The QLP Questionnaire: Brett Krutzsch
"One of the great things about being gay is that we aren’t expected to play certain roles or be the one who does the cooking, cleaning, and laundry. We get to do what works best for us."
Did you struggle to find love? Or maybe you had a difficult time making it work in a same-sex relationship or outside the typical heteronormative parameters that dominate our culture and have lessons to share? Since most LGBTQ+ people don't have many role models to help us learn what it means to put ourselves together, we invite you to take “The Queer Love Project Questionnaire” and share your distinctive experiences so that others might learn from them. Email us at QueerLoveProjectSub@gmail.com to find out how you can participate.
My name is Brett Krutzsch and I come from a long line of people who apparently never thought having a last name that others could spell or pronounce correctly mattered. My paternal grandmother, who I loved dearly, was obsessed with making people think we were blue bloods who came from good breeding. Finally, in middle school I said, “Grandy, there is a “z” in our last name. The jig is up. Nobody thinks our family was on the Mayflower.”
Today, I have a Ph.D. so I’ve managed to add even more letters after my name. I am a scholar of religion, sexuality, and U.S. politics and the Editor of The Revealer, the award-winning online magazine about religion and society published by NYU’s Center for Religion and Media (and host of the magazine’s podcast).
My first book, Dying to Be Normal: Gay Martyrs and the Transformation of American Sexual Politics, was published by Oxford University Press and was a 2020 Lambda Literary Award Finalist for Best LGBTQ Nonfiction Book of the Year. (Here is my favorite interview I did about the book on the Straight White American Jesus podcast.) And this year, my co-edited anthology (with Nora Rubel), Blessings Beyond the Binary: Transparent and the Queer Jewish Family, came out from Rutgers University Press.
What is your age, where in the world do you primarily live, where did you grow up?
I am 45, but with a good photo filter I can pass for 44. I live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. As a kid, I grew up in Indianapolis, first in a suburb (eek) and then in Indianapolis itself (slightly better).
How do you define yourself on the LGBTQ+ spectrum?
Gay. Queer works too. “Lesbian” would confuse people.
What is your relationship status?
Married. We just celebrated our 11th wedding anniversary.
When was your first intimate moment? Was it with someone you liked? Did you feel pressured into it?
My first kiss was in high school. I desperately wanted to be straight and convinced myself I could will myself into heterosexuality. I took a female friend to see Alanis Morrisette in concert and Alanis was a-mazing! (Don’t I already sound like the picture-perfect straight guy?) After the concert, when I dropped my friend off at her house, we kissed. But instead of jumpstarting my hoped-for heterosexual desires, I found the kiss rather disgusting. I wanted that extra tongue out of my mouth!
Sadly, for several years after that, I still thought I could suppress my true attractions and develop romantic feelings for women. I had so many female friends! I preferred the company of women! Men seemed so boring! Surely, I thought, sexual feelings for women would follow. But as opposed to so many other things I had attempted, this was something I could not accomplish no matter how hard I tried.
How would you define love? Is it the thing you work at for a long period of time? Or is it the strong feeling you feel for someone right from the beginning for no reason?
The gay writer W.H. Auden wrote, “Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator. But among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.” This rings especially true for me. And no one makes me laugh more than my husband. We laugh together every day. Really, that’s not a joke! On the one hand, I think that means we get each other in a special way.
On several occasions, I have said something to a group of people and I’ve heard my husband laugh first and loudest. So, I think you need someone who gets your humor and whose own humor makes you laugh out loud. And that takes me to the other hand, which is to say, I think a good life is full of laughter. Does that fully define love? No. There are moments when we are doing something simple like sitting on a bench in Central Park, or when we get giddy when we decide to order dinner from a favorite restaurant and we put on a TV show we enjoy, where I notice how fully in love I feel. I’ve been in love with him for many years, and my feelings of love have only grown. I’m smiling at this moment just from thinking about him.
When did you come out to family, friends and others for the first time?
I came out my senior year of college. My mom, who says she knew I was gay by age four, tried her best to get me to come out in high school. She never confronted me directly, but she would leave books around the house with titles like, “How to Support Your Gay Child.” But that was in the mid-1990s. And while my mom is a mighty 5-foot-3 Jewish woman, she is only one person. She may have been OK with gay people, but it didn’t seem that many others felt the same way.
When I did come out, it was because the closet had become, in the words of gay writer Paul Monette, more of a coffin. I feared it would kill me if I didn’t deal with it. I planned to tell one friend and then, if I felt comfortable, I would tell a few more over the ensuing months. But something surprising happened. After I told that first person, I couldn’t stop telling people! I told another friend that same night, two more the next day, and several others that week. The feeling was sort of like what I imagine removing a corset must have felt like for Victorian women—I could finally breathe! (I know, even my analogies are gay!) And in coming out, I could take in more oxygen and the world seemed like a different place where I could be fully alive.
Did you have any LGBTQ+ role models as a child or teenager? What do you remember about images of same-sex or queer relationships or messages you gleaned?
