Making a Man Out of Me by Richard Blanco

This is the man who read a poem at the inauguration of President Obama yesterday:

Making a Man Out of Me

From Elledge, Jim and David Groff, WHO'S YER DADDY? GAY WRITERS CELEBRATE THEIR MENTORS AND FORERUNNERS. © 2012 by the Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. Reprinted by permission of The University of Wisconsin Press.

I'm six or seven years old, riding back home with my grandfather and my Cuban grandmother from my tía Onelia's house.

Her son Juan Alberto is effeminate, "un afeminado," my grandmother says with disgust. "¿Por qué? He's so handsome. Where did she go wrong with dat niño?" she continues, and then turns to me in the back seat: "Better to having a granddaughter who's a whore than a grandson who is un pato faggot like you. Understand?" she says with scorn in her voice.

I nod my head yes, but I don't understand: I don't know what a faggot means, really; don't even know about sex yet. All I know is she's talking about me, me; and whatever I am, is bad, very bad. Twenty-something years later, I sit in my therapist's office, telling him that same story. With his guidance through the months that follow, I discover the extent of my grandmother's verbal and psychological abuse, which I had swept under my subconscious rug.

Through the years and to this day I continue unraveling how that abuse affected my personality, my relationships, and my writing. I write, not in the light of Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, or Elizabeth Bishop, but in the shadow of my grandmother--a homophobic woman with only a sixth-grade education--who has exerted (and still exerts) the most influence on my development as a writer.

I am seven, I think. My grandmother tells me I eat wrong: "Don't use a straw, ever. Los Hombres don't drink soda with a straw. Now throw dat away and sit up." I look wrong: "Dios mío, you nosin but bones. Dat's why the boys at school push you around. Even a girl could beat you up. Now finish your steak, or else." My friends are all wrong: "I no taking you to dat Enrique's house neber again. He's a Mamacita's boy. I don't want you playing with him. I don't care what you say, those GI Joes he has are dolls. Do you want to play with dolls; is dat what you want señorita?"

I play wrong: "I told your mother not to get you those crayons for Christmas. You should be playing outside like un hombre, not coloring in your girly books like dat maricón Juan Alberto." I speak wrong: "Hay Santo, you sound like una niña on the phone. When is your voice going to change?" And I walk wrong too: "Stop clacking your sandals and jiggling like a sissy. Straighten up por Dios--we're in public." I am wrong ("I'll make a man out of you yet . . ."), afraid to do or say anything (". . . you'll see . . ."), scared to want or ask anything (". . . even if it kills me . . ."), ashamed to be alive.

At thirty-one, I sit at a candlelit table across from the man who will be my husband. I tell him about my grandmother and the coping mechanisms I developed; how they naturally led me to writing; mechanisms that became part of my very creative process. Becoming withdrawn and introverted, I grew to become an observer of the world, instead of a participant. In order to survive emotionally I learned to read my environment very carefully and then craft appropriate responses that would (hopefully) prevent abuse and ridicule from my grandmother. I explain to my husband-to-be that I am still that quiet, repressed boy whenever I am in a room full of people, trying to be as invisible as possible, but taking in every detail, sensory as well as emotional, that will eventually surface in a poem.

My work is often described as vivid and lush; relatives often marvel at my recollection in my poems of family events and details. Qualities I attribute directly to the skills spawned from my coping with my abuse. But beyond that, I've come to understand why writing and me became such a great fit. It allowed me to participate in the world, to feel alive, while remaining an invulnerable observer, safe in my room, at my desk, in my imagination where no one, especially my grandmother, could hurt me.

I'm eight, definitely. I remember because my grandmother is horrified that I'm already eight and haven't learned to ride a bike yet. "Qué barbaridad, no wonder . . . ," she tells me, leaving me to fill in the blanks with her words: No wonder: I'm a sissy, effeminate, a weakling. I'm used to her words for me. "I'll teach you," she barks, "Put your sneakers on." We walk my bike to the empty parking lot at St. Jude's Church where I pedal and fall; pedal and fall; pedal and finally glide in perfect balance, leaving her behind clapping and cheering me on: "¡Andale! Finally! ¡Andale!"

On the way back home, I ride my bike beside her as she praises me, "Qué bien. You did great! ¡Qué macho!" and kisses my forehead. That night she makes chicken fricasé--my favorite--with extra drumsticks and olives just for me. For a moment I can almost believe she loves me, that she'll never call me a faggot again, that she'll let me play with my sissy Legos and watercolors. But that very night she shoos my cat Ferby off my lap: "Stop dat. You looking like una niña sitting there petting dat thing. Why don't you like dogs?" Apparently, I have the wrong pet, too.

