Ever since I announced that I wanted to be Tina Turner for Halloween (at age 7 no less), my once and future sexual orientation was always up for casual speculation among family, classmates, or strangers on the street. “The Tina Turner moment was the first time I began to suspect that you were a bit, um, different”, my mother told me in retrospect. 

She actually did let me dress up as Mrs. Nutbush – or a first grader’s makeshift concept of what that might look like – no blackface, of course. My Tina Turner costume, in the end, consisted of an Afro wig,  my mother’s 9 West red hooker heels, and her black leather miniskirt. “Nobody at school knows who Tina Turner is, so maybe you can have a second costume for school and for trick-or-treating,” she cheerfully suggested.

So I paraded around the living room, tripping on my knees underneath the skirt, with that synth-flute warbling in my head à la “What’s Love Got To Do With It”. In private, I was simply the best!  But in public, I was a limousine chauffeur for my heteronormative costume.  I guess it’s all pretending when you come down to it, but my mother was just trying to let me be me without attracting undue attention from the other kids. They could be so mean.

My mother never criticized or made me feel weird for having less-than-masculine interests, and that kindness saved me a lot of potential self-esteem issues as I reached adulthood. Well, actually, one time when I was a senior in high school, I bought some really tight pants at Buffalo Exchange – we are talking like almost bicycle shorts level of tightness – and decided to wear them to the movies one night. 

I was on my way out the front door, grabbing the spare key to her Nissan Maxima, when she said, “Whoa, Matthew, hold it right there, those are PAINTED ON.” She made me go back into my bedroom and change into a pair of Girbaud jeans or something more respectable (I was never kewl enough for Jncos).

In general,, my family was largely pretty tolerant and progressive. Except for one important person – my grandma Theresa. She was Catholic AF – we are talking rosary beads, Maryknoll and the Fatima Crusader magazines, and regular visits to confession. She was so Catholic that she felt that Vatican II was one roman numeral too far – the type of Catholic that thought that Karol Józef Wojtyła was a bit of a radical choice for Pope because he was from a Slavic nation and not within the pale of settlement of The Vatican.

She was very vocally anti-gay – “they are going to Hell,” I recall her saying several times, well before I even know what ‘gay’ was. She passed away due to lung cancer when I was 13, so I avoided the potential heartache of having to come out to her.  It was sad to know that my grandma had such a strong dislike for gay people, because otherwise she was a very caring woman who loved people of all races and religions. She was a lifelong Democrat from Oklahoma who visited over 30 countries in her lifetime. She was just of a different generation, I suppose.

On that delicate subject of my homosexuality, my mother once said “we dodged a bullet on that one!” while my aunt suggested that if anyone could have been the catalyst for changing her outdated views on gays, it would hae been me. She loved her only grandchild so very much!

The irony of all of this is that she inadvertently exposed me to some of the most broadly homophilic, gay-as-a-caricture pop culture, not realizing that it was so very, very gay.

Her favorite cassette tape to play on long road trips in her 1987 Mazda 626 was none other than Liza Minnelli’s “Liza with a Z”. Yes, that Liza. She played that tape so often that I have committed most of her songs to rote.

Gather around, I gotta story to tell,
about a Manhattan laydee that I know vewwy well!
She lives at 5 Riverside,
her name is Shirley Devore!
And she travelled ’round the world to meet the guy next door!

It was thanks to my grandma and Liza that I know where Dubrovnik is – in the song “Ring Them Bells”, it’s the penultimate vacation destination for Shirley Devore (who did not hit it off with the Londoner because of his bronchial cough, then met a handsome señor in Madrid who was no matador, then bombed out in Brussels, Mallorca and Rome, until someone said “try Dubrovnik dear, before you go home”).

What I want to know was, who was this friend giving such advice, and why Croatia? While I know that Tito’s Yugoslavia was more Western-facing than the rest of the Rapunzel republics hidden away behind the Iron Curtain, it still is nevertheless an odd choice of places to end your vaycay.

So she “borrowed a thou, and called TWA, and announced to her parents that she was off and away! I’m going to travel the continent, for a month, maybe two, and find myself a ‘huz if it’s the last thing I do!” But I digress.

She also loved k.d. lang, yet seemed to have no clue that she was, in fact, a Wild Rose of a prairie lesbian.  “Short hair is a practical choice for a lady who is from the high plains of Alberta!” There was always a seeming lack of wavelength or gaydar on my grandma’s part – never even noticing what was plain to see for the rest of the world.

Eventually, though, she became clued into all the gayness around her, not that this softened her homophobic bottom line stance. A few months before she would begin chemotherapy, my grandma, my mother, my aunt, my godfather, and I went to Macaroni Grill for a special occasion type of dinner. The Rutledge ladies in my family are heavy drinkers, so the playful arguments between them would occasionally devolve into shouting matches.

“Mom, Mark is so gay. I know for a fact that he’s gay! I have proof!” my aunt started to shout, about 2 Bellinis into the appetizer interregnum.  Almost all of her friends in college were gay  Mind you, this is in the early mid 1990’s.

“That’s not true, Mark just hasn’t met the right woman yet. He needs someone who is as devoted to the Church as he is!” grandma shouted back. Mark was a volunteer at her Parish of Choice, and they were liturgical bosom buddies, joined at the hip in a tangle of rosary beads and CCD pamphlets. While myself, and anyone / everyone else could surmise that Mark was a homosexual, my grandma could not see it.

