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Today in calss when I was looking through an old issue of Rolling Stone I came across this amazing article. It is a 14 page spread devoted to showing the world what it was being young and gay. It was writen back in 1998 and has an 3 or 4 page snip-it about The Abbey and about kids in Indy. It was so amazing I amlost cried in class.
I tried to post the whole article but it was too long... Never had that happen to me before... Here is the section about the Abbey... If you are interested in the whole article I will email it to you. It is so worth reading. Amazingly the story of the kids in Indy isn't even the most compelling of the story.
"To Be Yound and Gay"
No one knows how the abbey - a two-room coffeehouse ten minutes from downtown Indianapolis - became that city's center for gay teenage life. On weekend nights, kids sit on the curb smoking and hugging each other, answering pages (nearly everyone carries a pager - a way to cut down on parental involvement with the telephone), comparing clothes, drinking lattes, splicing together plans. The Indianapolis kids aren't old enough for bars; this is their alternative. I've never seen more embracing than I see at the Abbey. It's like being backstage at the Academy Awards.
It's a Friday-night crowd evenly split between male and female; couples inside are sharing booths and pricey sandwiches. For the unattached, there's a strong sexual vibe, a feeling of possibility in the evening. Some kids are trying to mount a trip downtown for the midnight screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which, more than two decades after its release, is still going about its business of titillating and reassuring teenagers - a kind of Grateful Dead show of transgressive sexuality. Leaning against a car, I talk to Wendy Craig, a high school junior who's just been kicked out of her parents' home. Wendy is blond and pretty, and dresses like someone in student government. "There's been this thing lately," Wendy says, "of all these girls cutting their hair off and trying to be a little more butch, trying to act a little more manly - as if that's how they have to be to get accepted by other lesbians. They think you have to fit into a mold. I haven't fallen into that. I'm happy to have my hair long, and I love my nail polish. I love perfume."
Wendy's parents learned about her sexual orientation in a fairly common way: They found the books she'd checked out from the library about coming out - how to tell parents, how to tell friends - and some brochures from IYG (the Indiana Youth Group), which is the primary gay-teen support center in Indianapolis. She'd been hiding it all under her bed. "For a while," Wendy says, "they'd been dropping hints about it. I thought it was my parents saying, `Come on and tell us, it's OK.' But as soon as I told them it was true, they were disgusted." Wendy's parents -her stepmother especially - are extremely religious: Homosexuality is wrong, simple as that. Wendy was prom queen last year at the IYG spring dance; her parents found the photographs - "my prized possessions so far" - and burned them in front of her.
For a while, Wendy subsisted on tapes of Ellen and the lesbian crime thriller Bound - she rented it so often that she eventually bought a copy, watching it on the downstairs VCR, flicking the set off and running upstairs whenever she heard her parents pulling into the garage. Before she was kicked out of the house, Wendy was forbidden to talk with other lesbians, go to IYG meetings. So she would hit the Abbey.
Because the Abbey functions as the center, it attracts gay kids from a wide area. Patrick Pearson drives thirty minutes to the Abbey on weekends. He's a seventeen-year-old junior from the tiny agricultural town of New Palestine, Indiana: cornfields, filling station, convenience store, church, and then you're driving to the next town. "There's maybe about a thousand people there now," Patrick says, "surrounded by corn and hog farms." The social center of New Palestine is the Taco Bell, which is nestled inside the Gas America station; students sit there and gossip. Patrick's father is retired and lives in Indianapolis; his mother drives the New Palestine school bus. Patrick is about six feet tall, with a football lineman's massive build. He has a wide, handsome face that vaguely follows the Patrick Swayze mold; inside the V-neck of his velour polo shirt hangs a big gold cross. He comes from a classically large Catholic family: five brothers, six sisters. He's maybe the least likely gay person in the world.
