Talk About It

It's National Coming Out Day, and I know this may come as a bit of surprise to some of you, but I'm queer. I know, how shocking! What with the statement in my sidebar bio, the flirtation with all the ladies, and the constant queer-themed jokes, who could tell, right? Anyway, according to the oath I swore when I got my pro certificate in cunnilingus, I have to talk about my sexual orientation today or else they come repo my toaster oven. Please hold your questions until the end, thanks so much.

When I was a small child, I learned very early on that one of the major governing rules of my dysfunctional family was: We Do Not Talk About Things. Of course, at first, this had nothing whatsoever to do with my being queer. This was something I assume my parents got from their parents, but that is one of the things that We Do Not Talk About. They could never really convince me to buy all the way into this dumbass, repressive, psyche-damaging rule, and I was quite young when I started experimenting with breaking it.

I gave this to my mother the Christmas I was 6. (Heh, I actually signed my name as first-middle initial-surname, as well, just to make myself as clear as possible, and because I understood that that's what you do when you write something serious.) My mom cried. This short routine with me telling the truth and my mom crying was to become a theme.

Nonetheless, when I realized that I was sexually attracted to other girls, I did not run home to make a family announcement. I had inklings about my queerness throughout junior high school (looking back on it, if homosexuality weren't so repressed in society, I could've possibly known in grade school), but it was undeniable by the time I was 15. By then, though, I knew that the fractures in my family were more like chasms than like fissures, and I was no longer eager to go leaping across them willingly. I was just biding my time until I could get to college.

The year I was 16, I had acquired my first girlfriend to go along with my collection of boyfriends. Then my mother found the extensive and graphically written journals I'd kept since the fourth or fifth grade, so she found out I was queer in a manner that included permanently scarring detail for her. I am not just queer, you see, I am also experimental and capable of being rather extreme about it.

I come by the extremity very honestly; my family was very extreme. As I explained to a new friend recently, in my house, there were not just family fights, there were family fights that routinely involved the police. So this little turn of events, this family outing, did not just amount to a lot of unpleasantness when my mom read my journals to everyone in my family (yeah, my family, she'd not been related to these people since 1974) spanning a 5000 mile range, and then hauled her ass over to my girlfriend's parents' house and read to them what I'd been getting up to with their daughter; it also amounted to my mother changing the locks on our house and simultaneously reporting me to the police as a runaway because she wanted to have me institutionalized. My father was, as per usual, uselessly distant and detached from this whole scene.

This doesn't really sound like We Don't Talk About It, but it was a crucial part of the We Don't Talk About It process. This was the shaming part. This was all supposed to teach me why We Don't Talk About It, and to reiterate how important it is that We Don't Talk About It. Even in the middle of all of this chaos, everyone talked around it, but other than to call me a pervert a few times, no one ever talked directly to me about any of it.

Everyone also totally Othered me immediately after this was exposed. No one would even so much as look me in the face. I still remember my then-girlfriend's mother smoking furiously on the porch, refusing to look me in the face, and making terse sentences about how I wasn't welcome in their home anymore. "We thought of you as another daughter, and you betrayed our trust." There are really no words for how awful it was. I lost my entire support network -- everyone in my life -- over a matter of about 2 or 3 days.

Then I was given a choice. I could agree to say that this had all just been experimentation, that I was not really one of those gay people, and I could allow myself to be institutionalized and "fixed", whereupon, after my release, things would go back to We Don't Talk About It. In fact, things would progress right on through to We Will Never Talk About It Again. In the true We Don't Talk About It spirit, this was never presented to me so starkly, so directly; I had to ferret it out from the context clues.

Frankly, at the time, I wasn't even sure that I was actually gay. I still experienced sexual attraction to boys (I'm still attracted to men today although it's been quite some time since I did anything about that; I am more or less pansexual with a moderate preference for female bodies and virtually no preference for gender expression), and I didn't know anything about the breadth of theory regarding sex, gender, and sexuality. All I knew anything about was my own experience, which was rather limited, and a bunch of cultural taboos, which were thoroughly grounded in ignorance, repressive hierarchies and bigotry.

Still, being me, I took a "Fuck all that," approach to this bullshit choice. So my mom, being my mom, involved the cops. The day before my 17th birthday, as I sat in the local police station arguing vehemently with a detective over what was true and what wasn't true, I realized that, unless I capitulated to the institutionalization my mother wanted, her intention was to manufacture enough lies to have me sent to juvie. She accurately figured they could miserably punish me there in ways that she really couldn't anymore. This was completely in character for my mother; this was how she often treated the husbands and the boyfriends over the years. It still surprised me when she directed this behavior at me. And it hurt more than I had ever been hurt before.

My most recent step-father -- who was, at that time, actively in the process of divorcing my mom -- was overly familiar with this whole routine, being a target of it himself. Gratefully, he was an exceptionally decent dude, and so when I managed to sly my way out of the police station, my then-step-father said it was cool for me to crash at his place. He had taken off for a business trip, but left me the keys to his penthouse apartment overlooking Biscayne Bay and told me I could stay for as long as I liked and that he'd help in any way that he could.

It was only a matter of days before my mother found me there, though, and started issuing threats. Because my then-step-father had two other (younger and far more vulnerable) children, and because I knew my mother would ruin all of their lives by going nuclear trying to control mine, I wound up thanking him profusely, wishing him luck, and dodging out of there.

It is all a very long and tragic story, and this post doesn't even represent half of it, but the way I ultimately chose to deal with the situation was the best way I could figure out how to deal with the situation -- I decided to go underground until I turned 18. I knew my mother, and I knew that she would not stop until she had me under total control or perhaps killed us both trying (I mean that literally, and it is not an exaggeration), but I also knew that if I made it exceedingly difficult and prohibitively expensive, that that might serve as enough of a deterrent to buy me the year or so I needed to be out of her legal control.

So that was how I came to be 17, working about 100 hours a week for cash in this little Italian restaurant, and living in this shithole apartment just south of Hollywood, Florida, paying $65 cash rent every Friday to a biker dude landlord across town who never knew or cared to know my real name.

And all of that is just another story that illustrates why it is important to Talk About It. Changing the world and living your life on your own terms are both incredibly difficult things to do. Both involve a great deal of risk. It's important to measure that risk against the gain, but it's just as critical to protect yourself. Not everyone is capable of going through all that I went through. Not everyone is strong enough for that. I have friends who couldn't make it through what life had in store for them. Of course, you never really know what you're strong enough to do until you try it and you either survive it, or it kills you. Haha, that's another one of life's bigger jokes. The universe has a pretty fucked up sense of humor.

I get philosophical about things, which everyone who knows me for about 5 minutes knows, and I completely understand that there can be a lot of conflict regarding the social responsibility and personal responsibility involved in coming out. It's easy to say that everyone has a social responsibility to come out even if they must do so at enormous personal risk, but anyone who's both honest and fair about it knows that that's not always necessarily true.

What I think is always necessarily true is that we cannot be healthy (in the emotional sense), happy people unless we figure out who the fuck we really are, and then, whomever that turns out to be, live that as best as we can. Sometimes that involves wearing leather pants on a float in a parade down Main Street and other times it doesn't. All things considered, I think that, as long as we're being genuine (and not hurting other people), any choice we make about who we are and how we live that is the right choice.