Swish (27 page)

As Rob, Louis, and I entered the auditorium for the final evening session, the man onstage was saying, “God, I believe there’s at least one person in this room whose heart is still hard. And I pray that You would soften it.”
Already done,
I thought ruefully.

“Here,” said Rob, handing me a plastic bag. “We got this for you.” Inside was a DVD of
The Ballad of Little Joe,
an animated Veggie Tales version of Joseph and the Coat of Many Colors, with vegetables, as a Western ( Joseph was a cucumber and the brothers were green peas); there was also a pack of Veggie Tales cards.

“Thank you,” I said, feeling deeply moved and hating myself and wanting Rob to bend me over the pew and take me, all at the same time.

The evening’s testimony and service were exactly like all the other testimonies and services. At the end, I went up toward the front to ask the prayer team for help. I felt foul, and I wanted to be pardoned before I left. This time I didn’t run away. When my turn came I was led to a short, stout older woman in a floral-print dress. “Thank you,” I said, and grabbed her hand and started crying. I told her my name and she said, “Thank you for you, Joel. God, I pray that You let Joel know there is an army of angels protecting him, and he doesn’t have to do this alone.” I wished more than anything that I could believe this.

On my way up the aisle I had expected to be filled with the urge to confess and to beg forgiveness for what I was doing, but instead as she continued to pray she just made me feel nice.

As I came back to my seat in between Rob and Louis, the man onstage said, “I pray that those who are frozen with fear would get the strength to come up to the front and pray.” I felt that Louis, who had not moved a muscle, might be among the frozen. He was leaving tomorrow, to go back to a life in which he had to deal with his ex-wife and his career dissatisfaction and his bad hair, with selling his condo at a loss, with not knowing anybody like him. The bond these people felt with one another may have been dysfunctional, but they were part of a community all the same, and that community was about to be rent asunder. I put my hand on Louis’s neck and kept it there. He started crying, or maybe he’d already been crying and he was just more obvious about it now. After a while Rob put his head down in his arms. I couldn’t tell whether he was crying or not. I put my hand on his back and held it there. I asked whatever forces there might be in the universe to have mercy on the three of us, and on everybody in the room.
If there’s any way for my goodwill to help these two men,
I thought,
then let it help them.

At the airport the next morning, after Rob helped me take my bags out of the trunk of his car, he reached to shake my hand; I wouldn’t have it, and I hugged him, an awkward gesture given that he was a foot taller than me. “You grabbed a piece of my heart this week,” he said. “I can’t promise I’ll keep in touch, but I can promise I’ll be thinking about you.” Anything I said in this moment would have been a Gordian tangle of truth and deceit, and I wanted to be able to remember one honest moment with him, so I kept silent as he got into his car and drove off.

I had always thought that the Christian right was motivated by selfishness, intolerance, and fear. But the story, as I mused on the plane ride home, isn’t that simple. The Christian right—or at least the thousand members of it at the conference—or at least the half dozen of them I got to know decently—they don’t hate gay people; in fact they can be more consistently thoughtful and generous than many of the crowds that might be found in a gay bar on a Saturday night. Oh, I won’t mount any defense of Pat Robertson or James Dobson or the venal politicians who find it expedient to stand with them, and I won’t deny that a lot of people in this country are afraid of people who seem different. But I think most of the Christian conservatives on the street don’t want us to go to hell. They want to save us from danger. Their reaction against gay-rights legislation is an altruistic one. If I ran a zoo, and somebody came to me and said, “Hey, I have a great idea! Let’s take down the walls around the shark pool so all the kids can swim with the sharks!” I would have him thrown out on his ass. To many of these people, laws that make it easier to be gay only give Satan freer access to our souls.

And I don’t know how the two sides, acting in good faith, can ever reach an agreement, because it comes down to whether God said so or not. And if you believe that God said man shall not lie with mankind as with a woman, it is an abomination, well, then no amount of argument is going to change your mind. And if you believe that God doesn’t interfere on such a microscopic level with humanity, or that He doesn’t give a fuck about us, or that He has never existed at all, then nothing is going to convince you that if you disobey Him you are bound for the Pit.

I had foolishly given my e-mail address to my swimming companions, and two days after my return to Manhattan I got a message from Rob, informing me that I was a cool guy, that he thought he could learn a lot from me, and that he was impressed with my openness and honesty.

Two days later I got a message from Bill hoping my trip home had been safe.

Three days after that I got a message from Louis saying he didn’t want to lose track of me.

These e-mails sat in my in-box for weeks, torturing me in twelve-point Helvetica type. On the one hand, I wanted to stay in touch with Rob and Bill and Louis, so I could show them that they had options. I fantasized about a growing intimacy with them, an intimacy that led to New York visits during which they spent time with me and Mike and realized they could be gay
and
happy, visits during which they broke free of the chains with which they had allowed themselves to be shackled.