Right now he's in a funny spot. New Palestine is the kind of place where everyone shows up for the Friday-night high school football game and puts away some beers - a hard town to be gay in. "I was in the closet and then out, and now I'm . . ." Patrick laughs. "I'm in right now. A couple of people know: one of my sisters and two of my best friends. I kinda hoped for a while that maybe I was thinking I was something that I wasn't. But then as soon as I start just trying to date girls, I realize. I'm willing to try it, but I just like girls to talk to 'em. They just aren't as interesting to me as guys. I don't feel that buzz." Patrick began guessing he was gay when he was seven or eight. Last year his sister ("who has a big mouth") started telling people, and soon everyone at his school had heard, Patrick says. "And then I was criticized so much about it, and I really didn't know what all was going on. I had, like . . . really bad relationships. So I just kinda thought I'd stick with girls."
The kids at his school weren't any help. "A lot of the girls were cool," he says, " 'cause I'm really good friends with almost all of them. But the guys were complete punks. They never did anything physically to me 'cause they knew that I'd be able to beat them up." He laughs. "I know if I was, like, a weenie, I'd be beaten blue and straight by now." In Spanish class, when Patrick's teacher introduced the Spanish verb jugue, which is pronounced who-gay, the class snickered and someone said, "Patrick." Patrick is a member of the swim team. For a while he played linebacker with the New Palestine football squad, but he was uncomfortable showering with the rest of the team, and when he told them why - because he'd had many piercings - the guys laughed, and he didn't much want to play football anymore.
"It was OK," he says. "I just didn't want to take showers with them. I'd had my nipples pierced, and - well, I'd gotten my left thing pierced. And they were like, `Man, I want to see it.' And I was like, `You're not going to be seeing anything.' 'Cause I was so used to them being jerks to me." Patrick discovered the Abbey last year when some friends from New Palestine brought him around. At first he didn't like it. "All the guys were kind of feminine looking," he says. "And I don't really get into that." Around that time, he started to think that being gay was perhaps causing him more problems than it was solving.
"I just didn't want to be criticized the rest of my life," he explains. He read an article about how a person's whole future can be determined by his influences. "And psychologically, I thought, maybe it was just because with my parents divorced, I didn't have a guy role model. So I thought if I started hanging out with my brother a lot, things would be better. We went to Panama City, did all kinds of crazy stuff there. Partied a lot. Coming back here, I just thought, `I'm not gonna mess with it anymore.' "
And here's how Patrick went back into the closet. His mother, driving the school bus, was taking a lot of flak. "She was so miserable about everything," Patrick says. "She wanted me to be with a girl. She would come home crying from the bus because people would say stuff about me on her route. They'd say, `Your son's gay, he goes to gay bars' - although I've never been to a bar in my life. And she didn't know how to react to 'em. I just wanted my mom happy." Patrick spent a few nights last spring writing an essay about himself for New Palestine High's Crimson Messenger. The editor gave the piece its title: pat says his acting job is over. "I just wrote that I wasn't what they thought anymore. Kind of let them believe it. I just wanted to stop the rumors. I just said, `I'm not what you think I am.' I described everything that had happened -that I had tried different things, and I didn't like it. And that I'm back like everybody else, really. That's about the extent of it." His schoolmates read the essay; his mom was OK on the bus. Patrick doesn't intend to bring it up again. "I don't really plan on saying anything else to her," he says. "I want to let her know what I'm really like -but then again, I don't want to burst her bubble. I just want her to be happy. I'd like to say something, but I'm just not going to mess with it." Patrick plans to keep dating women in college: "I'll let her know about the girlfriends I have, but with the guys, I just won't say anything." I ask Patrick what being gay means to him. He sighs, and what he says is touchingly romantic:
"It's just where two people can be together under whatever circumstances. You know, they have to put up with a lot to be together, and they care about each other."
Patrick decides he wants to go to Rocky Horror - he's never seen it- and we drive downtown. After about half an hour of the movie, he's had enough. The transvestism makes him uneasy, puts him off -and he gets up and leaves. This isn't his vision of what being gay is about. Outside, I run into nineteen-year-old Alex, a small sixteen-year-old girl named Christie and a slim Hispanic high school senior named Sidney. Christie is nervous; no one can find her friend Jacob Eiler. Jacob is essentially homeless; he crashes at the homes of people he knows through the IYG. Lately, Jacob has been staying at her house, and Christie doesn't want him to end up sleeping outdoors. "He's used to having stuff of his own," she says. "He used to live somewhere. And he lost it. He woulda had to stand in line for a homeless shelter. So I was like, `Look, you can stay at my house.' " We pile into Sidney's car - or, rather, the car Sidney is borrowing. It belongs to an older friend, the man who owns the real estate agency where Sidney works part time. It's a new Lincoln Continental, license plate: morgage. It smells like baby powder.
