windows. I could hear him
snoring lightly. Soon after, I dropped off. I haven’t any idea how much later
it was, but I woke to find his thigh bearing down on mine. In a flash, both his
powerful legs had pinned me. Now his entire body was smack on top of mine, and
he was mumbling incoherently into