When did I know for sure? Was it the day my sweet, sensitive Gus went to the library and came back with Hot Cool Cars? Or when Henry doubled over in laughter while watching The Three Stooges? For me, the road to acceptance has been long and winding. But I no longer deny the truth: Neither of my sons are gay.
I wanted a gay son. Very, very badly. A few years ago, I wrote a book, You Make Me Feel Like An Unnatural Woman: Diary of a New (Older) Mother, about having twins late in life, and in passing I mentioned my wish. I got more hate mail for that one throwaway paragraph than for anything I'd ever written; as one woman snarled in her e-mail, "Why don't you just wish your kid gets cancer?"
This response completely baffled me. Frankly, I don't understand anyone who wouldn't want a gay son. Now, I'm not saying that if I had four boys I'd want them all to be gay, each holding up his own letter when they did their "YMCA" number for ice-skating class. No. But I craved one bent child to call my own.
I don't mean to stereotype. Maybe with a gay boy I wouldn't be better dressed and accessorized, and maybe my home wouldn't have exquisite window treatments. But let me ask you one question: Have you ever met a gay man who didn't understand the importance of good lighting? I would always look 10 years younger in my own home. And even if my son's taste weren't impeccable, he'd have 40 friends whose taste was.
In my gay-son fantasy, I would have, in my dotage, a companion to do all the things I love—dance, ballet, theater, midnight screenings of The Sound of Music. We would share so much. We would both be in awe of Nabokov, Susan Sontag, and David Sedaris; when he came over to watch TV on my 100-inch flat-screen, we'd both get the vapors watching the leather-pants-clad John Travolta in Grease. Never would I have to listen to a conversation that involved the words "point spread."
And another thing. My gay son might have a million boyfriends, but no other woman would replace me. C'mon: Have you ever met a gay man who didn't love his mother?
Today, here I am, with twin boys who just turned five. Again and again I ask myself, What went wrong?
Anyone who meets Augustus would have me pegged for a future PFLAG parent. He is tiny, delicate, and bookish; he eschews rough-and-tumble and has a great love of show tunes. But then, at 3, he fell in love. With a girl. He has been steadfastly in love with the same melancholy beauty for two years. He carries a picture of Tressa around, prefers her playdates to all others, and likes to remind me, very solemnly, that when they grow up they will marry. I half believe him.
Henry then became my fallback gay child. True, he is stereotypically boyish. Large, athletic, and swaggering (rough trade?), he loves rock climbing, Power Rangers, and what he calls shooters (translation: any movie where someone is carrying a gun). But then again, he has an unholy love of clothing. He is extremely neat, and he gets upset if his hair isn't just so. For a while there, whenever I left the house in a dress, he'd ask me to twirl. If that isn't a man destined for Project Runway, I don't know who is.
At any rate, a few months ago Henry asked me to buy him some Barbie dolls. Ignoring a certain ambivalence from my husband, I rushed out and purchased a Barbie princess. "Go ahead, honey. Express yourself!" I said.
Henry was thrilled. He admired his princess, took her out of the packaging, set her on a shelf. Then he never looked at her again.
After a few weeks, I couldn't help asking, "Honey, why did you ask me for a Barbie? I thought you wanted to play with her."
He looked puzzled. "Me? No, she's for my friends," he explained. "If a girl wants to have a playdate with me, she has to have something to play with. I told all the girls in my class: I got Barbie."
So there it was. Barbie was not an expression of his burgeoning "creativity." She was, instead, the 5-year-old equivalent of "Want to see my etchings?"
Henry and Gus are tender, sweet, wildly affectionate, and, I think, irredeemably heterosexual. I am almost at the point of accepting the possibility that straight boys can be that way too. And anyway, there's not a damn thing I can do. In the nature-versus-nurture debate, I am 100 percent on the side of nature. Because trust me, if nurture had anything to do with it, my boys wouldn't be sitting in the living room right now, flicking each other on the forehead and shrieking, "Nyuck, nyuck, nyuck."
No, please, I don't want your pity. I'm fine now—no, really. I only wish they would stop setting me up and then dashing my hopes. Yesterday, for example, I caught Henry playing with my iPod; he was transfixed. "Mom, listen to this!" he said. I listened; it was Gloria Gaynor belting "I Will Survive."
Joyously at first, I watched him boogie down to Gloria. Then my heart sank.
At 5, he's already doing the white man's overbite. And he's a terrible dancer.
