(Above: Ty Goldwater with his grandparent, Barry and Peggy Goldwater, and his sister Alison. The Barry and Peggy Goldwater Foundation.)
When I read about how divided America is or listen to talking heads bemoan the division - tribalism is often decried when the division is being described - I roll my eyes for when has America ever been otherwise. Indeed, seeking one’s tribe where one can begin to cultivate a kind of cultural trust has been part of my life’s search ever since I was a little Mississippi sissy - one who stuttered, stayed inside away from the other kids who knew how to play, and couldn’t stop my parents from dying consecutive deaths from driving and disease - otherness has been my companion. It didn’t ask me to play when we’d sit inside listening to the playful happiness outside, a happiness that got paired with “beyond me” early on. It didn’t ask much of me at all. It was there so I could grow comfortable with its patient company. The two of us formed my first tribe until I was old enough to set forth as a 19-year-old gay boy to find my tribe of “the othered” in New York City.
You’d think that such otherness would have informed my politics when I became aware that I could have such a thing. Family, I guess, is one’s first tribe - an unchosen one - and my grandparents, who raised my brother and sister and me, had the tribal politics of white southern racists. One of the things I had to navigate other than grief and otherness when I was that little sissy was how to find goodness in objectively bad people because, though racist, my grandparents grounded me with their unconditional and sacrificial love; they saved my life. I have always been grateful for them and even finally found gratitude for their galling racism for it came to galvanize my more mature politics as a kind of familial amends. They hated the Civil Rights movement and its leaders - the “communist outside agitators,” as they called them - and laced our household language with the n-word. They were fervent George Wallace supporters in 1968 but before Wallace, in 1964, they were just as fervent about Barry Goldwater. Mississippi was one of 6 states that Goldwater carried in Johnson’s landslide defeat of him.
Taking my cue from them when I was in the third grade, I too was fervently for Goldwater and proved it in the way that only a little sissy could. I wrote about it in my first memoir, Mississippi Sissy. I was already aware in third grade of living a narrative instead of a life in order to cope with the latter. I realized instinctively that if I witnessed my life and turned it into narrative - if I were a character in it - it lessened the trauma and the grief and the lonely otherness. I don’t know if I was born a writer with that instinctive ability to see life as narrative, or if I saw life as narrative to survive and, by doing that, I became a writer.
The Goldwater narrative circled back years later when I wrote the first cover story for POZ magazine. It was about Ty Goldwater, Barry Goldwater’s grandson who was coming out as HIV positive. I was yet to convert to HIV myself. I flew out to LA to meet him at the photo shoot at Greg Gorman’s studio and took him to see a Sandra Bernhard concert. I then visited him in Phoenix and traveled with him in his pickup to Sedona. We had flirted at Greg’s LA studio and the Bernhard concert began to feel like a date. There was a mutual attraction, but I told him that professional ethics precluded my sleeping with him unless I slept with him and made that part of the story. He was fine with that. Because I was still negative, I even thought it was important on a political level as I rationalized the personal one. I was part of the generation of gay men in the 1970s for whom fucking was a political act. We could not have known that it would be a factor in the emergence of HIV/AIDS. So making lust political within the narrative I was fashioning for Ty was easily honest enough but also a bit too clever. Because HIV positive men were too often being made “the other” by HIV negative men I wanted to make an implicit statement against that by writing explicitly about our acting on our attraction to each other when we arrived in Sedona. I found it appalling to be “othered” within one’s tribe of the “the othered” but many people were just as appalled by a writer sleeping with the subject of his profile. It proved to be controversial, and still is. Some colleges teach the story in their journalism classes to engender debate. You can read it here.
And here is an excerpt from Mississippi Sissy in which I get in trouble for having a Little Miss Goldwater beauty pageant at recess thus learning that political tribalism could be dangerous in Mississippi even for a third-grader which is one of the reasons I left Mississippi when I was old enough in order to find my own tribe where danger of another sort - biological and deadly - lay in wait.
The Excerpt:
When I started third grade in stern and staccato-voiced Mrs. Johnston’s class, I had gotten in trouble for having a Little Miss Goldwater contest during recess. My grandparents were big Goldwater supporters; it was all they talked about leading up to the ‘64 election when they weren’t talking about my mother’s health, her latest turn for the worse or turn for the better. I had even gone into my grandmother’s closet and retrieved a big golden bow she had saved in her Christmas bow box and secretly taken it to school to use as the Little Miss Goldwater crown. I had also conducted a poll as to which candidate, Johnson or Goldwater, the teachers and students and janitors and maids were rooting for. The big vote-getter for Little Miss Goldwater was a blonde named Diane O’Bannon whom everybody, girls and boys alike, agreed was the prettiest girl in class. Goldwater also won in a landslide. In fact, Johnson got only one vote and it was from Flossy, the elementary school’s tall black maid who regally swept the hallways each day while she hummed her favorite hymns to herself. “Tryin’ to rustle me up some peace' a’mind,” is how she put it when I had asked her why she was always humming.
