Remembering: One Gay Soldier Who Gave His Life

We Americans are a famously insular folk, and readers of this blog in other places may not be aware that today is a national holiday in the U.S.: Memorial Day, a day set aside to remember those who have died in the nation's wars.  Steve and I are using the holiday weekend to spend some time in Minnesota, so that he can visit his mother, whom he hasn't seen since his father's funeral.  And his aunts who are Benedictine sisters, who remain constantly welcoming and affirming of us as a gay couple, while Steve's über-Catholic siblings don't welcome us.  One of them even warned us not to come home to visit his mother on this whirlwind trip. 

We've also seen oodles and kaboodles of cousins, and I'm now a bit dazed by several days of driving up and down the state.  Minnesota is a looong state, and Steve's family live at the opposite end of the state from the twin cities, where our flight took us.  An interesting drive, though, with rolling hills and small lakes giving way to sandy, higher terrain with sparser vegetation, and then ending in the flat, land-rich Red River Valley on whose eastern edge Steve's family live and farm.  Full of one tiny town after another, many of them (including Steve's hometown) featuring signs equating abortion with the decline of the nation, with the original sin of the nation, on the outskirts of town, as you enter and leave the community.  

These are warning signs.  You're meant to see them as you drive into and out of town.  They're warnings of what the nation--our nation, the underlying, hidden text reads--will become if people stop voting right.

To me, the signs are reminders of how strong remains the political outreach of those using Catholics to shore up the Republican party and to get Catholic voters to vote "right," in areas like small-town Minnesota.  I'd find the insistence on forcing the rest of the nation to accept Catholic pro-life stances on abortion a lot more compelling, if I saw a similar concern for human life across the spectrum on the part of those staging this political crusade.

But, instead, I see the opposite: I see a blind, mindless equation of American values at their crudest, at their most anti-life, with the gospels, among many of those crusading against abortion.  For example: as we drive into Steve's hometown, we're listening to a radio station playing polka music, making Norwegian jokes, and celebrating the holiday weekend with patriotic and religious songs.  The program ends with an announcement (the man doing the announcing happens to be a cousin of Steve's, a staunch German-American Catholic who, Steve and I know, has a cousin who was a Nazi soldier in Germany, with whom the family remained in contact) that, it being a quasi-sacred holiday and all, we'll finish with an appropriate hymn, "The Old Rugged Cross."

But by mistake, the announcer plays, instead, "God Bless America."  And that seems to say it all, for small-town pro-life values: American dominance in the world portrayed as divine will, civil religion tragically intermixed with Catholic and evangelical values and teachings, the cross wrapped in the flag.  Nothing much examined very carefully, as long as it's proclaimed to us by some traditional authority figure somewhere, who tells us who's the real enemy (liberals, people of color, gays, Muslims, environmentalists, "them"), and who stands on God's side (George Bush, of whom one of Steve's uncles has just made a small statue, celebrating Bush's appearance at the 9/11 site, bullhorn in hand; Republicans; the pope and bishops).

And I feel millions of miles away from all of this, culturally and spiritually.  For one thing, I have no recollection at all of Memorial Day from my childhood.  We never celebrated that holiday.  Didn't even know it existed.  

And as I grew up and learned of its existence in other parts of the country, I discovered the reason why: this was a holiday that, in many parts of the American South, was considered an imposed holiday to remember them rather than us.  To commemorate the Union dead and not the Confederate dead.

So that we substituted our own version of memorial day, with Confederate themes, which was celebrated several weeks later than the Yankee holiday--in early June.  As I became an adult, I realized that this was why the cemetery in which my mother's family have been buried for several generations in southeast Arkansas has always held its decoration day on the first weekend in June, followed by a church homecoming the following weekend.  And this is why my father's maternal family have always gathered that same Sunday in June for their family reunion, which is centered around and attached to another small church cemetery in Louisiana where many of my forebears on that side of the family are buried.

I grew up with alternative traditions, and for me, the rhetoric about God and country that comes so easy to people of faith in the heartland seems alien, something from another land, another set of experiences than those that shaped me as a child.  For me, given my formative experiences, it seems dangerous--actively so--to equate God and Christian values with patriotic values and with the aspirations of any particular nation in the world.  All of which live under the eschatological proviso, and none of which deserve divine status or idolatrous adulation.

I've been remembering already, much of May, since May is the month in which that small cemetery in which my mother's family are buried issues its annual appeal for donations.  Since it's a "free" cemetery--no one pays for plots there; if you have roots in that church community, even if you don't belong to the church, you simply have to sign up and claim a plot in the cemetery--I feel obligated to give money to the cemetery each year, to assure that it's maintained. 

