To Bring Him Home and Other Tales

IntroductionThese are all love stories. But, as one of my oldest and dearest friends pointed, out, all of my stories are love stories, mostly gay love stories. Then, she thoughtfully remarked that all the stories in this collection are about home: leaving and returning home, losing it, finding it, home as an idea, home Here and There, home as a place of the heart. Mostly, she said, these stories are about starting a new home in some way. She was, of course, right. That I didn’t see this immediately suggests that I am in the midst of recreating my home. My husband and I were married in November 2018, when he was living in one place, and I was living in another. For job reasons, we didn’t move in together until March 2020, in the midst of the pandemic (not recommended). And here we are, learning how to be at home together in a deeper and more profound way. Home can be a real, physical place, the house, the home place, in which one grew up, or where one now lives. For a long time, when I dreamed of home, and knew, in that weird dream way, that I was home, I dreamed of the house on NC 86 in central Orange County, North Carolina. When I dreamed of my mother after she died, we were together in that house. Home is where we are from. It can be a neighborhood, a town, a country. It can be a family, a community, culture, a faith or belief system. Home doesn’t have to be physical. Home defines us and shapes us, it gives us a language, and history. For good and for ill, home is where we belong, But home is not always safe. It can be a perilous place for l***q+ young people, as they may be cast out from their homes, discarded by their families, because of who they are and who they love. According to a 2014 Rolling Stone article, the number of homeless gay teens who have been “cast out by religious families keeps growing.” Coming out can mean all support is cut off, the locks are changed, and the teens are kicked out with just the clothes on their backs. Being cast out and cut off, and losing one’s home and family, isn’t just for teens, as tragic as that is. Older adults, many successful in their careers, still struggle with coming out, still keep who they are and who they love a secret. I am offering a different story, where there is hope. It is possible to find and choose and build a new home. Why tell these stories as fairy tales, as fantasy and science fiction? I read my first fantasies, fairy tales and myths, and science fiction tales in elementary school, and I fell in love, and I have been in love ever since. In these genres, I found the home country of my imagination. As Le Guin says in her essay, “A Citizen of Mondath,” “The limits, and the great spaces of fantasy and science fiction, are precisely what my imagination needs. Outer Space, and the Inner Lands, are still, and always will be, my country” (in Language of the Night, 25). Here, I also found my country, a home for my imagination. My other country, that of queer folk, often coexists in the same geography as that of Outer Space and the Inner Lands. So, I tell these stories out of love and for love. I tell them to understand love in a more true and profound way. I tell them to help make the Outsider, the different, queer folk, visible and present, to bring them home. To Bring Him HomeWith much thanks to Ellen McQueen and Ann Carver