Haunted Houses and Witches

photo: Eric Diesel

Like many of my generation, I grew up on monsters. The Addams Family and The Munsters were broadcast back-to-back after school, their black-and-white camp counterpointed by the lovable day-glo silliness of The Groovie Goolies and Scooby Doo. The weekend late show on the Tulsa tv station showed monster flicks. I don't mean the wonderful B movies of the fifties and sixties -- I discovered those later -- but the originals: Dracula, Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, The Invisible Man. I loved the gothic glamour with which Tod Browning told Dracula's story and the icy elegance with which Bela Lugosi embodied it. I loved the way James Whale wed wry (and, as it turned out, hard-won) social observance to a real sense of fear to create atmosphere and how, in turn, he used atmosphere to convey story. All of these were part of the evolving cultural aesthetic called "horror."

Of course, I couldn't have articulated these things at the time. I just knew I liked the style of haunted houses and witches. As a boy, I was supposed to want to be a cowboy or an astronaut or a football player. To be otherwise set me apart where I grew up, in a time and place where binary gender essentialism provided not just context but content. In that time and place – not that different than here and now – it was fundamental to cultural cognition that boys did this and girls did that and that the two were polar opposites. To challenge it, even if you were just a kid who wasn’t consciously choosing to issue a challenge, wasn’t just confrontational, it was outright anarchy. If a boy was going to like monsters, it should not be because he perceived beauty or style in anything, but certainly not the cobwebby eaves of a haunted house or the swirling black robes of a witch. If a boy was going to like monsters, it should be because monsters were aggressive. It should be because monsters were scary. Identifying with aggression and fear reflected the boy’s boyness and reflecting that, in turn, reassured the adults about the male in the making.

During that childhood of haunted houses and witches, I was expressing a gift for aesthetics. Thank Hecate that my grandmother was there to recognize the gift, to value it, to nurture it, to run interference with the never-ending parade of adults who thought -- wrongly -- that it was not a talent that should be encouraged in a boy. I get asked about her quite often. The only real response I have is that I wish you could have met her. She was strong and somewhat contradictory: a fancy city girl who had managed a collective farm of several families during the dustbowl Depression, a homesteader who would have been the first to decry that in comprehensively managing a home she wasn't expending any special effort, an Osage Indian woman who didn't wear braids or beads. Perhaps her ability to navigate apparent contradiction explains why she never questioned that I should learn to keep house. I think she was thrilled to have a student who was so ready to receive the lessons she had to teach: about the fundamental rightness of making a home, of the importance of remembering, of how skills and tasks like gardening and cooking and cleaning and memory-keeping were concrete ways of living in attunement to the ever-spinning cycles of time and that doing that was a veneration of life itself. What is a grandmother but a crone -- that aspect of wisdom embodied in the cultural symbol of the wicked witch? For that matter, what is a haunted house but a place where atmosphere provides memory a place to coalesce?

There is a lot of discourse right now about the problem of bullying in our society, especially in schools. As I write this, I am exhorted to wear purple to show solidarity against the epidemic of bullying. I am glad to wear purple. I am glad that we are talking about this. We should be talking about it, as long as talk leads to action. I believe in the It Gets Better movement. But my heart breaks for those kids who never got a chance. While we’re patting ourselves on our backs for having the dialogue, I believe that we owe an apology to everyone who was affected by the countless conversations that never happened.

I cannot stress enough that I am doing fine now, but I was bullied relentlessly in high school and regularly in college. To their shame (please note, alumni associations), in neither institution did almost any of the adults in charge exert any special effort to correct the bullies’ behavior. In fact, in many instances those adults in charge were participants. I came through both institutions with some good experiences and some very good relationships, and I treasure these. But it wasn’t until I got to graduate school – an urban school, where they knew how to manage this issue as due course from managing cultural breadth – that I came into my own.

Once I struck out on my own I found out that I wasn’t alone in any of what I had been told all my life were my weirdnesses. In fact, there were entire communities built around them.  They were comprised of people who had themselves often been treated as freaks as they were growing up. How delighted we were to find each other, and how organically we formed community. Though we were different in a myriad of ways, most of us had been hassled for being so, and either that experience or sympathy for it was our commonality.

I don't want to give the impression that it was utopian. Often it was messy. We were young, and we navigated as much by trial and error as we did by the equally traditional youthful gifts of passion and resiliency and newness. But we were also kind and generous and fun and accepting. We were heartfelt and dead serious about our belief that all people deserve respect and that no one deserves to be ostracized. Accordingly, we were keenly aware of the invisible kids, who might have given anything for the courage to assert themselves within the safety of community, even just for the chance to explore it. And that is why I repeat that, while we are having the important cultural dialogue about bullying, we need not just to put action into place to address it.  We owe an apology to every current and former kid to whom harm was done while this dialogue wasn't happening and when no action was forthcoming.

