Let Our People Go
By Nancy Pickard
I saw a wonderful little movie recently, called, "Beginners," about a youngish man trying to get his life back on track after his charming, maddening father dies of cancer. The young man is Ewan McGregor--always a plus--and his father is Christopher Plummer--also, always a point in a movie's favor, in my opinion. A lot of the movie portrays how the dad came out as a homosexual after years of miserable heterosexual married life, and how wonderful it was for him in the four short years he got to be an openly gay man.
It really moved me to see the awful pain that results to us and to the people we love when we deny who we are. The young man, as a little boy, lived in a mysterious-seeming family where his mother was painfully, hilariously quirky and often depressed, and his father was mostly absent. The boy, their only child, could never understand why everything seemed so off-center all of the time. And then his dad "came out," and that explained so much, as the saying goes. The hiding affected all of them, and made life so much harder than it might have been if only the dad had been able to be who he was, instead of living a furtive life of lies. Of course, if the father had been able to be who he was from the start, then the boy would never have been born, and that would be a different movie. Wouldn't it be lovely if movies like this never needed to be made? Wouldn't it be nice if people saw a movie like this and looked at each other in bewilderment and said, "What was that? Was that science fiction?"
It got me thinking about how hard human beings work to try to keep other human beings from being the humans they really are. I thought of my cousin who was one of the early deaths from AIDS, and how his struggle to be who he was turned him hard, sharp, cynical, and angry. It changed him from the loveable boy he'd been, when he was "suspiciously effeminate, into a pissed-off man who liked to shock people--especially his family--and hurt them. He was only getting his own back--he'd been hurt, too, and he was still too young to have time to get wiser, so he lashed out everywhere, at everybody. I think what he really was, was bi-sexual. Once he took home an African-American girlfriend, and I'm not sure which was the bigger shock to his parents--the black woman or the boyfriends. He wasn't pleasant to know, by then. I had adored him as a child, but I walked away from him eventually, because I got sick of being on the receiving end of his nastiness, and I was on his side! Thank goodness we had another cousin who knew him better and loved him more; she took him in and nursed him in some of the last weeks of life. She says that in the final days he started softening back into the sweet human being he used to be and might have continued to be, if only. . .
It's just so sad when humans pen up other humans in little dungeons of "Should" and "Ought to Be." I'm reminded of a horrific description in one of books of The Game of Thrones, by Geoge R. R. Martin. Here, one of the characters threatens another character with imprisonment in an "oubliette". . .
"We have oubliettes beneath the Casterly Rock that fit a man as tight as a suit of armor. You can't turn in them, or sit, or reach down to your feet when the rats start gnawing at your toes."
The photo above? That's the entrance--from the top--to an actual oubliette. I think that's what it would feel like to be gay and be forced into an oubliette of straightness. Or to believe in one (or no) religion and be forced into another. Or pregnant and forced to go through with it when you desperately don't want to. Or. . .or. . .or, there are so many different examples of the dictum: "You WILL be who we say you are, go where we say you can go, do what we say you can do, and you will stay in that stiff, agonizing, and twisted position all of your life, which is possibly the only life you will ever have."
It's not always about big things like sexuality or religion, either. Sometimes it's just the little daily denials that add up--the little squashings of childish joy or exuberance, the rejection of a child's intelligence or introversion, the rejection of their athleticism or their love of being a cheerleader, for god's sake, if that's who they are. We can find all sorts of reasons to reject who people really are and what they really want to be, and how they want to get there. And sometimes we reject ourselves for the same "sins." How dare we want what we want; how dare we be that way; how dare we, how dare they. . .
I'm not exactly sure where I'm going with this, except that after seeing that movie and another one called, "Buck," I'm just in a mood to grab people's clutching hands, and unloosen their fingers from other people's bodies and minds and souls, and plead, "Let go of him. Let go of her. Please, mercy, just let them be."
And, p.s., I'm sick of stories like this one headlined, "Baseball's Still Not Ready for Openly Gay Players." Oh, grow up.
Whose fingers would you like to unclutch from other people's lapels? When have you, yourself, managed to let go and let other people be themselves? Has anybody ever given you the lovely gift of letting go their tight grip on you?
