Folie A Deux, or Brother To Brother

About 10 years, when the High Heel Race was a full out street party, with a stage and performers, I was walking down 17th Street, meeting some friends of mine, when I heard someone call out my name. I turned around, and saw the most harrowing costume I’d ever seen. It was my brother, dressed in full drag, wearing one of my mother’s purloined wigs. In garish make-up and an old house dress, he looked like Bizarro-Oprah. He said that when I saw him, I jumped back and my eyes were wide as saucers.


I knew that my brother was gay before that, though. He’s 6 years older than I am, and he came out to my parents with a letter that he instructed them to open after they’d dropped him off at college. I was 11 at the time, and they didn’t tell me. Instead, they kept a close eye on me, lest they have another gay son. Which, of course, they did. After college, my brother went to live in South America for a couple of years, and he left all of his college possessions in our home. Being the snoop that I was, I found evidence of his homosexuality. Not that he tried to hide it. Books, like The Gay Mystique, James Baldwin’s novels and copies of Boston’s gay newspaper were in his files. I perused those books in my teenage years, trying to gain insight into both gay life and the life that he led.

At the same time, I was deeply ashamed of being gay, mostly because I knew it would upset my parents. While I read the literature he left behind and pieced together the clues of his secret life, I was conflicted. I was proud of him, and I also resented him. I thought that his homosexuality would be tolerated—after all, he was a star pupil, a polyglot and an Ivy League graduate—while I was just in his shadow and had no other talents to make my sexuality palatable. It was partially because of having a gay older brother that made me come out so late.

When I began to have problems in high school—academically, and emotionally—my parents sent me to a therapist. I remember when I was being driven to the his office, my mother told me, chillingly, “I know you think you’re gay, but you’re not. You’re just confused.” As a result, I never told my therapist that I was gay, because I knew that having one more gay son would break my parents’ hearts.

I finally came out to my brother in college. It was anticlimactic. He visited me in Western Mass one weekend, and I told him that I was gay, like him. He said he figured as much—I was a little too obsessed with Kate Bush! It was only after college that I really began to appreciate having a gay brother. My younger brother went though a Born Again period and homosexuality was high on the shit list then. My father came from a religious background; he was literally the son of a preacherman, and had the expected views of having a gay sons. My brother and I were a support system against parochial views. He was (and still is) a great sounding board, as we’ve both experienced racism in the gay world, homophobia in the black community and prejudice in the world at large. We’ve even come up with a shared idiolect that rivals Polari.

In retrospect, it was seeing him in drag all those years ago that cemented our relationship. As much as I love my family of choice, it's great to have an advocate in your family of origin.