Dear Friend,
It’s the first week of September and Print Club packages were sent on Monday. But I like for print club members to receive their packages before revealing this month’s print. So I’ll wait to share more photos from the print club photo shoot until next week.
This week I’m sharing some photographs with JP from my By the River series. For those of you who have followed my posts for some time, you know that I often go to Rock River in Vermont and have lately enjoyed photographing there. It’s a special place tucked away in a hidden part of the state.
But instead of discussing Rock River, I wanted to take this week to ask a question I’m curious about.
I came across a video of Ian McKellen reading Armistead Maupin’s Letter to Mama which was written for his weekly column for the San Francisco Chronicle which later became his series of novels, Tales of the City. Letter to Mama is a response to Anita Bryant’s crusade against homosexuals back in the 1970s. For those who don’t know, Anita Bryant was a Florida beauty queen and singer who thought gay people were a menace to society. An anti-discrimination law had just passed in Miami-Dade County and she wanted it repealed. Her campaign was called “Save Our Children.” Her campaign inspired many people to come out to fight this bigotry.
Here is what McKellen reads:
“Dear Mama, I'm sorry it's taken me so long to write. Every time I try to write you and Papa I realize I'm not saying the things that are in my heart. That would be OK, if I loved you any less than I do, but you are still my parents and I am still your child.
...[I want] to tell you the truth, that your own child is homosexual…
I'm sorry, Mama. Not for what I am, but for how you must feel at this moment. I know what that feeling is, for I felt it for most of my life. Revulsion, shame, disbelief -- rejection through fear of something I knew, even as a child, was as basic to my nature as the color of my eyes.
I know what you must be thinking now. You're asking yourself: What did we do wrong? How did we let this happen? Which one of us made him that way?
…I can't answer that, Mama. In the long run, I guess I really don't care. All I know is this: If you and Papa are responsible for the way I am, then I thank you with all my heart, for it's the light and the joy of my life.”
Seeing this video, reading this letter, got me thinking – “what does coming out look like for gay boys today?”
I know my story – the sad loneliness living in suburban New England that gave way to elation when I finally moved to New York City in 2008. It’s a common story of being lonely, sad, repressed, confused – perhaps a story that describes modern teenage angst. But I wonder if coming out as gay even feels necessary for kids these days. There are so many new ways of expressing oneself, through gender, clothes, makeup, social media.
I have to say, while reading this letter makes me feel a little emotional, I also feel like there’s a great distance between what this letter may have meant in the 70s, and what it means to me now. It feels more like a relic of the past than an emblem of the present. Being a gay man feels, to me at least, like a non-event within the structure of the larger society in 2026. Of course there are still bigots, closeted republicans, and conservative people who hate us, but their ire, writ large, seems directed in a different place and being a man, even a gay one, comes with privilege.
It’s an odd thing to grow up feeling like “the other” and now to be in a culture where being gay is so normalized it’s almost as if those years spent struggling are erased. Well, not erased, exactly, but at least, no longer present. I find myself asking the question, “who am I without that struggle?”
I’m curious what you think …
Have a sexy week,
x
MM
