Michael Shackelford slides under his 1988 Chevy Cheyenne. Ratchet in hand, he peers into the truck's dark cavern, tapping his boot to Merle Haggard's "Silver Wings" drifting from the garage.
Flat on his back, staring into the cylinders and bearings, Michael fixes his truck like he wishes he could fix himself.
"I wake up and I try so hard to look at a girl," he says. "I tell myself I'm gonna be different. It doesn't work."
Michael is 17 and gay, though his mother still cries and asks, "Are you sure?" He's pretty sure. It's just that he doesn't exactly know how to be gay in rural Oklahoma. He bought some Cher CDs. He tried a body spray from Wal-Mart called Bod. He drove 22 miles to the Barnes & Noble in Tulsa, where the gay books are discreetly kept in the back of the store on a shelf labeled "Sociology."
While the rest of the country is debating same-sex marriage, Michael's America is still dealing with the basics. There are no rainbow flags here. No openly gay teacher at the high school. There is just the wind knifing down the plains, and people praying over their lunches in the yellow booths at Subway. Michael loves this place, but can it still be home? What if the preachers and the country music songs are right?
"Being gay, you'll never have that true love like a man and a woman," Michael says, standing against his truck as Merle Haggard mixes with the backyard whippoorwills. "Hearing all the songs about a man coming home from work to his wife's loving arms, you never hear of gay couples like that."
He sets his ratchet down. "Do you?"
The gay revolution hit the buckle of the Bible Belt with a clang. The sweeping changes of 2003 -- the U.S. Supreme Court decriminalizing homosexual acts between consenting adults and the Massachusetts high court legalizing same-sex marriage in that state -- pushed gays more toward the mainstream than ever. If the revolution was coming, Oklahoma aimed to stop it. In the first weeks of Oklahoma's 2004 legislative session, 10 anti-gay bills were introduced, including one to ban gay marriage and another to prohibit the recognition of out-of-state adoptions by same-sex couples.
The damnation mixed with the bluest skies, so beautiful and round. The greater Tulsa phone book has 13 pages of church listings; there are 133 churches alone that begin with the word "First." One Tulsa church that bills itself as a "hardcore, in-your-face ministry" constructs an elaborate haunted house each Halloween where live actors depict various sins. Last year's spook house featured a gay male pedophile.
Tulsa has world-class opera and Starbucks, and a religious conservatism that rules public life. It wasn't until 1993 that a social agency, Youth Services of Tulsa, noted a higher suicide rate for gay youths and quietly began providing counseling to gay teenagers. To this day, the United Way-funded agency does not publicize the location and times of its meetings. When one of its social workers drove out to a rural middle school to talk with an eighth-grader who had told a teacher she was gay, the teacher locked the social worker's pamphlets in a cabinet before leading her to the girl, who waited in a darkened classroom. "Lady, I already know I'm going to marry a woman," the student told the social worker. "Just tell me, am I going to hell over this?"
For Michael Shackelford, blond and earnest, the question of salvation is a serious one. But his concerns about eternal life are eclipsed by the here and now of being a gay teenager in the rural town of Sand Springs, west of Tulsa. There are only a handful of openly gay students at Charles Page High, and they are subject to ridicule and vandalism. This year, they also became a convenient outlet for the fury against gay marriage, which is why Michael wanted to keep his sexuality a secret.
Much more at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49856-2004Sep25.html?nav=hcmodule_____About This Series_____
Growing Up in an Evolving America
In the courts and popular culture, gays in America experienced an unprecedented push toward the mainstream over the past two years. But far beneath the surface, away from the spotlight of the historic advances and the conservative backlash they detonated, are the ordinary lives of young people coming to terms with their homosexuality. Their journeys are beginning earlier than ever. The average age when a young man or woman self-identifies as gay has dropped significantly in the past two decades, from 22 to 15 or younger, according to several academic studies. This earlier awareness is linked to a similar drop in the age of puberty’s onset and sexual awakening for all youths.
Even with greater acceptance by society and the passage of anti-bullying laws, the lives of young gays are still fraught with peril and isolation. They are two to three times more likely than their peers to attempt suicide, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association. The American Counseling Association reports that nearly a third drop out of school, largely because of harassment related to their sexual orientation.
Michael Shackelford and Felicia Holt, the two gay teenagers at the center of the four-part Washington Post series that begins today, do not know each other. They come from very distinct places in America, defined by culture, race and geography. But even across the miles, these two strangers know each other.
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