Coming Out to Play, page 3
Aunt Lollie was my mother’s youngest sibling. (My mother is the second of seven children.) And she moved back in with our grandparents to help my mom right after my parents separated. She’d been really involved in our lives from the time we were little. Before she left for Revelle College at the University of California, San Diego, she babysat my sisters. Once she was in school she’d sometimes bring us there to visit with her. After my parents separated, Aunt Lollie and my grandparents really helped keep things together.
We jokingly called Lollie “the Sergeant” because she’d gather us all up and make sure we behaved. She made very clear that she adored each of us equally, but I felt like I had a special relationship with her, which I’m guessing was how we each felt about our aunt. At that moment in my life, with my parents having a rough time, my Aunt Lollie was the most important person in the world to me. She’d come over to the house and we’d hang out on my bed and she’d ask questions about soccer and school.
And then she was gone.
There was a nighttime police chase and the woman being chased turned off her headlights. Aunt Lollie was driving through an intersection when the woman came through at 110 miles per hour, T-boning Aunt Lollie’s car, killing her instantly. She was thirty-two years old.
After Aunt Lollie died, I talked to her a lot in my prayers, saying that I hoped she was with God and was being well taken care of. To this day I miss her terribly, and a couple of years ago I got a tattoo on the inside of my bicep in memory of her.
If my family wasn’t what it seemed once you looked below the surface, then neither was Rolling Hills Estates, and the older I got, the more clear that became. The most obvious evidence that things were not quite as they seemed were the parties and the drugs. I started going to parties the summer after eighth grade. These were insane parties, unlike anything I’ve ever been to since. They were always somewhere in Palos Verdes at someone’s giant mansion while their parents were away for the weekend or on vacation. Imagine four hundred kids in togas, a live band playing music, kegs of beer, and people doing drugs, just like you’ve seen in the movies. It was all these kids with too much money, having fun and getting into trouble with absolutely no adult supervision. It wasn’t like I didn’t drink, too, although I was a quick learner, so it only took getting sick a couple of times to discover my limits. But I didn’t do drugs, other than trying pot a few times, which made me tired, anxious, and paranoid.
I was definitely not one of those unsupervised kids, and after my mom saw what went on with my two older sisters at Peninsula High School and heard about all the trouble other teenagers in our community were getting into, she decided to send me forty miles east to live with my cousins in Huntington Beach so I could attend Mater Dei, a private Catholic school. It happened to be a more convenient place for me to live because of where I had to go for soccer practice, but that wasn’t the primary reason my mother sent me there. She just wanted me far away from Peninsula High School, and I don’t think she minded that Mater Dei conducted routine drug tests.
When my mother first told me she wanted me to go to Mater Dei, I was outraged (in the way only a teenager can be outraged at his mother) because I didn’t want to leave all of my friends who were going to Peninsula, and besides, I complained to my mother, my sisters were both going there, too. It just wasn’t fair. But then I went to visit Mater Dei and thought it was a really cool school with a nice campus. And much to my surprise I wound up loving it—the history, the tradition, the school pride, all the school activities, the football games, and even the school uniforms. I’d wear khaki, gray, or blue shorts with a navy blue, maroon, or gray polo shirt, with a pair of Converse or Vans sneakers. This made it easy to dress well, because everyone had to dress in the same kinds of clothes. I’ve always liked dressing well, but I’m also Californian, so I like my clothes to be casual.
After a year of living with my cousins I moved in with my soccer coach’s parents, Gene and Luanne Theslof. (My coach, who was also one of my first mentors, was Nick Theslof.) And that turned out to be perfect because I wasn’t driving yet and Nick could take me to all of my trainings and games. By then Nick had invited me to play with the Orange County Blue Star, a Professional Development League team that he coached, in addition to my club team, the Palos Verdes Raiders. Most of my teammates on Blue Star were college players from the local area, which was a lot of fun because I got to play with guys who were a lot better than I was, but I could still outrun them. So it was a chance to learn a lot and also to show off a bit to guys who had a lot more experience than I did. This included Jürgen Klinsmann, a legendary German footballer who played for a time with Blue Star using the alias “Jay Göppingen” (and in 2011 was named head coach of the U.S. men’s national soccer team).
My mom always seemed to know what was best for me. And lucky for me, at that age I didn’t have a choice about doing what she said.
I think one of the lessons you learn growing up is that things are usually a lot more complicated than they look on the surface. Just because something seems golden, like your family or your community, doesn’t mean that once you scrape away that shiny outer layer things will look as good underneath. And the same could be said for me when I was a teenager, because, just like my family and the community in which I grew up, I looked pretty golden, until you scratched the surface. In fact, if you were to ask my brother and sisters, they would tell you that in our family I was the golden child who almost always got his way. From the outside I was a stereotypical, all-American boy who was into sports, never got into trouble, and was nice to his grandparents.
I have to admit that with all the attention I got and all the success I had in judo and later in soccer, I felt pretty golden. Some people who knew me might have thought I was a bit spoiled. Then as I grew into my teens I began to understand that while I may have felt golden and looked pretty golden to the people around me, I had this one huge flaw. And from everything I’d learned up to that point in my life I knew that if I ever let anyone see my flaw I’d be guaranteed disappointment, condemnation, and maybe even rejection from my family, friends, God, and the soccer community.
