11-30-01

I was thinking about it yesterday, and it would seem that I haven't talked to my brother in over 5 years. I'm not good at sensing the passage of time. Everything beyond two years ago seems so far away to me.

It was during my fifth year of undergrad (I started at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland where I started as Biomedical Engineering before changing to Electrical Engineering, the transferred to The Ohio State University where I switched from EE - after a few semesters when I got into the upper level EE classes and hated them - to English Lit) when I got a call from my brother.

"Hi, David. Uh, uhm. There's something I have to tell you. Uhm."

"What," I asked it clicking in my brain what he was trying to say, "Are you gay?"

"Yeah," he said in amazement, "How did you know?" "I don't know, it just made sense."

It never really crossed my mind one way or the other. All I really knew was that my brother only had one date in high school, for senior prom with a girl who was a junior, but I don't believe they ever went out again. I always though he was just was too, either, anti-social or too smart or got picked on too much to go out with girls. But hearing him hesitate the way he did, it must've clicked in my brain. You gotta remember, too, we grew up in the suburbs in a pretty conservative family (although my dad was a lifelong Democrat, he was still rather uptight), and we didn't really have any gay role models or even think about it much. More on that later.

"Well, what do you think about that?" he asked me.

"S'cool with me," I said. I think by this point in my life, I'd outgrown any lingering homophobia inflicted by ignorant adolescence. Or, if not completely, it certainly evaporated by the time I was an actor and got to become friends with many homo-sex-u-iles. Two of my four groomsman are gay, yeah, so fuck that homophobia.

"Oh!," He was kind of amazed by my reaction, expecting me to be freaked out, I guess, "Okay. You're only the second person I've told. I told my best friend here in college (a female) and she's really angry with me. I think she was maybe wanting to have a relationship with me. I haven't told mom and dad yet, I think over Thanksgiving. Can you be there to make sure they don't freak out."

"Yeah, sure. I'll do that."

So over Thanksgiving, Abraham breaks it to our parents. They are pretty shocked. I'm sure it never crossed their mind to wonder. But they handled it well. And by the next semester or next year, my parents had gone to Philadelphia and marched in the Gay Pride Parade with my brother in the Parents of Gays group or whatever it's called. The following Thanksgiving, while I was in Grad School, my brother brought a boyfriend home from college to meet everyone. They seemed fine about that, although I'm sure it was weird for them. The guy, I don't remember too much about him. He was okay; I don't think we really had much to talk about.

So my father has well mellowed out by this point, and my brother and I, although we never were good friends at least weren't fighting any more. He told me that his coming out experience was really painful. He literally was in a dark closet (get that) banging his head against a wall having a hard time accepting what he was. He says he always knew he was different, preferring to look in the Sears catalog at the pictures of the men in underwear even when he was little, but he didn't really recognize that he was gay. He started seeing a psychologist to deal with his fears, insecurities, depression, etc.

When he came out and accepted his own gayness, he seemed a lot less angry all the time. I kind of remember him being angry and very serious most of the time, a bit like my father that way. At any rate, he and I started to get along better. We could talk without shouting at each other. We were not very close, not like friends, but we didn't argue much at least.

I had graduated from grad school with a Masters in English Lit from U of Wisc-Mad at this point and moved to Chicago to become an actor. About three years have passed, and my brother, and I talk every once in a while. I'm seeing a therapist too for a while - it think that's required for every Jew or ex-Jew, to see a therapist at least for a little while - and he encourages me to try to build a better relationship with my brother. So I start trying to call him about once a week, to catch up. He's a senior in college at University of Pennsylvania by this point.