The love that dare not hold hands in public

I spent a good portion of the week in State College, the generically named home of Penn State University's main campus (the equally generically titled University Park) in the center of the Commonwealth in, appropriately enough, Centre County. You other Commonwealth types rejoice! The quaint form of English orthography used by Brits, Canadians, New Zealanders, South Africans, Australians, et al., still lives in America. Although Centre County and the occasional High Street in small Pennsylvania towns are the only examples I can deliver at the mo' . . . .

State College feels so remote from the rest of the Commonwealth, at least by the route I drive from the Harrisburg area. The sometimes two-lane, sometimes four-lane blacktop swirls around the Susquehanna and Juniata rivers, curves among an overgrowth of trees, and wraps itself around mist-shrouded hills and mountains. After the long drive, when the mountains part long enough to let you enter the verdant "Happy Valley," the comparison to Shangri-La is perhaps a bit overwrought (given the proximity to Altoona), a might inexact (given the close-by-ness of Johnstown), but not entirely inaccurate, at least in feel, at least to me.

A small moment made the visit seem a little more mystical, a little more epiphanic, this time around.

When walking back from downtown after a delicious dinner at Zola's (seared tuna with mango salsa--just like the Caveman on that Geico commercial, as my friend EcoGal pointed out--corn grits stuffed into a roasted chile, pear and gorgonzola salad, and a lovely glass--or two--of Viognier) on a warm, spring evening, some colleagues and I passed through a little park on our way to the Nittany Lion Inn. In the park sat two men, relaxing comfortably with one another on a bench. They were in their late 30s or early 40s perhaps, attractive and nicely dressed, but no fashionistas, no male models on a break from a photo shoot for some designer who uses jagged-edged cheekbones and heroin-gaunt eyes to sell Italian shirts or German cologne. They were just adorned in the usual Gapwear that the rest of us find ourselves in most days. And they were holding hands, which they continued to do as our little group passed by.

I don't know why, but I was nonplussed on seeing them holding hands in public. I was in mid-sentence with a colleague and lost may way in the conversation, and it took me a few beats to remember where I was and what I was trying to say.

There was nothing out of the ordinary in the moment, other than the fact that two men were holding hands in a park in State College, Pennsylvania. They weren't defiantly, silently screaming, "We're here, we're queer, get over it!" They weren't so in love, so hand in glove, that the sun was shining out of their behinds (another Smiths reference or two for you) gazing glassy-eyed into one another's souls. They weren't ashamed, either, acting like 'possums caught in headlights on a nighttime drive, who felt the need to run away or be run over upon the approach of others. And they weren't using hand-holding as a prelude to anything else that some people might get up to in a park at 10:30 on a sultry night.

They were just like us, just minding their own business and enjoying the night and each other's company.

I felt torn. I wanted to look at the guys, just to take in the moment, and I wanted to smile at them as a way to say, "Good for you!" Instead, I didn't do anything at all--which is probably fine; it was their moment after all--except bumble along in my conversation, failing to acknowledge their presence, except through my discomfiture.

I felt disconcerted in part for stumbling onto a private moment, in part because of my long-standing battle with an undiagnosed variety of social anxiety disorder that makes me secretly uncomfortable and nervous whenever I'm in a situation that I think might make others uncomfortable and nervous (which it didn't and rarely does), but also--let's face it--because of the whole "gay thing," the display of affection between two men en plein air, en plein nuit.

* * *

My reaction was more than a little pathetic when you consider that I, too, am a gay man and have certainly witnessed PDAs by other men. I've even on occasion carried them out myself--furtively, surreptitiously--with a willing partner. Holding hands in a movie theater with a former significant other, a quick kiss on the lips with a new boyfriend in front of a coffeehouse I used to frequent on the St. Mary's Strip in San Antonio, a warm hand resting on top of another with a potential suitor in a Buckhead bistro a few years ago, probably the last time I was truly excited by the possibility of dating someone.

Not the boldest of gestures, I'll agree. Admittedly, I'm hardly the Che Guevara of Gay Love.