Mrs. Johnston had overheard me that day asking Flossy about her choice of candidate and my subsequent berating of her for having the audacity to choose LBJ. Flossy, who up until that moment had always made a point of being nice to me, since everybody in town knew my orphan-pending circumstances, flew into a rage at my questioning her vote. I thought she was going to hit me with her big push broom. Mrs. Johnston hearing the overheated discussion, came out into the hallway and snatched my presidential survey from my hand and then marched me out to the playground to snatch the bow just as angrily off Diane O’Bannon’s head where I had placed it with a flourish. Mrs. Johnston’s accent wasn’t soft and Southern like that of the rest of the adults I knew. My grandmother thought that her dead husband must have been a Yankee or Midwestern and she adapted her cadence from him, it being “just a little too distant for my tastes,” my grandmother had said upon meeting her when the took time off from the hospital to register me for school that year. “Don’t act right friendly enough, but that might be the Presbyterian in her “
Mrs. Johnston, still clutching my Little Miss Goldwater bow in her fist, ominously told the class after we had settled into our desks after recess, that there was a “ticking time bomb waiting to go off around us here in Mississippi and you children had better start behaving yourselves, especially around the colored help. They are entitled to their opinion. They are entitled to vote for whomever they want,” she said, staring right at me. “It’s none of our business … and, yet, well, it’s everybody’s business, I guess,” she said, confusing the class with such circuitous reasoning. Mrs. Johnston, her usual staccato voice becoming shaky, barely audible, seemed scared to find herself in such a place, in such a time. She had only one son, Ray, who was the quarterback on the high school football team, and he was slated to graduate. Listening to her warn us about the world in which we all lived there in Forest, Mississippi, circa 1964, I realized that she would soon be more alone than even I was. Instead of being mad at her for scolding me over my Goldwater behavior, I began to feel sorry for her. The year before, when President Kennedy was assassinated, the only two teachers who cried during the emergency assembly called by our principal, the brusque and Avon-deprived Miss Ishee, were my second grade teacher, Miss Mills, too young to be an old maid but as yet unmarried, and Mrs. Johnston. I remember the other teachers pointing at them and whispering about their reactions. Eyebrows were cocked. Dry-eyed stares were curiously pointed their way. Within two years no longer able to deal with the ostracism that began the day they had so openly displayed their grief at President Kennedy’s death, both teachers moved away from Forest and headed for parts unknown in California, never to be heard from again. (Mis Miss Mills added to the gossip by escaping with her widower next-door neighbor in the gleaming Airstream trailer parked in his drive.) “Some of your parents will tell you bad things about the civil rights movement,” said Mrs. Johnston that day of my Goldwater escapade, summing up her thoughts. “But the civil rights movement is not bad. It is how we choose to react to it that can be bad. Don’t be bad, children. Mississippi is already full of enough badness.”
The next day Mrs. Johnston, asking me to follow her into the hallway, stopped Flossy after she had dropped off our pre-recess cartons of chocolate milk, the squeaking wheels on her milk cart always announcing her approach. She instructed me to apologize to Flossy. Miss Ishee witnessed what was going on and told me to hurry off to play before recess was through. Over my shoulder, I could hear her telling Mrs. Johnston that she had had some telephone calls from parents about her “little speech” the day before. I turned and saw her shaking her finger at Mrs. Johnston, who, we were told by Miss Ishee when she substituted for her the following week, “is home for a few days’ rest. Remember that little speech she gave you boys and girls about colored folks? Well, whenever anybody talks about colored folks around you these days, you to don’t listen to them. It’s nothing children should worry about. Colored folks don’t have anything to do with reading and writing and arithmetic.”
I raised my hand. “Is Flossy at home for a few days’ rest, too?” I asked, having not seen her and her push broom that day.
“Flossy doesn’t work here anymore,” Miss Ishee said with her signature brusqueness.
I love this installment so much. But before opening it, and only reading your teaser, I thought it might be about Meghan McCain.
Many are, once again, acting out their frightening and frightened fear of “the other.” It seems that “BEWARE” never goes out of our domineering natures.