"goodbye, i love you"

I recently finished reading "goodbye, i love you," Carol Lynn Pearson's moving account of her marriage to, divorce from, and lifelong friendship with a gay man who eventually contracted HIV and died in her care. I don't read books often, being illiterate and all, but I finished this one in two days. I couldn't put it down.

Pearson's memoir will appeal to anyone with an interest in sexuality and/or religion. And it is a must-read for anyone who still believes that gay men can be changed or "cured" through heterosexual marriage (or what I call "the transformative woman"). There is a palpable sense of life wasted in the book's depiction of a gay man who must tamp down on his deepest desires to conform to the demands of his world. In one particularly affecting scene, Pearson watches as her husband weeps while listening to a radio broadcast of the poem "The Buried Life" by Matthew Arnold:

Alas! is even love too weak
To unlock the heart, and let it speak?
Are even lovers powerless to reveal
To one another what indeed they feel?
I knew the mass of men conceal'd
Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal'd
They would by other men be met
With blank indifference, or with blame reproved;
I knew they lived and moved
Trick'd in disguises, alien to the rest
Of men, and alien to themselves--and yet
The same heart beats in every human breast!

* * *

But often, in the world's most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us--to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.

Yet the book makes the case that the gay man is not the only casualty in such a sham marriage. Pearson achingly limns the heartbreak of a wife whose life is spent offering a love that can never be returned:

Where could I go to find healing for the wound to the woman in me? Only to God. But . . . Didn't God prefer men too, in a spiritual sense? God was male. God associated with males, did business with males, spoke to males, called males to work. God did not transact important business with people with small woman's hands and a woman's face. He loved all of us, of course, but he preferred men. My mind moaned under the weight of it. And God's Church preferred men. . . .

I had known all my life that somehow femaleness was second prize. But they had promised me, promised me that in this one thing I was safe. The man would want me, need me because I was a woman. My softer skin and woman's breasts would be indispensable. I had been cheated. I had been violated. . . . I will not accept this answer, I cried inside. I will beat my small woman's hands against heaven until I get a better answer.

But where Alma crumpled into bitterness in "Brokeback Mountain," Pearson ultimately manages to forgive and have compassion for her husband. Definitely worth a read.

(Interesting tidbit: this book plays a small but important part in "Confessions of a Mormon Boy," a one-man play written and performed by the gay Mormon man who married and later divorced the daughter of Carol Lynn Pearson! Guess the apple didn't fall from that tree....)