In 1957, I discovered the joy reading, when a thoughtful teacher handed me Rufous Redtail, my first novel. Reading caused a new dimension of life to unfold, it stoked my fire, and thus inspired, I consumed my father’s science fiction book collection, from Asimov to Bradbury to Twain, at light speed. Mind on fire, I set out in search of more kindling all across my one stoplight, the tumbleweed-strewn hometown of Casa Grande, Arizona.
In the 1960’s, as the fractured nature of society became manifest, the value of reading changed character. Once a pleasure, it was now becoming essential. President Kennedy was assassinated, racial justice activists attempted to cross the Edmund Pettis Bridge on Bloody Sunday, students marched against the Vietnam War, women burned bras, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were murdered, hatred reigned, and books armed me with knowledge and refuge. No less significant was the active oppression on a national scale of the LGBT community. Indeed, when I was young, during the last half of the 20th century, members of the LGBT community were confronted with a terrible choice, to cower in darkness or face a deluge of homophobia rampant everywhere. During this period, out gay men, women, and youth risked public humiliation, ostracization, excommunication, incarceration, beatings, and also murder or suicide in the thousands on a yearly basis. We were all traumatized. Even those who chose the closet couldn’t escape the lethal secondhand smoke of hatred.
The demons of hell had annexed America. The signs were everywhere, including in literature, and now reading for this alarmed youth became not so much a refuge, as one more battlefield, littered with homophobic mines. Gay-hating characters lurked in fiction, and cold-blooded prejudice dressed itself in faux research articles. It seemed there was nowhere to turn. Gay-friendly literature apparently didn’t exist, at least not in disapproving small-town America. James Baldwin, Christopher Isherwood, and their kind were barred from bookshelves in Casa Grande. I began scrutinizing unfamiliar authors and held at arm’s length any I knew to be prejudiced.
The war against people like me imposed an impossible dilemma. To accept the status quo meant denying myself and living in secret despair, whereas to support gay rights was nothing short of dangerous. Neither option was workable, not for any of us. Therefore, we sought to compromise, resulting in intense anguish which threatened to tear me and other LGBT youth apart. It was impossible to accept the prevailing view and simultaneously hold on to who we were. But we tried, oh how we tried, and the cost was high, for desirous of a place at the table, we sipped the Kool-Aid.
Though attractive schoolmates pursued me, I chose to live the fiction of heterosexuality. I denied my orientation and thus made no real friends and experienced no romance. At eighteen years of age, my only constant companions were nightmares, tears, and daily thoughts of suicide. Upon graduation, at a crossroads and despondent, I sought sanctuary in Christ, was baptized into the Church of Latter Day Saints and left behind my bigoted hometown for Brigham Young University, only to find hate there too, masquerading as God’s Word. Flailing, as the bells of doom tolled, I cast about seeking one last chance at life. I put on a uniform and deployed overseas, into the unknown.
Military service provided breathing room and opportunity. I made rank, commanded men, and received the Army’s praise, promising events that engendered in me the first bloom of self-esteem. Then Paul came into my life, and we fell in love. He filled me with joy, and we considered coming out. It was a conversation that always ended sadly. The Uniform Code of Military Justice with its severe penalties against homosexuality dissuaded me. Paul and I, if discovered, could be imprisoned at Ft. Leavenworth, to endure a life worse than death. Or we might be killed outright, as occurred with a soldier at my post, who suspected of being gay, was stuffed into a metal locker and shoved out a fourth-floor barracks window. He did not survive the fall.
Ardent, romantic, and enticing, Paul held out hope, as did I. We showered in the barracks when others were away, lingering in clouds of steam and passion, yet not touching, fighting a desperate battle to sustain our own true love. We went on for years like this, treasuring one another, whispering our love, and yearning for change that would not come. Then one day, Paul lost hope, retreated into counterfeit heterosexuality, and like so many others, drifted through the rest of his unhappy life, rudderless and bankrupt.
The pre-Obama Army was inhospitable, yet I had thrived through two terms, serving my country as a non-commissioned officer in time of war. I fell in love, motorcycled across Europe, climbed the Zugspitze and the Hoch Vogel, and found friends in (straight) fellow soldiers who knew about Paul and me, and kept our secret safe. Filled with confidence and hope for the future, I would use these last six years in the service as a foundation upon which to build a happy future.
But the crisis was not over. Stranger in a strange land, finding a job was very difficult. People still hated gays. I no longer heard Paul say he loved me or tasted his lips on mine. My comrades in arms had come home and scattered, and there was no more praise from the brass. I put off coming out and sunk into depression, and holding a job became that much more challenging. It took every iota of energy I could summon. One monochrome day succeeded the next, and the seasons changed unnoticed until a letter arrived from Casa Grande. After 26 years, my parents had decided to divorce. This was the final blow. I drank a case of Stroh’s beer, climbed into a hot bath, cleaver in hand, rubbed salt on my wrists, and through grace, passed out.
Over the next few years, jobs, cities, and apartments changed, though I did not, contemplating suicide every day and suffering nightmares in the darkness in between. The mid 80’s saw me in Phoenix, where I chanced upon the fledgling LGBT community, and sadly, developed a reliance on alcohol. Seeking to recreate what Paul and I were denied in the Army, I fell for one man after another only to discover each episode was a testosterone and booze-fueled illusion of love. Every man I met was infected with the same debilitating disease. It was no longer useful to demand society change, as we had learned to hate ourselves. We gathered in gay ghettoes and lashed out at society, but it was ineffectual because we were already infected and the healing need begin at home. I was sick. I could see that much, and I knew the cure. However, taking was not as easy as knowing.
