I don’t know why I’m still on Facebook. When I was a senior at Cornell, it was one of the first few schools to be added to the site, which at the time was an elitist yearbook-like website for the Ivy League (and Stanford, Berkeley, and Georgetown). It’s just a tab that’s constantly open on my laptop, something that’s been with me my whole adult life. I guess I haven't deactivated for sentimental reasons combined with the fact that my siblings, parents, and aunts post things I might not otherwise see. When Facebook started, it felt so fun and novel. And even though it’s turned into a hellscape of misinformation, I’m still on it.
I think a lot about the fact that my generation was the first to grow up with constant reminders of our origins, posted in picture and video form daily on Facebook. It’s meant that things like high school reunions are now redundant - we know what Ashley Tompkins from our high school freshman class is up to because she’s been posting about it on Facebook for the past nineteen years. In some ways, I’ve found this kind of a relief because you don’ have to work too hard to check in on people. In other ways it makes me kind of sad. How can you have a reunion with people from your past if you’ve never left them?
The other day I tabbed over to Facebook and scrolled until a post immediately jolted me. A guy from the class ahead of me at Mariposa County High School had died. He was forty-one. The obituary provided no cause for his death. I’m going to call him Shane for the purposes of this story because his death is pretty recent and I want to respect his family’s privacy.
Upon reading this news, tears involuntarily began falling out of my eyes. Like not purposeful crying, just active tears coming from a place I didn’t understand. I was in the middle of working on a particularly unsatisfying design project but I had to stop working and lay down. I do this sometimes when I get overwhelmed. Go over to the sofa and ask Satie, my two-and-a-half year old honey-colored pit bull, to come snuggle me. She usually comes when I ask for snuggles, and if not she doesn’t mind being picked up like a baby and held like the teddy bear she is. She is medicine and whenever I am upset I go to her for comfort. Getting that dog has been, quite possibly, the only good decision I’ve made since the pandemic started.
Sun streamed through the arched windows of my little Spanish bungalow in LA. I laid there for a while, a little bewildered by my own response to this news. Shane had been close with a lot of my friends, but we were not really friends. And this made me wonder why I was so upset.
I laid there in pit-bull-snuggling, tear soaked daze thinking about it. Why was this hitting me so hard?
To understand the depths of my gratitude for Shane, class of 1999 at Mariposa County High School, you kind of have to understand the context of what life was like in the late nineties in the community I attended high school, a small town called Mariposa at the base of the Sierra foothills.
People think of California as a sea of liberals, but quite frankly once you get away from the coast, you’re in pretty conservative territory out here. I grew up in Yosemite Valley, an hour’s drive from Mariposa but a grizzly two-hour bus ride (each way) that made the town feel like it was a thousand miles away. Yosemite is pretty middle-of-the-road politically, leaning neither liberal nor conservative. As you can imagine, growing up in a pretty neutral place with the same fourteen kids in my class from kindergarten through eighth grade, only to be bussed off to a school in a completely different climate (geographically, culturally, and politically) was a culture shock to me and my Yosemite classmates. I remember turning to my sister (two years older) when I arrived to campus and saying “we’re in California why do all these kids have southern accents?” I grew up in California but still somehow managed to go to high school in the Deep South.
Mariposa County High School was the kind of school where guys in tight wranglers and cowboy hats sat on the back of their trucks chewing tobacco. It was the kind of place where a baseball coach called my brother and his friends faggots for having long hair (this actually happened). It was the kind of place where the drama teacher had his students to pray before plays. It was the kind of place where the choir (which I was in) sang mostly about Jesus. It was basically a place where alt right Christian politics were not only unquestioned, they were the norm.
While I was in high school a twenty-one year old named Matthew Shepard was beaten, tortured, tied to a fence, and left to die for being gay.
While I was in high school, Columbine happened.
While I was in high school, Prop 22 passed, stating that marriage was between a man and a woman.
While I was in high school, “Will & Grace” was about it for us.
While I was in high school, the Defense of Marriage Act passed with overwhelming support from both Democrats and Republicans.
In this era women and girls were routinely sex-shamed and asked about their virginity (think of Diane Sawyers interviewing Britney Spears asking about her status). And gay people were cast as deviants and predators, mostly by the Republican Party, to get people to vote. During this time, The Boy Scouts (an organization I participated in as a child) banned gay people from being scout leaders.
I don’t think about this stuff that often but it completely shaped the way I feel about myself and my place in the world. Recently, I went with Kelly to see her brilliant daughter Bea perform in her junior high school’s glee club. During intermission, Kelly had to use the restroom so I waited for her outside the auditorium. And a kind of terror arose over me as I realized I was a grown adult man, with a mustache, standing alone outside a middle school.
Gay men my age were raised to feel like we were, innately, predators that shouldn’t be allowed around children. There were literally policies that enforced this (see Boy Scouts example above).
Gay men my age grew up knowing it was likelier we’d die of AIDS than fall in love.
Gay men my age knew if were assaulted many people would think we’d asked for it by failing to conform to the rigid standards of masculinity constantly shoved down our throats.
This was a fucking terrible time and I do not miss it.
Which brings me back to just how radical Shane was.
Shane was joy. As I said before, we weren’t close. Probably because in some ways we knew we had to keep each other at a certain distance or be found out. I was semi-out of the closet in high school (my friends and family knew but it wasn’t like there was a GSA to go to or anything). Shane was not. And I don’t know much about his family other than they seemed friendly and his little sister was always sweet to me. They were country people though, and I do wonder if that combined with the conservative surroundings made Shane feel like he couldn’t be fully open. I had very liberal and accepting parents and most of the people in Yosemite weren’t openly homophobic so my situation was different than his.