Yet Mark and my grandma were a dynamic duo at St. Thomas More – they organized volunteering events together, they even went on a few ecumenical pilgrimages to places like San Antonio. She absolutely adored Mark, with his very clean manner of dress, his patience with women, his consistency in attending Mass.

“How dare you suggest that Mark is, you know, living in sin, worshipping the fallen, wicked St. Dorothy, or worse, idolizing St. Gertrude of Buggery Bollocks! He just hasn’t met the right girl yet – he only moved to Texas from Pennsylvania about 6 years ago. Give him some time!” I’m paraphrasing here.

Mind you, this is a normal rose colored tint moment for a woman who got off on the finger-wagging, rules-heavy, doubling down aspects of Catholicism.

My aunt Sara then blurted out, “I’ve seen him several times at Oil Can Harry’s! So I know for a fact he’s gay!” After she then remined everyone that OCH is a GAY BAR that she goes to every week, despite being straight, and Mark is a regular.

All my grandma could say in response was “OH NO! Oh….No! OH!” as she imagined her beloved Mark sliding a $20 bil around a  male stripper’s lime-green thong with joyful abandon, sliding it aroun the neon buttfloss like it was the best parking ticket a meter maid ever placed underneath a winshield wiuper blade.

Not the kind of collection plate moment that she had come to expect to be associated with her beloved Mark. She looked really confused and disappointed as she picked at her fettucine.

If grandma had any pearls to clutch, real or imagined, she would have held them tight to her chest. The last time they got into an argument over ideological-type issues, it was when my teenage aunt was forbidden to go see the movie “The Last Temptation of Christ”, that silly modern reimagining of Jesus that Peter Gabriel was somehow involved with. Hardly a blasphemous piece of arthouse work.

My aunt was a film major at University of Texas, so of course she went to go see that movie. Upon learning of this unspeakable betrayal of Jesus, God and the Diocese of Decency, she was then grounded, like when she was in 8th grade and snuck out to see Duran Duran in concert. Only this time, she was a junior in college! What is it about Catholics and restriction?

As the night wore on, my grandma wouldn’t give up on talking about homosexuality.  My mom largely stayed silent, but my godfather decided to chime in.

Colonel Quinn was a highly-decorated Irish-American officer in the Army, who had served with my grandpa in Germany.

“The way I see it, he said, it’s like Barry Goldwater when he said, you don’t have to be straight to shoot straight.”

Dead silence. Grandma Theresa was outnumbered. The argument ceased immediately – plates were finished, doggie bags were obtained, tips were left, and Colonel Quinn put my anti-gay granny in her place. Booyah!

Whenever I would spend the night at the Quinns’ house, I would fall asleep with a knot in my stomach, because I knew that sometime around 7 or 8AM the next day, Colonel Quinn would come barging into the bedrooms and announce that it’s “TIME TO GO TO MASS!” My grandma and him adored each other, but he was a man of few words usually. Until that night. He was an unlikely ally, a legend in my eyes, from that moment forward.

As a child, I was extremely afraid of him, of even talking to him, or looking him in the eye.

Witnessing my family shout and scream about gay this and gay that, I felt a weird pang in my stomach, and it wasn’t from the Alfredo sauce. It might have been the first time I knew I was different – I did not yet associate the word gay with my identity until; aboutt 10th grade – this was a few years before I would come out.

Interesting side note about my godfather -he was leading a group of soldiers in South Vietnam on a mission, when they had to airlift very quickly under heavy fighting. As he searched around to account for all of his men, he noticed a woven basket with a blanket on top of it, not unlike a picnic basket. Inside was an infant girl, barely a few months old, who had been abandoned on the side of a road by her parents. He refused to leave the area without this baby girl. He put his career on the line to insist that this baby come home to the US with him – she ended up being his 6th child, Sheila  Colonel Quinn was the kind of Christian that is sadly rare these days – and he was the last person you might expect to be tolerant of gays.

But that knot in my stomach that I felt when gay stuff was being discussed, it would resurface from time to time. I felt like it was a subconscious acknowledgement that I too might be different.

My grandma managed to make me feel that same feeling of sadness and heartache one more time before she died. She was babysitting me one summer day, when she tuned into the TV show DONAHUE.

The episode that day was about gay marriage. It featured a gay “wedding” ceremony, live on the air. I remember seeing the two grooms in their penguin-like conformity, and not thinking too much of it. Once my grandma clued into what was happening, she began to loudly moan and lament the perversion of matrimony that she was witnessing.

“OH MY GOD! OH NO! OH NO!” she kept on howling at the Sony Trinitron on the other side of the living room. She was very, very offended by what she saw. She was booing like an away-team season-ticket holder for the New York Mets.

I didn’t understand what was so bad about two grooms hugging and kissing in front of their family and the syndicated viewing audience at-large. My heart began to hurt yet again – I felt like I had done something very shameful, even though I just sat there in silence while my grandmother paced around the coffee table. “I can’t believe this is happening! It is sickening.”

Little did she know, that the sickest thing was my stomach, because on some level, I felt some kind of affinity to those two grooms.

So when my mom said that I dodged a bullet when she died the nect year, she really meant it. Nevertheless, this is still the same grandma who let me learn every song on the Liza with a Z cassette. I loved her so much, and sometimes you have to love from afar long after she was gone.

She died at age 54 in the spare bedroom in my house; the same bedroom where I would sneak in boys in to have sex with a few years later. What can I say, you gotta ring them bells!

Rest in peace, Phil Donahue, who was instrumental in helping me realize I was gay. And thanks to Theresa, my grandmother, even if she didn’t know that k.d. lang, or that her own grandson, was gay.