As we drive through the deserted streets of Indianapolis, Sidney tells me why he has this car: His thirty-five-year-old boss has been in love with him for a long time. He bought Sidney a Chevy Cavalier; he pays for Sidney's cell phone so they can keep in close contact; he bought him rings and a gold watch; today at work, he left flowers on Sidney's desk. Sidney isn't sure he likes the situation but doesn't know how to break things off. Christie lunges between the front seats, picks up the phone, dials a number she reads from her pager and finally locates Jacob. Ten minutes later, Jake gets into the back seat, and the five of us drive to an all-night Denny's just southwest of the city. Sidney and Alex were reluctant to go there at first (they were hassled by some skinheads at the restaurant on Friday night), but the waitress knows about them, accepts that they're gay, so they decide it's OK.
At the table, there's a lot of joking but some real sadness. These kids don't have the assurance that the schools in Massachusetts give their students - that being gay is OK, a part of them like an ethnic background or the neighborhood they're from. Jacob tells me how he came out - his parents flipped out and have still not accepted him - and I can understand his often hurt look. Alex came out at school during his sophomore year, just because he was "tired of everyone accusing me and not really knowing. So I was just like, `Fine, fuck you. I'm gay.' " When people followed Alex in the halls, calling him a fag, asking him about boyfriends, he would turn around and say, " `You're just jealous because you can't get up in my butt.' It just kind of, like, stumps them." One boy hit Alex. Alex punched back. Both students were suspended; when Alex returned to school, the rumor in the halls was that the principal had taken the other boy to the bathroom and asked what it felt like to hit a faggot.
When men walk by, Alex and Jake lean across the table and whisper. "See his ass? Nope. He didn't have one," Alex says. Jake responds, "Never mind that - you don't have the booty, you're not getting me." Alex muses, "I want my butt to go away. Just because that's all I ever hear: `Nice ass.' `Your butt is big.' " Christie laughs. "Gay guys are bitches," she says. "Lesbians are so much cooler than gay guys - oh, my gosh, they're just so much fun." Then she whistles, "I'm a Barbie girl." Sidney explains to someone on his cell phone that he's driving the Lincoln this weekend. Then they start teasing Alex - in a strange, reversed moment - because three years ago, at fifteen, he had sex with a girl. They tell him he's a closet heterosexual. "She raped you, huh?" Sidney asks. "How could you get it up for a girl, anyway?" Jake asks. Then they accuse Alex of having liked it. "I didn't," Alex says. "For real I didn't, guys. I didn't." The check comes; Sidney stretches: "OK, girls, shall we leave?"
We gradually drop everyone off. Alex picks up his own car at the Abbey. Jacob and Christie search for her father's truck in the parking lot of the building where she lives; when they don't see it, they smile in relief and slip upstairs. Driving me to my hotel, Sidney gets momentarily silent. The Lincoln's blue clock tells me that it's 3:20 and sixty degrees outside the car. Sidney carefully asks whether, in talking to gay people in other cities, I've found that there's a history of abuse: "Have you found if anything happened to them as a child or something? That, like, had a major impact on their life, that made them change the way they were, made them so they're gay or something?" As he makes his way through the Indianapolis streets, he tells me that from the time he was seven until he was eleven, his teenage brother would sleepwalk into his bedroom at night and rape him. His mother never believed Sidney -"I'll never forgive her for it. I mean, there's no way I could. 'Cause I don't know what I might have turned out to be; it's just one of those things" - but over the holidays a few years ago, his brother admitted it. I offer Sidney the standard helpful, truthful line: that most people I've talked with are happy and satisfied with the way they are. He watches the road. "I mean, I'm happy the way I am, too," he says. "But I'd like to have seen what would have happened if that wouldn't have happened. 'Cause I don't know if this is the way I would have turned out or not."