Mama’s Boy - by Dustin Lance Black
Published:
Mama’s Boy - by Dustin Lance Black
Read: 2025-04-12
Recommend: 8/10
You can hear Dustin Lance Black’s trembling voice narrating the audiobook, adding a deeply personal touch. At times, parts of the book feel like a sermon. To me, the central theme is: “A promise is a sacred thing.” This reflects the promises Lance made to his mother and to the LGBTQ+ community.
Notes
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
Here everyone was perfectly imperfect—their battle scars, casts, crutches, or wheelchairs worn like merit badges. Here, afflictions, stitches, and braces didn’t earn the label of “freak” or garner stares and disgust; they were symbols of one’s will to survive. In this extraordinary place, young polio survivors got a glimpse of what a “normal” childhood might have been: crushes, squabbles, laughter, tears, and heartbreak. So these lonesome survivors formed a tight, absolutely unique family of outsiders, and at the center of it all, like some Hollywood ingénue, eight-year-old Rose Anna shortened her name to simply Anna. Because here she felt sure that Anna could be a star.
But the Christmas of 1961 promised to be the most special yet. Despite all of Anna’s doctors’ passionate appeals, Anna had refused to use a wheelchair. “I don’t want to be down there. I want to be up with everyone else. And my arms are stronger than any working legs, thank you very much.” And so by her thirteenth birthday, with her strong arms and the help of metal braces on her legs, torso, and neck, Anna had become fairly proficient on crutches, using them in much the same way she had her old potty chair. Her arms became her legs, her braced legs swinging like a pendulum beneath her torso. Most days she could make it clear across the ward without falling, and she didn’t mind all the bruises and stitches on her chin from her many epic crashes. They were her battle scars from a war she was determined to win.
Because when you grow up poor in the South, you have two options: you either sink into your misery and die, or you celebrate every little thing you can and live. With the latter option, there’s little time for self-pity; you have to “get up and get on with it.” That’s what Cokie had to teach her Rose to do now.
One of the most well-worn pages in Anna’s long-saved essay “Our Suffering” contains this passage: We can rebel against our condition and make ourselves and those around us miserable. Or we can accept it with resignation and patience, and derive great benefit from our suffering for ourselves and others. This patience is not a passive acceptance of our suffering and a meaningless surrender to our wills. But it is an active and energetic exercise of the will….We must continue in our efforts, not despairingly, but hopefully aware that one day our struggle will end and we will be victorious.
Anne had never been a very religious young woman, but her prayers to God in New Orleans had worked out well enough. And so, after receiving Embry’s letter about God’s love and purpose easing heartbreak, she began visiting churches near campus.
And I was left with a growing sense of what “family comes first” really looked like and meant for us—it wasn’t just the stuff of greeting cards and church testimonies; it was a promise that spoke to responsibility, endurance, and survival.
Sure, we fought among ourselves. My mom might call her siblings sinners for drinking Jack Daniel’s and espresso, and they might call her brainwashed for her floor-length dresses and Mormon undergarments, but the moment anything threatened any one of us, we’d lock arms. Because husbands might come and go, and Santa might drop dead, but here in my mom’s neck of the woods, I now understood that the family I’d been born into, the one she had fought through surgeries and comas to keep, could be counted on. They were my foundation now too.
I already knew ours wasn’t a land that celebrated differences. I knew it was best to keep mine hidden, so I didn’t need words to know that my mom wouldn’t want hers openly acknowledged either. It would take many years before we’d both learn that our differences demanded to be seen, understood, and perhaps even celebrated.
Then my mom said something Merrill didn’t like, and he backhanded her hard across the face. Her eyes turned black like mine had, and she told everyone she’d fallen. It was the same lie I’d been coached to tell, so Marcus and I didn’t buy it, and our protective instincts began to kick into high gear. But here’s how our situation was different from that of others in similarly precarious positions: we weren’t allowed to turn to traditional avenues for protection. Even after Merrill blackened my mom’s eyes, the church still didn’t want the police involved. They considered ours a domestic dilemma of eternal consequence that should remain in the hands of the church. This was my first up-close look at a deep division between two tribes most imagine would be well aligned—a rift between two powerful, conservative institutions: our church and our state’s law enforcement. It’s a divide whose roots date back to the origins of the LDS Church. You see, Mormons were a brand-new minority in the early 1800s, and just too different for most other Christian folks. So in an effort to get Mormons out of town, their homes were burned, their cattle killed; my forefathers were tarred, feathered, and senselessly slaughtered by militias, and our first prophet, Joseph Smith, was murdered by a government that refused to protect him and his “peculiar people.” The church’s second prophet, Brigham Young, even threatened war against the U.S. government if it didn’t stop harassing his faithful.
