Southern Lady Code: Essays(7)

Growing up, I did not think of this kind of man as homosexual, I thought of him as Southern Effeminate.

Southern Effeminate men are eccentric. They wear seersucker and bow ties. They garden and read and paint miniatures. They antique. They collect salt shakers and cookie jars, linens and art. They see their mothers every Sunday. They escort rich widows to cultural events. They help their women friends wax their legs and lip-sync “Love Is Strange” by Mickey and Sylvia in a talent show like Anthony Bouvier did on Designing Women.

Now, when I meet a man who carries a dog like a monocle and has an accent as peppery as white gravy, I think, Is he gay or Southern Effeminate?

Grandpapa was such a Southern man. He was funny. He buttered onions. He owned and played a piano. He dressed well. He had an umbrella stand of polished walking sticks. He let his daughter, my mama, raise forty-five cats in their backyard. When I earned top academic honors in college, he speed-needlepointed a ninety-inch rug runner to the soundtrack of Oklahoma! that read: “Lawdy! Lawdy!! My Gran’chile Is Summa Cum Laude!” When I slept on an egg-crate mattress pad on the floor of my first Manhattan apartment for eight months, he bought me a twin bed and box spring. Every year for my birthday, he sent me the amount of money of the age that I was. So, the year he gave me the bed, he also gave me twenty-two dollars.

Grandpapa and I got on fine because I wrote my thank-you notes. Not everyone wrote their thank-you notes, and if you didn’t write your thank-you notes, he cut you off. My sister never got more than thirteen bucks. And to really teach her a lesson over the following years, Grandpapa sent her cash-enclosed birthday cards that were empty.

Grandpapa had a dark side. A shady side is more like it.

“Have a nice day, sir!” someone would say. And Grandpapa, with a singsong voice that sounded like coochie coochie coochie coo, would say, “I’ll have any kind of goddamn day I goddamn want to!”

Grandpapa never ate at a restaurant without sending food back. He gossiped. He carried grudges like handkerchiefs. He dropped the N-word like marbles from a busted bag of marbles. And then there was the man who I’ll call Norman.

After Grandpapa’s wife—my grandmama—died when I was an infant, and then Grandpapa’s next-door neighbor—his mama—died when I was a kid, and then two spinster sisters drove their car through the side of his house, he moved from Yazoo City, Mississippi, to Cincinnati and moved in with Norman.

As far back as I can remember, Norman was always in our Kodak pictures. He was younger than Grandpapa, closer to my parents’ age, but I always thought of him and Grandpapa as a matching set. Grandpapa and Norman came to our school events and on vacations. Grandpapa and Norman traveled for free on cruise ships because they agreed to dance with all the single octogenarian ladies. Norman was never called Uncle Norman. He was just Norman. They were roommates. They were friends. They hosted family holidays. And when we stayed in their home, Grandpapa and Norman stayed at a hotel.

Grandpapa died when I was twenty-four. As Papa drove my sister, Mama, and me to the graveyard, Mama reviewed Grandpapa’s eulogy—which he’d handwritten himself, underlining certain words for emphasis—but then stopped, looked up, turned to my father, and asked, “Mike, do you think Papa was gay?”

“Yes,” he said.

And that is all I’ve ever heard spoken about it. It was also the last time we spoke to Norman, who immediately moved to Florida and moved in with another man.

So why did—and do—Southern men keep their homosexuality a secret?

I’m sure there are a lot of reasons. Religion is a big one. To a lot of us, the threat of eternal damnation is more real than ozone depletion. Jerry Lee Lewis could marry his thirteen-year-old first cousin once removed, but if he’d gone to bed with the “Chantilly lace and a pretty face” of another man, he’d have gone to hell. He might as well have started weaving a hand basket. But cane and wicker crafts could make you a target. When I was a teenager, certain Southern boys got jumped in parking lots.

And again, not because they were gay as in homosexual, but because they were Southern Effeminate: quiet or small or smart or they dared to wear something other than Wranglers. One pair of Howard Jones parachute pants and a rattail would get you a Pepsi can thrown at your head.

Some boys ducked and covered with us young ladies. Looking back, I was a member of what I’m now pretty sure were two tribes of Three Girls and a Gay.

In one group, the boy named each of us after one of Judy Garland’s witches of Oz. There was the wicked one and the dead-to-the-world one. I, of course, was Glinda. To show me his devotion, this boy gave me an envelope filled with his fingernail clippings. Such flattery! I never felt so adored.

In the other group, the boy was our designated driver after each of us girls had chugged a Bartles & Jaymes Exotic Berry wine cooler. We thanked him for his support by letting him sleep on the floor during our slumber parties. At my house, boys weren’t allowed in my bedroom, but Papa took one look at this kid and waved him out of the living room and on up the stairs. I’d thought it was because the boy was so homely that Papa didn’t think he stood a chance with me. Now I know my father must have known what he knew about Grandpapa. But Papa, unless he was directly asked, was too considerate to let on.

Did I know these two boys were gay? Absolutely not. They never said they were, it never occurred to me to ask, and I honestly don’t know if they are now because I don’t do Facebook. But what I do know is that nobody bothered them in high school because they were shielded by us girls. And we girls could flirt and get tipsy without fear of having our reputations ruined. It was a wimp-wimp situation. We were all safe from regular boys.