Hooked On Sardonic: A Queer Success Story

By Author: AMANDA
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As teachers and parents, we relish success stories. My late son Greg, who became known as Stephan Sure, started life as a teacher's and parent's dream. Not so much because he "behaved well"--in fact, there was a bit of impishness in him from the beginning--but because he was a natural wordsmith.

Stephan's knack for clever language was visible through the years in crisp repartee and hilarious storytelling, but his secret life as a writer didn't fully surface until after his untimely death. During his lifetime, he was Omega Replica out of the closet as a gay man, but not as a writer. No one could nudge him past his insecurities toward a path that would have led to recognition of his short stories, poems, and Wildean aphorisms.

His story is intertwined with learning experiences at home and in the schools. Although it's the particular account of one young gay person, teachers will sense in it resonances of the experiences of students, relatives, and friends who felt, as Stephan put it, that society is "selling me used words" and offering "the coffee table version ...
... of truth."

Stephan found ample room for verbal sport in our large, energetic family in New Orleans. With few luxuries available on a teacher's budget, language games were a major form of entertainment. I took notes on the children's language, partly because I had a serious interest in language development--mostly, though, because they said such interesting things.

Stephan quickly got the idea of language play. Noticing that a store had closed down, he said, "They must have gone storerupt." I was playing a fill-in-the-word game with the twins. "My little boys are called my sons, and my girls are called . . . ." Stephan rushed in with "Pests!" While driving through the French Quarter, I wondered about his sense of direction. "Where's the Mississippi River?" Answer: "Under the Mississippi River Bridge." A doctor asked about the location of his headache and he answered, "In the Arctic area of a globular map."

His experiences in the education system began as a fertile ground for cultivation of his wit. He charmed his elementary school teachers and posted high grades. He dabbled for a while with the clarinet, was an able cartoon artist, and he continued to craft witticisms to the delight of all.

At a young age he showed some signs of effeminacy, but my gaydar was not tuned in. When the family was walking among Breitling Replica Watches the block-long rows of fruit stands in the French Market, Stephan said, "What I want to know is, if I'm a fruit, what's that? The kids in school call me a fruit."

Stephan's grades took a serious downturn in high school. He showed increasing impatience with the restrictions of conventional school programs. Yet he brushed off a chance to apply for the drama program at the district's new school, NOCCA (New Orleans Center for Creative Arts), now a famous performing arts school.
In the ensuing years, education and other social institutions became fodder for prickly attacks, written down in a notebook that he called "The Book of Rude." His whimsical quips had morphed into the language of rebellion. He was, as he wrote, "Hooked on sardonic." Some sharp-edged entries:
1. I'll accept your insults but not your ignorance
2. Do you floss those talons?
3. You're pulling from an empty basket
4. Strapped to your agenda
5. Passing over the poetic for the pretty again
6. Spit puddles with more depth than you
7. Why don't I just move my mouth while you feed me the words?
8. Girl, you hate fags. Go buy you a t-shirt but don't tell me about it.

The pattern of flippant rebellion of his teen years seemed to be masking a deep self-doubt. He expected the development of his gifts to come naturally, without institutional guidance or painstaking practice and self-discipline, yet he was uneasy about his place in the world--"more prop than participant."