Conveniently leaving out our church’s uncomfortable polygamist history, these stories of government-sanctioned persecution were still being shared in Sunday school lessons when I was a boy. And although we were encouraged to run for public office or sign up for the military, a general distrust for the U.S. government lingered—a feeling that at any moment, no matter how virtuous a citizen or soldier we were, our government might come for us again. This further explains the money from the Mormon Church in our mailbox after Raul’s vanishing act. The church would rather we take care of our own and not lean on the government for help. So now, again, we were forced to lean on our church’s instruction during Merrill’s latest reign of terror. We were told to never call the cops. I dreamed of calling 911, of the brave Texas police officers who would quickly arrive. Tough and grizzled, they wouldn’t let it stand if they discovered a paralyzed wife and her children were being beaten by a man who smelled like old bread. They believed in right and wrong, not some LDS mumbo-jumbo about who Heavenly Father had blessed with “priesthood authority” in the home. “Bullshit,” they’d bark. And I would ask God to forgive them for the curse word. I dreamed of seeing these cowboy hat–wearing cops bust down the front door, tackle Merrill to the ground, and press his face to the cold linoleum he’d knocked me down onto. A few kicks in the ribs, and they’d read him his rights and drag him away for good. Instead, we caved to the fear of eternal damnation, obeyed the church, and lied our asses off at school and in our neighborhood. We must have seemed like the clumsiest kids in San Antonio. My homeroom teacher even chided me when I showed up with a new shiner under my right eye. “Maybe if you kept your head out of the clouds, you could keep your feet on the ground, Dustin.” I didn’t bother telling her that the people I actually cared for called me Lance. I was raging inside: against Merrill, against a world that was set up to allow this. But for now, all I could do was look for ways to make myself scarce at home.
Then a kind of angry laugh came vomiting out of him, and with it, “What kind of faggot are you?!” He was genuinely asking, and loud enough to make sure that everyone heard him say it, so that no one doubted his manhood in our exchange. I don’t remember what kind of shit-poor lie I might have spun. All I recall is a sickening panic rising up inside of me—my monster suddenly laid bare. The next thing I remember is searching through the rolling hills in front of the school for a bike I would never find, tears streaming down my face. I was a failure even at being a fraud.
I was a sinner in my church, a criminal to the law and my community, and a pervert and a freak to everyone else. And so, that was the first of many nights I would lie in bed contemplating taking my life. I thought about how I might do it in a way that no one would know I’d been a coward. I thought about how I might make it painless and quick. But then I thought about how my death would hurt my mom, and honestly, even thirty years later, I can say that’s likely the only reason I didn’t do it. I was ready to hurt myself, but I couldn’t bear to hurt her.
Having learned from my childhood church and state that many, if not most, human differences are best kept hidden, I had done to Tim what I’d been told would happen to me if anyone discovered my own secret difference—I’d found him guilty of being too unusual, and thus unworthy of respect.
When I first realized I was gay, at the age of six, my choices were clear: I had to hide, or suffer the shameful personal and familial consequences of exposure. So I hid. By twelve, I had considered suicide to quiet the pain of isolation and shame. At nineteen, I’d tried to replace love with a family by getting a young woman pregnant. All of this because I’d been told by my church, our state, the news, and our neighbors that gay people lived horrific lives of indignity, sickness, and death, followed by eternal loneliness in a burning hell. Yes, I still treasure Texas and the South, and yes, our church kept my family alive in so many generous ways, but both had long been tearing me to pieces from the inside out.
Oh life, you funny devil, another Jason! I instantly fell for this brand-new Jason—I just prayed for a less bloody ending.
It was the only time we ever openly acknowledged that she was “disabled,” that she needed those crutches to survive. It was the first and last time we ever acknowledged how different she looked. How different she was. In that moment, all the pretending had vanished. For both of us. It was indescribably painful. She had no answer. She knew full well that those crutches weren’t a choice. Her only choice had been to survive them. And when she looked at me again, I didn’t have to tell her this wasn’t a choice for me either.
