REMINISCENCES OF 1970S SAN FRANCISCO

The Hilarious Thing My Mother Said On Coming Out to Her

She wanted to “get to know my son again,” so I told her

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Mother said something unexpected and hilarious when I came out to her.

Well, you’re never the woman, are you?

That was her question after she stopped crying, the uppermost thing on her mind.

It was late morning. We were standing in my bedroom next to the king-size waterbed on which I had entertained any number of men. Bob, her second husband and a stranger to me, stood behind us just inside the open door.

Jim and his partner, Daniel, were having a late breakfast of orange juice, homemade yogurt, and toasted homemade sourdough. They sat at the kitchen table down the hall but within earshot. Richard and Jen had returned to their bedroom to study.

I had introduced Mom and Bob to them all, my eclectic little flatmate population. Mom had been warm and effusive as was her manner but seemed a little confused. Bob had remained silent and stone-faced, picking up on the mixed gay/straight vibe, I thought, but betraying no reaction.

I had just told her, “Mom, you should know that I’m homosexual.”

I had chosen that harsh, clinical term instead of the familiar “gay,” thinking she wouldn’t know the latter in the current context, but would instead have thought I was declaring my cheerful, sprightly nature. I wanted an abrupt, short-and-sweet statement to drive the point home hard. I had spent the last 15 years hiding my nature from her. I had decided to come out of my closet, swinging. Damn the torpedoes; full speed ahead.

The late-morning light from the big, east-facing bay window streamed in on us.

With a few tears still glistening in her eyes, she looked up at me expectantly, her question hanging.

In fact, I had readily “bottomed” on that very waterbed on occasion, with the right man, and in the right circumstances. I was “versatile.” I was wearing the correct color hankie (dark blue worn in the left hip pocket) to prove it, too.

At 6 feet 2–1/2 inches and 175 pounds, with the Groucho-Marx-moustache that I’d had since my sophomore year in college, I was quite comfortable in my masculinity.

Further, I knew that having anal sex is not the only way two men can be together. It does not make one less of a man. Anyway, one can control from the bottom as well as from the top.

I knew that being a “bottom” is not only about surrendering control to the “top,” but also about placing trust in him — giving him the responsibility to use his control for both our pleasure, not just his.

Those thoughts came to mind as we stood there.

Still, not wanting, at that particular moment, to get into that particular discussion, I lied and said, “No, Mom, never the woman,” thinking that concept so far from reality as to make the lie almost inconsequential. I glanced Bob’s way with my peripheral vision. He was impassive, his face fixed in a neutral look.

She turned away for a moment and stared out the bay window. Then, she looked back up at me and said,

I just don’t want you to be lonely.

I was 28. Although I had been an active, gay man since 22, I had not yet come out to my parents or siblings. I quit home at 18 for college. I would have liked to have seen my mother after that, but it would have meant seeing my father, too. Not an option. So, I was estranged from them both. My siblings were irrelevancies.

My mother had divorced him when I was 24, the year my little sister graduated high school and went off to college. Sacrificing her happiness, she had waited until the last of her children was safely out of the house. She married Bob a year later. I wasn’t at the wedding.

Dad returned to his boyhood, northeast-Texas hometown, where he played pool and poker with his new, good-ole-Texas-bubbas and quietly drank away the few remaining years left to him. He had spoken to me once in the four years since the divorce.

I had not been in their lives for a decade. I was comfortable with that. I had no plans to change it.

That is until my mother called me and said that she and Bob were going on their delayed honeymoon to Hawaii. On the way, they were going to stop in San Francisco “to get to know my son again.”

That was what was happening that morning. She was just beginning to get to know me again when she confessed her second fear —that I would be a lonely homosexual. Bob was getting to know me for the first time. He remained where he stood, impassive, quiet, and unmoving. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

My flat was on Noe St. two blocks off Market and within spitting distance east of Castro. It was 1976. We were in the gay Mecca of the U.S. at its heyday in the innocent era before HIV. “Lonely” did not compute.

I said, “Come on, Ma, we’re going for a little ride.”

I drove up Market and stopped at the left turn light at Castro. She was in the front passenger seat. Bob, still mute and still an enigma, was in the back.

Looking at her, I told them,

I’m going to turn left here. For the next four blocks, every man, woman, dog, and cat you see is gay. Every shop is gay-patronized, gay-staffed, and gay-owned. All the apartments above the shops are gay-occupied. For four blocks on either side of us, all the houses are owned by gay men.

I used a little hyperbole, though not much.

She said, “No!” with that skeptical tone one hears when “no” means “I don’t believe it.”

