Get Used to It

My Mom taught English at Lake Lehman High School for a while back in the 80s and early 90s, before we moved to State College. She used to regularly plan trips to New York City to see museums and Broadway shows. I was lucky enough to get to tag along on a number of those trips. Because of her, I saw / was introduced to Into the Woods (with Bernadette Peters), Sweeney Todd, Phantom of the Opera, Les Miserables, The Heidi Chronicles (with David Hyde Pierce, pre-Frasier) and more. I went to the Met and the MoMA. I got to do all of these things before I was 13. That was so lucky!

The one story I tell a lot from those trips involves one of the few Lehman grads who became famous.

Some of the others are Ricky and Rocky Bonomo, All-American wrestlers. Another local legend is Zap from American Gladiators. Zap had a gym in Dallas (called "The Gym"), and one time when my Mom was on the treadmill there, some meathead dude was lifting and groaning loudly. A six-months-pregnant Zap stormed out of her office, grabbed his barbells and proceeded to aggressively, yet quietly bang out a 10-rep set. She handed them back and loudly said, "I can do that and I'm six months pregnant! You don't need to make that much noise!"

The Back Mountain's less testosterone-fueled celebrity is Jay McCarroll, familiar to followers of Project Runway as the winner of Season One. Jay and my sister Barbara were good buddies in high school, as they were two of the only artsy-fartsy folks in their class. Jay, for the record, is really quite true to himself as a celebrity persona. He was every bit as outlandish, creative and hilarious in high school. I can vouch from being a witness.

On one of our New York trips, our bus drove past a group of gay protesters who'd been excluded from performing in the Saint Patrick's Day parade (anyone remember that old chestnut from newsreels gone by?). Jay, upon seeing the picket signs, lept to the side of the bus and began shouting at the top of his lungs, "We're queer! We're here! We're Irish! Get used to it!" over and over and over again.

This story would be less remarkable if not for the following factor. Jay was on a bus with fellow students from Lehman. An extremely rural location, the Back Mountain was (I don't know if it still is, really, but it was) the kind of place where, if one wasn't dressed for a day of hunting, construction work or farming, one felt a bit ostracized. It wasn't so much that people worked actively to make one feel left out (people there were always very nice, I thought), it just happened naturally. Needless to say, Lehman (like pretty much 99.9% of rural America) wasn't the most gay-friendly place.

The fallout from Jay's outburst? Everyone laughed good-naturedly. A few jockish dudes sitting behind him threw him the ol' high five. No one was the least bit bothered. It was just Jay being Jay.

Maybe that's how America needs to deal with her (other people's words, not mine) "homosexual crisis." Maybe she just needs to accept all the diverse peoples within her borders, make them all one of the gang, high five them after they do something funny, and move on.