Editorial
Ain't no place like alone for the holidays
by David Ortmann
originally appeared in the Bay Area Reporter, December 14, 2000
"What are you doing for the holidays?" People always ask.
When I tell them I am spending it alone, they look at me like I just sodomized a toddler in their kitchen.
And then they invite me to dinner!
I have over ten dinner invitations, four brunches, two potlucks, and a spa weekend offer, and it's not even December yet! Anything people can do to insure that I'm not spending the holidays alone, they've done.
Last Christmas, at my parent's house, with a Willie Brown smile shellacked to my face; I hugged and shook hands with an parade of people, most of whom I couldn't remember meeting. I felt like a bride at a bad wedding. a bride without the dress! One particular woman started laughing when she saw me. She had to be eighty years old. I said hello and wished her the best of the holiday season, but she just kept giggling. Finally, her husband intervened.
"You see, my wife hasn't seen you since you were four."
"No, Herbert, let me explain." The woman said, regaining composure.
"I haven't seen you since Christmas of 1978 and, oh my word I am blushing so, you kept taking your. your penis. out of your pants and showing it to me. 'This is my penis' you would say. You seemed so proud of it. Oh, God, and here you are now, a grown man. I'm just so embarrassed!"
What does one say to something like this?
"Well, I promise I won't show you my penis tonight, unless you ask really nicely." I winked at her and she laughed so hard she almost went into cardiac arrest right there in front of me.
So this year, I am going to stay in San Francisco. Not lonely, just alone.
With apologies to Garbo, the truth is I want to be alone. I like my family and I can't wait to celebrate the holidays with them, in March, when all the fast paced, buy-it-now-before-it's-too-late craziness has gone away.
I remember the last holiday season I spent alone, which was more or less thrust upon me. It was the very early 1990s and, freshly returned from a teaching gig in Europe, I was twenty-two, poor, alone, and newly out to my family as gay. I was slaving at Bloomingdale's department store schlepping dress shirts I'd never be able to afford at my six dollar per hour pay rate. Homeless, I was couch-surfing with various friends until I saved enough money to get my own apartment. My boyfriend at the time was home with his family, as were all my friends. I had no home, no lover, and no money.
I filled that holiday season with volunteer work, church work, homeless outreach, soup kitchen support, and warm clothing drives. In the end, I think this vegetarian homosexual pulled apart over thirty roast turkeys! The work gave me purpose, filled the hours, and showed me that my own perceived misfortunes were much lesser than so many others were.
This holiday season I'll be alone again, but by choice this time. I may pick up that book that's been gathering dust on my bedside table, the one I've been telling myself I am too busy to read. Maybe I'll go for that hike up to Corona Heights that I've been meaning to do for years now and then take a bath using my roommate's sweet-smelling foot scrub. Maybe I'll fix myself my favorite dinner and bring half of it to the schizophrenic guy that sleeps on my apartment steps in the colder months. Maybe I'll just think of all the things I have to be thankful for. and there is so much, I realize that I might need more than just one holiday season to think of it all.