When I was in the 5th grade, Jimmy asked me if I was gay. He made it sound so good, that my fresh-off-the-boat ass replied with an enthusiastic yes before I had the good sense to go and find out what this strange new person in the strange new land of Riverdale, Georgia had just asked me. When I went home that afternoon, I couldn't wait to ask my mother what I'd just claimed to be at the tender age of 10 so that I could understand why all my classmates suddenly hugged the walls and giggled when I passed by them.
It took me a second to decipher the look on her face when I first asked the question. At first I thought she didn't hear me, so I asked again.
"Mommy, what does gay mean?"
I knew things were serious when she turned off the television in the middle of a "Days of Our Lives" episode, especially mid-week when Victor Kiriakis was on track to put an end to Hope and Bo Brady's love forever.
"Where did you hear that word?" she asked, her mind racing to catalog 10 years of "Dallas", "Falcon Crest", and "Knots Landing" episodes for any reference to something that may have conspired to set me off on this dangerous inquiry. "The boy knows," she must have thought. "Allah damn it, I thought all those hours of G.I. Joe and He-Man cartoons had infused him with enough machismo to drop balls on a eunuch."
I beamed as I told of Jimmy's query, and then Stephen's, David's, Billy's, Allison's, and every other kid in class who lined up to learn more about their exotic new classmate that afternoon. I'd been missing my friends back home terribly since school started, but now I stood on the precipice of new-found popularity, and all I had to do for it was utter a new word in American code. "This must be what they call the slang," I'd thought.
"What did you tell them?" she asked, desperation rising in her immigrant eyes.
"I said yes!"
My mother said nothing. Her eyes widened as she reached for the phone and dialed my father's beeper.
"It means happy," she kept repeating in monotone. "You're happy. You're happy to be in America."
"But Mommy, what does it mean?"
"Wait for your father," she said, and then went back to the TV.
"Ooh, what's Victor Kiriakis up to today?" I started, in a naive attempt to lighten the mood.
"Nothing! He's not doing anyhting..."
"But Mommy, why's Hope crying?"
"She's not crying! She's happy. Those are tears of joy!"
"So she's gay too?" I quipped.
"Go to your room! Play He-Man!" she shrieked.
I don't remember much from my conversation with my father that evening, but birds and bees were specifically invoked, as were marriage in the animal kingdom and God's irreversible wrath. "What a cocktail," I remember thinking. "How the hell does a bee put it into a bird, and why on earth would that piss God off more than all the other crap Victor Kiriakis pulls on the Brady's in a typical week?"
I was instructed to go to school the next day - only because I didn't have the telephone numbers and addresses of my classmates on me that very night - and find every single one of those kids, starting with Jimmy, and tell them that what I meant to say was that I was happy. I was happy to have come to America; I was gleeful that we'd landed in this sprawling piece of Americana, South of the Atlanta airport at the crossroads of the world. I was so full of joy that only one word summed it all up, and despite my prowess of the English language as a freshly arrived pre-pubescent future American citizen, I hadn't yet encountered this magical, life changing adjective.
Years later, when Ellen Degeneres posed for the cover of Time and proclaimed "Yep, I'm Gay", my first thought was this:
Bitch stole my thunder.
Happy Coming Out Day, everybody.
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