Nekkid Resurrection

Hearing Lea Michele, Glee’s Rachel, break into “Papa can you hear me…” on last night’s episode was met with fluttering hands, deep gasps, and a race to my Twitter account.  Sorry for the spoiler West Coast friends, I was just way too excited.  The fact that on the same day I received a copy of the original Yentl soundtrack as a particularly kind gesture of friendship from a man I expect might have been slightly embarrassed to purchase it (I can imagine him saying, “It’s for a friend…really”), just made the moment that much sweeter.

I know it’s a ridiculously sappy, emotionally manipulative, self-indulgent Bab flick, but I love it.  Yentl is part of my story, and encountering it this week reminds me of who I was twenty-five years ago.
Yentl was released in 1983, but I didn’t see it until it made its way to HBO the next year.  We had recently purchased a VCR, and I secretly recorded it, knowing it spoke to me in some place not to be named out loud.  I kept the tape hidden under my bed and only watched it on the rare occasions I found myself home alone.  The shame wasn’t in the film itself (I don’t think I yet knew the implications of being a Barbra fan) it was in me.  Yentl is the story of a young woman pretending to be a man in order to study scripture, in love with her best friend, simultaneously angered by the restrictions of gender constructs and awkwardly embarrassed by her failure to adhere to them.  The fact that I played the scene where she reveals her secret to the man she loves over and over again, the closest thing I’d ever seen to a love scene between men, was what confused, troubled, and thrilled me.

Let’s put some context around this: I was a sissy, but of the nerdy type, so with the exception of one particularly homophobic bully my experience of harassment could have been much worse.  Nonetheless, I received the clear message that all boys got that nothing was worse than a girly-boy, and nothing made a boy more girly than liking other boys.

At age eleven (1984) while performing a bit part in the NC School of the Arts junior class production of Shakespeare’s MacBeth, I walked in on two men kissing in the dressing room.  I was thrilled.  They were beautiful.  I was stunned. They saw my drop-jawed expression in the mirror, smiled and laughed.  These two lovely men taught me how to play chess, and since they were rarely on stage at the same time they kept a game going with me while I awaited my one scene (which consisted of fourteen lines and a murder).  They took me in, and became my guardians as the lone child in a strange culture of college theater types.

Not long after that, I developed a crush on a youth leader at church.  He was a big burly guy, kind and warm.  It was in the arms of a (very safe and appropriate) hug from him that I experienced an awakening.  I was turned on.  I felt safe, known, and loved.  I felt sure that I heard a voice from God which I identified as a call to vocational ministry. Later I would deconstruct and reconstruct what was going on in my psyche in that moment — the mix of ecstasy, shame, longing for approval — but the complicated link between my sexual and spiritual awakenings that have shaped much of my life was established.

About that same time, AIDS became headline news.  All I knew of men who loved men was that they died young and tragically, that they were abandoned by their families and cast out by society.  I cut articles about them out of magazines and newspapers.  Those clippings stayed securely in a shoebox with the secret videotape.  Be clear, I was nowhere close to identifying myself as gay.  That was inconceivable.  I literally kept the lid on my desire, boxed up and hidden in the dark.

The twists and turns of the following couple of years, the ways in which my world was distorted through a Sunday School Teacher’s (different man) sexual abuse, only deepened the simultaneous sense of longing for God, craving a life of ministry, and coming more and more to realize my exclusion from the institutional church.  As a middle schooler I never could have articulated all of this, but I could watch Yentl over and over again.  Not even really knowing what drew me to the film — the keeping of secrets in order to live out one’s faith, the hope for the secret’s unravelling — it kept calling me back.

Sixteen years later, I found myself sitting in the back row of a ministry class in my first semester at divinity school. At that point I was in a well-established relationship with Ron.  I’d been quite transparent about my home-life as I entered the school.  I was not alone; there were three or four other same-gender-loving folks who showed up that year, too.  But when our professor, illustrating some point I can’t recall, asked if any of us remembered the last scene of Yentl, it was me that gasped, clutched my chest, and sang out “Papa can you hear me…”, promptly confirming every stereotype lingering in the back of my classmates’ minds.

So, yeah, I know it’s not a great movie, but color me Barbra — it still grabs my heart.