My Trip Down the Pink Carpet (14 page)

I mean, did Jesus not clearly say to turn the other cheek?

Here is a quote from
USA Today
: “Galileo was persecuted for revealing what we now know to be truth regarding Earth’s place in the solar system. Today, the issue is homosexuality, and the persecution is not of one man but of millions. Will Christian leaders once again be on the wrong side of history?”

It took the Catholic Church 376 years to admit that the earth did indeed revolve around the Sun.

And it is happening again.

Are we in the midst of a culture war? You bet your sweet ass we are. We are in the throes of the greatest civil rights movement since the 1960s. And I am thrilled to be a part of it. We will prevail—and it is going to happen in my lifetime.

This I know.

W
HEN
I
was growing up as a Baptist, I had a friend with whom I shared a very shameful secret. It was not
the
secret, although we harbored that, too. Our secret was so shameful that I swore I would go to my grave without telling anyone. When we were little boys and no one was home, my friend and I would dress up in my mother’s clothes, stand before the mirror with a hairbrush as a microphone, and pretend we were Diana Ross and the Supremes. We had no idea what a drag queen was. We just loved pretending we were Diana Ross and the Supremes.

I took my mother’s bathrobe and fashioned myself a lovely gown. I would put the robe on backwards, let it fall off my shoulders, and then cinch it at the waist. Then my friend and I would put on our pretend high heels and prance around on our toes. And it’s probably not widely known, but during those daring days, I accidentally invented the Farrah Fawcett shag, way before anyone had even heard of Miss Fawcett. I would sneak into my mother’s closet, pull out her wig, and try it on. It always looked a little boring, so one day, in a fit of inspiration, I flipped the wig completely upside down. Voilà! It looked like shit from the back, but I was good to go in the front.

I was always, always Diana Ross. “Are you going to be the backup girl?” I’d ask my friend. “Then back the fuck up!”

My little friend and I would bring down the house with our stunning renditions of all the Supremes’ songs. I love that the two little queers in our great big church found each other. And do you know, we were best friends all the way through high school, but never once did we mention the things we did when we were little boys.

Eventually my friend took a much different path. He married a beautiful girl who was the daughter of a doctor. They were married for a couple of years before I heard through the grapevine that they had gotten divorced. And then my friend just disappeared.

Twenty years later, I was walking down the street in West Hollywood, where there are queers hanging from the trees, and there he was. I couldn’t believe it.

I asked, “Where on earth have you been?”

“Oh, honey,” he said, “I’ve been having a Homo Hoedown!”

He was the very first person I knew to be diagnosed with the AIDS virus. This was in the early 1980s, and a few years before I began my work with Project Nightlight. Back then, AIDS was terrifying. If you visited someone in the hospital, you had to wear a complete space suit, mask and all.

But for some reason, with my friend, I was fearless. I’d like to think that my colossal bravery was because of my enormous heart and my love for all mankind, but I think it may have actually had more to do with the amount of crystal meth I was snorting. I read once something about Hitler giving his troops amphetamines, because it gave the troops a feeling of invincibility and made them too paranoid not to fight.

I would sit with my friend night after night, high as a kite. All my friends would exclaim, “Leslie, I don’t know how you do it!”

What else did I have to do? Go home and watch porno movies? At that point, my life had shrunk to almost nothing. Plus, it became my job to dole out his medicine. Now
that
was a lot of fun!

“Here you go, sweet baby, one for you and two for me….”

I’d even let him smoke cigarettes. He was on oxygen! As we both lit our Virginia Slims, I’d say, “Be careful of that tank, girl. You’ll blow us to kingdom come!”

We would sit together, smoking, giggling, and talking up a storm. We used these endless nights to catch up. We laughed and laughed about our diva days pretending we were Diana Ross and the Supremes. Sometimes on his good days we’d get up and act it all out again. We would even make beautiful gowns out of hospital robes. We talked about everything under the sun except his illness. I instinctively knew that was off-limits. Then one day out of the blue he went crazy on me.

I didn’t know back then what we know now—that sometimes AIDS patients suffer from dementia. I just thought he’d gone bonkers. He began to rattle on incessantly. He would spew forth babble with absolutely no segue. But, you know, I was tweaking so hard on speed a lot of it actually made sense!

“Mmm-hmm, yeah, I’m with you on that one, girl.”

One night, at about 5 a.m., he had finally quieted down, bless his heart. I was staring out the window, smoking my last cigarette, and waiting for those goddamn birds to start chirping. All of a sudden, I heard a tiny voice.

“Leslie…do you think I’m being punished?”

I had a minor panic attack. It didn’t help that I was out of my mind from the drugs. At the time, the preachers in the Deep South were all saying the same thing, that AIDS was God’s punishment for homosexuality. Ironically, if you had been raised as I had, it made a lot of sense. It was a tumultuous time for gay men who had been raised in the church.

My friend would not let up. In his dementia it became his mantra.

“Do you think I’m being punished? Do you think I’m being punished?”

He would repeat this over and over again, like a parrot. And no matter how many times I tried reasoning with him, he would act as if he didn’t even hear me.

“Do you think I’m being punished? Do you think I’m being punished?”

Three days before he died, he sat up in bed and he was as lucid as I had ever seen him.

“Leslie, the most amazing thing has happened. I prayed last night, and God spoke to me.”

You must understand that in the Baptist church we heard that stuff all the time. The preacher was always shouting about speaking to God: “And then He spoke to me! Whoopee! We got the Devil on the run!”

