I.
There was of course that winter the creek froze behind my house it was so still ice everywhere trees making a canopy down the glittering creek path I thought
“Lets see where this goes…”
I stepped so gingerly upon the dark ice, seeing the water swirl beneath fingers of trees touching my cheek frozen outlines about them I felt fear bubbling up but I would not have it
the dark
the dark
I walked upon the ice as a miniature frozen Jesus everything in that forest was sanctified I felt everything through the wet wet atmosphere I wanted disciples of ice, trek disciples, loneliness and cold and to see where it all ended
Within the forest was my next home. I found it by walking outside during the night, out of my bedroom and down the stairs in my pajamas, my blanket clutched in one hand, out the locked front door and onto the night street with the one yellow lamp, down the path next to the driveway and into the deep woods. I walked for maybe an hour, trees on all sides furry and rustling, and then opening up to a clearing with a great stone house. It was my house. I knew it because the façade matched exactly the house I had just left. I found everything curious and inviting. Who would put a house in such a place?
The front door was wooden, and unlocked. Inside was a cave, misshapen and dank. It looked like my house but it wasnt. Inside was my mother but it wasnt. She stood at the top of the stone stairway, holding a candelabrum, wrapped in chairs and the tatters of a gown. Her hair was like spider-webs. The light she emitted played mysteries upon the walls, caressed them with witch-like luminescence. I could barely speak. “Flynn?” she said. “Flynn, is that you?” I was rooted to the spot. From within the cave there was a wretched cold, weaving sinuously with the candle-light. She descended the stairs slowly with a glazed expression and trembling teeth. I found strength in my feet. I backed away, but she came closer and closer. Hair and gown and candle flames undulated. I fled. I ran into the forest and smelled meat all around me, meat and animals and saliva. The tree-fingers snatched at me, hungry and vicious. Wolves emerged out of tree trunks with teeth ready for snapping and tongues coiling into hooks. I broke from the trees and bolted toward my real house, still waiting in the yellow streetlight. Finally safe behind the locked door.
The house was silent.
I ascended the ordinary wooden stairway to my bedroom top floor straight white hallway sans serpents and candlelight.
The Head was waiting
hair curled and lashes shiny plastic
skin of packing tape and Styrofoam
a snakeskin undulating where there should be carpet
It sighed, “We will fix you.
“You will last forever here.
You will be so full of life.”
II.
Aaron Fricke grew up in Rhode Island years before I was born, and he happened to be gay. He wasnt aware of this until age 15 or so. He participated in theatre and didnt play sports: obviously some kind of fag even if unaware. He wrote stories, too, sometimes with illustrations. He was a real person, even if he no longer exists.
III.
I used to dream of a massive waterfall in some kind of tropical zone, huge rushing water over towering rocks, the landscape serene yet insistent. Naked boys crowded in its wake, jumping from the sides of the pool which collected at the waterfalls base, swimming through turbulent waters that slapped and caressed their nubile bodies. I awoke from these dreams hard as a rock, feeling deranged and damaged, needing to bury my head in a distant lot. That dream was a traitor. It didn’t stick around, but I had others to torment me. There was the crystal ship that sailed upon lavender waters, where I found myself clad in nothing but a white towel which some strangers tried to frisk off of me. I got into a tug of war with them for that one piece of modesty, only to awaken and find myself gripping the covers of my own bed.
Aaron and I both had a love of theatre. We both thought about being actors when we grew up, perhaps because we had to become such expert liars. Im sure he was taunted and ridiculed on occasion, as every child is, as I was. I remember harboring a secret, which was linked to my dreams and imaginings, that would burn with white-hot guilt whenever I was the object of such attentions. I knew there was a queerness within me that must be contained at all costs. If I wanted success, if I wanted translation of my fantasies into art, into capital, I must not tell. I must invent everything, a new truth. The Truth would be transformed within my imagination to something I could use.