Twenty-eight years later, I get a cat at the suggestion of another therapist, who says it would be good for me; I should indulge myself. I name him Buddha--a leopard-spotted stray who follows me everywhere around the house. He kneads my arms and stomach; he licks my eyebrows. Though he's an animal, his "love" feels unconditional, unlike my grandmother, who only loved me if I didn't strike out at little league games; if I didn't swing my arms as I walked; if I sat still and behaved like the straight little boy she wanted to turn me into. At an early age I came to believe that all love was conditional like my grandmother's. Consequently, I shut down my emotional communication with others, because in my mind no one could be trusted. I became afraid to love, because no one could truly love a faggot like me: not my father or mother, not my brother--or my lovers. But writing allowed me to connect emotionally with others, albeit as a substitute for the real thing. In a poem I could love from a safe distance, love virtually; say what I couldn't ordinarily say, make myself vulnerable.

I'm nine, maybe ten, sitting on the family room sofa, sneaking a look through the Sears catalog, again: pages and pages of men without shirts, men in tight briefs, men in boots. Wanting to touch them, I run my fingers across their smooth chests, their hairy chests, their arms, their crotches, pretending. It feels good. It feels terrible. I want to touch myself, but I can't because that's what my grandmother means by faggot, I know that by then. She knows I know and that I'm up to no good when she bursts into the room.

Before I can stuff the catalog back into the magazine rack, she tears it from my hand, tosses it across the room, and yells: "Stop being such a mariconcito. You wanting me to put you in ballet classes? Is dat what you want? What's wrong with you? Go playing outside like a normal boy." Instead I dash to my bedroom. In tears I tear out a page from my composition book and write: I, Ricardo De Jesus Blanco, swear to never do what I did today, ever, ever again, or else. As God as my witness. I sign and date it; seal it in an envelope and place it under my mattress.

Thirty-two, maybe thirty-three years later, I'm remembering I couldn't even bring myself to write down exactly what it was I did on that day, afraid my grandmother might read it and find me out; that I would out myself through what I wrote. A fear I carried well into my thirties, through my first and second books of poetry, never daring to come out on the page. Those love poems I did dare to write, I wrote in second person, a gender-neutral "you"; and used only initials in my dedications: for M.K., for C.A.B., for C.S.B. All my beloved and almost beloved--Michael, Carlos, Craig--reduced to anonymous letters, acronyms for my sexuality that my grandmother would (hopefully) never figure out. I remained safely locked inside the literary closet.

Though lately I've come to think it was a cultural closet I was hiding in. Since I couldn't even begin to entertain writing about my sexual identity, I focused my work on issues of cultural identity and negotiation as Cuban American instead. Not that these weren't important and honest concerns of mine (and continue to be); but in part it was my living in the shadow of my grandmother's abuse that kept me from investigating and identifying with gay writers, much less writing about my sexuality or my grandmother's abuse. I simply was not one of them, in my mind, but I was of course.

I'm twenty-six visiting Cuba for the first time. We are having lunch at tía Mima's house when I learn that her son Gilberto set himself on fire at eight years old, and died. I feel an instant kinship with this child, this boy I never met. In a flash, I remember what I meant/felt when I wrote or else: that desperate feeling of wanting to end my life, too; that deep, entrenched sadness that was my childhood. A sadness I have carried since then, according to yet another therapist who diagnosed me with dysthymia--a low-grade but persistent mild depression. At forty-one I realize I've been sad all my life and have always written from that psychological point of view. I am inspired by the melancholy I see mirrored in others, in the world, and the ways we survive it. I strive to capture sadness and transform it through language into something meaningful, beautiful. Although throughout most of my writing career I had never consciously written for or about the gay community, thematically I feel I've unconsciously been a very gay writer all along in this sense: trying to make lemonade out of lemons, castles out of mud, beauty out of pain.

Would I have become a poet regardless of my grandmother's abuse? Probably, but not the same kind of poet, nor would I have produced the same kind of work, I think. Nevertheless, in the end her ultimate legacy was to unintentionally instill in me an understanding of the complexities of human behavior and emotions. I could have easily concluded that my grandmother was a mean, evil bitch and left it at that. But through her I instead realized there are few absolutes when it comes to human relationships. People, myself included, are not always good or always bad.

They can't always say what they mean; and don't always mean what they say. My grandmother loved me as best she could, the way she herself was loved, perhaps. Her trying to make me a man was an odd, crude expression of that love, but it inadvertently made me the writer I am today. And for that I feel oddly thankful, I realized fourteen years ago: I'm standing alone at her bedside at Coral Gables Hospital: She's drugged up. The tubes down her throat don't let her speak; she can't say terrible things to me anymore. Watching her, I flash back through all the sound bites of her verbal abuse, and start scribbling down a few lines for a poem I tentatively title "Her Voices." The first poem I will ever write for her, about her, and my sexuality. My first out poem.

I'm twelve, I'm thirty-eight, I'm seventeen, I'm thirty-one, I am a man when she wakes up, opens her eyes wide for a moment, looks at me and squeezes my hand, then slips away, quietly, silently, without a word--and I let her go.