Doing It Right for a Change

Y'all, I'm published! Okay, so it's an online publication, but it's still all mine. I would like to thank Dr. Stephanie Vanderslice for letting me know about the publishing opportunity with Splinter Generation. Read my poem and let me know what you think!

In other news, I'm coming down with the funk from running myself ragged with the course work and the teaching and the socializing. Snotty nose and sore throat makes Tim a sad boy. But not so sad that I didn't go out with a whole slough of folks for cheap Mexican food and half-priced Dos Equis pitchers tonight. I mean, I had to eat, right? Plus, it's against my religion to stay in on a Friday night. I have people to love on, y'all.

In the long absence since my last post, I've been busy, busy, busy: writing poems and short stories, reading about campy performance art, teaching argumentative writing to somewhat resistant-but-still-utterly-adorable college freshpeople. Spending too much time loving on friends. I'm living the dream, and I hate to think that it's going to end in six months. Here's to making it the best six months yet.

I'm on my way to bed for some much needed recuperation, but I'll share a completely endearing teacher story with you before I go:

A student confided to me in an individual conference before fall break that he felt he "just wasn't doing this college thing right." "I just don't have any friends, Mr. Sisk," he said. "I don't think I want to come back after Fall Break." His admission struck me as odd since he is one of the chattier boys in his class. In fact, I had planned to tell him he should stop talking so much in class, but my heart just melted. I couldn't scold him. I couldn't let him give up on college, especially since he tries so hard and does good work in my class. I told him that I noticed he'd been getting along with a boy he sits beside in my class, that from my end of things they looked like pretty good friends. "Ask him to go to the football game with you or go to church with him," I said, doing my best to speak to him in his language. I know his language. Well, last week I decided to hold class outside under a tree since the day was lovely and our reading dealt with defining a sense of place. Both classes did a wonderful job discussing the text (I was so proud!), and at the end of the class with the aforementioned student, he came up to ask me a question about an assignment. I noticed that the boy I told him he should consider his friend stood a few feet back waiting on him to finish talking to me. Then they walked across the quad together talking about things that 18-year-old boys talk about. I was so damned proud so see these friends interact, to know that maybe this boy no knows he is doing this college thing right. It was one of the best kinds of teaching moments, and I hope I remember it forever.


It sounds so cheesy, but I don't care: being a teacher is my favorite thing about my life. And I've got a pretty good life full of lots of great things.

Happy weekend, y'all!

On Cleaning Up and Coming Out

My Old College Room Mate is coming to Knoxville for a visit this week, and I'm terribly excited to see him.  When the house sitting gig is up, I have to spend a day scrubbing my kitchen and bathroom, vacuuming and dusting, and strategically arranging my tacky Goodwill nicknacks so OCRM won't give me grief.  I love him, but he's one of those bitchy types, the kind who stares you down before you leave the house and says, "are you really going to wear that?"  

He is so much like Ouisa Boudreaux, crotchety, abrasive, but has a heart of gold.  I'm terribly excited to see him, because he can keep me in stitches and have an intelligent conversation with anyone, but particularly the literature crew, because the boy reads.  He thinks.  He knows his stuff.

Old College Room Mate called me the other night, late.  He'd been drinking, and so had I, and he confessed what I already knew:  he's gay.  Or at least he's trying to figure out if he is.  I'm proud of him for taking that step.  Back when I was with him every day, OCRM was a bit standoffish, afraid to let people know him too much.  He always denied any speculative rumors of his sexuality, and he had the conveniently located Colorado "girlfriend" who never was around.  So, for him to explore his sexuality and practice assuming a gay identity is major.  For him to invite me along on this process is flattering.  

Identity issues are tough.  Sometimes I feel like I know that more than anyone.  I find myself wanting to give OCRM tips on how to successfully navigate himself through the closet door, but I realize that the process is different for everyone.  OCRM came to terms with his sexuality by first entering into sexual relationships with other men and denying the gay label associated with those activities.  'Gay' is a tough label to willingly accept, because it casts its bearers in the role of Other forever.  It makes them suspect, opens them up to countless, "bless his little heart" epithets.  I readily understand why OCRM has been so reluctant to put on the Homo Hat.