Yet long before I came to the realization that I had anything to hide, those who knew me best could already tell that I was different from other young boys. They could sense that little Robbie Rogers, who loved his bow ties, vests, and dress shorts—and notwithstanding his status as a soccer and judo prodigy—was a “fairy.”
CHAPTER 5
YOU’VE GOT TO BE CAREFULLY TAUGHT
You don’t grow up hating yourself by accident. You don’t learn to lie about your true nature on a whim. You don’t pretend to be straight just for the fun of it. You have to learn and be taught these things and I was a good student.
There’s a song from the 1949 Rodgers & Hammerstein musical South Pacific called “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” that reminds me of my experience growing up. The first line of the song is, “You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear.” The lyrics go on to talk about prejudice and describe how children are taught to hate people who are different from them and to hate all the people their relatives hate.
My family and church would never have tolerated the kind of prejudice described in the Rodgers & Hammerstein song. But gay people were another story, and growing up I heard and saw plenty that made me think that being gay was bad, defective, and sinful. I guess if you’re straight and taught to hate gay people that’s not as big a problem, because then you don’t grow up hating yourself, although teaching children to hate anyone is wrong and I think deeply held prejudice of any kind is soul-destroying. But when you teach a child who is gay (or lesbian, bisexual, or transgender) that his fundamental nature is somehow bad, you create a situation where that child grows up hating himself and feels compelled to hide his true feelings, no matter what the cost is to him and those around him. And that’s what happened to me beginning in early childhood.
Just a quick disclaimer before I say anything more: My parents did not set out to knowingly hurt me. They were taught by their parents and church to believe certain things about homosexuality and gay people that were widely held beliefs at the time. My goal in sharing my experiences with you is not to trash them (or other family members, or teammates, or friends), but to give you insight into my experience growing up as a gay kid in a world that was filled with hate and prejudice. It was a world in which I learned to hide anything about myself that might have given anyone any idea that I wasn’t the All-American Straight Golden Boy they wanted to believe I was—and that I desperately wanted to be.
It all started with My Little Pony, a cartoon TV program I liked to watch when I was a very young boy. The show was built around a cast of characters based on the colorful and highly decorated plastic pony toys manufactured by Hasbro. I can’t tell you why I loved My Little Pony, but I did. (Ironically, my favorite pony was the blue one with wings and a rainbow-colored mane and tail—for those who don’t know, the rainbow flag is a symbol of gay pride.) The fact that I loved My Little Pony in the first place was the problem, because the My Little Pony TV show and the My Little Pony dolls that I collected and played with were designed for and marketed to girls.
I have to give my mom some credit because when I asked for My Little Pony dolls for Christmas and birthday gifts (and we each got to pick out a new toy when another sibling was born), she let me choose whatever I wanted. And what I always wanted was a My Little Pony doll and another less-than-masculine toy, this stuffed dog that had a flap on its belly with little puppies inside.
But I don’t want to give my mother—or my sisters—too much credit, because they liked to tease me about the fact that I liked to play with toys that most boys had no interest in. They used to sing a song meant to torment me about “My Little Pony and baloney,” and they’d sing it back and forth until I started crying. I was very sensitive when I was a child (I still am), so it didn’t take a lot to get me to cry. Still, I don’t remember the teasing bothering me all that much. Though apparently it’s not that way for every boy who loves My Little Pony. I recently read about an eleven-year-old boy who was a fan of the My Little Pony cartoon show and was teased so relentlessly that he tried to take his own life, which is beyond heartbreaking.
Other than the occasional teasing, my sisters were happy to play dolls with me. And my mother was content to let us enjoy ourselves. My father was another story, and on a few occasions when I was very young he made it clear that he didn’t like his namesake playing with “girlie things.” I remember one time overhearing him say to my mother in a really angry voice, “I don’t ever want to see him playing with dolls again! I don’t want a fairy for a son!”
It would be years before I understood that the word “fairy” was a stand-in for “fag” or “homosexual” and that my father was afraid that by playing with dolls I’d grow up to be gay. What was clear from my father’s tone of voice was that whatever kind of fairy he didn’t want me to be, I figured it had to be pretty bad. After that my mother deftly shifted me away from My Little Pony dolls and over to more standard toy horses, which she would buy for me at the general store. Happily for everyone, as I got older and my brother Tim and I spent more time playing together, we only wanted toys that would shoot stuff. We’d set up little soldiers and go at it the way boys were supposed to play. That must have come as a huge relief to my father.
There was one other gender-bending thing I did as a child that made my dad insanely angry, and his reaction is burned into my memory as if imprinted there by a red-hot branding iron. My two older sisters and I liked to dress up and play a game they called “Cool Girls.” I was pretty young when we did this, so my sister Alicia has more complete memories of this than I do. Here’s what she remembers:
My mom and dad both worked full-time and went on a lot of trips together, so after school and when they were away we stayed with Hilda, our adopted grandmother. She was the most amazing, loving, good woman and we were so blessed to have known her. We went to garage sales with her and we’d buy 1950s lingerie and other silky things. Then we’d come home and Hilda would do up my hair and Coco’s hair in little curls. We’d put on these slips we’d bought and Robbie would, too—he did whatever we did. So we’d get dressed up—I chose the name Sara and Robbie’s name was Robin and Coco was someone else—and we’d parade around the house and pretend we were cool girls.
