When She Learns Her Son Is Gay

Abstract

WHEN SHE WAS EIGHT, her mother used the word, but it meant something different. This was long before she was Mrs. Schlafly, long before she was the scourge for the Right, The Sweetheart of the Silent Majority, the ardent anti-communist, claimed by John Birch as his loyal philosophical daughter, the comfort of Cardinal Mindszenty, the unrelenting foe of the ERA, protectress of the unborn, the raging moral core in the heart of a country bound, but for her, for hell. This was 1932 and the anti-Christ came to St. Louis. Her daddy took her to see him because he wanted to teach her how to look evil full in the face and not blink, that was what he told her. They rode the streetcar to Union Station where the band played Happy Days Are Here Again over and over, and the jittery throng was so thick the police closed off Market Street for two blocks on either side of the railroad terminal. A woman on stilts, wearing a straw hat with donkey ears, threw toffee wrapped in wax paper to the children, but her daddy told her to leave it on the pavement because it was Democratic sweets, and she did, although all around her boys and girls gleefully chomped on the sticky balls of candy, brown sugared saliva glinting from their chins. One boy ate seven pieces at once, his cheek swollen as by a tumor. Before the Depression, her daddy had been Someone and even though they ate now only because her mother sold gloves behind the counter at Famous and Barr, he still had the bearing of a capital P Personage, and the crowd parted to let them pass, the regal man in the somber gray suit and the little girl in the powder blue dress and the yellow ribbons in her hair and the white gloves fastened with faux pearl buttons at her slender wrists.