Three Sizes Too Small

I wrote about the NYC Pride Parade for Gay City News this week, about what it costs to keep this going. This is what I carry down Fifth Avenue every June. It’s the story underneath that article—the backstory and the deeply personal parts that I didn’t have room for. You can read the piece here: Don’t let the parade pass you by

There’s a moment in the 1966 cartoon How the Grinch Stole Christmas! — watch it here — where the narrator says his heart is two sizes too small. He steals everything from the Whos of Whoville. The presents, the food, the roast beast, the whole production of Christmas. He expects to have destroyed it. Then he hears them singing anyway, without any of it, and something happens to him that he didn’t order and can’t explain.

His heart grows three sizes that day.

I’m fifty-five. I circle back to that Christmas cartoon every June, at the end of Pride season, because it’s still the closest thing I have to describing what happens to me on Fifth Avenue.

I was a spectator first, then a marcher, then a grand marshal, then a rider on a float, and now I’m not sure what I am. A witness, maybe. I’ve done the parade in nearly every way a person can, and none of those roles explain what still happens in my chest when I’m standing there.

Before I understood any of that, I was just a scared gay kid.

At 18, I was afraid the way you’re afraid of something that might kill you. Being gay felt wrong to me, like a door to hell I’d been shoved halfway through. I prayed alone in bed many nights, asking God to make it normal, to take it back. I’d lie under the covers with the radio turned low, listening to Dr. Ruth Westheimer on the AM dial, hoping she’d say something that meant I was okay. She never quite did. I didn’t understand yet that the prayer wasn’t going to work.

I also already knew about AIDS. People sometimes assume it entered my story later, but it didn’t. I’d known about it since the early eighties, and it terrified me before I even had the language to say why. Being gay meant, to my 18-year-old mind, a death sentence layered on top of a moral one. That was the calculation I was doing in my head. That was part of what I was afraid of when I prayed.

Then I went to my first Pride parade. I was a 19-year-old college student. I stood on that sidewalk and watched people who looked nothing like each other and nothing like me, from every direction, celebrating something together in public, without shame, in the sunlight. I didn’t have a word for what happened in my chest. I know the word now. It was the Grinch moment. My heart grew three sizes right there on the sidewalk, before I’d even come out to most of the people in my life. I stopped being alone in the space of an afternoon.

Weeks later, a letter arrived from a Scouting executive in New Jersey, a man I knew. It shattered what I thought I understood about my life. It set off a decade of litigation that ended, badly, at the Supreme Court.

Most gay men my age were spared what came before the treatments changed everything in the mid-nineties. I wasn’t spared the fear and the terror that I too would die. I worked in AIDS organizations in those years and saw the devastation up close, in people too young for what was happening to them.

I think about Mario Cooper. He ran the Democratic National Convention in New York, working under Julian Bond. He was a mentor to me and a friend, one of the people who showed me what a fully realized gay life in public could look like.

And I think about Jason Worth, the first openly HIV-positive judge in New York City. Jason introduced me to Mario Cooper. Jason asked him to look out for me. And Mario did.

I met Jason right as I was arriving in the city, barely starting to feel comfortable in my own skin. He sat on the board of the Community Research Initiative on AIDS, where I worked for $19,000 a year, a shoestring salary even then for someone trying to live in New York. Jason’s life was already winding down as mine was just getting started. He was in his forties. He took me under his wing. He protected me. He showed me things I couldn’t have afforded on my own, Fire Island among them. He encouraged the parts of me that would become my activism. I was too young and too naive to see, at the time, what the photographs from those years actually show. Now, looking back at pictures of Jason from the early nineties, I can see the disease stealing him away in real time, in a way I wouldn’t let myself see while it was happening. He died in 1995, and then Mario died in 2015. I was devastated in a way I’m still not finished processing.

I carry them to the parade every year, whether I mean to or not.

After I lost at the Supreme Court in 2000, I did what people do after a loss that size, though it wasn’t as clean as simply walking away. I stayed involved, just at a much lower volume. I used my voice selectively. Mostly I pivoted, out of the nonprofit world and the community organizations that had shaped me, into corporate America and the big advertising agencies. I told myself I wanted to make it in the real world, the straight world.

I was wrong about what that meant. It just took me years to admit it.

For a long time, the thing I was most afraid of wasn’t the Boy Scouts or the Supreme Court. It was being alone. I genuinely believed, for years, that a gay man like me didn’t get to have the kind of love other people took for granted. That I was too different and too broken. Then I met David in San Francisco.

He saw me. Not the plaintiff, not the case, just me. We’re not alike in most of the ways people usually mean when they say that, but we complete something in each other I don’t fully have language for, and I’ve stopped trying to force the language.

This year, I walked the parade route on Fifth Avenue, holding David’s hand, eleven years after we met, with someone as generous and steady as David has turned out to be. We don’t always feel comfortable doing that, even now. As out as I am, the gay Boy Scout, the world can still be unsafe, still be cruel, and some old caution doesn’t fully leave you. That day, for a few blocks at least, it did.

Here’s what the parade gives me now that it couldn’t have given me at 19. Back then, it led me to the realization that I wasn’t alone. Now it’s different. I notice who’s still here and who isn’t. I think about what it cost to get the people marching now the right to walk down that street without fear. I think about David beside me, and about Jason and Mario, who never had the years David and I have had.

The joy isn’t separate from the grief anymore. They arrive together now.

Somewhere out there is a 19-year-old on a sidewalk who doesn’t have a word yet for what’s happening to him. I know that feeling from the inside. I’d tell him this, if I could reach back far enough: the door you think is closing is the one that opens. Go through it. Your heart is about to grow three sizes, and you have no idea yet how much room you’ll need.

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