Outside of New York and San Francisco, Chicago and Boston, maybe Philadelphia and Seattle, or any number of A-gay watering holes (Provincetown, Fire Island, Key West, and Palm Springs, to name but a few), it's still a very rare thing to see two men share any public affection, however innocent, however neutral, especially in a small city or town. Rarely, too, is man-on-man affection viewed as innocent or neutral in our culture. Look at the reaction to Brokeback Mountain, even before it was released. Lots of squirmy men, lots of nervous jokes, lots of abject discomfort over the thought of sex and affection between two cowboys, the icons of the American West, the archetype of American manhood.

And the squirming, the jokes, the discomfort weren't experienced only by straight guys but even by some gay guys. Including this gay guy.

It took me two viewings to "get" Brokeback, to fully appreciate it. I don't know what my reluctance to, ahem, embrace it in public was due to exactly. I had loved the original story by Annie Proulx and had, in fact, been haunted by it for days on end after reading it. But I was disappointed by the movie when I saw it in a theater upon initial release. I kept saying that I found it a workmanlike production, a too literal retelling of the story. I was bored by it. And I was aggravated by the somewhat self-pitying attitude (at least that's my perception) of Director Ang Lee upon losing the Oscar for Best Picture to Crash, in part because Ang Lee seems like such a closet case to me.

One of his first major films was The Wedding Banquet, a cross-cultural tale of an American-based Taiwanese-Chinese man who arranges a marriage of convenience with a Chinese woman in Manhattan for the sake of family unity and respectability, all the while being in love with an American man, who more or less is part of the wedding party and the marriage.

I vaguely remember reading somewhere (lost to me now) that Ang Lee has said he could understand the story because he was a Taiwanese-Chinese man living in America between two cultures. But, suspicious bugger that I am, I just don't know that I'm convinced that that's the whole story. Two influential gay films under your belt, and you claim that you understand same-sex love and relationships and the prejudice against them because you grew up eating with chopsticks instead of a fork? Pardon the gross oversimplification of cross-cultural differences, but while you present an interesting theory and perhaps you are a highly evolved, sensitive, heterosexual male of the species, I'm not sold, Mr. Lee, that the wedding ring on your finger isn't just part of your own Wedding Banquet sleight-of-hand.

As part of my own closet case mentality, though, I even went so far as to claim in these pages that Crash didn't rob Brokeback of anything. It was only when both my mother and sister watched Brokeback separately over a weekend, then were haunted by the movie for several days afterwards themselves, that I decided to give it another go. And then I, too, was haunted by Brokeback for several days as well--and still am even to this day.

Perhaps it was the hype or the repeated claims that Brokeback was a "universal love story," made no doubt in order to "sell" the film to a wary public. Two men find love herding sheep one summer in the early 1960s and end up having a lifelong affair woven through a mesh of marriages, children, divorces, fear, self-loathing, frustration, unrequitedness, missed opportunity, loneliness, and sadness. Love story? More like a love tragedy.

Perhaps what put me off were the endless accolades that Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal were so "brave" for doing this movie. But how tough is it to play act emotional or physical love with someone of the same gender? Gay and lesbian actors have been doing it for years with members of the opposite sex, and yet there's no Oscar for Best Performance by a Closeted Homosexual in a Romantic Comedy or Academy Award for Best Fake Orgasm Opposite Harrison Ford by a Known Silverlake Lesbian. Thus, can it be that much more difficult to play gay-for-pay than pretending to be a ghost-bustin' version of one of the Brothers Grimm or faking your way through a laughable global warming disaster in The Day After Tomorrow?

Perhaps, though, I resisted the movie because of my own discomfort with seeing two men trying to express their love in words and deeds on the big screen.

It's hard for me to know for sure. I'm good at self-therapy, so I can go on for pages (obviously) about stuff that would be readily aparent to others and thus quickly dealt with, expressed, and dismissed. But at times like these I realize, despite my seeming openness, despite my nearly quarter century of outness, I'm not as free or as brave as I would like to be.

So if you're looking for bravery, don't look to me. For pity's sake, don't look to Hollywood actors, either. And certainly don't look to Hollywood period because it never made an "edgy" choice without both eyes on the bottom line. Guess who's coming to dinner? The producer, the accountant, and the studio exec, that's who.

Instead, if you want bravery, look to two men holding hands with one another in a park in State College, Pennsylvania, on a sultry night in June.

Now that's brave.