But I always ran up against the fact that any good such an example might do them would be destroyed utterly when my book was published and they read it and they found out that I had been deceiving them all along. “I lied to people to make them like me,” I moaned to my friend Sarah.

“We ALL lie to people to make them like us,” she shouted in frustration.

Except that I had also unintentionally infused my conference interactions with a great deal of truth. Yes, I was practicing a deception. But in the end I did show them who I was, and I did come to care about them deeply. How was jumping out over the Asheville River a lie? How was putting my hand on Louis’s neck when he was weeping a lie? How was laughing a lie?

I wished I had never given any of them my e-mail address. I called my father for advice five times a day. I talked to my therapist about the issue and found him singularly unhelpful, so I got a new therapist, who was no better. I ordered a copy of Sissela Bok’s
Lying
but it got lost in the mail.

I still haven’t answered the e-mails.

That, more or less, is what I wrote during the summer after I got back from the Exodus Freedom Conference, and I thought it was the end of the story.

It wasn’t.

A few weeks after I finished a first draft, Rob e-mailed me again to tell me he had found my website and read about my book,
Gay Haiku.
“Imagine me, knowing a famous author,” he wrote. “If you write a play about the crazy Exodus crowd, please get a good actor to play me.”

“The game is over,” said Mike when I showed him Rob’s e-mail. “He knows why you were there.” Something frozen in me began to melt.

“It was great to get to know you in Asheville,” I wrote back. “I may just write something about the Exodus crowd. And I’ll get Tom Cruise to play you.” I attached a photograph of myself playing softball at the gay summer camp from which I had just returned. “Let me know if you’re ever in New York and I’ll show you the town.”

“Sorry, brother,” he responded, “but you just don’t seem very ‘gay’ to me. You did not have any fear of the water in NC and were quite daring on that rope swing. Now you send me a picture of you looking like a natural at home plate.” I did not tell him that I looked like a natural only because a lesbian had adjusted my stance.

As Rob and I continued our intercontinental correspondence, I made sure to include subtle references to my boyfriend and our life together, to keep before him the idea that it might be possible for a gay person to find intimacy at places other than rest stops. “Don’t be too aggressive with him,” warned Mike. “You don’t want him to shut down.”

Rob sent me a frustrated e-mail about a doctor in Cádiz he’d become friends with who wanted to be more than friends, and I sent him a supportive response. He wrote back, “I wish I could give you a big hug right now!”
He totally has a crush on me,
I thought.

I told Mike to watch his step. “There’s a guy in Spain who’d be
happy
to wash the dishes if I asked him to,” I said.

But as the months went by it began to dawn on me that Rob really
didn’t
know I had been undercover at the conference. I was once again tortured by guilt but this time the decision was much easier to make; I had maintained an emotional bond with him, and I owed him the truth. I dropped an offhand remark into a subordinate clause in my next e-mail that left no room for doubt (“Since I’m sure you’ve figured out by now that I was at the conference doing research for a book…”).

He didn’t answer.

He still didn’t answer.

He continued not to answer.

“I’m not sure what you’re feeling about me,” I wrote finally, my fingers trembling, “but if we aren’t in touch again I just want to tell you that in the short time we spent together I grew to admire you deeply.”

His response came almost immediately. “Lighten up, my friend,” he wrote. “My silence only means that I’m overworked. You did a great spy job. I was honest when I said that you have a piece of my heart. And through our e-mails that piece has stayed alive.” He wrote a little bit more about Jesus and ended with, “Keep searching for Truth.”

I burst into tears in the middle of Starbucks.

We stayed in touch, and in April he told me his summer traveling schedule had him laying over in New York for a few days in July, so naturally I insisted that he stay with us. I joked to Mike about how excited I was to realize my conversion fantasy. I started planning menus; I investigated various tours of the city; I bought tickets to
Wicked,
the Broadway musical that tells a different
Wizard of Oz
story, in which Glinda and the Wicked Witch of the West start out as school roommates and best friends. “If a musical about the Wicked Witch of the West doesn’t turn him gay,” I said, “then nothing will.”

He arrived and hung out with us. We went to my favorite Thai restaurant. He came to the gym with me. I cooked chicken with pineapple-jalapeño salsa, and peach Melba for dessert. We got caught in a downpour. We went to Central Park and took photographs. He asked my advice about the doctor in Cádiz; I told him he didn’t have to stay friends with this guy just to be nice. He told me he had been in touch with Louis, who was now back in the lifestyle and had a boyfriend, something I was very happy to hear. I asked Rob if he believed that people who don’t believe in Jesus are going to hell, and he said that, if they’ve had the opportunity to believe and chosen not to, then yes, they’re going to hell. I asked if that included me and he said no, Jews are a special case.