by Andrew Coile
I hope I don't shock you, but I come from a dysfunctional family. These days, that's not unusual—everyone appearing on Oprah or Donahue seems to fall into that category. My family has more than a few dysfunctional elements.
A friend of mine has a theory that every gay person is from a dysfunctional family. Because it usually takes a while before we "come out" to the family, the fact that we are gay but no one acknowledges or discusses this "family secret" creates the dysfunctional dynamic. It is said that the operating mode of families dealing with alcoholism is "Don't Talk; Don't Trust; and Don't Feel." This could easily be the motto of families struggling with gay members—and notice how closely this models Clinton's "Don't Ask; Don't Tell" policy about gays in the military.
The first big family secret that I became aware of was that I was gay. I figured this out when I was 13, and I told no one. I didn't do anything about it until I was 21.
The next big family secret that I found out when I was in High School was that my father had been (gasp!) married once before he met my mother. To my surprise, I had three adult half-brothers that I had never met.
The last big family secret was that the youngest of my half-brothers disappeared when he was 18, and has never been seen again. For the next 15 years, the mysterious disappearance of Benjamin Paul Coile was never, ever discussed.
Now, we are all adults, and I have met two of my half-siblings. Periodically, my lover and I get together with my full brother Jonathan and his wife Wendy, and my half-brother Chris and his wife Susan. We all even spent Christmas together at my father's first wife's house. If what I had heard growing up was true, this was an event comparable to Hansel and Gretel going to spend Christmas at the Gingerbread Cottage. However, like so many family tales, my father's first wife is not the Wicked Witch. She is a wonderful person, warm and accepting, although it is easy for me to see she was mismatched with my father.
On a fishing trip on the Chesapeake Bay a couple of years ago, Jonathan shocked me by asking Chris, "What do you think ever happened to Ben?" I just about fell out of my chair when Chris replied, "You know, I always thought that Ben was gay." It was a chilling thought.
My father is a retired Air Force Colonel. When I was growing up, known homosexuals were literally not allowed in the house. When I came out to my parents in 1984, my father's exact words were, "Well, this is good-bye, forever." I was stunned that having lost one son, he would choose to discard another, simply because I finally acknowledged who I really was.
It caused me to wonder if, rather than deal with my father's (probably much more extreme) reaction to homosexuality in the mid 1960's, Ben simply chose to disappear. Around June 18, 1966, Ben told his mother that he was going to catch a bus to Rehobeth or Bethany with some friends for a weekend at the beach. He was never heard from again.
Missing persons reports were filed, and the FBI even searched for Ben because he didn't answer his draft notice (because he never got it). After 28 years, the trail is a bit cold, but I have been able to ascertain that the Social Security Administration does not have him listed as dead, but the last wage and earnings reported were in 1966. There are no "John Does" (unidentified bodies) matching his description in Delaware during that period.
There would appear to be three possibilities. One, Ben is dead. He ran into a Jeffrey Dahlmer-type, was killed, and the body has been hidden so well it never surfaced. I was molested on a Greyhound bus by a tired old queen when I was traveling between L.A. and Long Beach when I was 19. I was able to quickly think a way out of my predicament—in a similar situation, Ben might not have been so lucky. If he was young, gay, and naive, who knows what could have happened?
The second possibility is that he left the country. Ben may be happily living in Montreal, or Toronto, or Sweden for all I know. We are doing our damnedest to pursue whatever investigations we can in Canada (as his mother did, years ago), but have no leads so far.
Third, he could have planned to disappear. He got a new name, a new social security number—a new identity. If so, he did a masterful job. This Christmas my nephew shocked the family by asking my father about Ben. My father immediately produced a letter (which none of us had known about before) that Ben had written to him a week before he disappeared. It was relentlessly normal. It provided absolutely no clue that anything was wrong. Ben could now be living anywhere in the United States, secure in his new identity.
While it was rocky coming out to my parents in the 80's, I survived. I got 'hate mail from home' for a few years, but eventually my parents calmed down. Now, they have done a complete 180 degree turn from their previous position of not allowing a homosexual in the house. My parents treat my lover exactly the same as they treat the spouses of my brother and sister. My mother now verbally beats up politicians who go gay-bashing or gay-baiting their opponents. (A local candidate got the shock of his life after a press-the-flesh campaign lunch when this white-haired little grandmother type came up to him and told him that his campaign workers were gay-baiting his opponent, that her son was gay, that she resented the allegations, and if his best qualification for office was that he was straight, he shouldn't be running!)
Benjamin Paul Coile, it's safe to come home now. Every member of the family has made some effort to locate you at one time or another. Recently, you have been on everyone's minds. If you're out there, the gay half-brother you didn't know you had invites you to make contact. Or if anyone else knows you, or (god forbid) knew you, please drop us a line.
Andrew Coile is an AIDS and gay rights activist who works as a computer programmer and lives in Springfield, Va.
Originally published in The Washington Blade on August 5, 1994; also published in Au Courant, Philadelphia, PA; Baltimore Alternative, Baltimore, MD; Bay Windows, Boston & Provincetown, MA; Seattle Gay News, Seattle, WA; The Wisconsin Light, Milwaukee, WI; and Capital Gay, London, England.
I had wondered even before the subject came up if Ben could be gay, since there is such a strong genetic component to homosexuality. I doubt if I'm the first, only, and last queer Coile. I had toyed with the idea of placing classified ads in the Personals columns of all the gay newspapers across the country. Almost a decade later, I wrote this article instead.
Alas, it hasn't worked, at least not in the sense of having Ben get in contact with the family. The asshole may still be out there, somewhere, but we are just left with this open wound that won't heal. If he did show up, I'm not sure if I'd hug him or deck him (probably both). It wasn't until I wrote this column that I realized how much Ben's disappearance had affected all the members of all the different branches of our family. I really feel for his two full brothers, and his mother.
Some papers were enthusiastic about this column; some never even bothered returning the postage-paid return post-card that said whether or not they were going to run it. The Philadephia paper changed the post-card from reading "Yes, we like the story and we're going to run it" to just "Yes, we're going to run it." I'm baffled why they would run a story they apparently didn't like, and why they would bother making sure I was informed that they were going to run it even though they didn't like it. Those editors must be on serious drugs.
One-quarter of the gay papers I submitted the column to had ceased publishing within the month between my collecting the names and addresses and mailing out the column. Another quarter had different editors in place by the time my column reached them. Only the Washington Blade and London's Capital Gay paid me for running the column; Capital Gay alas went under in October of 1995.
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