I didn’t have any role models and I think that was a source of concern for my mom. Once, when I was maybe 15, she took me with her to the hair salon so I could spend time with her gay stylist. At that time though, I acted as if homosexuality was contagious and, at the first sight of an actual gay person, I’d head in another direction. On that day, however, I was trapped. My mom even booked the last appointment in the evening so the salon would be quiet while we chatted with her hair stylist.
So, there I was feeling trapped and unsure of what I was supposed to glean from this encounter. Was my mom, who had sacrificed so much to send me to a private high school, suggesting that my future was in hair cutting simply because she suspected I was gay? Was I to give up my dreams of going to a good college and head to the Vidal Sassoon Academy? I will admit that I was neither the friendliest nor the most talkative that day. And my mom, who probably just wanted me to see that life was possible as a gay man, never tried to help me find a role model again.
Do you have a Chosen Family?
Yes, my close friends are my family. I feel strongly that one does not need to share DNA to be family. Along with my husband and my mom, my friends are the people I most want to spend my time with and the people I love most in the world. They are my family. I see no distinction.
What is your relationship with your biological family (if any)?
My mom and I have always been close. She seems to have lived many lives, some of them quite difficult, and yet she managed to be an incredibly loving and supportive mother. I’m the only child from her marriage to my father. He died a few years ago, but we didn’t really have much of a relationship after I left for college, mainly because I grew tired of his drunken tirades. Deciding to walk away from my relationship with him was one of the better decisions of my life.
What’s the most surprising thing you have learned about relationships from your perspective?
In the first Sex and the City movie, there is a scene where the girls are discussing Samantha’s failing relationship with Smith Jerrod and Samantha questions how often people should be happy when they are part of a couple. Charlotte answers by saying something like (I’m paraphrasing here), “Every day. I’m not happy all of the time every day, but every day.” When I first saw that scene, I was in my 20s and in a relationship with someone else and I thought, “Why would the film’s writers portray such an unrealistic view of relationships? You can’t be happy in your relationship every day.” Well, as it turns out, you can. Charlotte’s answer rings true for me now. I feel happy with my husband, Kevin, every day. Not all of the time every day, of course. But basically, yes: I feel happy with him every day. And I had no idea such a thing was possible!
Have you experienced heartbreak?
Yes, and honestly the signs of heartbreak were there early on, and I willfully ignored them. But that heartbreak, and my own role in it, will give me good material for my memoir.
Do you have any moments of joy, happiness or pleasure that you can share about being in a same-sex or queer relationship?
Something rather special is that my husband and I bring out each other’s playful, silly sides. For a variety of reasons, both of us were rather serious kids, not all of the time, but often. Being serious was a reaction to our childhood environments and being boys who didn’t love doing what the world told us boys should enjoy. Now, as adults, that playful, silly side comes out with each other, and it almost feels magical.
Additionally, when I think about queer relationship joy: We don’t have kids, and never felt pressure to have children, so we get to live in the city we love, travel to our favorite parts of the world, go out to shows on weeknights, meet up with friends on weekends, spend lazy afternoons at museum exhibits or on the couch with treats from our favorite bakeries, and lead a life that is full of things that bring us joy.
Are there any things that standard heterosexual relationships have that you feel are out of reach or that you wish you had or could achieve?
No, and in fact, “standard heterosexual relationships” do not look appealing to me. Look at their divorce rates! And their rates of domestic abuse! And sexual assault! That is not an appealing, healthy, or safe system—especially for women. It is a big con that we should all want that.
Have you had a difficult time navigating the “roles” you should play in a relationship?
One of the great things about being gay is that we aren’t expected to play certain roles or be the one who does the cooking, cleaning, and laundry. We get to do what works best for us. My husband likes to clean. And I like to order dinner.
Any advice you’d give to someone younger than you who thinks it’s impossible to find love?
About six months after my husband and I started dating, I began to feel unexpectedly anxious. For reasons that were a mystery to me, I thought things would abruptly fall apart even though all signs suggested clear sailing. Because I could not figure out why I was anxious on my own, I started therapy, and it was revelatory.
At the end of my first session, the therapist recommended a book for adult children of alcoholics. Reading that book, and then staying in therapy for a few years, was transformative because, although I knew my dad was an alcoholic, I had never considered how that shaped my personality or my approach to relationships.
So, my advice is that sometimes we need a professional to help us understand our own lives better and to help us chart new paths so we can show up for others to receive their love and to love them back fully and deeply.
BONUS:
We all need more inspiration. Recommend something that influenced or helped shape you significantly that you’d recommend to someone else.
Book: Borrowed Time by Paul Monette was the first memoir I read about gay love, and it remains my favorite, even though it is also the story of the early years of the AIDS epidemic. Monette is a remarkably gifted writer and this book is at once both important historically and deeply moving in its details of the love between him and his dying partner.
Play/Musical: The Broadway musical Kimberly Akimbo. This musical is about love more broadly and getting the most out of life, but there are also some gay characters. I saw this show three times when it was in New York City. I cried and laughed every time. If it comes to your town, go see it.
"All of them make me laugh." Yes yes yes! Such a great piece. Many thanks!
Yep. Laughter. That is the golden ticket. Great interview!