I remember, almost too vividly, the day my mother and I vacuumed up my 12-year-old brother from the tired shag carpet. There was the stench of the old vacuum and how mad I’d been that mom spilled him in the first place. The ashes themselves gave no protest, of course. They just clumped by the bed, innocent and demure, the way too much sugar clumps in a bad cup of coffee. She and I were still bitter at that time. The ability to laugh openly came only later, with the palliative distance of time.
Looking back, it was a defining moment for us — the kind that establishes the genre of a life story as irrevocable as the letters on a birth certificate but denied the same diminutive heed. The loss of my brother overshadowed every adolescent milestone of mine, including coming out as gay a few years later. However, his death later connected me with a community I never knew existed at a time when I needed it most.
One universal quality of grief is its difficulty. Some people make cocktail parties out of wakes. Others don’t hold services at all. How Joshua’s ashes came to rest by that bedside is the story of how my mother coped. For a year after the funeral, Josh’s remains had been entrusted to my dad. One day my mom decided it was her turn to be custodian. Her fondest memories were of cuddling with Josh and watching TV, so the box of his remains took up residence in her bed.
Despite my protests, this arrangement continued for some time — until the inevitable happened. One morning, mom awoke to find the box face down on the floor. Fortunately, the amount of ash that had escaped was minimal. Less fortunately, a little ash goes a long way. That’s when we brought in the Hoover. And I knew the rest of my life I’d be cleaning up the mess grief left behind.
I was fourteen.
At seventeen, I came out of the closet in waves — little ones at low tide. My mother dragged me out the first time. While she was flipping channels in a motel room in North Dakota one night, she said, “You know you’re gay, right?”ĚýIt wasn’t even a question, really. But I did know, and so did she. That made the process pretty simple. A few minutes later we turned out the lights, worried about checking out of the motel on time the following morning, and I was struck by how little my being gay mattered. Next to cleaning up the shambles of my little brother’s untimely exit, being gay had been like spilling red wine on a black rug.
My grandmother was the next to learn, excluding a couple of my closest friends who, like my mother, didn’t seem to care. Most of them had known Joshua and figured this was the least of the Foster family maladies. The task of telling Gram remained daunting, however. Gram is a little old Catholic lady — the kind that works at a soup kitchen, collects rosaries and pretends she never had sex despite the blaring evidence of her two grown children. One day I decided it was time to get the damned thing over with. It went down something like this:
Me: “Grandma, I’m gay.”
Gram: “So was Jesus.”
That was it. Crisis averted. As she began to elaborate on her theory — 12 guys and a foot fetish or something — I was baffled. I realized in that instant I had wanted a scandal of my own — untouched by the loss of theĚý´ÇłŮłó±đ°ůĚýkid. I wanted to be seen, really seen, as a human being who still had to deal with the rest of life’s inconvenient details. Instead Grandma’s Queer Trinity had stolen the scene, good intentions notwithstanding. I would never identify with the kinds of gay characters onĚýWillĚý& GraceĚýorĚýGlee. My coming-out wasn’t season finale material.
This “Glee complex” followed me to college when I was 19. From the beginning, I felt alienated from the gay community. I tried getting involved with just about every group I stumbled across on campus from an up-and-coming bisexual support group (I don’t identify as bi-anything) to a “poet” collective to the Gay-Straight Alliance and its menagerie of exaggerated lisps and falsettos.
But the results were depressing. I wasn’t into Lady Gaga. I wasn’t looking to hook up. I wasn’t into sound poetry or the Dada revival. I didn’t live up to the ultra-masculine ideals or even the high-femme stereotypes of this “gay culture,” and this made me lonelier than ever.
Enter Scarlet Bowen with an introduction to queer literature class. I remember shopping for her assigned reading and stumbling upon Andrew Holleran’sĚýDancer from the DanceĚýand Richard Siken’sĚýCrush.ĚýInĚýCrushĚýI unearthed a passionate poetry collection that blurred the line between desire and despair.ĚýDancer from the Dance,Ěýwhich had sounded like a literal redundancy, explored Fire Island’s “temples of love” in a pre-AIDS era wrought with loneliness and disappointment for its two aging protagonists. Something clicked. Losing my brother connected me unexpectedly with an earlier generation of gay men whose community was defined by loss.
If the heteronormative idyll is concerned with procreation and the cycle of birth, the queer idyll to me consists of living inside the brevity of human life. We like to think we’re the post-AIDS generation, but our predecessors have so much to offer us. An entire generation died or watched the people they loved die, and somehow we missed that only to stand and mouth the mantras of gay liberalism. The truth, however, is that even if we spend our entire lives chasing love and sexual gratification, death and poetry and the smell of ocean brine will still touch us with an immediacy that identifying as “such-and-such” can’t and won’t and shouldn’t.
More than seven years after my brother’s death, his loss continues to suffuse my life in ways words cannot express. The world around me, in all of its complexity, will always come at me from ashes. That sounds like a sob story, but it doesn’t have to be if I pen the tale myself rather than be defined by others.
Remembering the strange longing I had to be a part of that “coming-out scandal,” I can’t help but feel there is something destructive about the repetition of these coming-out nightmares. “It gets better” might be a message of hope for some, but it suggests that it isn’t and can’t be OK right now. Society picks up on that. As long as we keep telling ourselves we cannot laugh at death or come out in a whisper rather than a shriek, we will continue telling the same old stories, in the same tones, we never meant to tell.
Zachary FosterĚýis a senior majoring in English literature and psychology at CU-Boulder.
