Claiming Kin

A.

I have been hesitant in writing you, not shy exactly but uncertain what to say.  I have been like the anthropologist who believing against belief in the existence of a fabled tribe finally comes face to face with one of the natives and having lost the ability to speak runs headlong back into the jungle.  The discovery of you was and is a momentous thing to me.  It changes the landscape of whole decades of privation and isolation; and in its way it offers the restoration of something--a fraction of something--that has been lost.  In my consciousness of my sexual identity, I am one of those people who seemingly always knew myself to be gay.  It is strange to think about it and difficult to describe to some folks especially those who see same-sex attraction as being an adolescent derailment by Satan of "normal" desires; but I remember clearly being five--maybe four, maybe six--and sitting at a long table in my sister's boyfriend's mother's house and having a strange epiphany.  Colleen, the second eldest of my sisters (your aunt Jane's age), was in college and she had taken myself and my sister Kelly (Barb's age--three and a half years older than me) water-skiing on a  large reservoir thats muddy contours had been more or less ripped out of the thirsty plains north of Great Falls.  Perhaps her invitation to her little brother and sister was a way to buffer herself against the pressure and advances that might be expected from her new boyfriend.  Perhaps my own mother, wanting a reprieve from what was already almost 30 years of child-rearing, had pawned her two youngest off on one of the "older girls."  Whatever the reason, after a  memorable day of playing in mud and sand, of watching college-educated country boys skiff the brown water on wobbly knees, of wandering intrepidly among the dunes alone and with Kelly ("Watch out for rattlesnakes!"), after all this, I found myself on a low chair at the head of a long table, my head and shoulders just high enough for me to successfully twirl the spaghetti onto my fork and cut the too-big meatballs into managable bites.  At the far end of the table, Colleen was sitting beside her (now nameless) boyfriend and beside him on the other side sat his two friends--frat brothers?--animated by the afternoons beers.  They were glowing red or brown, with the summer baked into their skin from these afternoons of leisure and the long hours of working in the field.  Young men, young drunk men, they were of course flipping shit and making fun of one another.  For a kid like me, without brothers, they were as fascinating as an animal in the zoo.  They--like your father and uncles when, every summer, I would go to the farm--were specimens of an otherness that attracted and alienated me.  And at this moment, between greedy bites of pasta, I experienced for the first time the convergence of self-consciousness and a kind of hidden shame.  Jostling one another across the room, the young men's joking shifted.  There was a suggestion by one man to another that he was some unnamed and despicable thing, some kind of person who deserved no respect.  This idea solicited laughter tinged with something that I would understand later to be sexuality.  The men's voices were levatating above the table, high and mocking, suggesting that one or two or all of them were queers.  Five years old, not following the words at the time and certainly not remembering any of their cuts or barbs today, I paused, perhaps put down my fork, and the tone and the substance of their giggling abuse entered me.  "They are talking about me."  The thought crystallized.  There, between sips of lemonade, I recognized the essential difference between myself and other people, other boys, other men.  I give you this rather long-winded recounting of an epiphany because I want you to have a flavor of the sensitivity and awareness that was both burden and gift as I grew to adolescence, adulthood and middle age in the milieu of the Dwyers.  It was with full self-knowledge, if not full understanding, of my attractions and sexuality that I passed my annual sojourn in North Dakota.  A queer weed in Grandma Dwyer's garden, the youngest of her grandchildren, an afterthought, a dangling tag-along for Kelly and Barb barely established as an entity when the wave of great-grandchildren arrived:  Darren from Grace's line, my nephew Brian--three years my junior--born to my oldest sister Nel, four or five years older than your Aunt Peggy who with Olin rounded out the first wave of the coming generation.  My place in the family was unique.  Unlike my older sisters I had no cousins close to me in age.  (My remaining sister Maureen, not yet introduced in this monologue, was the same age and closely tied to your Aunt Ruth.)  My own pride (and penchant for being a loner) kept me from playing with those "little kids" following the same attitude that was at the center of Kelly and Barb's resistance when the adults would force them to take me along camping in the buttes, swimming in the dam, of going on the Old Settler's trail ride.