For Better or Worse

By Steve Friess, Sun-Sentinel

Photos by Victoria Stagg Elliott and Susan Stocker

I tried as hard as I could not to look.

Keep your eyes on Jim's face, my brain told me. Look at the rabbi if you want. Or stare down at your feet. Just don't look.

But, no. I wanted to see it.

You have to look, my heart insisted. Look now, or forever hold your peace.

So, as my new sister-in-law read from Ecclesiastes, my head turned. And I saw. And I smiled. And new tears formed in my eyes. And I probably gasped. At least that's what Jim told me later, although the video replay offers no evidence of that.

There they all were, almost every single person I ever knew, ever loved, ever hoped would witness this.

Our seven nephews and nieces? Check, and not fidgeting too much. My 85-year-old grandfather? Present and grinning. The girl everybody assumed, back in our high school days, would be standing today in Jim's place? Here, with her fiance. Ninety people filled row after row of white wooden folding chairs. Some held hands and some held handkerchiefs. They seemed completely unaffected by the high Arizona desert we'd lured them into, despite beads of sweat on almost every forehead. They looked soothed by the trickle from the fast-moving Oak Creek beside us and the buzz of cicadas hidden in looming, lush cottonwood trees.

And, most of all, everyone appeared oblivious to just how radical an event this was. Revolutionaries in cocktail dresses and tuxedos, all of them.

They did what people do at weddings: They watched us. Their eyes stared straight ahead as the rabbi commanded their attention to an orchid-decked chuppah where he administered vows for James Robert Richter and Steven Ira Friess. They chuckled when we fumbled with our wedding bands, emitted "awws" as we sealed our commitment with a lingering kiss and applauded with gusto when we both stomped glasses to mark the end of the ceremony.

It was all so natural. So comfortable. So easy.

Surprisingly easy. There is a moment after the Jewish wedding ceremony when the couple steal away for time alone before joining the reception revelry. My groom and I snuck up a short hill, hid behind a row of cabins at the rustic resort in Sedona, Ariz., and gazed back down to see our guests mingling.

And together we smiled. And fresh tears surfaced again. And without question, we both gasped.

"How?" Jim asked, shaking his head and fixing my perpetually crooked bow tie. "What did we do right here? How did this happen?" It is a long story.

BEING GAY, ODDLY, was much harder for me than it was for Jim.

Odd, that is, because he is the good Catholic boy from the South Side of Chicago, the former altar boy whose family visits the parish church every Sunday.

And yet he accepted his sexual orientation with a matter-of-fact calm you might find in a kid from a liberal San Francisco clan. It may not have been so simple for the rest of the Richter family, but Jim found his gayness simply an intriguing but mostly inconsequential aspect of his identity. His intuitive mother wondered one day when he was 21. She asked, he told. She offered no religious condemnations, so he felt no need to disassociate from his faith. Life continued.

My process was longer, more dramatic. I am the youngest of four children raised Jewish in the lap of Long Island luxury. To my mind, the Judaism of my upbringing was a cultural habit, a bond between generations and a cause for family gatherings to fulfill annual traditions. Rarely was it presented as a guiding set of moral principles, and never did I hear a foul word about homosexuality in the context of God.

No, my poor image of gays and lesbians came from the media, which is the only place I ever saw them during the 1980s. What I saw typically - a swishy, sissy portrayal used for comic relief - disgusted me so much that I hoped the tug of gay attraction would pass as my hair-twirling phase did. I didn't want to be so ridiculed; I'd just spent my pre-adolescent life absorbing merciless, unceasing barbs from my peers for my hearing disability. As a teen, I just wanted to be normal, if not cool.

So I fought it, but it became impossible to deny. One high-school afternoon, I watched six gay men on Donahue tell their miserable tales. Five were spurned by their families; the sixth was in electroshock therapy in a vain hope of "converting back." At the hour's end, I stared into a bathroom mirror with tears streaming down my face and a steak knife pointed at my chest. That was me, I thought. I am that. Everybody will hate me.

Fortunately, I lacked the guts to do myself any harm. Unfortunately, it took me another four years to realize I was perfectly normal.

This epiphany came in my second year at Northwestern University near Chicago, on Yom Kippur. As I contemplated my sins of the prior year during the closing services for the Jewish day of atonement, I came to the startling realization that my most significant transgression had been the fact that I had become a chronic liar.

