Are You Guys Brothers?

     On the occasion of a heterosexual friend’s 60^th birthday, Ray and I gave him a nicely framed picture of us on our 20^th anniversary in Central Park. In it, I was behind Ray, holding him lovingly. Our heads were touching and we were both smiling happily. It was a beautiful shot, one we have given to our closest friends and family members. Our friend Jack thanked us with genuine enthusiasm, as did his wife Jean. He then handed it to the other two heterosexual couples who had just shared in the wonderful meal and delicious cake, and who were passing around cards and opened gifts for appreciation.

     The next day, the two husbands who had been passed the photo, independently called Jack to say how unsettled they had found themselves feeling while looking at it. These were both very successful businessmen with whom we had shared more than one evening of dinner and board games in Jack and Jean’s home, and who had engaged Ray often for his opinion on the stock market.

     My feelings were hurt, as they unfortunately often are when I let down my guard with heterosexual men and women and then learn that they were not quite as comfortable as they had given us the impression of being. Like the time that Ray and I, during our tenth year together, were entertaining his folks at our cabin in New Hampshire and we asked his dad to say the grace before the noon meal. We all held hands, closed our eyes, and listened as Art solemnly gave thanks for the food, and then reminded God that it wasn’t too late to send two good women into Ray’s and my life so that we might get married and have children. But I get hurt less often and less deeply today than I did ten or twenty years ago because I’m much less invested in the acceptance by others, gay or straight.

     Reflecting on that incident at the birthday party prompted me to wonder recently if my father would have displayed the same photo of Ray and me in an embrace on his executive desk in the Public Relations department of General Motors. Would Ray’s father, despite his unrealized dreams for Ray, do the same in his Wichita real estate office, if he were alive and still working? Did their love of their sons ever embrace us fully for who we are, or was there any embarrassment with our intimacy, or shame that we weren’t “real” men?

     I often quote Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, a radio talk show host and former principal of the Iran-Contra scandal, who warned during Bill Clinton’s administration that if the President allowed openly gay people to serve in the military, “no real man would ever enlist again.” Most members of my corporate audiences laugh at the lack of sophistication of North’s observation, but my guess is that many of these same people would privately wonder about my relationship with Ray, as the vendors in Istanbul boldly asked us many, many years ago when we walked through the Grand Bazaar, “But, who’s the wife?”

     If two men are captured in an intimate pose, does it mean that one or both of them are “unmanly”?  The very same photo of us in Central Park would draw little, if any, negative response from men in Italy, China, South Africa, or other countries where we have witnessed intimacy between all men as a common daily occurrence. Heterosexual men from India, in fact, have told me that one of the first lessons they needed to learn when they moved to the United States was not to hold the hand of their male friends in public, as it is seen in the U.S. as unmanly and an indication of homosexuality, which in America, they sensed, are the same.

     That does not mean that men in these other countries are completely comfortable with homosexuality. Our tour guide in Cambodia, for instance, in response to my query about local attitudes toward gay people, told us that there are very few homosexuals in Cambodia. They’re all in Thailand, due to the fertilizer they use in that country to generate three crops of mangoes annually. The homosexuals in Cambodia, he said, are transsexuals who want to be reincarnated as women in their next lives because it’s easier in Cambodia to be a woman. (I decided that it was “a teachable