decamber lû. 1998 »
9
n rT E T C n e w s
hile Michael Joseph Broder­
ick no longer considers him­
self particularly photogenic,
he could serve as something
of a poster boy for the devas­
tating effects of sexual repression.
Broderick, a news director at Portland-based
KBOO community radio, is almost 50 years old,
but in some ways his life is just beginning. He
came out only two years ago.
Like K BO O’s newscasts, which provide an
alternative to conventional wisdom, Broderick
hopes his story will reach people with a message
seldom heard in mainstream U .S. culture:
“Never allow the dynamic of your own sexual
energy to destroy you.”
“My bisexuality has been a major issue all my
life,” Broderick says. “I’ve lived nearly half a
century with Catholic Church repression biting
me in the ass.”
Broderick grew up the third of seven chil­
dren in an Irish Catholic neighborhood on the
south side of Chicago, in a place he dubs
Mike Broderick
“Archie Bunkerville.” He recalls three kinds of
people in the world of his youth: men like his
father, who were the masters, and women like
his mother, who were the slaves. Everyone else
was a pervert.
From early adolescence, Broderick felt an
From repression to compassion: one man's story of coming out
insistent sexual attraction to other boys. He
never acted on his desire. Instead it shadowed
and coming to terms with a complex sexual identity by Holly Pruett
him. “1 convinced myself 1 was a freak,” he
recounts in a rapid-fire recitation. “I treated
left Broderick shattered. He resolved to move to
myself as a pervert and accepted the self-identi­ arts and other pursuits that intersected the gay
Portland for the new year, where he planned to
community.
ty of my oppressors.”
live
with his younger brother and finally come
Throughout
the
1970s—
a
time
Broderick
As a Catholic schoolboy, Broderick believes,
describes as “a morally vacuous ozone of people
out.
sexual repression was suffused into his bones.
The move went as planned but the coming
trying
to
get
high
and
get
laid”—
gay
men
con­
Knowing that he didn’t fit neatly into the
out took another four years.
tinually hit on him.
check-off boxes of heterosexual male or female,
“I struggled with how much I didn’t fit into
“I
was
aghast,”
he
remembers.
“I
wondered
if
he headed off to prep seminary, a place he could
the gay community,” Broderick explains. After a
I had a big Q [for queer] on my forehead."
be “neutral and neuter.”
lifelong journey to arrive at that door, he still
Finally,
the
choke
hold
of
his
childhood
pro­
By the time he got to college in the late
wasn’t sure he held the key to get in.
hibitions loosened enough for him to respond to
1960s, Brodericks outrage over rampant sexism
N o longer sporting the hard-body looks
one of the propositions. “I took him up on it and
and racism and the Vietnam war turned him
prized by parts of the community, Broderick
crossed the line,” says Broderick.
away from the church and toward leftist
grappled
with the logistics of finding a mate. It
Years of secret and anonymous sex with men
activism.
wasn’t just the cigarettes and alcohol of the bar
Sexual liberation, however, remained out of followed, mixed liberally with the alcohol that
scene
that he found challenging. As a bisexual
was another family legacy.
reach. He recalls, “The sexual revolution filled
man, Broderick had experienced intensely inti­
Around the time Broderick turned 40, he
some of us with grief as well as joy.”
mate
connections with women. By contrast, he
faced the fact that much of his life felt unre­
Broderick tried to keep up with the times by
found “many gay men keep away from deeper
warding and superficial. He quit drinking and
doing his best “to be a raging heterosexual screw
connections
to each other. Making love matters
reverted to his teen-age conception of himself as
machine,” as he describes it.
less than getting your rocks off."
“sexless.”
Yet his desire for men continued to exert
His bisexuality itself posed another barrier to
In
1990,
the
death
of
an
older
woman
friend
itself as he threw himself into the performing
W
No M ore L ies
acceptance in the gay community. “I
would have preferred to be 100 percent
gay or 100 percent straight. Bisexuals
are rejected by both,” he contends.
But at this point in his life, an aging
child of the ’60s in a rumpled “I’m a
Beatles Fan” T-shirt, Broderick is ready
to move beyond the confines of the
male/female, straight/gay dichotomies
he grew up with. “I’ve lived enough of
my life on the outside of feeling accept­
able, that I refuse to lie anymore to fit
someone’s notion of which square to
check off,” he says.
As Broderick came to accept the
complexity of his own sexual identity,
he began to discover a correspondent
complexity in the queer community.
“There are such an enormous num­
ber of agencies, events, organizations,”
he says. “If only the straight world rec­
ognized what an incredibly diverse
community we are.”
Broderick has begun to make connections in
the queer community via groups like the Port­
land Bisexual Alliance, Cascade A ID S Project
and Portland Gay Men’s Chorus.
Broderick also finds KBOO, where he is
responsible for the weekday 5:30 p.m. newscast,
“a very supportive environment for gender and
sexual minorities.”
Like the gay community, KBOO provides an
alternative to the status quo. Broderick believes
“KBOO exists to scream out the fact that debate
is necessary.”
He adds: “There are profound issues facing us
as a society, and the mainstream news deludes us
into thinking that the leaders have the answers.
[But] the leaders want to keep things the way
they are. The people who have and will find the
answers are the ones at the bottom getting
ground down by the machine.”
Despite the fervor of his rhetoric, Broderick
finds that, as he gets older, “truth is not as
important as compassion.” It is a compassion he
tries to extend to the “Joe six-packs” of his
childhood as well as to himself.
“My deepest regret,” Broderick concludes, “is
that it didn’t happen 30 years ago. If only I’d had
the guts to fuse what 1 knew was true inside
myself with the outside world.”
His advice? “Come out, get healthy, and talk
with people like yourselves. Sexual repression is
too expensive. This isn’t a dress rehearsal.”
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