And as I give, I remember my mother and brother, both buried in this cemetery, along with my maternal grandparents, three great-grandparents, two great-great grandparents, and numerous other aunts, uncles, cousins buried in the cemetery.  I also remember, each May, my grandmother's death on May 23 in 1968, several days before I graduated from high school.  I remember my grandmother with great devotion, because of all she meant to me as I was growing up.  She was a strong, upright, tender woman who also had a fierce streak that frightened my brother.

But not me, for some reason.  I saw the fierceness as the external shield for the inward tenderness and inner strength: the way in which those virtues communicated (and protected) themselves in her interaction with others.  And so I remember, each May, all that my grandmother did to shape me as a human being from the time I was born--born with, so I'm told, a slightly misshapen head, since the doctors feared that labor was taking too long, and used forceps to pull me head-first from a womb I apparently intended not to leave, causing my skull to be somewhat lopsided when I emerged into the world.  So that my grandmother spent the first weeks of my life literally shaping me, carefully kneading my skull back into the seemly round shape of a well-tended child.

Steve and I are remembering this weekend in another interesting way, as we celebrate our idiosyncratic Memorial Day.  One of the cousins we visited yesterday has, over the past several years, generously shared with Steve some five or six photo albums and scrapbooks that her mother meticulously put together over the years.  Because the cousin is 87, the photos, newspaper clippings, prayer cards, and so forth in these albums go back quite a ways.  They're treasures for family historians.

And as Steve photographed and scanned all of these albums over the past year or so, we made a curious discovery: one of the people commemorated in the albums is an uncle of the cousin who owns the albums, who died in World War II.  He's not directly related to Steve, since he's on the French and not the German side of this particular family.  And he was, it's clear to Steve and me as we look at the photos his sister kept of him, a gay man.

A gay man who left small-town Minnesota before the war to go to San Francisco with a friend.  So that many of the pictures in the album show him in his San Francisco life--at the beach, with several other handsome men (and always beside him the same handsome man whom the sister carefully labels "the Virginian" in each photo).  Or sitting in a convertible, top-down, beside the Virginian, in whimsical drag, scarf carefully arranged in Grace Kelly style, demure white gloves.

Just because.  Because, it's clear from many of the pictures, this was a young man who loved life and loved to have fun, who had himself buried in sand on the beach, with tiny little legs formed from the sand to match a full-sized body. 

A man who was an accomplished amateur painter, who did paintings for some of the churches in his community in small-town northern Minnesota before he left for San Francisco.  (This is a theme not new to me.  My sister-in-law's uncle was a gay man who left small-town Arkansas for San Francisco in a slightly later period, in the 1950s, who painted a stunning mural of Christ the Good Shepherd for the baptistry of his childhood church in Arkansas.)

Yesterday, when we visited the elderly cousin so that Steve could return to her the albums she had loaned him, he asked about her uncle Enthyeme's art work, and she rummaged around and brought out a number of paintings he did while living out west.  They're wonderful landscapes in vibrant colors, with witty little touches that go along with the too-small legs of sand and the natty white gloves.  For instance, Enthyeme hides his initials in tiny details of the landscape, so that you have to search the whole painting to find them.

And here's what we were able to tell his niece, who knew that he had died in the war, but didn't know the details, since her knowledge comes from one final, censored letter he sent his sister, saying that he was on the front lines: when we saw his pictures in the photo album and wondered who he was, we did a bit of online research and found he died in the landing at Anzio.  And that he's buried in a military cemetery there, whose tombstones have been photographed and are online.

So that we could retrieve a photo of the tombstone and share it with Steve's cousin, who had never seen this photograph and wasn't sure where her uncle was buried, or even where, precisely, he was killed as a soldier.  And, strangely enough, the very day we did this online research and found the photo turned out to be the day Enthyeme died.

And so we're remembering today: one soldier who left no wife and children behind, who was drafted after he'd begun a new life as a gay man (of this we're certain from the photos, though it's not something anyone in Steve's family has ever said to us, or may even know) in San Francisco.  A young man full of fun and talent, with his life ahead of him.

Who gave his life for his country, because he was called into action, despite the fact that the American armed services pretended for far too long that gay men could not make adequate soldiers.  Or were a threat to the coherence of a military unit.  Or posed a danger to the country because they could be blackmailed.

Enthyeme gave his life.  And we're determined to remember, because the pictures we see of him in the albums Steve has now copied, and the paintings of his we saw yesterday, remind us that this was a life well worth remembering.

