Free Brown: The Last Discovery of America by Richard Rodriguez

are,
I hope your troubles are few . . .
    You turn up the volume so they can hear it in the kitchen—this part, where the orchestra seems to breathe like a field in summer. You know very well what a field in summer sounds like, but you prefer this redeemed version. So that, henceforward, as you walk a country road, the field will become this, an orchestra! Or this part, the finaletto to act one, the pompous kettledrum amuses; the orchestra becomes an aural equivalent of a curtain’s plunge.
    But they never do hear it. Life intervenes. The phone rings. A thought springs from their inattentive heads. Or the vegetables come to a boil. The coffee grounds which have sat all morning must at this moment be emptied into the pail with that thump, thump, thump. Someone flushes a toilet. Or someone turns on the tap. The spell you are broadcasting is so fragile it can be drowned by a kitchen tap.
    James Woods, in a recent essay, construes soliloquy in the theater as “blocked conversation.” In my youth the musical comedy soliloquy was the perfect vehicle for blocked homosexual emotion—self-effacing epiphanies, reconciliations to disappointment. Vows. Examinations of conscience, rather as the church taught. The song about how much I love him but he’ll never know it.
    And he never did.
    I once had a teacher who wrote in a letter, “Tell me the truth, even if you have to dissemble.” Dissembling was the specialty of Broadway musicals. The storylines were scrupulously heterosexual. What could I have heard in them that made me think they explained me? It was this: The innocent characters were so wonderfully compromised by the actors who played them; by the writers and musicians who created them. The scar tissue on voices. The makeup on faces. Youth! The wicked stage! The jaded legend refreshed the innocence of my youth.
    Musical comedy songs were more real than my life because they were articulate and because they had ligaments of narrative attached to them. For today’s young queers and lonelys, these songs must seem quaint and campy and not useful. But they were never campy for me—for us?—they only became camp in the attempt to share them without embarrassment. It became necessary to distance ourselves from memories of a solitude so comic, perhaps, and yet so rich and so holy—huge balloons of rhyming thought hung in the air, lapidary, efficacious, memorable—and the world (represented by the narrative) stopped.
    The emotion of these songs is both retroactive and proac tive. Once you have fit your own emotion to these words, the words will forever after find your emotion; will, at some unforeseen time, explain your emotion to you, unbidden.
    And the narrative resumes.

    Many years later, long after I leave Stanford, I will be pursued in print by some puritan professor there for exhibitions of ethnic self-hatred in my writing. Yes, as a child, I dragged a razor blade against the skin of my forearm to see if I could get the brown out. I couldn’t. A clandestine experiment. Just checking. Did I hate my brown skin? No. Would I rather have been white? I would rather have been Jeff Chandler. Jeff Chandler would rather have been Lauren Bacall, according to Esther Williams’s autobiography.
    And yet I remain as much a puritan as any American. I remember, as a boy, being perplexed by a real-estate agent (a neighbor) wearing a red fez and riding a miniature motorcycle in the Shriners’ parade.
    I went to a performance of Death of a Salesman in New York last year. I had a box seat very near the stage, at a raised and acute angle. I could see into the wings. The wonderful actress who played the wife became so emotionally engaged in the final scene, the graveyard scene, she could not come out of her grief at the end of the play. She had to be helped to her bows by the other actors. This interested me.
    I have noticed, during speaking engagements, that I sometimes feel a freedom to weep, to assume voices, to carry on in public, to