Shadows, Larger than Life

Once, a friend of mine stated that he thought homophobia in stories featuring gay protagonists was overdone and had become trite. I had to disagree—even though it is featured frequently. But that idea did give me a lot to think about. In this blossoming of the LGBTQ civil rights movement, how pertinent is it, as a writer, to discuss the bigotry of what will, hopefully, soon be a bygone day?
However cliché it may seem to outsiders, these struggles are still pertinent to people in my daily life. The Northwest isn’t a location where LGBTQ people are routinely murdered or summarily beaten. But my mothers, when seeking healthcare via Washington Healthfinder, were still unable to use the website because it had been designed to deny same-gender spousal applications, despite the fact that marriage is legal in Washington State. When I lived in the South Carolina, I had a friend whose parents retracted their financial support because of her identity. In America, these problems, at best, linger like a bad taste. Elsewhere in the world, they flourish. We all know about Russia.
A couple of years after my husband and I married, we moved to Germany for a job opportunity. I spoke little German. We lived near the old production center of zeppelin manufacturing. The town looked beautiful, but modern because it had been bombed out in the war. Because I took a five-hour intensive German course for five days a week, I knew mostly immigrants. Out of the twenty-four people in the course, twelve were Russian or from ex-Soviet nations. They’re an invisible but growing minority.
When our class went to the zeppelin museum, we presented a diverse group: a Russian grandfather, his daughter and her husband, a Czech divorcee, a Peruvian and a Mexican girl, a couple of Turkish women, a Khurdish woman who’d always wanted to become a soccer player but who’d been forced to get married instead, a North African, an Iraqi, and several others. I was the American who didn’t look like an American. Everyone knew Americans were supposed to be fat and blond and loud and I wasn’t any of those things.
I stayed near the front beside the tour guide with my two closest friends, Anna and Olesya, both Russian. The three of us, almost fluent but not quite, peppered the flustered tour guide with questions as she took us through the historical exhibits.
Anna had been a highly paid corporate secretary in Moscow, but however highly she earned, she’d scrabbled for existence, only able to afford a single room in a three-bedroom apartment shared by twelve people. She had come to Germany to live with her father. Young and ambitious, she hoped to achieve fluency and go to university.
Olesya, in her mid-thirties, had come from Russia to be married to a German train conductor who she’d met over the Internet. The two had only met in person once before marrying. Eastern Orthodox, she kept a small glittery altar in an otherwise exquisitely spare home.
The three of us followed the tour guide into what I thought was the jewel of the exhibition—at least it was to me, as a writer—a full-scale replica of the inside of a zeppelin. Whenever I get a chance to venture inside a place like that, whether it’s in the Met, the Cloisters, or the British Museum, my mind feels afire with possibilities. I get almost hyperactive.
I forget how we even started talking about it—homosexuality—probably because I was so wrapped up in peering into the compactly designed cabins. The tiny shelves of beds, the fold-up table, the wash-basin, the narrow closet, all reeked of absurdly miniaturized luxury.
“Well, do you think it messed you up?” Olesya asked, when she realized I had two moms.
“No, I don’t think so. Does it seem like it did?” I get this question a lot. It used to make me incandescent with rage. Now it makes me weary and sad.
“I just think a man and a woman should raise a child together,” Olesya said.
“What about kids who have divorced parents?” Anna asked. She’d been raised by her artist mother in Russia while her father had worked here in Germany.
“The children will still know they have both parents,” Olseysa said, stubbornly.
“What about single moms?” I asked.
“That’s different,” she said. “That’s not their fault! This would never happen in Russia.”
It’s hard for me to be civil sometimes, when I’m having a conversation like this, when I feel like my family is under attack. But we regularly ignored cultural chasms in our class. The three of us continued on in silence, now acting attentive to our poor tour guide. She brought us through a luxurious dining room, where a piano had been installed. Small round tables dotted the carpeted floors. A broad window had been propped open, a clear remnant from a time before safety regulations.
This had been the sole room where men and women had been allowed to mingle. I could imagine it—the piano, played with an amateurish exuberance, the small tables where young people would’ve played cards, watched by sharp-eyed grandmothers. Perhaps a pair of young men may have stood beside the open window, cautiously flirting, as they trailed their hands through the cool air and watched the wavelet sea below.
The tour guide led us to the men’s smoking room, separated from the drawing room with by a small corridor that contained a bar. Only the bartender, the tour guide said, was allowed to have a lighter on the flammable airship. The length of the bar was just right for one man to lean over to get his cigarette lit by another.
“I knew a gay boy when I was younger,” Anna said finally. She contemplated the men’s smoking room with a thoughtful, sad expression that seemed at odds with her usually mirthful, foxy face. In our manly surroundings, she looked out of place in her six-inch stilettos, her push-up bra, her long dark hair that, even when put into a high pony tail, fell almost mid-thigh.
“He went to my school. We were friends,” she said. She shook her head, her ponytail swaying. “No. I was his only friend. He said he would go to America. He disappeared one day. I still hope he made it.”
The three of us contemplated the likelier option. I felt a shudder race through me. I imagined the room around us full of men quietly talking, the smoke a thick haze in the air, the bright cherries of their cigarettes, the ash falling, their indulgence when stopping’s not so easy as that, when a stray spark, a stray coal tapped off, could’ve destroyed them.
“That’s not true,” Olesya said. “That never happens. There aren’t any gay people in Russia.”
The tour guide led us through the mechanics of the zeppelin, the reinforced wires that supported its fragile structure. I could almost imagine them humming with wind. We walked past images of the Hindenberg. Outside the museum, we went to a café and practiced our German small talk.
In this time when civil rights for the LGBTQ community is flourishing, is discussing homophobia and the ramifications of it still pertinent? Do other depictions, of a world where homophobia is not an issue inside a story, provide a more interesting roadmap for the times that will come? Will my stories age out, because I explore this issue?
I can only hope so, honestly. But as anyone who loves steampunk can attest: Just because something’s not around anymore doesn’t mean it’s not meaningful. We don’t love stories with zeppelins in them because of the reality of zeppelins: that they were cramped and also explosive. We don’t love stories that feature the social pressures of bigotry because of its outmoded hatefulness. We like stories that embody defiance. The zeppelin, in an era of innovation and adventure, showed us another way to fly. M/M stories with lovers that defy social expectations and norms can show us how love can give us the strength to overcome our social fears, to help us surmount our anxieties, and ultimately provide us with a more selfless and meaningful existence.
But yet one day, I want my work to seem as antiquated as Tess of the d’Urbervilles. But in today’s times I still do think this is a subject worth talking about.
And here’s for hoping that poor kid made it to America.