Under the Rainbow: Foreword

[Under the Rainbow cover]

The Foreword to the New Edition

of Under the Rainbow

As a child, I was taught to respect the truth, but I wasn't always allowed to tell it. I loved honesty, and I hated secrets. If we were planning to move or my father lost his job or if someone in the family were sick, I was always bursting at the seams, wanting to tell my friends. But my parents would always caution me that it had to be kept quiet, and I did my best to obey them.

As a young teenager, however, I decided that honesty was the best policy, and one day I decided that I would speak nothing but the truth from then on. Furthermore, I wouldn't even wait to be asked; I would volunteer it whenever possible. The next day was a holiday, and the neighborhood families put on their best clothes and stood in front of the synagogue, hoping to be admired. (A few hard-liners actually went inside to pray, but nobody cared what they were wearing.) I went up to a schoolmate who was having a good time decked out in an ill-fitting ensemble with a royal blue top and a flower-printed skirt and I began to practice my new policy.

"Hi, Toby," I said. "I really don't like your dress very much."

"Oh," she said, suddenly crestfallen. "Really? I made it myself."

The guilt lasted for years. The thought of that incident came back at odd moments, and I would hum a little tune or make some odd noise to drive it from my thoughts, which is probably how some crazy people begin talking to themselves. I immediately changed my policy -- I would be only selectively honest, withholding the truth if it might hurt someone's feelings or cause unnecessary trouble.

As an adolescent, when I realized that I was gay, I knew I had a major problem on my hands. To be truthful about my sexual desires could mean total ruin. I was dying to tell, but there was no one I could trust. I was all alone. So Newark, New Jersey's most honest citizen had a gigantic, classified, not even "eyes only" top secret to carry around, and it weighed on my conscience like a flying monkey sitting on my shoulder. This time I had it both ways: I kept the secret and I got the guilt.

That was why the land of Oz was so important to me. Over the rainbow was a place where troubles would "melt like lemon drops" and I could be both honest and happy. My problem was that I lived under the rainbow in uncharted territory, and I had to learn how to make do. I did my best for nearly thirty years before gay liberation came into my life, and then I learned I wasn't the only dreamer in town. (By that time the town had changed from Newark to New York -- something like changing from a drab hair shirt to a shimmering satin chemise that goes perfectly with your eyes.)

The struggle to make my dreams come true taught me an important lesson. I could be honest, but the world wasn't necessarily going to love me for it. In fact, people might even hate me because civilization is a fabric woven of myths and fantasies and lies (for example, the notion that everybody wants to marry someone of the opposite sex and have babies). To say otherwise might begin to unravel the social order. Still, if I were willing to persevere no matter the cost, I could tell the truth and survive, which is what I did, and whatever society may have felt, at least I felt better for it. That was why I originally wrote Under the Rainbow over twenty years ago: to show other people that if I could get a miserable secret off my chest and participate in the stream of human history, they could do the same.

With the passage of time, I've learned what a difference a decade can make. My life turned upside down with the gay liberation movement, and then it turned upside down again with the AIDS epidemic, yet I haven't ended up in the same place where I began. Once again I find myself in unexplored territory, and writing about it is the best way to make a map. It was easy enough to say,"Gay is good," when the country was in the afterglow of the liberated 1960s. Now, in the 1990s, when the response is likely to be "Gay is immoral" or "Gay is infectious," followed by a heaved rock or a threat of quarantine, it's not so easy anymore.

I am not sorry for the good times I had in the 1970s. I had enough bad times before then and since to pay for them. I still believe in the freedoms I fought for then, but I also believe in the responsibility that comes with freedom, and I admire the way the gay community, once famous for its frivolity, has learned to look after its own and to stare the grim reaper right in the eye. It is a lesson that transcends sexual orientations. Maybe in Oz they can fuck without condoms, but not here. Life under the rainbow never stops being difficult, which is what keeps it interesting. Troubles here melt less like lemon drops and more like polar ice caps...s l o w l y. But given enough time and painstaking effort, they may eventually disappear. In the process of learning that, I have gained enough strength to say to those who would purge my nation of me and my kind: "I really don't like your dress very much," without feeling even slightly guilty. If only I had known in the beginning so much was possible...

New York, 1996

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