One time we were playing in Hilda’s back room when my dad walked in—he was just back from a trip or came by early to pick us up to take us home. He took one look at Robbie all dressed up and I could see him getting really angry because he was grinding his teeth. He didn’t raise his voice very often, but when he did it was scary. He yelled, “My son will not be a faggot!” Robbie just froze. We all did. I remember the look of shock on Robbie’s face, and his furrowed brow just beneath his perfect bowl haircut.
When I talked with my mom about this recently she recalled being at Hilda’s house that day, too, and that dad also yelled at Hilda and said, “Don’t let my son dress up like a faggot!” Here’s what Mom remembers:
Rob was out-of-control angry and I told him that he couldn’t yell at the children like that and he said, “He’s going to grow up to be a fairy.” And I said, “I don’t care what he’s going to grow up to be. You may not do this.” I felt that as a mother I had to step in and say, “You’re not going to do this to our son. He will be who he is, and if he wants to play like this with his sisters, don’t you ever yell at him like that.” Robbie’s facial expression changed dramatically when his father yelled at him and he appeared extremely hurt.
That experience with our dad just taught us to be more careful when we played “Cool Girls,” because it wasn’t like we stopped. There was another time when my dad caught us and this time it was at home when we were still living in San Pedro. Alicia was probably eight, Coco was six, and I was four. We’d raided my mother’s closet and used her scarves and whatever else we could find to make togas. I put a shirt on my head and pretended that I had long hair. We were on the second floor playing and running around and having a lot of fun, which probably explains why we didn’t hear Dad coming up the stairs, but suddenly he was screaming at us. I was so scared that I have no memory of exactly what he said or what I said in response, but Alicia remembers that I said, “I’m pretending to be a horse. I’m not pretending to be a girl.”
I have no idea how I knew to say that, but apparently I knew enough to know that what made my dad so upset was that his little boy was pretending to be a girl. As I came to understand much later, in Dad’s mind that meant I’d grow up to be gay, which was something so terrible that the thought of it made his blood boil. (My father is now so supportive and pro-gay that it’s hard to imagine he ever had any problem with me playing with dolls or dressing up to play “Cool Girls.”) Of course, not all boys who play with dolls and play dress-up with their sisters turn out to be gay, but this boy did. And if there are any parents out there who still worry that their child’s choice of toys has an impact on the child’s sexuality, let me put your minds at ease. There is no cause-and-effect. Don’t forget, I also liked to play soccer and was a judo champion, and that didn’t make me straight.
Before I figured out what “fairy” or “faggot” meant, or that it had anything to do with my sexuality, I had a sense that I was different from other boys. In elementary school I’d hear my friends talk about girlfriends and I couldn’t relate to it. I wasn’t excited about the idea of having a girlfriend and couldn’t understand why they were. I thought that maybe I was just afraid, but at first I couldn’t put my finger on what the problem was.
One time, I remember watching an episode of Dawson’s Creek on television and seeing a gay character, Jack McPhee, and I really took notice. It wasn’t that I was attracted to Jack—at least I don’t recall being attracted to him. There was just something about his character that felt familiar, that Jack and I shared more in common than simply his hair and eye color. But even before Dawson’s Creek, when I watched movies or TV shows I was always more attracted to the guy characters than the girl characters and didn’t know why. Then, as I got older and realized that I was gay and understood why I was attracted to them, I didn’t allow myself to have those feelings.
Maybe it sounds crazy, but I never really let myself feel attracted to other guys. It felt too dangerous. I told myself that I could never date one of my teammates, or any soccer player, any friend—anyone I found even remotely attractive, for that matter. I trained myself to say no, no, no to any feelings of attraction I might have had even before they surfaced. For most of my life, when I saw a good-looking guy it was like looking at a sibling, so I’d feel sick to my stomach if I allowed so much as a flicker of attraction to slip through.
My growing sense that something was wrong with me came at around the same time (in 1997) that the character Ellen Morgan (played by Ellen DeGeneres) on the sitcom Ellen told the world she was gay. More than forty million people watched that episode (by comparison, the top-rated Modern Family was watched by around ten million viewers in a typical week in 2013). I can’t imagine that my family watched Ellen or that episode, but even if we had I don’t think I would have made any connection between what was going on with me and what Ellen Morgan (and Ellen DeGeneres herself) announced to the world.
When I was ten or eleven I also started to hear gay slur words and kids would say, “Don’t be so gay,” like gay was a bad thing, like you were doing something stupid. While I knew by then what gay people were, I can’t say I had a real understanding yet that I was gay myself—or at least I wasn’t willing to consider that possibility. But somewhere deep down I must have known because my ears perked up whenever I heard those slurs or heard about gay civil right issues on the news or debated by my family or discussed at church.
