Far from the Tree Son I HAD DYSLEXIA AS A child; indeed, I have it now. I still cannot write by hand without focusing on each letter as I form it, and even then, some letters are out of order, or left out entirely. My mother saw this early on and began to work on reading with me when I was two. I spent long afternoons on her lap, learning to sound out words. We practiced letters as though no shapes could ever be lovelier than theirs. To keep my attention, she gave me a notebook with a yellow felt cover on which Winnie-the-Pooh and Tigger were sewn. We made flash cards and played games with them. I loved the attention, and my mother brought a sense of fun to her teaching.
When I was six, my parents applied to eleven schools in New York City, and all eleven turned me down. Despite my advanced reading skills, my test scores said I would never learn to read and write. Only a year later did the principal of one school overrule the exam results so that I could be enrolled. That early victory over dyslexia taught my family that with patience, love, intelligence, and will, we could defeat a neurological abnormality. Unfortunately, it also set the stage for our later struggle. It made it hard to believe that we couldn''t correct something else that was perceived as abnormal--my being gay. * * * People ask when I knew I was gay, and I wonder what that means. Recent studies have shown that as early as age two, many boys who will grow up to be gay avoid some rough-and-tumble play.
By age six, a good number behave in some ways that aren''t typical "boy." I knew that many things I liked were unmasculine: I never traded a baseball card, but instead shared the plots of operas on the school bus, which did not make me popular. I was popular at home, but I was also corrected. Once, when I was about seven, I was leaving a shoe store with my mother and brother, and the salesman asked us what color balloons we''d like to take home. My brother wanted a red balloon. I wanted a pink one. My mother said that I did not want a pink balloon. She announced, over my protests, that my favorite color was blue, so I ended up taking a blue balloon.
The fact that in adulthood my favorite color is blue stands as evidence of my mother''s influence; the fact that I am still gay is evidence of its limits. Though it was supposed to be integrated, my grade-school class actually included only a few black and Latino kids, and they mostly socialized with one another. My first year at school was second grade, and when Debbie Camacho had a birthday party in Spanish Harlem, my mother made me go. I was one of only two white kids who went, out of a class of forty; none of my friends was there and I was terrified. Debbie''s cousins tried to get me to dance. Everyone spoke Spanish, the food was unfamiliar, and I had a kind of panic attack and went home in tears. I didn''t see the parallels between everyone else''s avoidance of Debbie''s party and my own unpopularity. It never occurred to me that she and I had anything in common.
It was only years later that I understood why my mother had made me go, and recognized that it was a moral issue. Then I was glad to have been there: It was the right thing to do. Debbie''s party was the beginning of my tolerance toward people who were different from me, and that attitude ultimately helped me understand that I was okay even though I was different. A few months after Debbie''s party, Bobby Finkel had a birthday and invited everyone in the class but me. My mother called his mother, sure that there had been a mistake. Mrs. Finkel said that Bobby didn''t like me and didn''t want me there. My mother picked me up after school on the day of the party and took me to the zoo and out for a hot fudge sundae.
Now I can see how hurt my mother must have been for me--more hurt than I was, or let myself notice I was. She knew that being different had sad consequences, and she wanted to protect me. Making me choose the blue balloon had been partly an effort to shelter me and partly an act of aggression. In many ways, my mother encouraged me to be myself, and she made me believe I could be loved for who I was rather than for who the larger world suggested I should be. But at the same time, she wanted to change me in ways that I couldn''t be changed. That made me angry; it still does. The hardest thing to make sense of was the fact that the love was real even though it coincided with the rejection of a central part of me. I floundered in the tricky waters of elementary school, but at home, away from the cruelty, my quirks were mostly humored.
When I was ten, I became fascinated by the tiny European country of Liechtenstein. A year later my father took us along on a business trip to Switzerland, and one morning my mother announced that she''d arranged for us all to drive to Liechtenstein. The same mother who forbade the pink balloon took us to lunch in a charming café, on a tour of the art museum, and to visit the printing office where they made the country''s gorgeous postage stamps, just to indulge my weird fascination. Still, there were limits, and pink balloons fell on the wrong side of them. My parents'' rule was to be interested in others from within a pact of sameness. I wanted to do more than just be interested in the whole world: I wanted to be a part of it. I wanted to dive for pearls, memorize Shakespeare, break the sound barrier. Maybe I wanted to transform myself because I wanted to break away from my family''s way of being.
Maybe I was already trying to get closer to who I wanted to become. * * * In 1993, I was assigned to investigate Deaf culture for the New York Times. I thought of deafness as a defect. Most deaf children are born to hearing parents--parents who often think deafness is a tragedy, and throw themselves into making sure their deaf children learn to speak and read lips. Teaching those skills usually takes so much time and energy that parents neglect other areas of their children''s education. Some deaf people become very good at speech and lip-reading over time, but at the expense of learning history and math, and they end up fairly uneducated. Some kids stumble upon Deaf identity as teenagers, and it makes them feel free and powerful. They move into a world that uses Sign as a language and they become proud of the same things about themselves that used to embarrass their parents.
Some hearing parents accept this confident new identity, but others struggle against it. I understood this complex process of self-discovery because I am gay. Gay people usually grow up with straight parents, who often believe that their children would be better off straight. Frequently, they pressure their kids to be or act straight. These kids discover gay identity as teenagers or later, and it comes as a huge relief. So the line between illness (the negative way of looking at a condition) and identity (the positive way of looking at it) is never clear. Something you start out considering as an illness can become a cornerstone of your identity. Also, what some people think of as an illness, others think of as an identity.
And the same attribute can be defined as an illness at one time, then in a different historical time it can change to an identity. Sometimes, it can be an identity and an illness at the same time, even for the person who has the condition. When I started writing about the deaf, the surgical insertion of a device called a cochlear implant, which can offer something similar to hearing, was a recent innovation. Its supporters said it was a miracle cure for a terrible defect. The Deaf community saw it as an attack on their culture. The issue is complicated by the fact that cochlear implants are most successful when they are introduced in infants, meaning that the decision is made by parents before the child can possibly weigh in with an opinion. My parents would have said yes to a childhood operation that would have made me straight. If such a process is ever invented, I think most of gay culture would be wiped out within a generation.
That thought makes me terribly sad. But it has taken time for me to value my own life. I, too, once wished to be straight. While I have come to understand the richness of Deaf culture, I know that before I did this research, I would have assumed that the only thing to do for a deaf child would be to fix the abnormality. A few years after I began spending time in the Deaf community, a friend gave birth to a daughter who was a dwarf, and she had a lot of questions. Should she raise her daughter to believe that she was just like everyone else, only shorter? Or should she make sure that her daughter had dwarf role models and developed a dwarf identity? Or should she consider surgery to lengthen her daughter''s limbs? I saw a pattern that was becoming familiar. First I had found common ground with the Deaf, and now I felt the same way about a dwarf. Who else was out there waiting to join us kids who were different, and whose parents had a hard time figuring out what to do about it? * * * Because genes and cultural habits get passed down from one generation to the next, most of us share at least some traits with our parents.
These are vertical identities, like the trunk of the family tree. Ethnicity, for example, is a vertical identity. Children of color are born to parents of color. Language is usually vertical, since people who speak Greek as a first language usually raise their children to speak Gr.