I received a lovely email from a woman named Sharon, who had just read a review of my memoir.  She wrote, “I just read a review of your memoir Mama’s Boy, Preacher’s Son.  The clinging-yet-hostile attitude of your mother, the remoteness and judgmentalness [sic] of your father, and the machismo of your brother Mike are all factors in the development of your homosexuality in the first place. Homosexuality and transgenderism [sic] are not inborn.  But they are preventable and treatable.  Treating a sick person humanely is good; treating a sick person as if he or she were well is not…The sooner you do your inner work and heal your masculinity impairment, the sooner you will cease this fool’s errand and have the kind of life everyone really wants.”

Thanks for the tips, Sharon!  I’ve never heard anything like this before!  It’s such a relief to know I am sick and can be cured!

Aside from the arrogance of Sharon’s statement that, if I follow her advice, I will “have the kind of life everyone really wants” (my only reply to her email was “I am perfectly happy with my life the way it is, thank you”), I am struck by her definition of what is “good.”  Apparently she thinks convincing people they are sickos is good for them (even if such negative barrages lead to higher rates of suicide, drug abuse, and other self-destructive behaviors).  Well, sorry, Sharon, that just reminds me a bit too much of my Dad’s pronouncement before speaking us “This is going to hurt me a lot more than it is going to hurt you.”  I didn’t buy that kind of malarkey then, and I don’t buy yours now.

The “judgmentalness” that I have a real problem with is not my father’s but that of folks like Sharon, who feel like they have the right to tell other people how to live their lives.  Now that is a real sickness.

Kevin Says... | 2 Comments »

On August 7, 2005, I had a nearly-fatal heart attack just after playing an ice hockey game at Chelsea Piers here in New York.  Obviously, I survived.  But my sense of who I am did not.

How did I change?  In short, the heart attack wiped away my sense of youth and immortality (you may be amazed I still felt those at 42, but I did…).  The physical restrictions I face now are pretty minor – certain activities, like ice hockey (contact) and scuba diving (pressure), are out — but otherwise it’s all pretty much back to normal.  But I have never returned to what passed for “normal” mentally before the heart attack.  Having been struck down out of the blue (bad family history, but I had good cholesterol, didn’t smoke, had no warning signs), I can’t help but feel like it could come again just as suddenly and, just as suddenly, it might all be over.  No case of heart burn gets dismissed as too much spicy food now: anything out of the ordinary makes me jittery.  And not a day goes by when I am not aware of the defibrillator that was implanted in my chest last fall (if one did, I’d be quickly reminded by the hand search I have to go through at every airport security checkpoint, as I cannot go through the standard screeners as they interfere with the device), or that I had a heart attack in the first place.  There’s a constant sense of living on borrowed time.

So how did this impact the book?  I was asked in an interview recently why I did the book now.  The initial reason was because Beacon asked me to.  But in July of last year I was feeling quite discouraged about it:  Helene Atwan at Beacon liked the first draft but thought it needed substantial revision and, given my schedule, I couldn’t figure out when or how I could do this.  Then August 7 came.  As soon as I got out of the hospital, I spent virtually every waking moment on the book and finished it within three weeks.  I had a sense of drive, as Mom was now dead and I might be soon, too: the story had to be told.

Who knows what the future holds.  The doctors say I should live to a ripe old age, but the certainty I once felt has been forever shattered by the events of August 7, 2005 – which is my own personal little September 11, the day after which nothing would be the same again.

Kevin Says... | 1 Comment »