At thirty years of age, I joined Alcoholics Anonymous. In AA, we were instructed to practice rigorous honesty in all things. It was, they claimed, essential for success. So, LGBT AA members came out, announcing in meetings that homophobia led us to drink. I too came out and was met with rage and violence. It was the same for all of us, and many took up the bottle again, while others among us did something extraordinary. We created the Live and Let Live Alano Club, of which I was a founding board member. The LLLAC was a safe place to come out, and during the thirteen years, I learned how to live without the inveigling crutch of booze, became a reliable employee, and fell in love. Mary Renault, Gore Vidal, and Donald Windham had emerged from the shadows. Yet my struggle was not over. The American Psychiatric Association continued to list homosexuality alongside paranoid schizophrenia. A group of young men beat me with blunt objects until I fell to the ground unconscious and bleeding from multiple wounds, and my dearly beloved, Sergio Mateo Hernandez, died two weeks after his 26th birthday, from AIDS.
Although AA taught me how to live life sober, it could not close the gaping wound homophobia had opened. Consequently, with affordable health insurance that a decent job provided, I undertook psychotherapy. It was a difficult decision, as homosexuality was still classified as a sexual disturbance.
Psychotherapists had all kinds of explanations for my difficulties. The homophobes among them told me I wasn’t gay, or that I should live a straight lifestyle because it was sophisticated, or that my fear of public places, anger, trust issues, and problematic self-esteem were caused by a perverted attraction to other men. I was variously diagnosed with a panic disorder, OCD, ADHD, and borderline personality disorder. Psychiatrists prescribed medications that erased all feelings, not just the depressing ones, caused muscle cramps, flu-like symptoms, memory loss, and cognitive impairment. The treatment seemed worse than the cure. Nevertheless, I persevered. Clinicians stopped labeling homosexuality as a sexual disturbance, more effective medications were developed, and someone got my diagnosis right. I had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and as it turned out, not due to enemy fire, but because I grew up fending off homophobia. Getting shot at overseas only exacerbated what was already there. Meanwhile, I put one foot in front of the other, clinging to hope, for although I finally had a diagnosis, there was as yet no cure.
Cornered and beaten time and again, I held on and over the years, slowly grew stronger. Then, when Sergio perished, I did lose hope for a while, and although working and taking classes at night, it was as a dead man walking. Slowly, my standard of living improved and I opened a modest retirement account. Over the next ten years, working full time and studying part-time, while my contemporaries were finishing postgrad work, buying vacation homes, and traveling Europe, I eventually eked out a Bachelor of Science Degree in Nursing. After several years at Mercy Hospital, at times caring for friends with AIDS and occasionally wheeling their broken bodies to the hospital morgue, I moved up the coast to work at Stanford University Hospital, hopeful the proximity of San Francisco would be of benefit. Although romance eluded, in other areas of life, I fared better. With postgrad study, I was awarded certification as a mental health nurse, was baptized at Most Holy Redeemer in the Castro, and worked for a time before retirement at Harbor Hills Hospital in Santa Cruz, as the Director of Staff Development, all the while hounded by PTSD.
Somehow, while I was at BYU, Patricia Warren’s, The Front Runner, fell into my hands. It was both a revolutionary and depressing novel for although the main characters were gay—a rarity in mid-70’s literature—they also lived in fear. As someone who dreamt of a sea change in society, Warren’s novel did little more for me than confirm in writing what I already knew, and I read just one other gay novel up until the last few years of my nursing career: The Persian Boy, by Mary Renault.
Issues with health required I spend less time at work, and I took advantage. I rediscovered the excitement of reading and was heartened to find dozens upon dozens of gay or gay-friendly works of literature. Remarkably, thanks to the internet and Amazon, the veterans, James Baldwin, Christopher Isherwood, Donald Windham, and Jim Grimsley, to name but a few, were at my fingertips, and new voices were appearing in print, including Shawn Ruff, Nick Burd, and Alexander Chee. Suddenly, a pile of books appeared on my bedside table, books that fill me with pride as a gay man and inspired me to stretch my wings.
The nascent writer in me drew his first breath. I sent friend requests on Facebook to every author whose work inspired me and requested advice from time to time on aspects of writing. My first effort, Rough, describes 60 years of life fighting and eventually overcoming homophobia and PTSD, and how adversity forged the writer I am today. Writing Rough was much more than an experiment or a lark, or excellent training. It felt like extracting shrapnel from a gaping wound, painful and necessary. It was a public renunciation of homophobia. Looking back at my life, rich in excruciating and bloody detail, I am sure that had it not been for the anguish, I would not be writing now. Moreso, beyond catharsis and self-validation, writing is also a way to serve the LGBT community. The book, Soldier Boy, and the subsequent next two volumes in the series, The Adventures of Bryce Tyconnel, Gay Patriot, counters the propaganda that homosexuality is vile, shameful, and perverse. Homosexuality is like heterosexuality, what we make of it, and that varies from one person to another. In Bryce Tyconnel’s case, that means serving his country as an openly gay man, living life proudly, integrated with society, raising a family, and unashamedly partaking of spiritual sustenance. Graphic erotic sex is employed in my writing for two reasons, to give it a public face that no one can deny—desensitization if you will—and to banish the false notion of gay sex as twisted. Plainly, sex is sex and love is love. No longer need we limit ourselves to homophobic literature. A new century has dawned, LGBT literature is flourishing, and I am happy to share the journey with you.
Thomas L. Marshall