When people see us now, I think this is what they see. And I admit: it looks pretty damn good. We have a wonderful life. We are, as some VSCO girl might say, #blessed.
And yet, as much as I originally started this blog because of a desire to put our family out there as a representation that this (motions all around) is possible–that it does get better–I also see now that the narrative we’ve constructed is only partly true.
Yes, the lovely, joyful life we now lead feels easy. (I mean, easy in the we-don’t-agonize-over-our-sexuality-or-fear-the-repercussions-of-those-we-love-because-we-are-gay kind of way. Not in the we-have-two-careers-and-two-toddlers-and-just-enough-time-and-everything-is-fine kind of way.) But no, it wasn’t always.
To quote Langston Hughes, “Life for me ain’t been to crystal stair.” So, let’s back up a bit.
It’s National Coming Out Day. I think the Danielle of twenty years ago would have put on her Doc Maarten combat boots (which are back in style, btw), adorned herself with every possible rainbow-colored accessory, and made some sort of public stink about it. The Danielle of today sits in her very comfortable bed, listening to the rain fall outside, and writes a blog post.
The Danielle of twenty years ago was tortured. The Danielle of today has settled into herself.
Twenty years ago–or twenty one, if we’re being precise–I came out to the people around me. I was 16.
Unlike Sona, who says she conceived of herself as “gay” from a very early age, I never did. That’s not to say that I conceived of myself as straight, either. It’s just that my worldview wasn’t open to the possibility that I would love anyone but boys. Every woman I knew loved boys. Every TV show I saw orbited–either directly or indirectly–around girl-boy love.
(In hindsight, I now see that part of me did know I was gay at a very early age. I obsessed over the bodies of the other girls in my dance class. I begged my childhood best friend to play “house,” which meant that we would kiss under the stairs while my mother, who worked nights, slept.)
But I didn’t know during the summer of 1998. Will & Grace wouldn’t premiere for another few months. Ellen had come out the year before, but that was hardly on my radar. A few years earlier, some guy named Pedro, who was openly gay and living with HIV, moved into an MTV-funded house full of strangers and was the first openly gay person I’d ever seen on TV.
I guess what I’m saying is that I didn’t know I was gay because I didn’t realize that I could be.
Then, I met someone who was. She was the friend-of-a-friend at my very small high school in my very small Southern town. And what can I say other than that she awoke inside of me what must have been some long dormant desire to love and be loved by someone who wasn’t a boy?
My life can be divided into two periods: BP (before Pam) and AP (after Pam), which really has very little to do with Pam at all and everything to do with the fact that I think I spent 16 years of my life wondering who I was and the rest trying to reconcile exactly what truly knowing who I was actually meant.
There was a period between when I first started falling for Pam and when I admitted to myself that I had fallen for Pam that, in hindsight, were some of the darkest of my life. My family had moved from one part of Tennessee to the other. In the middle of my junior year of high school, I was thrown into a new school, a new community, and I didn’t know a single soul.
During that time, I was sincerely and utterly alone in my fear that I might be a lesbian, which was terrifying. Now, as I try to unpack where that fear came from, I think it must have been rooted in some deep-seated awareness that I was forever changing the course of my life. I was deliberately steering into much angrier seas. I might lose my family. I would probably lose friends (many of whom where deeply conservative and religious). Would I be able to have the life I’d envisioned for myself: a career, a marriage, a family? More than once, I didn’t know whether that life–or any life–was one I could bear to live.
At that same time, I was falling head-first into an Emily Dickinson obsession and had stumbled upon the book Open Me Carefully, which detailed–through letters, poems, and biographical accounts–the likely romantic relationship between Emily Dickinson and her sister-in-law, Susan. That book became my bible. I would read it every night, and every night I would cry myself to sleep. As alone as I felt, I took solace in knowing that someone I admired–hell, someone everyone admired (albeit through misunderstanding)–was like me.
I drove back to the town where Pam lived (and where we’d moved from), I pounded on her door, she opened. And just like that, as if someone had finally wiped the wet-grey fog from my windshield, I could see what I didn’t want to see before: I loved her.