Coming out was different for me, probably because I was so young.  When I was fifteen I told my high school friends one-by-one, and much to my surprise all were completely fine with it.  After that I worked on finding something within the cauldron of stereotypes associated with 'Gay' that I could latch on to and learn to perform my identity.  I wrote poems.  I colored my hair.  I auditioned for the school play.  I did everything I could to learn how to live as a gay man, as someone who accepts the label and the marginal status in stride.  Any type of sexual contact with another man would come much later, because I was too scared of men--too scared, or at least unsure, of the man I would become.  Like sex for any teenager, I didn't know what to do (literally, in my case) or how to do it.  Unlike other high school kids, I wasn't willing to fool around until I figured it out.  Experimentation would come later, when I was in college and more used to living as openly gay.

At sixteen, I came out to my parents, shortly after the 9/11 attacks when I thought the world was going to end and I couldn't face Jesus without having confessed my dark secret to Momma and Daddy.  Coming out under fire, I was greeted with mixed-and-unexpected responses from my parents.  Daddy, the stoic, emotionally frigid, ex-Marine, law enforcement officer said "Well, that's okay."  To this day we've never talked about my sexuality again.  Momma, on the other hand, cried in bed for two days and told me how disappointed she was in me.  Isn't it funny how the meanest things someone ever says to you come from those who you are closest to?  I'll never forget when my momma told me she'd sooner me be dead than gay.  I was devastated, because I'd been raised to believe my mother would always love me.  And she did, and she does.  I don't fault her for what she said, because I know she didn't mean it.  Like me, my mother was learning to play a new role, one she'd never pictured herself in before:  the accepting mother of a gay son.  After her two-day crying jaunt, she got out of bed, went back to work, and to this day is my biggest fan.  Sometimes people have to do the wrong thing in order to know how to do the right one.

I want to share all this with OCRM, to let him know that coming out, especially initially, is an emotionally over-wrought process.  He will feel more loved than he has before, and he will get hurt.  He'll feel regret, that perhaps he'll change and not be gay after he's told his friends and family, and then what?  He'll develop a heightened sense of awareness about other people's intentions and attitudes, because a part of him always will be on guard.  A part always has to be.  

Ultimately I want him to know that despite the challenges, the fact that he'll be coming out all his life to every new person he meets, it's something he needs to do in order to feel better about himself.  Disclosure, honesty, self-acceptance:  these are keys to successful maturation, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.  I want him to know that loving himself is key in situations like these, followed closely by surrounding himself with people who love and support him.  There are a lot of negative people with ill-intentions towards difference, but those are not the people to dwell on, because by fearing them we give them what the want.  I want him to know that he is lovely and he will always be loved because he deserves nothing less.  

But before all that, I want him to know that I am not a bad housekeeper and I do have some semblance of taste, so it's off to cleaning, scrubbing, and installing the curtain rods I've been meaning to get around to for 8 months.

The Man I Have Not Become

One thing I know for sure: The Lord put my Daddy on this earth to be a daddy. It's taken me a while to come to that conclusion, but I think it's right, and I'd prefer not to be contradicted. For a long time, especially when I was a know-it-all teenager, I didn't know what to do with the man. Bald head, rotten teeth, incapable of uttering a sentence only once, my daddy the chronic repeater just didn't jibe with what television and children's books led me to believe a father was supposed to look like. He chews tobacco and paces the floors when he's talking to you. He has never said I love you before in his life. I'm nearly 100 percent sure of it, and that used to bother me endlessly until I came up with my Theory of Predestined Roles. At least that's the working title.

The thing my daddy is best at--and he's good at lots of things--is being a father. Not the handsomely trim, emotionally demonstrative soccer coach dad you'd see on Desperate Housewives (a DILF, if you will). He's a born caregiver. He doesn't have to look the part because he invented it. He doesn't have to say "I love you" because his body screams it with every muscle spasm and joint pop.

My daddy ran my bath water for me until I was ten years old. I think it hurt his feelings when I, in my decade's worth of grandiose wisdom, told him I would no longer need his services. He obliged me without an argument, but he was right there when, just after he left, I cranked up the hot water and yelped from the scald. Daddy cared about me, and he didn't want me to burn myself from the water that got much too hot as it traversed its way topsy-turvy through the persnickety pipes of our double-wide trailer. He cared about me enough to let me burn myself, though, and learn caution. Learn that maybe I still needed him after all.

