Steven Carr - Closet Collage

 

So, I have never done this before, y'all, so go easy on me, okay? [laughs] 

 

[cheers and holler] 

 

Show of hands, how many people have ever been gifted something that someone has made for you that they worked really, really hard on, and it was God awful? [audience chuckle] Anybody? Yes. Okay, this story is for you, guys. So, I got a gift like that a few years ago from my mother. And it was a gift for my boyfriend at the time, David and I. It was a collage of pictures of David and I. She had put it in this big frame, and she had matted it and wrote all these quotes on it. She had gone all out. She had cut all of these pictures up into different shapes. It was really cute. 

 

But there was only one problem. And that problem, was that the quotes that she wrote around these pictures were not quotes about love or romance or relationships. They were quotes about friendship. [audience laughter] Yes. So, this was my mother's way of telling me. Now, granted, David and I had been in a relationship for four years at this time, okay? So, we'd been around for quite a while. But this was her way of telling me that she was not able to validify our relationship. You might be thinking to yourself, geez, Steven, like, “Lighten up. It was a good gesture. She was just trying to be nice and it's the thought that counts.” 

 

But the reality is, is that people like David and I have to fight really hard to have our relationships recognized. And so, from the places that we work and the places where we go to church and the friends that we thought we had and from our family. And so, this was a really big deal for me. You see, I had come out to my mom as gay whenever I was 20 years old. She's a really good, staunch Southern Baptist woman. So, David always jokes that whenever I came out to her, she started drinking and she's been drinking ever since. [audience laughter] 

 

As you can imagine, as a very staunch Southern Baptist woman, our relationship was strained a little after that. I would get calls all the time from her, calls about, “Hellfire and damnation and brimstone. This is just a phase that you're going through and you're going to grow up out of it.” When I didn't grow up out of it, she was saying things like she might disown me and all kinds of crazy things like that. She would cry about how I was never going to get married and I was never going to have children. This went on and on and on until-- 

 

See, I'm from Shepherdsville. You all know about Shepherdsville, right? All of this came out of Shepherdsville. [audience laughter] One day, she was in Kroger, and someone that I used to go to church with cornered her in the frozen vegetable section, and they pointed their finger at her and they said, "You are a horrible mother for allowing your son to backslide into the fiery pits of hell. God is punishing you, because your faith was not strong enough.” And this really hurt her. They left her crying into a bag of frozen peas. Sd she realized that those kinds of words, they hurt. They hurt coming from strangers that you don't even know in the Kroger. And so, how much more would they hurt coming from your parents, the people who are supposed to love you unconditionally? 

 

And so, back to this collage of pictures with the friendship quotes all around them. We didn't know what the hell to do with this thing. I mean, we weren't going to put it up on our wall. And so, we put it in the closet, [audience laughter] and eventually we just put it out in the garage, never to return. So, my mom would show up to the house, and she'd be like, "Oh, where's that collage that I got you? I worked really hard on that." 

 

I had just gotten my mom back. Over time, she had come around and gotten to know David and liked him quite a bit. I had just gotten her back and I didn't want to upset her anymore, and so we lied. And we said things like, "Oh, we're looking for the perfect place to put it." And then, a few weeks later, she would call me and she would say, "Hey, did you ever figure out where you were going to put that collage? I worked really hard on that." And I said, "No, we want to find the perfect spot, because it looks so nice."

 

And so, about a year passes, and one day, my mom and I are sitting in my kitchen, and we're having a few Miller Lites, and she's thinking to herself and she says, "Hey, whatever happened to that collage? I worked really hard on that. How come I don't ever see it up anywhere?" I don't know if it was the fact that I had finally gotten comfortable with her and she'd gotten comfortable with me, I don't know if it was the fact that I was on my fourth Miller Lite, but I was thinking to myself, to hell with it. I'm going to lay it out for her. I'm going to tell her. And so, I said, "Mom, I love you, but I can't put this thing up on my wall, because David and I aren't friends. At this point, we'd been together for five years."

 

And I said, "We are going to end up getting married and we're going to have kids. I can't put this thing up on my wall." She thought about it for a second, and she'd come a long way since then and she said, "You know what? You're right. That makes sense." And that was that. That was it. I had toiled over this whole thing for a year. It didn't really mean that much. All I had to do was explain to her why I couldn't put it on my wall. So, May 23rd of this year, David and I actually got married at Highland Baptist Church. [audience cheers and applause] 

 

Thank you. My mom came to the wedding. We actually got married on her birthday. It was weird. It just worked out that way. Anyway, her favorite movie is Steel Magnolias. And so, instead of having a groom's cake, because why don't you have a groom's cake at a gay wedding? [audience chuckle] But instead of having a groom's cake, we actually brought her out into the middle of the floor and we sang Happy Birthday to her. And the baker brought out a cake that was in the shape of an armadillo. [audience laughter] It was a red velvet cake complete with gray icing and a tail. She clapped, and she laughed and she said later on that it was the most special that she had ever felt. 

 

And so, the real gift of all of this for me was actually a month later, after the wedding, our family reunion. A lot of people came in from different parts of the country. Some people I had never even met before. And my mom insisted on walking around and introducing David to every single member of my family as my new husband. Thank you.