As an out gay man -- but also beyond being one -- my heart breaks for all of the kids who are broken by the unforgivable act of bullying. I can write that because through my grandmother I grew up believing in my talent.  Believing in my talent forced me to believe in myself. That gave me the courage -- the imperative, really -- to take the difficult road away from the western plains. Others appeared to help along the way, and I am grateful to every one of them.  Eventually, I made it to the city for grad school, where I studied design and education and published about gender in the academic press.  I numbered among my personal acquaintances not just LGBTQ people but nerds and weirdos and punks and Goths of every sex and all genders. In fact, lest I be accused of my own form of xenophobia, I'll share that my first serious boyfriend was a varsity athlete.

From them all, I received something that brought me to this keyboard right now, and through this keyboard I try to return the gifts. I write consistently about what I learned from my grandmother. From my friends from high school and college and grad school and work, I was given and still receive the gift of acceptance; of appreciation for and encouragement of talent in its limitless expressions; of the simple, vital importance of fun. I met my life mate in grad school, and I cannot even begin to describe the depth of his gift to me by simply existing. With him, I have made a home.

Fundamentally, there is shelter. From shelter, we create home. How we do that is the homekeeper's gift, but it is a gift that is a contribution. A house begins as a building, and then a home grows there to protect and reflect the sacred lives within it. If, as you read this lifestyle blog, you find something that interests, educates or inspires you, then that pleases me, for that is why I write it. If, as you read this column, you care to reach out to some kids who do not have the gift of home, then click here.

Aesthetes are often characterized as shallow or impractical or frivolous or snobbish, especially during challenging economic times. I try to write, not to mention live, from the firm conviction, whose elemental structure comes from the tutelage of a wise woman who had learned the lessons of the Great Depression, that an aesthetic of living is not a luxury but a commitment to and gesture of respect for the sacred gift of time. To prepare a meal at home, to can your own food, to hem your own clothes, are the lessons of not just thrift but of using your means, whatever they are, to commemorate the gift of life.  Preparing your own food means learning how to use herbs and spices to season it; hemming your own clothes means remembering the person who taught you to sew.  Daily living is full of details, and every one of them is sacred.

I frequently have to defend myself both for having aesthetics and -- still! -- for being a homemaker. No matter what, to some good taste is superfluous, and boys aren't supposed to have it. I understand that sometimes it's simple insecurity, that people are worried about having their own tastes be judged (something that, as far as I'm concerned, no person of true good taste would ever allow themselves to do). But it's also more insidious than that.  Just this week I weathered the blanket statement that "men have no idea how to give a party."  I understand that the individual who said this said it in frustration, probably over a party that they needed help with and with a man who, in fact, either didn't know how to help or couldn't be bothered to.  Nonetheless, I was standing there with an arm full of Halloween party favors I had just created.  Not ten minutes later someone else was noticeably shocked to learn that I not only know how to make caramel apples, I make the caramel from scratch and from a recipe committed to memory.

To paraquote the phrase of the moment, though it absolutely does get better, the effects of the small-mindedness whose root is binary gender bigotry do not entirely go away.  The deeper truth of the transactions above was the automatic positioning of a sentiment whose fundamental architecture is binary gender bigotry.  Yes, bigotry.  It is telling to me that, in both instances, when I said something, the response almost instantly turned to conciliation, as if to palliate an assault I had experienced on my masculinity.  This is a derailment, and it is also the point. Like any talent, the talent for creative living is not inherently gendered.  There are plenty of males who have it and plenty of females who don't.  And that is true across the spectrum of gender.

So what does any of this have to do with with Halloween? When we recently redid our living room, part of the process involved transplanting some of the furnishings from the office. We call the office the goth room. Old paper and ink are the inspirations for the color scheme of the room, and so books are offset against dark wood, amber glass, and golden fabric. Mortuary and cemetery collectibles intermingle with vintage fortune-telling arcana and scary lab equipment from John's med school days. Shelves are dressed with vultures, bats and ravens. I collect witches, and these crones cackle throughout the room, alighting on broomsticks, stirring cauldrons, clutching frogs -- more grandly, weaving the magics of safety and memory. I also collect haunted houses.  They are lined up side by side just like on Mockingbird Lane, silhouetted on console shelves in front of the window.  There they await, a coalescence of memory, welcoming anyone who has the vision to look inside.