Guilt - Kent Wright

“He forgives us if we ask.” I was standing on the sidewalk in my hometown speaking with a woman I had not seen in perhaps forty years. She had asked if I was still out there in San Francisco. I looked at her for a moment as what she was saying sunk in. I sensed she felt on the solid footing of a high moral ground. It felt familiar, that giving a message without saying it, and I made a decision.

“Forgive for what?”

“Our choices,” she replied quietly.

“My choice you mean?” She smiled with benevolence and I added, “The coffee is on me if you have a few minutes because I would love to tell you about my choice.”

We settled into a booth in the coffee shop. She sat opposite me with one hand on each side of a white mug.

“So my choice. It was the summer I turned thirteen. It was a Tuesday in July, muggy as anything and outside one of those steady summer rains had set in. So I was stuck there, no bike, no ball to play, nothing to do but lay there on my bed with that antsy boredom that sets in so quickly when you are thirteen. My mind bumped around from thing to thing but finally settled down around what I was going to do with life. I decided to make some decision, one decision anyway, that afternoon about what would be on my road outside the city limits of this little town. You know what I settled on?”

The woman opposite in the booth shook her head.

“I decided to be a homosexual. Not that I really knew anything about it,” I mused looking off like I was remember just what it was like that afternoon. “There was not one person I knew growing up, even from a distance, that I could identify with that label homosexual. Not one. And what I had absorbed from the innuendo, slang and looks of society about it was the picture of a blank, fogged in pit of loneliness, isolation and rejection, but when you are thirteen, you feel you can whip it all sometimes. I decided laying there on my bed on that hot, rainy July day in 1955 ‘ what the hell, I am going to be one of those homosexuals. I made the choice right then and there. It was easy.” I was looking directly at the woman. She didn’t speak. “And do you know what the great thing about that is? Great for you I mean?”

“For me?,” she asked just above a whisper.

“If I can make that choice to be one, so can you!” and gave her a big, warm smile of reassurance.

“But,” my booth mate said finally, “I’m not that way.”

“So? If it is a choice, you can choose to be homosexual too. What is the problem?”

“I don’t have those feelings.”

“Feelings? Forget feelings. Choice. It is choice remember?”