Friday's Guest: Bill Stauffer's "Woke Is Better"

My 84-year-old Mom and I took a road trip last week to Boston from Portland – she to visit with a friend of more than sixty years and me to have dinner with my friend, Dave. When I dropped Mom off in Newton, she asked me to say hello to him, wished she could see him, too. I took route 9 to Huntington Ave, winding around behind a green line train. I was thinking about how our friendship almost ended, and wondering how it must feel for a gay man to experience our country’s opening up, only to then witness our current regression.

Dave had flown into Boston from San Francisco for a biomedical conference. We only get to see each other one or two times a year, though we talk on the phone more frequently. He and I were best friends in high school. We had separate interests – me a captain of the hockey team and chasing girls, Dave involved in student government and volunteer work. Otherwise, we were inseparable. One time we camped on a riverbank in New Hampshire in the rain and watched as the water rose around the tent before finally receding. On the weekends, we went to high school parties, sometimes taking Dave’s Mustang II, other times taking my 4-cylinder Ford Capri, made in Germany. Both cars were close to junk because we bought them ourselves from the money we earned working at Friendly’s, in those flammable polyester uniforms.

Senior year we rented an ice cream truck and ran it as a business, undercutting the gruff, old guy who ran the existing ice cream truck business – until I left the truck unplugged one night and all the product melted. To be nice, Dave suggested that maybe we had been sabotaged by our competition     .

After college, Dave unexpectedly disappeared from my life for a number of years, and it hurt like hell. We didn’t have cell phones or any of that back then. Over the summer or Christmas holidays I’d leave messages with his mother, sometimes even write him a letter. I rarely heard anything back.

When another friend told me that Dave had come out as gay, I called him and asked him why he didn’t tell me. Dave said he felt guilty for lying to me all those years, and I felt relieved because I just wanted our friendship back. I didn't care that he was gay.

I'd even taken a few “woke” classes in college – women’s studies courses where we read Annette Kuhn, Jacqueline Rose, and Jacques Deridda, and literature by Audrey Lorde and James Baldwin. Not that that makes me an expert, but I could appreciate some of where he was coming from. Five years ago I even got to be in his wedding, as he had been in mine.

Dave had booked an Italian restaurant in Boston. We were both late for the reservation, but Dave flirted our way into getting a table. The hostess wore a cute flannel shirt and Dave asked her if the restaurant was doing a lumberjack theme. He’s always had this charismatic flair that lets him get away with statements like that.

When the waitress came over, Dave commented on how her glasses matched her watch, and asked her to repeat the specials in her beautiful Italian. I am sure it was because of Dave that she doted on and pampered us all night. I thought if I had known Dave was gay when we were in our early twenties, I would have asked him to set me up with her.

It was only when the waitress brought us the check that she shared with us that she was transgender. Dave didn’t seem surprised or to care. Maybe he knew. He had told me that he once tried cross dressing but decided it wasn’t for him. Imagine having the freedom to test such limits of one’s sexuality and gender.          

On July 1, 2023 Governor DeSantis signed SB266 into law, known as the Don’t Say Gay Law. It bans minority race studies as well as many parts of gender studies. During Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing in March of 2022, GOP Senator Marsha Blackburn smugly asked her if she could define “woman.”

I suppose the Governor and the Senator are out to protect my white male, cis-gender, heterosexual interests, but I wonder if the readings I did in college that helped me understand and appreciate my friend Dave are allowed in Florida today, or in any of the states where 557 anti-trans bills have been proposed just in 2024. Or has the definition of “traditional and normal” been so strictly legislated in these places that I would be banned from reading literature like that at their state-funded institutions? If they think they are expanding my cis, white, male freedoms with these laws, they are wrong.

They are curtailing freedoms of people I love, whose freedoms matter to me as much as my own.

When Dave and I said goodbye, we hugged. I told Dave I loved him. We made plans to get together with our partners in California later in the year. Back on route 9, I felt furious about our country’s attempts to erase the existence of people I love, and anger at the possibility that I could have lost Dave’s friendship. But I also felt jealous, envious of the LGBTQ community’s ability to redefine their own existence by erasing binary boundaries and definitions.

In truth, it is people like Dave, as well as our adorable waitress, who possess true power, because they live outside all attempts at defining who they are and who they should be. What is more freeing than that? I hope I get to come along for the ride.

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Bill Stauffer is a writer and small business owner who lives with his wife on an island off of Portland, Maine.