Gay Travelers Magazine: Tommy McGlothlin – Before The Age Of Nine, I Knew I Was Different
The following is reprinted with permission from Gay Travelers Magazine
Today is National Coming Out Day, the day you tell your story to the world. It’s a good thing to do this once a year, if not more. It’s good for people to hear your story. The fewer of us in the closet, the more people know we are here, part of their lives, invited to accept us and love us.
So, before the age of nine, I knew I was different, but I didn’t know how or what to call it, or even how to react to it. And because I didn’t know what it was, but knew it was there, I feared it. What I remember about those days is that I was afraid, and unsure of myself as a person. I was nervous. I was insecure, and doubted myself.
In June of 1973, a terrible tragedy occurred at the Upstairs Lounge in New Orleans (where I lived with my family). The Upstairs Lounge was a small neighborhood gay bar in the French Quarter. It catered to locals more than to tourists. A disgruntled patron, however, set it on fire, killing thirty two men inside and injuring 15 others. It was a very visual tragedy for New Orleans, because the Fire and Police Departments had so little regard for the gay victims that they did not take care to hide their remains from passersby or the cameras of the press. The people of New Orleans were angry, not at the tragedy of the fire, or the lives lost, or not even at the insensitivity of the New Orleans emergency responders. They were angry that they had to be confronted that there were such things as gay men in New Orleans. One of the things I remember hearing on talk radio in the days that followed was “If those men hadn’t chosen to be perverts, they’d be alive today instead of in the morgue”. That was the tone of discussion that I heard the adults use while they discussed this.
As for me. I finally understood what it was that made me different. I knew what to call it, and I had an early, immature understanding of what it meant (same-sex attraction). But I also realized it was frowned upon, even hated, that it meant that I was going to hell (according to one preacher), and that this thing that made me different was bad.
File FEAR away for future reference in my 9-year-old psyche.
Fast forward through high school. Somehow, I’m not exactly sure how, I managed to keep this thing to myself. I was under no perception that it was something I would ever tell anyone about, let alone discuss it. Somehow I managed to go on enough prom dates, and had enough girl friends to convince others that all was “well.” But of course, it wasn’t.
File INTERNALIZED HOMOPHOBIA away in my 18-year-psyche.
Pretty much the same for college too. By this time, we had left New Orleans, and I was in school in Mississippi. I did what I had to do to hide in the closet. At Southern Miss and Ole Miss, I belonged to the College Republicans and idolized Ronald Reagan. Surely that would keep me safe. The advent of the AIDS epidemic helped with this too. But, on a trip to New Orleans one fall Saturday in 1985, I had my first coming out experience and admitted to another person (a group of people, actually), that I’m gay. One of those people remains one of my oldest and dearest friends. He is one of my two brothers of choice. Through this experience I was able to establish friendships with a few people at college and in Laurel, where I had “set up base” during my college years and after.
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Steven Skelley and Thomas Routzong
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