From reading his personal papers at the San Francisco Public Library History Archive, particularly the early publicity stills from his published memoir Reflections of a Rock Lobster: A Story about Growing Up Gay, I learned that Aaron did not think of himself as a homosexual until meeting his friend Paul Gilbert, the boy he would eventually ask to be his date for the Senior Prom and for which he would initiate a lawsuit against the school so their right to attend would not be compromised. Im sure Aaron must have known that he was gay, but like myself and most gay teenagers he buried it in a distant lot. For Aaron, that lot was full of food. Not like the discarded trash and cracked pavement and rusty basketball hoop in mine; his had buffets of greasy fattening delights and sugary frosted yummy-yums. During his freshman and sophomore years in high school Aaron ballooned up to 200 pounds, burying himself with zeal of a novice gravedigger. Paul was the instrument to which Aaron became unlocked. Once he did, his passions for artistic and intellectual expression became unfurled, and he started to write.
IV.
I never wrote down any of my dreams until I was in high school, but I know they informed my creativity from a very young age. Thusly, my imagination was provoked by those things which my subconscious decided I was not allowed to suppress. I played with dolls starting at age 4 or 5, using them to act out stories I made up. I drew pictures of the stories on occasion, one of which was about The Prince of Darkness. He lived at the bottom of a deep dark well near a house by a cliff. One night he decided to climb out and eat the family that lived in the house, but a good fairy intervened and saved them. These stories were spontaneous endeavors that I developed an intense attraction to, at times shirking my school work so I could devote more time to them. They took on written form by age 9, and I decided that I wanted to be a writer at age 11. By 14 I was keeping a regular journal, in which I first wrote about being gay: “I am not gay.” (Journals, 1/25/1994) Within a year I was writing about my queerness as a fact, albeit one that must be hidden due to the inevitability of dire social consequences.
In college, I acted in a play called Beautiful Thing. It concerns two boys, Jamie and Ste, who live in a working class London neighborhood and develop an attraction toward each other. After some complications with their families acceptance and a subplot involving one of their friends battling drug abuse, there is a happy ending in which they dance in the courtyard of their mutual apartment complex in full view of all the neighbors. In our production this is when a disco-ball effect happens with the stage lights, and Mama Cass comes on the speakers singing a slow ballad. Its as digestible a fiction as Aaron Fricke and Paul Gilbert slow-dancing at their prom, then hearing the familiar notes of the B-52s Rock Lobster and dancing more frenzied but with just as much romance. That incident really happened, but has become a fiction through its retelling: Aarons Reflections of a Rock Lobster: A Story about Growing Up Gay allow those who read it to imagine what their proms might have been like had they been so courageous or lucky. The incidents of the past become fictionalized through the relating of morality and conceptual messages in them; if stories were nothing other than the sum of facts or incidents, then they would not have the intended effect. Concepts ignite imagination because that is their place of origin; not the physical world. Through the imagination there is gathered strength, luminosity of will, and the desire to create. Facts may enlighten, but fiction is what inspires.
V.
All the while I was writing stories, my imagination reacted to social stimuli; I translated it to the page or to performance in the spirit of survival. I put my heroes and heroines through quests to rescue what had been stolen, or to push back that which had been unleashed, all so that I might embrace and contain the confusion, terror, and rage that I felt. I was alternately the child that was eaten and the demon that ate. Or the good fairy that set things right.
As childhood slips away, imagination becomes muddied and we rely more on facts, information, material resources, coping skills, conflict resolution; however, we continue to rely on narrative to give temporal credence to what we desire and create, to provide impetus to utilize facts and resources and achieve progress. Aaron Fricke utilized the legal system to advance his desire of acceptance and thusly provided a story many will take as inspiration, if they actually read it. Many are still reading a limited amount of stories that inspire in a very fragmented way and target only specific demographics. In this way more easily accessible information and communication resources will assist future generations, providing access to facts and fiction that will allow unbridled diversification of desire. Fears will be many, as they often are. With greater unity in intellect, however, they can be examined with much keener eyes.
