![]() Had his petite Christian wife with a puffball of permed hair just asked to go to a nude beach? His grunt, almost inaudible, said everything. ![]() My Air Force-trained father lowered his binoculars and turned from watching a humpback whale fluke slap the water. ![]() My inner teenager, that prone-to-shock kid, dangled visions of shells and fun lava pools. Body exploration was private porn, proscribed sex, kept secret. We didn’t lead ascetic lives, but prudish attitudes had invaded our psyches. I’d created a social distance I hated and now wanted to close with this vacation, pitched as a parent-son bonding experience - no siblings, the three of us, alone. Even the two mentors lost to AIDS, a painful awakening to the fragility of life, omitted. I was 36, and for over 20 years I’d scrubbed gay life from our conversations - boyfriends, drag parties, the gay swim team, the law firm homophobia - all nonexistent. ![]() At the time, my sexual orientation was subject to a similar self-imposed policy within my family. It was the spring of 1998, four years into the Clinton administration’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. The bohemian escapade happened by accident, when, after a stroll down Big Beach and nary a shell for my mother to collect, she asked which beach I liked best. Our Maui travel plans hadn’t included a nude beach.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |