Arrive - Summer/Fall 2016

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;.;;; • Summer/Fall 2016 • ;rrıve 39 and watch Dallas with me?” Forced into choosing, I chose Nicole. As I left the house, Mama Jean shot me a wounded look and served me a dose of guilt: “All right for you, but you’ll miss me when I’m gone.” The subtext: I always came first with her, so why didn’t she with me? And: If I leave her for Nicole, it will kill her.

By calling me James Earl, Nicole both elevated and infantilized me. Both were positions that were comfortable and familiar to me. No one saw then that my friendship with Nicole was a version of the one I had with Mama Jean. With Nicole, I could hide my homosexuality behind our friendship and simultaneously exercise it with her by fake tap dancing at parties and singing along to Pippin in the car. (See Evita above.) For Nicole, I was her lovable, huggable Jamie doll.

THE JAMIE DOLL

Nicole was the first person I came out
to, and she accepted me with the uncon-
ditional love I didn’t think Mama Jean
would give me. After Nicole went away to
college, there were other women fighting
She introduced herself: “Hi, I’m Nicole.

Speech and debate. You’re drama,
right?” And in the next breath, before
I had time to say my name, she asked,
“Do I look fat in this dress?”
“Not at all! I love that dress,” I said
on cue, having been well rehearsed in
how to respond to that question during
a lifetime of fittings with Mama Jean.

“Well, I feel fat in it,” Nicole said.
“Don’t ever let me wear this dress again.”
We were inseparable after that.

We also held hands during the first movie we saw together. Whereas holding hands with Mama Jean was mostly maternal with a mix of the platonic, holding hands with Nicole was largely platonic with a dash of the maternal. It helped that Nicole was two grades ahead of me. She quickly took over the driver’s seat in my world, making plans for us every weekend with motherly authority.

“James Earl,” she’d address me, using
my formal name, “I’m so bored. Come
pick me up and let’s go see The Big Chill.”
“You’re going out with Nicole
again?” Mama Jean asked. “That girl is
pushy. Wouldn’t you rather stay home
“Jamie doll.” And none of my prepubes-
cent friends were any competition.

“I wish they’d invent shrink juice, so I could keep you my little boy forever,” she’d say. I loved being the sidekick in her glamorous adult world—helping her pick out clothes, letting her outfit me, flipping through ladies’ magazines at the beauty parlor and going to movies in the afternoon. The memory of what she wore when she took me to my first movie, Pinocchio, is as vivid as the Walt Disney colors in that film. Her outfit was a royal blue sundress dotted with canary-yellow flowers and a border of yellow rickrack worn with matching yellow patent leather sandals. We held hands in the theater. I was as focused on her as I was on the movie.

Before Robert Mapplethorpe found his Patti Smith, before Will found his Grace, I’d wager that their first, best, straight gal pals were their mothers. ( There are many colloquial terms for straight women who love gay men; I prefer the genteel “fruit fly.”) My intense childhood relationship with Mama Jean, whose love knew no boundaries, came from being both in tune and enraptured with her feminine side in a way that a daughter or straight son just couldn’t be. It laid the foundation for a lifetime of relationships with women, especially bold ones. Of all the ridiculous myths about gay men, none is more absurd to me than the theory that we are homosexual because we hate women. Excuse me, but no one loves women more than gay men—at least this gay man.

THE BEGINNING OF THE END

Soon after our Evita sing-along, I entered high school and Mama Jean had competition. Just as I remember that sundress of hers, I remember what Nicole was wearing when I first met her at a speech-and-drama tournament.