And I counted the ways. I lied to my straight friends by ogling pretty women with them in order to "pass." I lied to gay people by avoiding their presence and disparaging them to my straight friends. I lied to women by pretending to want to date them, occasionally leaving them questioning what they'd done to cause my rejection. I lied to my parents, with whom a comfortable conversation seemed a distant memory because I chose to hide my internal hell.

But as I heard the mournful, earnest voice of our campus rabbi leading our repentance ceremony in Hebrew that evening, I realized I'd lied chiefly and most destructively to myself. I had alienated everybody I cared about. I was more alone than I ever had been.

Jewish law requires us to perform some form of penance to repair damage done by sins, and to me this meant that I would have to tell. If they all knew, maybe they would understand, and perhaps then they could forgive my lies. But would they be able to embrace me?

Suddenly, that question seemed irrelevant. They don't embrace me now, I thought. What's to lose?

But it wasn't quite that easy, no matter how forceful my logic felt. I saw a gay therapist, attended a coming-out support group and eventually confided through letters to friends in other cities who couldn't reject me to my face. None did so in writing, either.

Their encouragement led me to show my face at a gay campus dance, where I encountered people I knew from the school newspaper and my dorm. I begged them to keep my secret, but some didn't and the sky failed to fall. Still, to take back control, I set about to reveal myself before someone else did, first telling trusted on-campus friends, then some childhood friends during that summer vacation, and, in one final stop before the main event of my parents, I tried the act out on my aunt.

I was batting 1.000. Not a single listener told me to get lost. One even came out right back at me.

For a time, despite all of this progress, I continued to cling to the hope that perhaps one truly awful sexual encounter with a man would turn me off for good, or maybe one perfect moment with a girl would make all of this stress and fear disappear. Neither happened, and I came to understand that most unfathomable part about homosexuality: It's not about sex.

No, it's not. It's an intangible, deeply rooted emotional and physical attraction to people of your own gender that comes freely and easily when unimpeded by societal pressure and condemnation, something that can be ignored only at great psychological costs. Few people who are gay can even recall their first gay thought, just as straight people may not remember their first heterosexual fantasies. That's because it's neither a choice nor a biological error; it just is.

With this epiphany, I asked my father to dinner on Christmas Eve in 1992. I'd planned this moment for months, returning to my hometown of Syosset, N.Y., for my winter break knowing I'd have my father's ear because Mom would be at my grandmother's in Fort Lauderdale that week. Other gay men often express surprise that I told Dad first, since it's a cliché in the gay world that "mothers always know" and always understand better. In my family, though, we tend to confide in my father, who knows best how Mom will react.

I sat across the table from my father with my mouth open, the critical words failing to emit, finding it hard to breathe. Then I saw the fear in his eyes as he impatiently waited to hear some truly horrible confession, that I'd gotten someone pregnant, I'd contracted a disease, I'd committed a crime, I'd flunked out of school, I'd.

"I'm gay," I blurted.

I stared at him the way a kid stares after he drops a water balloon, cowering so he's not seen but unable to resist watching the splat.

There came no splat. Just a few quiet moments that seemed likely to last into 1993. "I knew that," he finally answered, almost flippantly.

I let out a huge breath, exhaling as if I'd been under water for 20 years. A seven-hour conversation ensued, taking us from the dinner table to our den at home where all the great issues and problems were considered and resolved. There was much to catch up on for a father and his son who hadn't spoken honestly in at least a decade.

This time, though, resolution was elusive. My father's initial reaction made me think I was home free, and for the most part I was.

But his acknowledgment that he knew I'm gay wasn't the same as acceptance, and I would learn many times over in coming years that well-meaning people say what they think is appropriate but not necessarily what they feel.

Dad wavered between betraying his true, somewhat disgusted, emotions and offering me the comfort he felt duty-bound to provide. First he'd confess he had avoided gay people as friends and clients his whole life, that the whole thing made him uncomfortable. Then he'd insist I'd done nothing wrong and that nobody deserved any blame because "it's probably all genetics anyway." He even "outed" two of his first cousins to me to prove this thing might be in the genes.

At one point he wondered aloud what exactly it was that gay men do with one another, but I asked him if he really wanted me to answer. He emitted a rare laugh, then withdrew the question.

Later he told me he believed that this "will make it harder for us to have a close relationship in the future," but it was my turn to chuckle. He clearly had no idea how far apart we'd already become.

Eventually, the night passed. On Christmas morning, spooning through pink grapefruits, we strategized about when to inform Mom. Dad asked me to hold off until the day after my youngest sister's wedding in March, hoping to avoid any upset that might detract from the event. I agreed to this reasonable request; I didn't mind three months to recover from this first exhausting experience.

