My brother didn’t become gay. He was that way before the fight between Mama and Papa, as they were about to separate, when Mama said to my brother through sobbing mouth mucus, “I hope you aren’t like him! If you are, you better figure it out before you get married and ruin some woman’s life.” I was there, but blocked it out. Papa reminded me after my brother came out to us, as he was preparing to tell my mother. “He’s afraid,” Papa said. “You don’t remember her hoping he wasn’t like me?” My brother was seventeen. I was twelve. My brother said, “I’m not, Mommy; I’m not.” It came back to me. I wonder what my brother remembers. He found Papa’s magazines in the office desk at thirteen as he helped at the real estate business after school. We all stuffed envelopes, but my brother kept up the computers. Mama made a big deal about my brother having found the evidence and holding it in since eleven. Little did she know my isolation while doors were locked and yelling seeped through the frames. To them I was too young to know. I was left alone. At twenty-five my brother finally figured it out, after years of leaving coeds in hotel rooms to smoke cigarettes because he couldn’t get it up. That’s when we became friends. When my brother finally told Mama, she was the last to know. She called me, the last hetero on earth. She said, “Every man I have ever known has abandoned me.” That’s where I got that from. Now Christ is the only man in her life. I told her what her marriage showed me: “You have yourself, your mind, your body. No man will make you complete.”
