Keith Yonick was born on Staten Island
Keith Yonick’s newly-released memoir traces his path from his protected childhood on Staten Island, to his tormented years at a Mesquite high school, all the way to present day
TAMMYE NASH | Managing Editor
nash@dallasvoice.com
Keith Yonick was born on Staten Island, a fifth generation Staten Island Italian on his father’s side, he said. His mother had been born in Pleasant Grove here in North
Texas but had moved to New York when she was 15 to get away from a harsh family environment.
“So she moved to New York, met this wonderful man, got married and had four children,” the youngest of whom was Keith.
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The Staten Island Fairy: The Forgotten Boy From the Forgotten Borough, by Keith Yonick, is available in Kindle format and in paperback at Amazon.com.
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And he loved his life there. Even being the flamboyantly gay child that he was, he said, he never faced bullying and harassment.
“Was I persecuted in Staten Island? Absolutely not,” Yonick recalled in a recent interview. “I had these seven very protective ‘mothers’ who looked out for me. Sure, every once in a while one of the older kids might bother me a little, but there were these seven women who lived in a two-block radius around us who always looked after me.”
Oh, and there was his uncle, too, who owned an auto parts store there in Staten Island, and a lot of the men there were mechanics. Yonick didn’t realize it at the time, but his uncle was looking out for him, too, and his uncle’s words carried weight.
“I asked someone later why it was that I was able to be myself that way and no one ever really bothered me. They told me, ‘Oh, Keith, most of the other kids liked you anyway, but they were afraid of your family.’ Apparently, my uncle told all the men, ‘You’ll be getting your auto parts in Jersey if your kids are mean to my nephew!’
And nobody wanted to go to Jersey to get their auto parts!”
But then, when he was 12, Yonick’s father lost his job, and the family moved to North Texas where his father felt he would find better job opportunities. And Yonick’s life changed — not for the better.
Yonick said he has two older sisters, and one older brother. The younger of his two sisters had a learning disability, and their parents learned when they moved to North
Texas that the Mesquite school district had the best programs and services for special needs students.
So although his mother did not want to live in Mesquite, the family ended up buying a house where Garland, Mesquite and Dallas all come together, and the four kids all went to Mesquite schools.
The older three children thrived. But for Yonick, it was a very different story.
There in his own neighborhood, it wasn’t all that different than living in Staten Island. “I still road my bicycle with the banana seat all through the neighborhood, and none of the kids there ever bothered me,” he said. “The mothers looked out for me, just like back in Staten Island.”
But Yonick couldn’t stay hidden in the safe enclave of his neighborhood. He had to go to school. And in the Mesquite schools, there were no protective mothers keeping an eye on him, and no one was worried about having to go to Jersey for auto parts.
And the flamboyant little blond kid from New York was an easy target for the bullies. While his middle school years were tough, it wasn’t until he started high school that the bullying reached its peak.
“It was hell on earth,” Yonick said. “I can count seven people in that high school who were nice to me, and they were all girls.
“But there were four boys — always the same four — who just tormented me relentlessly. They would haze me and spit on me and hit me. One time they got a rope and tried to hang in me in the gym,” he said.
When he was 18, Yonick said, there was an incident that scared him badly enough that he decided to go back to New York to finish school and get his degree.
It was about that same time — spring of 1988 — that the boys who had been tormenting him decided to branch out. They headed to Oak Lawn in Dallas to harass the gays, and ended up killing two men. It was a crime that made headlines around the country, especially after they were arrested and one of them went to trial, and the judge in the case told a reporter that he had been lenient in sentencing the killer because the victims were just gay men.
Telling the story
Yonick’s memoir, The Staten Island Fairy: The Forgotten Boy From the Forgotten Borough, became available on Amazon.com on June 20. In it, he recalls his golden childhood in Staten Island and the torment he endured in high school in Mesquite.
“I actually wrote this book years ago, between the ages of 18 and 20,” Yonick said. But it wasn’t until last year, when he was talking with an editor for a publishing company, telling her the tales from his life, that its road to publication started.
“She told me, ‘You should write a book,’ And I said, oh, I already did. She told me to send it to her, and I did,” Yonick said. “That was in November. And I didn’t hear anything else — until Mother’s Day. She contacted me and said, ‘I need 20 more chapters.’ So I wrote 20 more chapters. It’s only 31 chapters total — a short read.”
Keith Yonick with his husband Scott Tennant
But it’s also a solidly entertaining read. Yonick tells how he returned to North Texas again when school in New York proved to be too draining financially. He recounts his journey from working as a decorator for a “Dallas society lady” for 10 years before deciding to put the real estate license he already had to good use.
He tells how he met the love of his life, Scott Tennant, who designed a machine to correct macular degeneration and has since founded the holistic wellness company Synergy Wellness Group.
Yonick also talks about the many, many characters he has met throughout his life — from his Aunt Mary who taught him about gaydar, to Miss Norma, the real estate agent who sold his parents their home in Mesquite and was his first boss in the real estate industry, to Norma Langston, the “lovely woman” and realtor he worked with later on.
But Staten Island Fairy is also the story of how Yonick connected with his own parents. He never doubted his mother’s love; when he came out to her, she said “So what? You’re gay. You just be the best gay you can ever be.”
But it wasn’t until he was writing the book that he realized how much his “machismo Guido engineer” father truly cared. “I realized that he not only loved me, he adored me,” Yonick said. “He adored his gay boy.”
Although Yonick said the process of writing his book was cathartic and, in some ways, a revelation even for him, there is one drawback: “When I was writing some of it, my first thought was, ‘Oh my god!’ My mom is gonna read this!’ The hardest part of my mom reading it, I used the C-word in one place, and my mom is just furious about it! And in one part, I was describing the outfit I wore once to The Starck Club, and it was real risqué. Mom said, ‘Oh my goodness! I can’t believe you wrote that! My book club is gonna read that!”
