You should write a book!

Growing Up Queer in the 80s

My mom was queer. Bi wasn't considered much of a thing where we grew up, so she was more of an intermittent lesbian. She had female lovers, but after my early childhood, the girls never stuck around long, and most of her partners were men. He partners were generally lesbian women or straight men. Most of the straight men were not exactly what one might call role models. 

Most of the people who were around me when I was a child were queer in some fashion. My mom's best friend was a man named Charlie, who cut hair, but there were a lot of gay people because Texas in the 80s was not a super safe place for gay folks. 

This was despite the fact that my mom was good friends with the local mafia don that people often called "the fairy godfather," but never to their face. Now, I don't know their preferred gender or if they even knew what trans was, but mom called her Miss Johnny, and I did, too. That may have just been a catty joke between them, and as they have both passed, I will never know. 

What I did know was that Miss Johnny was no one to fuck with. Miss Johnny was about 5 foot nothing, but she always had two sturdy strapping hispanic boys with her at all times, as bodyguards and to open doors. Miss Johnny never opened her own doors. Miss Johnny didn't have any teeth, but damn could they drink. They were one of my mom's few friends who could drink her under the table. 

Looking back, and piecing together what I know about queer culture, local Mexican culture, and what I heard, I think Miss Johnny was the 'queer uncle' of a local Don, abused for a long time for not fitting into the culture until her brothers died. Then she took over, and ruled both more successfully and more brutally than any of her relatives, her competence eventually overcoming the more traditional elements of the local criminal element. 

What a lot of people don't understand about being queer in Texas is that because of the overarching conservatism of pretty much the whole place, there was a really doomsday party element to being queer there. "Party like you might die tomorrow, because you genuinely might," if you know what I mean. And AIDS just made that worse. 

I also remember a local club that the mafia frequented, though I won't say the name here, just in case it still does this, but the mafia ran several clubs in our little town, and one, one night a month, hosted a drag night. It was a time when all the queer gangsters could let their hair down and belt out torch songs in drag. It was also a prime queer hookup spot. I was allowed to go a few times before it became an outright pornographic affair. 

But god help you if you were a straight who ended up there on the wrong night. They had bouncers and such, to keep the place safe, but being outed could be a death sentence in those days, so if someone witnessed, someone who could talk... I heard stories of people who ended up there by mistake ending up in a ditch. 

I don't know if it was true, but it was said seriously, with no hint of the humor the queer folks usually had for a tousle-headed kid. 

I was raised among a rough element of queer criminals, service workers, drug dealers, and addicts, with just a few "acceptable" gays thrown in there. One was a psychologist who saw me when the allegations of abuse came out. It wasn't until I was in my 30s that I realized lesbians could be boring. I'd met horrible people, racist, sexist, even homophobic queer folks, but never had I met a boring one. It was revelatory.