I left her there alone in her office, still red-faced and raging. She had never had a film succeed in the real world, and it seemed to me that her insecurity had bred contempt for her students, students who showed real promise and had their entire lives and careers ahead of them. It’s a tough thing to say, but she was a terrible teacher—a mountain of anxiety and self-loathing she chose to aim our way, and now I was enemy number one.
good things could come from making the right kind of trouble. And from this moment on, I knew I had it in me to embody the noble title of “troublemaker.”
I dared not trust my ears. I dared not look at her in case I had just imagined her words. So we sat in silence again, both of our eyes welling up. Hell, mine are welling up right now just writing this down two decades later. Then my mom mustered the courage to turn and show me her eyes, so I turned and showed her mine. We looked at each other like that for as long as we could…about one second. Then she wrapped her arms around me and held me tighter than I think I’d ever been held. At least that’s how it felt then to my heart and now in my memory. And she didn’t let go. I knew right then and there that for the first time in my life, my mother was holding me for me, all of me, and that she not only loved me with all of her heart but also loved me for all of mine. In that embrace, in that moment, I suddenly felt stronger than I ever knew I could be: more courageous, liberated, seen, and loved. Her embrace that night lit a fire that would change the course of my life.
genuinely straight guys rarely give a damn if someone is gay. Less competition for them, right? It’s more often closet-cases who act on and/or vocalize the self-loathing homophobia that lives in their conflicted heads.
My rage and tears had turned into my mother’s favorite brand of foolish courage. Thanks to Cleve and my research, I had now befriended many real people from Harvey’s life. I still had the credit card I’d used to finance my first documentaries, and if I needed more money, I now had a home I could leverage. If I knew where an inspiring, hope-filled, lifesaving story was buried, didn’t I have a responsibility to excavate it, no matter what the personal cost? Isn’t that what my mother, with her broken leg and all her brave young soldiers, had taught me?
I didn’t want to screw this up like I had when Tim told me he was Jewish, or when Ryan came out to me as gay, so I fought back every unhelpful phrase trying to leap from my lips—things like “Are you really sure?” or “Maybe this is just a phase” or “You just don’t seem gay to me, bro!” Instead, I gathered all the “hope speech” language I could marshal and told him how brave he and Larry were, and how much better he was going to feel now that he’d given voice to this. I assured him that his life was about to improve, that I loved him unconditionally, and that he had strengthened our brotherly bond by trusting me with this. I even had him imagine me giving him the biggest, most accepting hug possible. Done! I thought. I felt sure that I had finally succeeded in not completely screwing up someone’s big coming-out moment.
it was incredibly difficult seeing my once indestructible mom like that, but I didn’t want her to know that, so I didn’t show an ounce of it. It was my turn to be shatterproof. And when the last of her hair was gone, I put a soft knit hat on her head and listened very closely as she beseeched: “I never, ever want Jeff to see me how you just did. Promise me, Lancer. Promise.” I held her, forcing back tears of my own, and made this sacred promise. For now, my job in this battle would be to help her hold on to whatever dignity she could, to help her stay beautiful for the man she loved.
Patience: “the capacity to accept or tolerate delay.” To my ears, sitting on those steps that morning, listening to the cheers of the living, I understood “patience” in a new way—as a word that deserves no comfortable home in a nation that has yet to fulfill its promise of liberty and justice for all.
I felt compelled that I had long since lost my place in this family. And so I turned the calendar pages to June. But there I was, right there on the tenth was my name—and not Dustin, or Dustin Lance Black, but my familiar name: Lance. As far away as I may have traveled, Josie had never let me go. And I began to understand that all I had ever needed to do was to face my fears with courage and step back in, and I would have been home again.
I know without a doubt that my mom and I are not the exception to any rule. We are the rule. Every single person on this planet is different from everyone else in at least one remarkable way. Still, every day, children learn that for this reason or that, they’re just too different, and then comes a list of what they’ll never achieve because of it. Everyone reading this has probably experienced that terrible moment at some point in their lives, because sadly, this fear of difference is our current state of being—despite all the proof that it’s our differences that make this world magical, delicious, entertaining, innovative, and downright livable. It doesn’t help that we live in a world still led by too many men stoking the fear of difference for power and their own personal gain.
a promise is a sacred thing