Losing my twin

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

In October 2001, something terrible happened to my twin sister, Cara. A capstone to some bad things in our lives that had gone before. That October, my sister was raped in the woods while she was out walking her dog. One of the consequences of the rape was that she was afraid to be alone. She needed me with her all the time. She asked if I would stay with her in Massachusetts, though she knew I had photography classes to attend in New York City. In my graduate studies, my only assignment was to photograph, which made it relatively simple to accommodate Cara. I selected her as my subject.

Cara refused to dress, so I made adjustments for the pictures that allowed for this. We wore identical long black cloaks. Cara buttoned hers over her nightshirt and pants, painted red lipstick on her mouth, pinked her cheeks. I copied her makeup, became her duplicate. We looked like old-fashioned harlots wearing long blank faces, in our long black coats. It was the middle of a harsh winter. I had a vision: identicals in the snow. I used the doppelgänger in the literary Gothic sense: landscapes were to describe the psychological state of the characters of our novel. It was easier for me to think of us as characters than to grapple with the truth of our new reality. I wanted Poe’s warring sisters, forever lost, women written with hysterical vapor. I wanted the fraction of history we owned.

Undercover as a gay man

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 15:53:00 +0000

Back when I was a student at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, the evangelical equivalent of West Point, the school taught me to be wary of gays: They were all HIV-positive perverts and liberal pedophiles. I’d grown up a conservative fundamental Christian, and I wanted to be a good “Champion for Christ.”

But my beliefs started to change after I left Liberty in my first year and returned back home. I found myself regularly going to a karaoke night, and so many gay people attended, we called it “Lesbaoke.” At first it made me uncomfortable, but over time I found in that place a new home, where everyone was the epitome of loving, and where the judgmental voice inside of me was forced into silence. The regulars at that bar became a family of sorts, tied together by something stronger than blood: a combination of cheap beer and rocking hits of the '70s, '80s and '90s.

Then one night, I had a conversation with a woman named Elizabeth that forced me to wrestle with my Christian past. “I came out to my family yesterday,” she said through watery eyes. “My dad told me to get my stuff out of his house, and that he wouldn’t pay another dime for the education of a ‘faggot daughter’!” Her face found my shoulder, and I wrapped my hands around her tiny body.

Salon.com > excerpts

Losing my twin

Undercover as a gay man