So when my friend told me that God had spoken to him, I walked over to where my stash was, chopped out a line of crystal, and snorted it. “Well, isn’t that something? That just tickles me pink. I can’t wait to hear what He said.”

It all went over the top of my poor, drug-addled head.

By this time, my friend was nothing more than a little burned-up french fry, but he took my hand with what seemed like superhuman strength, and pulled me down on the bed beside him. He was so weak he could barely talk above a whisper.

“Leslie, it’s important that you listen, because I heard Him. I heard the voice of God. And it is so simple. See, first of all…the soul has no gender. So when it is all said and done, it is not about whom one loved that is important. What is important is the quality of that love. We are on this earth for one reason and one reason only. And that is to give quality love on a daily basis.”

I sat holding his hand for a long time.

He died three days later in complete peace.

Many, many years later, when I finally sobered up, those words began to resonate. The whole recovery movement is based upon the idea that true recovery from any addiction springs from a spiritual awakening. It really is one day at a time. We are granted a daily reprieve from our addiction, based upon our spiritual maintenance. I think it was a stroke of genius to add the words “God as we understood him” when the twelve steps were written. Otherwise I would have been in trouble, and so would lots of other spiritually damaged people trying to get clean and sober. I never would have been able to kick drugs and alcohol if I had been told to lean on the stern and punishing God of my childhood.

Even after having what many would consider a true religious experience at the bedside of my friend who was dying of AIDS and praying on my knees in a jail cell, I still have doubts. Did my friend really hear the voice of God or did he hear what he needed to hear, in order to die in peace? Did god have anything to do with me getting out of jail, or was it just synchronicity? I don’t know. I have quit trying to figure it out. I just know that I am like a dog with a bone. I chew on things.

The best I can do is seek, on a daily basis. My heart is open. And I am of the opinion that those of us who seek are actually in a much better position when bad things happen than those who have blindly accepted a belief that was handed to them.

I think the most important spiritual axiom of the last two millennia is: Shit happens!

And it does. Really bad things happen to really good people and really good things happen to really bad people. Where is God in that? When I read about thirty-three people being gunned down on a college campus and one of them a nineteen-year-old girl who had dedicated her life to spreading the wonderful news of Jesus Christ, I think,
Where is God in that?
“It was God’s will” is a huge cop-out. And “It is not up to us to question God’s will” is pretty lame, too.

Was it God’s will that thousands of good, churchgoing people were left homeless and destitute in the wake of Hurricane Katrina? Is it God’s will when innocent children are molested or murdered? And people suffering from cancer, is that God’s will, too?

Shit happens and I don’t think God has anything to do with it.

I love the idea of having a God that does not do anything for me or to me, but only shines
through
me. I love the idea of God as a light, a beautiful, all-encompassing, nonpunishing, healing light of love. I love the idea of having a God that does not write books.
That
never made any sense to me anyway. He wrote several best sellers—why did He stop? What has He been doing all these
thousands
of years? Did He get writer’s block? And which of the books that He wrote so long ago does He count as His Truth? The Bible? The Torah? The Koran? And don’t even get me started on the Book of Mormon.

What’s up with all that?

All religions are man-made, and all books about religion are written by man (or woman).

When I first heard those words from someone sharing in my recovery group, I thought that was the scariest thing I had ever heard. I waited for lightning to strike the building. I felt bereft and rudderless. But the more I allowed these thoughts to creep into my consciousness and the more I incorporated these ideas into my belief system, the more things began to make sense.

And thus began my journey.

It was then and only then that I was able to find a spiritual path that worked for me. If a person has found an amazing and comforting spiritual path within an organized religion, that is wonderful. Millions and millions of people have. Good for them. But it didn’t happen for me. I garner what I can from all spiritual writings and teachings, and what doesn’t work for me, I leave behind. I don’t have to leave logic and reason at the door to have faith.

My spiritual path is intensely personal. I have slowly learned to follow my own spiritual path. It really is about the journey. I feel it is up to me to keep the channel open so the light can shine through. I was taught early in my recovery that there are three things that keep us from the sunlight of our spirit: our fears, our resentments, and our sexual misconduct. I learned to write on a daily basis about all of these things. When the scary monsters under the bed begin their low moan, I write in my journal. It slows my mind down to the speed of a pen, which helps me gain clarity. I read my writings out loud to someone whom I trust, usually my spiritual advisor. Then we decide what path I’ll take and whether there are amends to be made.

I write to keep the conduit open so the light can shine through me.

And oddly enough, it is in all this writing, all this seeking, that I have found my faith and acceptance. I have found so many wonderful, wonderful things. I found that happiness is a habit. Happiness is a choice. And happiness is something you have to really work hard at. I found that love is not a noun. Love is a verb. And it is in the action of offering loving service to others that we receive our self-love. I have found that the greatest healing force is laughter, and I have been blessed to have the gift, as my daddy told me, of being able to make people laugh.

I treasure that gift.

Maybe I do have a ministry. I don’t know. I try to live a life of attraction, not promotion. But I often think about the young gay man or woman, out in the Bible Belt, or wherever, perhaps lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, awash in feelings of shame, fear, guilt, and self-loathing. I think about that person wondering, as I wondered, if there is a God who loves queers.

It breaks my heart.

There is so much work to be done. I want that young gay man or woman to know what I have learned on my journey. It is up to me to pass it on. My crazy, convoluted tale, for what it’s worth. My trip down the pink carpet.

Because these are my stories.

These are my songs.