My BFF, Stephanie, was the first person I actually came out to. We’d traveled to Pittsburgh to attend my cousin’s bar mitzvah, smuggling cheap wine coolers into my grandparents’ basement. One night, as we were toe-to-toe in bed, I told her. She allowed herself half a second of shock and then, without missing a beat, asked all the same gossip-y questions any good BFF would when you tell them you are in love.
Coming out to my family wasn’t so easy. I came out to my mother first, while we snapped green beans for creamy Thanksgiving Day casseroles, my grandmother upstairs. To be honest, my memory of that conversation is hazy. I think my mother tried to dodge the conversation, made some comment about how it was a phase, and said something about how I was going to ruin Thanksgiving dinner. (I also have a very vivid memory of her going to hide in our coat closet after, but I know she would say that never happened now.)
My step-father, a man born in a dirt-road town to God-fearing parents whose church community was their only community, was next, and that was the hard one.
Because I love my parents who I know now both regret the way those years played out, and because it would be pointless to recount every single conversation in detail, as we all have different remembrances of how those years were navigated, I will move through the next few years quickly by saying that there were very long periods of time when I could barely stand to be in the same room with my parents, and I know they felt the same way about me. The tension was palpable–and for years. They refused to believe that I was really gay, giving the same excuses I think most parents do when their kids first come out: It’s a phase. It’s just because boys don’t want to date you because you are chubby. You are just seeking attention. Did that one neighbor touch you inappropriately when you were a child? Are you just trying to piss us off?
Ironically, because they were so deeply entrenched in their denial, my parents were also weirdly accommodating of Pam. She was at our house often, staying for days at a time. We were allowed to sleep together. In my bed. With the door closed. They pretended we weren’t doing anything that friends wouldn’t do, and we pretended we weren’t.
Still, when I came out, I’d drawn a line in the sand. For years, we all reacted by retreating–stubbornly and angrily, but likely out of pain–to our own sides. Ultimately, I did what any properly angsty teen would do: I rebelled.
You don’t accept that I am gay? Well, I’ll be the MOST gay. I put rainbow stickers all over my car. I watched every (bad) lesbian B-movie on repeat. I damn-near worshipped Ani Difranco. I took Pam to prom. In 1999. In a small Southern town. IT WAS A THING.
(At the time, I had moved back to my old town for the last half of my senior year of high school. I wanted to graduate with the friends I’d known, and my parents obliged [probably because they wanted to get rid of me], letting me live with a friend from January-May. When that friend’s parents found out I was gay, they wanted me out of their house. One night, when I happened into the kitchen at the same time as my friend’s father–a man who was widely thought to be The Nicest Guy in Town–he told me, milk dripping down his chin, “You know, in the wild, a pack of wolves eats another if he is too different.”)
Later, I became the president of my college’s LGBTQ organization as soon as I stepped on campus. And, when a local newspaper asked to interview me about LGBTQ issues, I accepted.
The article was published on the front page of the newspaper in the town where my parents live, complete with my name and a photograph. They were mortified. They saw in black-in-white text what they’d been trying to deny for years, and more embarrassingly, so did their friends and coworkers.
I was asked to leave my home. For months, I didn’t step foot in my parents’ house. I worked weekends at the CD store 10 minutes away, but rather than staying with my parents, I had to commute back to our college apartment, which was over an hour each way.
Meanwhile, Sona, who had also been disowned by her mother and thrown out of her house, continued to live in my parents’ home. That was more than a little awkward.
Like Pam, my parents loved Sona. I think they first took her in as some sort of motherless kitten. They always accepted her. They always cared for her and welcomed her. At the same time, they vowed they would never accept our relationship, they refused to acknowledge our engagement (after 6 years together), and they said they would never attend our wedding.
The rest, as I think you know, is history. I write more about the years leading up to our wedding–and our wedding–here.
This is what people see today–and this is what we see today. But we see the lives we have now through the lens of years we spent thinking we would never get here–through a lot of pain and resentment and fear.
I would be doing everyone following our family a disservice to think that we didn’t have to wade through some dark and scary waters to get to where we are now. And I would be doing them an even bigger disservice if I didn’t help them believe–if I didn’t help them see–that you can make it to the other side.