Cake Walk

I was called a “fag” at my RN graduation by a woman wearing a church hat.

In fact, the graduation was held in a church in Harlem near Malcolm X Boulevard. I was up on stage giving a speech about a nursing career that spanned three decades. I was an LPN for 30 years on the day that I received my diploma for registered nursing and had graduated at the top of my class. It was an emotional journey and my words proved an inspiration because people actually stood on their feet with applause.

I will never be sure why I was called a fag on that special day. What I do know is that I had every right to be there because I worked hard for it. My sexuality doesn’t pass medications any more than it could start IVs, insert NG tubes, or change incontinent diapers. My focus as a nurse is on humanity. I am not inferior or damaged because I am gay.

After years of call bells, side rails, medicine cups, and bedside commodes, the textbooks hung a port of call on my back and the baggage was worth the weight. I felt no disgrace with the outdated slur that a friend overheard; the hand-clapping had drowned that woman out.

Who knows why a person would say such an oppressive slang, perhaps it was a whimper of fear towards my culture? Maybe it was just outrage that a man from the Pacific Islands would win the top awards at a primarily black college. Worse, it could have been an aggressive attack filled with hate. All this under a Sunday hat and rows of praying pews. Oh, the irony of homophobia.

I took the state boards equally with Blacks, Asians, Whites, Indians, male or female. I passed the test and became an RN. It was one of my greatest accomplishments; that and winning a cakewalk when I was five (it was a big deal then, cakes were round and homemade).

When I first moved to NYC, I had never seen burkas. I heard a loud knock on the triage door and answered it to find a woman swathed in black from head to toe. My heart pounded because I could only see her eyes. I was scared to death. I looked around for a female nurse but it was lunchtime and I was alone. She sat down and said she had a rash. I could only imagine where the itchiness lay and I didn’t dare pursue the matter. I took her blood pressure over her clothes and wrote “for female MD” on her chart. Since then, I have seen men with little curly pony tails lying over their ears with big black hats and I know they are human and as equal to me as the immigrant who stowed on top of a train to get here.

Other things scare me, such as wigs that change hairlines and Christmas Madamba, an RN doing a “booty pop” in the nurses’ station (now that is just frightening, but the girl is a young nurse filled with the culture of optimism).

Gay is just a culture and the medical world is full of people like me. We form part of the diverse fabric of the hospital atmosphere, a place where patients breathe a sigh of relief or perhaps their last breath…and nurses are there wiping away the blood and the tears. There is a lot of pee and sympathy in what we do.

Happy Gay Pride Day to my brothers and sisters who have survived Stonewall and pray for equality. Life has not been a cake walk. Change is coming.