Tango by Justin Vivian Bond Page B

Lesley’s mother’s lawn for extra cash. I heard through Lesley that after high school he enlisted in the army and was discharged. For a while he lived in his car. There was a certain period where he was going to community churches, preaching, trying to be a minister. During a previous incarceration he’d ended up in the hospital with a broken jaw. Michael has had a rough life. When I read about his latest disaster in the Herald Mail , I thought back to the first day we met, when he was telling us all about how his father had provided all the glass for the UN building and trying so hard to make himself sound special. In those days disorders weren’t diagnosed in children like they are
today. And I realized I could probably see the beginnings of his bipolar disorder. Who could have known back then that his delusions of grandeur would one day lead him to call himself Tango while doing his “heroic work” stopping the drug trade on the highway outside of town?
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    IN MY MID-FORTIES NOW, AND GRATEFULLY childless, I don’t know with any amount of certainty what it’s like to grow up in these times. But looking back I realize the amount of pressure that we were under then, and what little resources there were for the issues we were dealing with, made things pretty tough.
    Our parents were aspiring toward safe, secure, middle-class normality, which was forged through hard work, steely determination, a tremendous amount of voluntary blindness, and a certain hardness that could be crushing to those of us who were unable to fit into their ideal.
    As much as I despised Michael at the time and as difficult as it was for me then, I realize now that because he and I were so different from
what our parents had hoped for and what society had expected, we became targets, lightning rods for the dissatisfactions of those around us. We were the victims of people who felt the shifting sands of identity and sexuality, and who were sure that they could manipulate, cajole, and torture their children into being what they thought was necessary for the survival of some kind of misguided social contract that we are all supposed to sign on to.
    I still haven’t figured out what that social contract was, but not long ago I had a dream and in that dream I was at the same family picnic during which Michael Hunter had set off fireworks and later painted Z ’s on all the trees. Instead of being in his yard, full of rage and desperate for attention, he was sitting next to me on a blanket, just as any teenage boy would do when sitting next to the person he was in love with. My hair was long; I was still a boy, but I was expressing a femininity that was forbidden to me in my youth. No one was paying us any attention because we were just stupid teenagers. No more, no less interesting than anyone else. No more
exciting or exotic than any other healthy high school kids. My parents weren’t thinking about what was wrong with or right with me. I was just their child. And in that dream it was the first time I’d ever even begun to imagine what my life could have been like if I’d never experienced trans- or homophobia. It was pretty amazing.
    I’m grateful to that dream. It was the first time I ever experienced the feeling of what I now call the “luxury of normality.” I can’t say I aspire to living that way myself because my life has been a constant series of adjustments and acceptances, but I do hope that a time will come when queer children can be themselves without any questions, able to experience the same dramas, heartaches, and joys that any other kids would have to go through, no more and no less.

acknowledgments
    FIRST OF ALL, I WOULD LIKE TO THANK MY PARENTS for loving me in the best way they knew how, and for providing me with a very good education, straight teeth, and a deep-seated stubbornness (a.k.a. patience!) that has served me very well throughout my life. Dad, Mom, Carol,