Remembering a (Gay) Friend: A Eulogy

I’ve been blocked with this blog, when it comes to writing something that really means a great deal to me.  And I know why.  And haven’t wanted to tussle with the reason.

Last year, a close elderly friend of mine of some thirty years died.  But I did not learn of his death until months after the fact.  And that’s part of the story of the blockage I've just mentioned.  But it’s also part of the reason I have difficulty thinking about ways to eulogize him on this blog—and that’s what’s really tugging at my heart to be done.

He had a secret, and I do not want to reveal it in a way that violates his privacy or the privacy of his family, even though he did not have a wife or children, and so there are no direct heirs to be considered if I share part of his story here.  Still, he took his secret to the grave, and I have been concerned not to write anything about my friend that might disclose his identity, out of respect for his privacy even in death.

At the same time, my friend deserves to be remembered—and remembered as he was and not as people wanted to imagine him, so that they could remain comfortable not naming or talking about what everyone who knew this friend has to have known about him.  He was gay, of course.  And he grew up in a world—hyper-Catholic, Polish, aristocratic, pre-modern—in which one did not talk about such matters, and in which one certainly was not gay.  Even when one was gay.  And when everyone knew it.

And because of this, because of how my elderly friend chose to live his life, when he died, no one contacted Steve and me, though he had visited us almost every year for the past thirty years.  Here’s how I learned of his death: as he approached his mid-90s, our friend began to tell us that there might come a year—he reckoned it as his 95th year—in which he could possibly begin to travel with less ease.  And he’d see what happened then, and would let us know about his yearly trip.

Last year, he planned a trip to us.  Our friend had long been a world traveler, making long trips annually to friends around North America and overseas, to see friends and relatives in Europe, to Africa and Japan, places he loved.  He actually began his travels in North America last year, with the intent of visiting us in the spring as he went from place to place.

And then we got an email from him saying he had become ill en route and had decided to return home, and thought he might not be able to travel again to see us.  I emailed him back—talking to him on the phone was not easy, since he had a hearing problem and couldn’t understand what I was saying to him—and then a long silence ensued.  I decided that perhaps emails weren’t reaching him, and I wrote him a letter.  More silence. I didn't know what to do to break the silence, short of trying to arrange a trip to see him, because talking by phone wasn't an option, given his inability to hear, even with a hearing aid.

Then not long before Christmas, I got a call from someone I didn’t know, his executor, telling me my friend had died in the summer.  I’m not sure how the executor got my name and why he chose to call me many months after the friend’s death.  I assume that my letter provoked the phone call—that the letter made my identity as a friend known, and at that point, the executor decided to contact me.

And that was that.  I was then able to go online and find many obituaries.  This friend was a noted scholar in his field, a polymath and Renaissance man of high cultural background who had many friends in important positions, an old-school Polish aristocrat with close ties to bishops and abbots and lords and ladies throughout Europe.  One of the things that tickled him the most about his life experience was that he had met, and was friends with, members of every royal family around the world.  

Or so he told me.  Royalty meant a great deal to him.  And democracy was anathema, an invention of the unlettered masses who had taken power from his sort in revolution after revolution in Europe and the Americas, until his class had been reduced to ghosts of their former selves.

But rich ghosts. Powerful ghosts.  Ghosts for whom every door still opened, as they traveled the globe and expected audiences with popes.  And as they upheld the power of kings, popes, and bishops any place royal institutions, whether secular or churchly, held sway.  And as they invested their still considerable holdings and upheld the ruthless power of corporate leaders drawn from the very unlettered masses they secretly despised.

A strange friend for me to have, you might say.  And yes, we clashed, often and volubly, over religious and political issues.  Because he was Polish and stubborn and I’m Anglo-Celtic and equally stubborn, we were not, either of us, above saying outrageous things to get each other’s goat.  I found it almost impossible to understand how a man who had come to terms with being gay and found being gay morally acceptable for him and his friends could simultaneously defend the most repressive, outrageously unjust structures and practices of a church he loved to excess.

My friend was both gay and comfortable with being gay and strictly closeted.  And he was both gay and comfortable with being gay and an ardent monarchist (a defender of any monarchy, it mattered not which).  And a right-wing Catholic who fasted on Fridays, never missed Mass, actively encouraged crackdowns on and silencing of theologians, wanted all religious women back in cloisters and in traditional habits and under male control.  But he was gay and actively so, and found that an acceptable moral option for him and his kind, as he did prostitution, since men of his class who weren't gay needed women to service them, don't you know, and  had always done so throughout history, and only boorish Puritans (who were, after all, drawn from the middle and lower classes of the British Isles) considered otherwise. 