I made the left onto Castro and got stopped in traffic at the second intersection, 16th Street. It was a Saturday at midday. There were no women, dogs, or cats in sight. But, the sidewalks, bars, and shops were chockablock with stunning gay men.

She looked right. She looked left. She looked ahead

“I don’t see any,” she said.

“Ma!” I exclaimed, “That one. That one. And, oh, that one.”

She stared a moment more.

“But they can’t be!”

“Why?”

Because they all look just like you!

I looked at her and waited.

I actually saw the light dawn in her eyes.

Oh.

I drove them to their hotel on Union Square. I dropped them off with instructions to spend the afternoon wandering around the square. I told them not to stray too far west, or they would wind up in the Tenderloin, a seedy part of town and, perhaps, just a bit dangerous. I suggested that they take the Powell Street cable car north to its terminus at Fisherman’s Wharf. They could see the Ghirardelli chocolate factory and the other shops and then have a romantic dinner at one of the seafood restaurants on the pier.

I picked them up the next morning and showed them the rest of the sights around the city. Across the bridge, we toured Mill Valley, the Marine Headlands National Park, Sausalito, and Tiburon. We had a late, light lunch at a little, Tiburon bakery cum café I favored. We sat on the deck out over the Bay. Light waves lapped at the supporting posts. Sunlight sparkled and danced over the water. As we ate, we watched the bright, multi-colored spinnakers of the several sailboats in view. Seagulls, looking for crumbs and other morsels left behind by the humans, squawked overhead. Across the Bay, the city skyline punctuated the landscape like crystal spires growing up from the rock. It was idyllic. It perfectly reflected life in San Francisco as I knew and lived it.

That evening, I took them to Louisa’s, a gay restaurant on Polk Street at the western edge of Knob Hill. Between Pine and Jackson, Polk was as gay as Castro but flamboyant. The locale and its men fit what I knew were their stereotypical visions of gay men. I wanted them to have an experience in contrast to the men of Castro Street, and me.

Louisa was American-born but of Italian heritage. Her recipes were authentic, having been inherited from her grandmother. Two weeks before, a friend who knew her had taken me there. He had introduced us to each other. He and I had had a memorable dinner under her close supervision.

She was at the hostess stand when we walked in. To my surprise, she knew me, calling me by name. I introduced Mom and Bob. She was effusive in her welcoming. She seated us at one of the finer tables by a window and went off to tell the table captain to give us his particular attention.

I ordered cioppino, an Italian fish and shellfish stew similar to the more familiar French bouillabaisse. The sauce was so good that I sopped it up with bread until there was no more. I was just about to start on the fish when Louisa wandered by.

In a commanding voice, she said, “Stop-a. Don’ eat-a. You gotta no sauce-a!”

With that, she turned and marched to the kitchen while the whole restaurant looked on.

From the kitchen, we soon heard, “Whatta you mean-a you gotta no cioppino sauce-a. What kinda chef are you?”

Then came the clanging and clattering of pots and pans. In ten minutes, she returned with a large saucepan brimming with cioppino sauce. The steam rose like it does off a hot, summertime New Orleans street when the raindrops hit it. The aroma wafted across the room. Again, everyone watched.

She ladled broth into my bowl until it too brimmed, then said, “Good. Now you gotta sauce-a. Mangia! Mangia!”

With that, she turned and headed back to the kitchen. The restaurant broke out in applause.

Discomfited, Bob blushed and shrank into the corner. Mom laughed, typically for her, as she spooned some sauce onto an oversized hunk of bread.

The next morning, I drove them to the airport for their flight on to Maui. As she stood beside the car at the passenger unloading zone, Mom began to cry. I hugged her and promised that I would not disappear from her life again. I promised that she would continue to get to know her son as the man he had become since she last knew him — a teen marching off to college and life on his own.

Directing the porter to go on ahead, Bob took Mom’s arm and walked her across the road to the far curb where they stopped. He spoke to her, then turned and walked back toward me. He stopped short before reaching me. He stood there a moment absorbed in thought, deciding what to say.

After a little while, he took the last couple of steps and said, “I have a son about your age. I wish that he was half the son to me that you are to your mother.”

With that, he extended his hand. We shook, then he clasped my hand in both of his, looked me in the eyes, and, just perceptibly, nodded. He let go, turned, and walked back to Mom.

He took her arm again. She looked back at me as they walked through the glass doors and into the terminal.

I got back into the car, thinking that, all in all, it had been a good start to getting to know my mother again, this time as the person I really was, a happily well-adjusted gay man, and decidedly not lonely.

© 2020 Steve Alexander