There’s no subtle way of saying it, so I’m just gonna say Shane was not straight acting. He was swishy, he had a gay accent, he wasn’t traditionally masculine. And neither was I. While he’d grown up with all the kids in our high school, I’d grown up in a different community altogether. He had ties that linked him back to those kids from kindergarten and those ties allowed him, at least with some people, to be his sweet gay self without question. I didn’t really process it until now, but seeing that was a huge comfort to me. Nothing about his sexuality was said explicitly, but I think at least subconsciously his friends knew and accepted who he was.
My freshman year of high school was dismal. Until then, I’d done the bare minimum with school, doing just what I needed to pass. I found it hard to concentrate and it always took me so much longer than everyone else to do the same amount of work. I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was thirty-seven, which brought a lot of clarity to why concentrating in school was a challenge for me.
As you can imagine, I - a weird gay kid who listened to Bjork and David Bowie - wasn’t welcomed with open arms when I arrived to high school. I was also still such a kid, fresh off loving Disney and playing with Barbies. I don’t know why I stayed so young for so long, but I think a lot of it was escapism, wanting to be anywhere but where I was, the feeling that the closer I crept towards adulthood the worse things were getting. There was a decent amount of bullying but I was lucky in that I avoided much of homophobic wrath I may have otherwise experienced because my older brother had been well-liked at the school and my sister, still currently a student, had a “scary” reputation because she had dyed hair and lots of piercings. Even with those privileges, I got picked on a lot. Sarah, who sat behind me in math, would whisper “faggot” for the entirety of the period. I got stabbed in the arm with a pencil. And so on. It was generally an awful time.
I remember seeing Shane for the first time and clocking his gayness. Mariposa County High School was bifurcated in the silliest, most cartoonish way possible. The liberal students, mostly kids from Yosemite and El Portal (the town just outside the park gates I like to call “Yosemite’s Brooklyn” because all the cool alt people live there) hung out on the left side of the school. The conservative kids (pretty much everyone else) hung out on the righthand side of the school.
Shane and his friends hung out sort of in the middle. To the right of the tree where all the alt liberal kids hung out but to the left of the hardcore conservative area. Yes, the school was really divided like that. It was like straight out of a dumb teen movie from 2005.
Shane did things I had never thought about, things that did not seem available to me. He joined clubs, was an active member of our campus community, and mostly was just nice to everyone. He was loved because he was just sincerely friendly and interested. In a way that was both transparently authentic and also highly personalized - this wasn’t just generic niceness, it was a genuine interest in other human beings.
Shane was also part of ASB, what our school called our student government. Seeing him involved like that sparked something for me. Maybe, despite the fact that I didn’t really fit in, I could do the same.
I went on to really buckle down on my school work. I realized if I was ever going to have the agency to escape this area, I’d have to get into a great college. So I joined every club that was even marginally related to my interests. Eventually, I also made it into ASB, something that I saw as the ultimate form of campus inclusion. Who knows why I got into college but I’m assuming at least part of it was how involved in campus activities I was. And I would have never thought any of that was possible if it had not been for Shane.
The past three years have been rough for me. It’s felt really lonely. My show being canceled at the onset of covid, followed by two very challenging, financially stressful years, has left me constantly questioning myself and feeling like I don’t know what to do. That phrase, “I don’t know what to do” “I don’t know what to do” “I don’t know what to do” has just echoed through my head. I don’t think there’s been a time I have felt quite this alone, quite this idiotic, and quite this irresponsible ever in my life.
But what a gift to find actual gratitude in the discovery that someone from your past helped you, paved a way.
They say that expressing gratitude is a good strategy to find joy. But I find that pressuring yourself to feel gratitude you’re not naturally feeling already can sometimes have the opposite effect, making you feel worse, like you’re a dick for not being thankful enough.
But man am I thankful for Shane and so sad he’s gone. He’s the reason I was able to join in on campus. And I’m pretty sure that’s the reason I got into college and have the life that I had.
You never really know who is coming up behind you, watching you, and what you are facilitating for them. I hope that in my years of pushing stuff out there I’ve made one one thousandth of the impact on someone Shane made on me.
Shane’s death has been felt so fully, by so many people. He deserved a much longer life and we are all worse off for him being gone so soon.
My wish for Kid Shane and Kid Me would be that we’d gone to high school in a better time where being friends felt more possible and where he was openly celebrated for being exactly who he was, not just being a supporting character to everyone else in his life. I also wish I’d had this epiphany - the realization that Shane had opened so many doors for me - a long time ago and was able to thank him for it.
Shane’s death has made me look back on my life for the helpers, the people who trailblazed and made way for me. It’s a nice feeling to think about those people - and there are many (I hope to write about them all eventually). So if there’s any lesson here it’s to examine your past for those who paved a path for you, find them, and thank them.
And so, to Shane, thank you. In ways big and small, you made many elements of my life possible.
With World Pride just finishing in Australia today, this was a timely read (yep, I just read it).
I'm a Cis female and I've worked and lived with LBTQIA+ folk, since I was 20.
I am so grateful for my experiences and all I've learned from and with these amazing, good humans.
These are the most authentic, real, no bullshit people ever!
You are too! 💓 Bless Satie.🐾
Orlando, fiiinally, your TV show is on in Australia and #You.Are.A.Joy!
Your authenticity shines through and I feel privileged to be able to watch you work your magic, for real.
Mmwwaahh! Rusty 🥰
I see a lot of memes and posts about how being "authentic" is a good branding strategy or can make you more successful, which is total bs. Really being our vulnerable, true selves takes a lot of courage and can lead to a lot of disappointment and heartache but it is still the only meaningful way to live. I think you embody that for people and there is tremendous value in that. Keep being you.