(no subject)
Having a rare (for me) need to process some news verbally…
Scott was my first serious boyfriend. We met at choir camp the summer before my sophomore year of high school; my roommate for the week went to his high school and introduced us. (She had a classic crush on him, but he told me later that she rated more as a nuisance than anything else. Having spent a week as her roomie, I could understand his point of view.) I was astonished that he had any interest in me at all, but we were choir geeks, f/SF geeks, art and language geeks together. He was pretty good looking, or at least I thought so: strong cheekbones and chin, dark winged eyebrows over pure green eyes, a quiff of dark-golden hair swept across his forehead and continually threatening to droop into his eyes, the barest smudge of a mustache; a swimmer’s, dancer’s body; a flexible low tenor voice but capable of a pure, clear falsetto.
Scott’s parents, Marge and Alan, were good and generous folk: former military, now both employed at the Milwaukee VA center. They invited me to visit a few times, a goodly ride by Greyhound from northern Wisconsin. I was, quite frankly, poor; sometimes would arrive in Burlington with barely any cash beyond my bus ticket. Marge insisted once or twice on taking me shopping “just because.” Scott’s uncle Buck lived with them too, a charming fellow full of stories. His sister Helen was already living in Madison.
We had good times together. In retrospect, we seem curiously innocent for a pair of teenagers; not to say we didn’t have our escapades, for we certainly did! But minor, minor and mild, and relatively untainted by youthful raging hormones. All the memories that come first to my mind are gentle and surprisingly chaste: “Beastie,” as I nicknamed him, was the first boy to ever buy me a rose, the first to say “I chose that song for us” and lead me out to dance, the first to take me out to dinner and a movie. He loved unicorns; I used one of his drawings as a pattern to carve and paint a leather wallet I made for him. (It occurs to me, for the first time in many years, that among the items I lost when thieves broke into our apartment in San Antonio and took my jewelry box, were all the pieces Scott ever gave me - and they were all unicorns, in some variation or another.) We swapped paperbacks and sheet music; he sent me a copy of the school newspaper the week he managed an interview with Gary Gygax. We listened to ABBA and Alan Parsons Project (“Turn of a Friendly Card” had just come out) and early Robin Williams (the scandal! Such a pottymouth!) and Doctor Demento’s radio show which none of the stations near me carried. We watched Star Trek and Monty Python and sang the soundtrack to Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Scott introduced me to D&D. He was our usual DM, and ran games full of tricks and traps that favored negotiation and thought over “kill the monster, take the treasure.” One of my all-time favorite gaming moments involved a session in the co-ed lounge at choir camp (not the year we met, but later; probably the summer before our senior years). The party had made its way across a trapped checkerboard to a statue, and all the clues pointed toward it having a secret compartment. Rather than play yes/no or warm/cold games, Scott stood up and became the statue, and we literally searched him for the secret. Hilarity ensued, of course...
So time passed. We wrote chatty letters to each other, played Battleship by mail (5 moves at a time). He came up for prom my senior year; I went to his graduation a few months later. By that time I knew I wouldn’t be going to Annapolis, and was about to put in my Navy enlistment papers when my uncle offered to loan me tech-school tuition for a year so I could try again. I spent a long weekend (I want to say it was Easter) with Scott and Helen in Madison, and we agreed that I would share an apartment with them that coming fall.
And at first all went well. Helen was one of my supervisors at the UW student union where I worked in foodservice. Scott was in the chef’s program at MATC and would try out recipes on us at home. But we began to drift…and finally I understood why. Scott had found an atmosphere in which he felt he could come out of the closet. I was one of the first of the people close to him whom he told.
Now I’ve joked at times over the years about it being an ego hit to be left for another guy. But the truth of the matter is, that aspect was never that big a deal to me. At least, when he finally felt he could be honest with me, I could accept and believe that the failure of our relationship wasn’t my fault, wasn't really anyone's fault. And he showed me a new world, something I’d never experienced before. He wasn’t uncomfortable still spending time with me on occasion, so we would still go out together now and then - but to places I might never have gone otherwise, the gay bars and drag shows of Madison’s near-East side.
I learned a lot that winter. And I learned that (and oh, does this sound like a cliché, but it’s still true) sometimes the only thing you can do for someone you care about is to step back and let them go.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not claiming to be some self-sacrificing angel. This all came down right about the time I met Steve, and realized part of what really had been missing between Scott and me. So there was mutual benefit there. I would say that we parted amicably, save that it wasn’t so much a defined parting as a wordless understanding that we would never be more than friends - but never less, either.
But despite the state that Scott and I had reached by this point, the other relationships within the apartment were deteriorating pretty fast. As it turns out, Scott had come out to me quite some time before he told his parents. And when he did, they, being products of their generation and upbringing, decided that his “turning” gay was somehow my fault. I don’t blame them; I didn’t blame them at the time. Even in Madison in the mid-80’s, accepting a gay son or daughter was a difficult thing to do - particularly in a Catholic family. But the emotional temperature grew pretty chilly and soon I moved out.
We went our own ways after that. I still saw Helen occasionally at the Union, though I no longer worked in her unit. Scott and I had pretty much lost contact by the time Steve and I married and moved to San Antonio.
In December 2000 I was startled to get a Christmas card from Scott. He'd gotten my address from my mother; I don't know what moved him to make the attempt. He enclosed a picture - and I would never have recognized him. His hair had gone dark, he’d grown a walrus mustache, and packed pounds onto that once slim, graceful body. He mentioned that he’d recently lost his partner to AIDS, and another person close to him was dying of it. I moved to Kenosha shortly after that; we swapped a few e-mails, and lost contact again.
So today, ten years after that last contact. The years in Madison had come up in LJ conversation; I’m listening to the radio as I work, and Styx’s “The Best of Times” comes on. And for the first time in decades I remember that first dance we had, to that very song. So I figure, hey, let’s find out what Scott is doing these days. Maybe I’ll run up to Madison one Saturday, go to the farmers’ market, see if he’d be interested in meeting up for lunch or a drink or something to catch up. A few minutes with Google brought me to a people-finder site that listed both his real and his drag name (“Staarr” - 2 a’s and 2 r’s). I’d forgotten that name, but it registered instantly - this was the right person. So I added it to the Google search.
And came up with an obituary. Scott died in 2005, "unexpectedly," at the age of 40. No cause given. All the few, brief details checked out with what I remembered, so no possibility of a mistake.
I sat here for a while in disbelief. Tried a few other searches, came up with nothing but obits. I thought briefly of trying to contact his parents or his sister. I hope and trust that at some point they were able to accept Scott as he was, to keep him in the love they still had for him however baffled they may have been by his actions. But after this long, what would I say? And would they even be willing to hear it from me?
So I’ve been chewing on this news all day, and still haven’t quite been able to put into words quite how I feel. Without Scott in my life, I would never have moved to Madison, and wouldn’t have met Steve; without Scott in my life, I would never have had an interest in gaming, and wouldn't have met Dan. The entire frame of my post-high-school life has been shaped by that teenaged romance.
And yet...while I feel a strange distant sort of grief, it's more of a deep regret, without poignancy or immediacy. It hasn’t moved me to tears (at least not yet), but to remember. I think I'm mourning Scott himself less than I am the idea of who we were in those days, the dreams we had and lost...and, selfishly, the fact that yet another part of my personal history now exists only in my memories.
So let this long post stand as my memorial. Not to the man who was, and who I never really knew; but to the gentle and sensitive boy who still is, and always will be, in my heart.
Scott Alan “Staarr” Petersen (June 26, 1965 - November 16, 2005)
Rest you gently, Beastie.
