The Art of the Natural

By Brandon Lorenz

"You're not gay, are you?"

In seven years as a journalist I've discovered that asking questions for a living has given me the ability to evade them when asked by others.

Unfortunately, that question was asked of me during my first three months as a professional journalist. I would have expected it from one of the cops I covered, but not a fellow reporter and the person who was informally assigned to be my professional mentor.

"No."

"That's good, otherwise it means there'd be something wrong with you," says my coworker, who is in her early 40s and clutches the few curves she has left. The curves combine with blonde hair and Texas twang to make her moderately exotic in rural Wisconsin.

My coworker found this a perfectly natural question to ask while standing in the middle of our tiny newsroom. Moreover, she found it a perfectly natural question to shout across the newsroom.

I was of course lying—the only time I've had to directly lie about the issue. I'd not yet come out to anyone, including myself, and this was hardly the time or place to start.

It's been nearly seven years since that day and I can remember exactly where in the newsroom I was standing, the rumpled blue shirt I was wearing, and how my face burned when she asked me the question.

I consider it a reminder that just because one becomes an adult doesn't mean one will leave behind the gawky self-consciousness and sense of not-quite-belonging that so often comes with adolescence.

What is natural?

As a magazine editor, I've spent the last four years exploring that question on somewhat technical grounds by writing about energy, buildings, and real estate.

And so as a specialist of sorts I'm quite qualified to answer that question. Today, every company wants to prove its products are green. The words vary (natural, green, sustainable, healthy) but the meaning is the same: Buy this because it won't hurt the planet.

Unfortunately such claims are rarely true.

The shaving cream in my bathroom, for example, has a green label on the back proclaiming the can's "ECO INFO." The label consists of a giant recycle logo encircling the word "steel." Next to that, the label states "No CFCs."

Unfortunately this happy iconography is designed to hide that the can wasn't produced with recycled steel. Virgin steel requires three times more energy to produce than recycled steel. And CFCs—which deplete the ozone layer—have been banned in aerosol cans for decades.

What is natural?

As a former newspaper reporter I spent the first few years of my career chronicling behavior that at least one other person considered natural, if only for a few brief moments. As an observer of human behavior, the range of activities that people think can pass for natural never ceases to amuse me.

There was a police chief who was accused of taking alcohol and guns from the department's evidence locker, and the college president who was raking in large raises while freezing faculty pay, to name two examples.

Clearly if a universal definition of natural existed there would be no news business. Watching the tug of war that inevitably occurs when people try to define "natural" always intrigued me. In this case I'm considering the word natural as a placeholder for the word normal, as people sometimes use it.

I've spent time over the last few years moonlighting for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, covering local government in Waukesha County. Every few weeks the residents (and sometimes local officials) I ran into during meetings would complain about the newspaper's "liberal bias."

Nearly as often but on a curiously delayed cycle, friends or acquaintances who found out I wrote for the newspaper complained they had stopped reading the paper because it was "too conservative."

Clearly then, without getting too postmodernist, natural must be like some sort of landscape that shifts depending upon where one is standing. That's hardly breaking news. So how about we shift positions and consider just what is natural from another point of view.

Even though I've spent a few years working in a business predicated on there not being a universally-adopted definition of natural, I've been looking outward for an answer when perhaps I should be looking inward.

I have no illusions what my coworker meant when she asked me that question seven years ago. It was not a question at all, but an accusation: You're different.

I didn't need her to point it out to me. I thought about it daily. And here we come to the heart of the matter because for years I've looked around and felt like the crowd discovered The Art of the Natural long ago like some sort of oasis in the desert, and has been hiding it from me ever since.

As a child, I had a recurring thought that eventually, my family would no longer be around, and when that happened, I'd be alone. Forming my own family was something I knew would never happen.

I went though college overweight and with terrible acne, a pair of developments that didn't completely destroy my social life, but did prepare me for embarrassment when my coworker started questioning me seven years ago in the newsroom. I was embarrassed on two levels.

There was of course embarrassment about feeling forced to lie. My normal defense in those days was simply not to talk much about myself in social situations—especially with new people. What I had learned after college was that if you ask a certain level of polite but shallow questions, you can usually deflect the flow of conversation away from anything personal that would be troublesome. But reporters can see through that trick eventually.

But the second and deeper embarrassment was lying about a world I had not yet been invited into, because I had passively let my weight become a barrier. Even though I knew I was gay by then, I hadn't yet taken even the slightest action in recognition of that fact.

Shortly after my coworker's question, I began a more serious exploration for what I considered The Art of the Natural. I moved away from home to take a job in a new newsroom. I went on a diet and in the year that followed lost 100 pounds. And I decided to try the whole dating thing.

Along the way, it became clear that taking the steps toward The Art of the Natural was going to be just as awkward an experience as all those years spent in silent self-denial.

I returned home after losing the weight to aunts and uncles who no longer recognized me. The person I sat near in high school during lunch for three years no longer recognized me when I returned for a wedding. My parents—after years of hinting that I should lose weight—complained that I was "too thin."

Reaching for what felt natural meant losing what had been for years familiar.

Douglas Coupland wrote that loneliness is the most universal human emotion. I think uniqueness is the same way—everyone thinks they are unique. Even the boys dancing at the bar in their bright Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirts and flawless hair—the boys who make going out feel like a weekly costume parade—even those boys like to think they are unique.

I would like to think I'm unique, but I'm not sure that's the case. I'm more than likely just another journalist full of self-doubt with an untidy personal life.

One of the biggest lessons I have learned over the last few years is to stop viewing The Art of the Natural as a Venn Diagram that I'm left outside of. The path I'm on today has just as much awkwardness as the one I left seven years ago after my coworker's question. But it is at least my path.

The other lesson I've learned since that is that I need to keep asking myself "What is natural?"

Too often it seems, life's little assumptions go unchallenged and soon life's little routines assume an importance all their own. I've not yet come up with any satisfactory answers to the question. But if, for example, I'm going to end up one of those boring suburbanites scorned in Revolutionary Road, it will at least not be by accident.

So I ask you:

What is natural?

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Brandon Lorenz is senior editor at Building Operating Management magazine. As a freelancer, his work has appeared in a variety of newspapers, Web sites, and magazines. He lives in Bay View.