He also belonged, I discovered from his obituary, to the secretive, powerful, far-right Catholic order (whose membership is reserved exclusively to those with aristocratic status) called the Knights of Malta.

I was not surprised to learn from his obituary that my friend was a Knight of Malta.  Nor was I surprised that in thirty years of friendship, he had withheld that information from me.  Learning it helped me make sense of things that had long puzzled me, like how he obtained the surprising, totally wrong-headed pieces of arcane right-wing information in which he believed devoutly—how he obtained such information when he showily avoided newspapers (too common, too plebian, and they don't tell the truth that only insiders in palaces and places like the Vatican's halls know), the internet, books of any sort except those calculated to correspond with his preconceived judgments about the world, and so forth.

I knew there had to be some kind of network supplying him with information like the following: that talk about global warning was a liberal conspiracy to curtail business (and don’t we need the profits of the rich to make everything work?), or that there cannot possibly be any such thing as gay marriage, since “Dictionary says (like many native speakers of Slavic languages, my friend had trouble with definite and indefinite articles) marriage is between a man and a woman.”  Period.  Case closed.

Can’t change what dictionary says!  And wouldn’t a nuclear war really be better, since most human beings in modern, democratic societies are simply parasites, consuming (pronounced "consumink") units, and weeding out these parasitical consuming units would be good for the continuation of the race?  And who ever heard of a distinguished female chef?  As everyone knows, women cook imitatively, as an obligation and not a creative endeavor.  It’s men who have the creativity to craft stellar dishes.  And the intelligence, which is more to the point.

As I say, my friend was a bundle of contradictions and complexities, and much of the complex contradictoriness seemed to be rooted in a particularly Polish penchant for believing passionately in two opposite ideas at the same time, and defending both with equal ardor against all comers.  Hence the puzzle of his being gay.

And closeted.  And dying in the closet, so that even his closest gay friends (we were, we understood, part of a circuit of gay couples he visited) did not know of his death.  Since we did not exist, for his family or the executors of his estate.  Like his own now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t gayness, we weren’t there.

We were, at best, names in a lengthy address book, to which faces and histories were not attached, and therefore we weren’t worthy of information when a beloved friend died—especially when the address book showed two men living at the same address.

I had always realized my friend handled his being gay and having many gay friends this way—that he treated both his identity and our existence as secrets, when he dealt with his devoutly Catholic Polish family and his many right-wing aristocratic Catholic friends and high-church ties.  In his yearly Christmas letter shared with friends around the world, his urbi et orbi letter as he called it, he would speak of his travels to visit this or that friend each year.  And when he recounted his time with us, he never identified us except to say that we were unnamed “friends” with whom he had visited that spring, and had seen this or that sight.

The sights always included beautiful natural scenes—on trips to us, the mountains north of Little Rock, the wildflowers there, a handsome new garden in Hot Springs.  Our love of nature helped us span the political and religious differences, as did our shared love of story-telling and outrageous narratives often drawn from family history (there are many points of similarity between crazy Southern families and those about which Russian, Czech, and Polish novelists have long written).  

We also shared a love of art and good books (albeit, ones that did not clash with my friend's monarchist and right-wing views, if we were to discuss books safely).  And so his visits to us always included time for libraries and art museums and long meals I cooked for us to enjoy as we talked—or, more correctly, as Steve and I listened to one droll story after another told in a charming Polish-accented English devoid of articles and full of “But, my dear!” and “Rrrreally?” and “When Count Burabura and I met at sweetest little Roman trattoria.”

I loved my friend.  We shall miss him bitterly.  I want him to be remembered.  I feel a strong obligation to eulogize him.

And as I struggle to do that here, in this posting, I feel intense sadness that he died having lived completely in the closet, so that even in death, he is not who he was in life—is not remembered as who he was in life, since, to our shock, we’ve found that several of the obituaries we’ve retrieved for him on line fabricate a wife he never had.

And I wonder why it has to be this way, for anyone, in the world in which we live.  And especially for those most ardently devoted to the church, to a church for whom they exist only by being invisible.  Even when they are, as our friend assured he was, part of an invisible but very powerful elite club of gay men with access to the elite halls of the Vatican itself, where—so our friend told us—hidden gay princes have for centuries carried important jeweled ecclesiastical gewgaws in papal processions, and continue to do so.  Though they’re not really there.

Since there are no gay men in those processions.