He was at each of Jeffrey's home football games, and at most of the away ones, too, unless they were too far south in Mississippi, so far he couldn't make them in time after he got of work. Daddy loved watching those boys fumble on the field, particularly his own son, my brother, the 2nd string whatever who got little field play. Despite his love of sports and my disinterest in them, Daddy was there for all my adolescent rites of passage: choir concerts, school plays, countless academic awards ceremonies. Even the Momma I Adore can't say that much.

I took a composition class at Mississippi University for Women the summer before my senior year of high school and wrote a personal essay about my father, how he was born to drive. It makes sense. He drives a silver boat of a patrol car for a living, would spend evenings driving all about the county after he got off work, taking Jeffery to Taekwando and me to church. He always drove Aunt Mollie to the Methodist church at Pleasant Hill on Sunday mornings and picked her up just before noon since she never stayed for the invitation hymn. And the only two times I've ever known of him go to church of his own accord were the day I was baptized and the night I played Shepherd Number 2 in a musical at the Cedar View Baptist Church. My Daddy doesn't do religion, but when his youngest, most precocious went through that Evangelical Phase small town Southern kids are susceptible to, he took off his cap, tucked in his shirt, and sat right there in the back of the sanctuary to watch me take the plunge, make my joyful noise.

Jeffrey is so much like my father. He paces the floor when he talks just like Daddy, and he never quite knows what to do with his hands when he's conversing. He is restless now, constantly burning up gas bumbling down the road in his red pick up, finding some relative or another to get mad at. That's our Momma coming out in him, but he'll settle down when he has a child. Like our father, my brother was born to be a daddy, to care for another person more than he does for himself. In Jeffrey's case, like in Daddy's, I think the other person will have to be his own child, or the equation just won't work. Men like my father and brother make strange bedfellows. They aren't passionate lovers, which precludes them from being husband material for the types of women to which they are attracted. If I had a crystal ball it would tell me that my brother will marry right around 30, have a couple kids and remain completely enthralled with them through his divorce and high cholesterol diagnosis, right up until the day he dies. Just like our father.

More tenuous is determining the Theoretical Predestined Role for myself. I'm not like the men in my family, and those men closest to me, Daddy and Jeffery, have never treated me like I would grow up to be a man at all. Daddy still doesn't want me driving late at night, and Jeffrey calls to check on me when I'm sick, not like a brother would but like a father, to impart wisdom and utter proclamations of finality, words infused with healing, "you'll be alright come morning." I often feel like the daughter and sister they never had, because I'm the sensitive one. I am the son who loves in a different way than they know how. For me, love is my mother buying me a glittery star candle holder at Goodwill because she knows that my interior design taste tends towards a tacky-hippie infusion. It's my grandmother picking me up a John Grisham book at a yard sale for a quarter, not because she knows whether or not I like his work, but because she knows I'm a reader. Thoughtfulness, random acts of kindness, evidence of care beyond the conceived parameters of care giving: this is the style in which I love, and it's often gotten me in trouble with my male friends who, upon reflection, consider the cookbook or homemade banana muffins I gave them demonstrations of my romantic interest.

I don't love like men do, because I feel that love is contingent. It's something that can slip away unless little signs are shown to indicate it's still in blossom. I learn that from my mother, and I see myself in waking dreams like her, endlessly loved yet constantly aware that at any time the affection could slip away. Love is something we pine for, like school girls, longing for a kiss, who spend Sunday afternoons weeping in unmade beds. My father loves differently, constantly, unquestioningly. He is the only man I accept this type of love style from, because I believe more than just about anything else that he was born to love his sons with every movement of his body.

But I wasn't born that way. I was born for something else, yet to be determined.


This scribble comes from a discussion I had with my therapist (did I just demolish any credibility I may have had?) and from thoughts I've had while reading The Man I Might Become: Gay Men Write About Their Fathers. I'm thinking of polishing, tightening, and including this piece in the collection of creative work I'm submitting for my master's thesis, tentatively titled Learning To Talk.