I had but one ultimatum: I would be out to both of my parents by April 25. That was the day of the largest gay civil-rights march in history to date, and I intended to be able to say that my parents knew I was walking the streets of Washington, D.C., that day.

Then, a problem. A blizzard postponed the wedding to April 18, a Sunday, and I had important exams at school that Monday. I wouldn't be able to stay in New York, and my father continued to insist I still not reveal myself before the nuptials.

Thus, we compromised. I handed a letter to my father on my sister's wedding day and instructed him to give it to Mom that Monday evening. I'd be expecting her call.

At the scheduled time, the phone rang. It was my father, informing me that Mom wished to speak to me. Yet next I heard not a voice, for she was barely capable of speech, but wheezing and sniffling. My mother was in hysterics.

"Ma, Ma," I cooed to her, my own cheeks now drenched in tears. "Mommy, I love you. I love you so much."

She continued to bawl. She kept trying to say my name, but she couldn't get all the syllables out. I didn't know what to do, how to behave, why my father was allowing this to go on for so long. My brain registered only one thought. I said, "I'm so sorry, Mommy. So sorry."

With that, Mom suddenly hushed. "No," she rasped, finally able to speak. "You say you're sorry when you do something wrong. You haven't done anything wrong." I recall nothing else of that night, except a lot more crying. My mother would cry every day for the rest of the week, during which time I would come out to almost every other relative at my father's direction.

But contrary to that aforementioned bit of gay conventional wisdom, mothers don't always know. Mine had no idea. It had never entered the realm of possibility to her, and she later would describe the news as a punch in the gut. Still, she was able to gather herself at the height of her meltdown and realize the broader truth here. She said, "You haven't done anything wrong." And that has made all of the difference.

I attended my March on Washington, a 20-year-old leading three reporters and a photographer from my student newspaper - pretending all the while I was capable of being an objective, uninvolved presiding editor.

On the day before the march, we arrived to cover the story of the mammoth AIDS Quilt being laid out on the Mall before the Washington Monument. The concept of being among so many gay people so overwhelmed me that I broke away from my group to scour the Quilt on my own and to recall the importance of avoiding HIV. Up until that time, I didn't worry much about AIDS because I didn't think anyone I knew would care if I died. Now I felt obligated to honor the immense love my family had afforded me by resolving not to act recklessly.

As unified as I felt with "my people," I was lonely, too. That's why when I spotted a collection of vaguely familiar college students from a university south of Chicago, I ambled over. I knew none of them by name, although they recognized me, too, from a gay student conference we'd all attended months earlier. We introduced ourselves, and then I blurted out what I'd been dying to tell someone that day: "I came out to my mother five days ago."

Jim Richter, then 22, found this awfully forward. The tall, round-faced boy with a smattering of sun freckles and brown eyes wasn't the type to offer such intimate information about himself to perfect strangers.

"Oh, really," he said hesitantly, "good for you."

Neither of us knows what happened to the other folks in Jim's party. They fell away at that moment, and the two of us walked aimlessly around the Mall alone. He was fascinated and somewhat shocked by my ability to reveal inner details of myself; I was amused by his need to be so strait-laced and private. He told me he aspired to be a doctor; I promised to become a famous writer. He couldn't stop talking about family; neither could I.

We spent an hour together that Saturday afternoon, at the end of which I further stunned and intrigued my future partner by pecking his cheek before we parted. We both returned to our respective Illinois colleges a bit surprised how quickly we'd clicked and wondering if that would translate once we resumed our ordinary routines. He called me at 4 a.m. the morning he returned to his off-campus apartment, "just to see if this phone number really worked." We talked for so long that I was late for my noon class.

For a few weeks we coasted along on the miraculous sensation of a new romance. We sat one afternoon in a coffeehouse in Chicago comparing our philosophies on our future as fathers. Both of us had already given it a great deal of thought, and both of us had determined adopting from overseas was the most reasonable, most socially appropriate way to become dads. What was so great about our genetic material, we agreed, that we need to create new life in an already overpopulated world? Was the ego kick of having a kid with my nose and eyebrows that significant?

"I don't care if the kid is a newborn," I said. "And I don't even care if he's healthy, either."

At this moment, we realized what we had. Jim looked at me agape. His dream, he explained, had always been to raise disabled children. "I never believed anyone else would want to do it with me," he marveled.

That made two of us.

Continue to Part 2