Aaron wrote Reflections shortly after his senior year in high school in 1980, the year after I was born: it details his coming out and dating Paul, the refusal of his high school to sell him prom tickets when it was discovered he would be taking Paul as his date, the legal battle in the U.S. District Court wherein it was ruled that Aaron would be allowed to take Paul to the dance and the school was responsible for providing enough security to insure their safety. Nine years later Aaron wrote Sudden Strangers: The Story of a Gay Son and His Father with his father Walter Fricke, about their relationship during and after Aarons coming out. Apart from the two books and the court case, no other documentation about Aaron Fricke is readily accessible. I looked through his papers at the San Francisco Public Library which consisted of notes, letters, and manuscripts for the two books; nothing detailed what has become of his life or his career. I was unable as well to find out who donated his papers, or even if he is still alive. He should be about 44 years old and San Francisco was his last known place of residence.
His two books, however, are still in print. And his court case set a precedent which is undoubtedly referred to when any gay high school student sues to have their civil rights protected, as many have. Gay people, especially youth, continue to be marginalized and discriminated against in most school districts. I had never heard of Aaron Fricke until researching this paper. I had definitely heard of Martin Luther King, Jr. Everyone has. Everyone knows about civil rights. It is not made clear though, to school children, that many are still made to fight for them.
“[Billy and I] were human beings who knew no social inhibitions and were willing to explore our sexuality to its fullest.
“We found vestibules around his house and mine where we could hide on rainy days while our mothers prepared a hot lunch. One day, Billys mother discovered us in a closet. It had a long passageway leading to a secluded space in the back, so she saw none of what had transpired a few minutes earlier. Yet, when she heard our shuffling about in the dark, it led her to holler in a quivering voice, ‘Aaron! Billy! Get out of the closet. Now!’ It was…just another lesson that there were many feelings I could not share with adults.” (Reflections page 12)
I honestly don’t know where he got the courage to fight all those ignorant bastards. Perhaps because he was in love. All I know is that I received very limited information on homosexuality my entire young life, and all of it was bad. Fantasy is what saved me. It was fiction without the benefit of fact; it was what won me praise and kept the dark where it belonged: at the bottom of the well. The tall grass at recess hid many a junk car near the back fence every kid played over there at some point we took turns so the teachers didnt see there was constant breach of space-time shrieks of laughter between the fence-slats. Trees covered in creeping vines perhaps sheltered needle-tooth crawlers; I imagine they did. Things with no hearts that looked up through the leaves salivating at the sight of your young fresh thighs. When it rained we had recess in the art-room with its big open garage-door looking out onto the fields that were forbade us, the door open necessarily because the room got so stuffy and the result being a mild wet draft instead. Alan Minkels sat next to me and I could see his dick through the hole in his sweat pants; I was intrigued but thought his face unappealing. A wouldnt go slumming even at age 7. Later there was so much rain, so many rotting wooden facades with trash poking out from grimy corners: the city was no land of opportunity. It was the land of the teenager. Acne and structural integrity. Sex leering from the corners of my notebook sliding up my arm like a frozen windowpane. Much work to be done much expectation, but sorrow on top of everything – a furnace of living bodies. I wrote: “I’m not even sure how I feel about sex. I want it very badly at times….being completely gay in high school is next to impossible, because everybody will find out, and I will be teased and probably beaten. Oh well. So I am straight…” (Journals, 1/10/1995)
Whatever there was that was wanted was forever. Surreptitious smiles in closed purple secrets. Whenever time remained, unshattered and with military purpose, there came a triumphant weeping like the back of a saintly hand. Two suns burned up in utter blackness, the light leaving miles of stiletto twinkling. When touched in secret there was eternal softness, hushed breath, vaporous daggers, knotted whispers, green blood and frightened children. Always the electric vermillion, seething and sheathing, full of whiplash and bloody promises. The heart of green blood is the swamp of childhoods end.
Bibliography
Fricke, Aaron. Reflections of a Rock Lobster: A Story about Growing Up Gay
Fricke, Aaron. Collected Papers and Manuscripts, San Francisco Public Library, 6th Floor History Archive, Call Number GLC24
Witmeyer, Flynn. Personal Journals, 1994-1995.
