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| Can you pick out the lesbian? |
unsurprisingly, i found a couple of telling photos and subsequently decided to share with you some of my lezzie background.
at the time of the photo above, my cousin Jack was my very best friend. he couldn't speak just yet, so already we had a connection that transcended words.
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| Different outfits, positions. So you know it's a different day. |
he was the only boy in our family, really, apart from another cousin i never really got close to. i was jealous of him in a lot of ways, and insisted on dressing like him: t-shirt and undies, that's all.
my aunt even cut my hair super short, as my mother complained that my curls were unmanageable and often looked like a fro. i can't even begin to describe how happy i was [about as happy as when my mom, after years of my begging, let me swim topless like a boy for a little while. i was 8.].
moreover, my toy collection was pretty androgynous [following a Christmas where my aunt gifted me a toy purse and i immediately tossed it to Annie, my girliest sister, and turned back to my fire truck. this was all caught on tape. everyone grew accustomed to my tomboyish preferences.] so Jack and i had a lot of fun.
to this day we bond over our mutual love for Tina Fey and have discovered that we have eerily similar tastes in women.
this was the closest i got to being a Disney Princess.
i remember how, on the day we bought it, my mom first tried to convince me to wear a number of different girl/princess costumes.
"Don' you wanna be Belle?"
"Yuck! No!"
she sighed despairingly and finally surrendered. it was my first taste of real cross-dressing [which is actually weird to say, being that it's a candlestick] and i was pumped. in fact, Halloween became my favorite holiday because it was the one time of the year my mother would let me explicitly be boyish [every year, in fact, i was some kind of guy: the Black Ranger, Charlie Chaplin, the Phantom of the Opera, Huckleberry Finn, etc.].
from the time i was 5 to around my sophomore year of high school, my mother refused to let me buy/wear anything remotely masculine, believing, as i later found out, that she was slowing or even preventing the progression of my gayness.
it's weird to think that there are gay kids out there; probably because we're so trained to think of gayness as a sexuality, whereas straightness is just, well, natural.
we don't like to associate children with ideas of sexuality because they're completely innocent, so when a child claims to have a crush on someone of the same sex, no one takes him/her seriously, but if a kid was to have a crush on someone of the opposite sex, nobody would question it.
but my mother picked up on the early signs: the fact that i only wanted to play with LEGOs and action figures; how i begged to swim topless; how i watched Audrey Hepburn movies, over and over again; how i told people i was going to be just like Ellen Degeneres when i grew up.
the weirdest part about this journey, though, is that my mother's worries began, not when the above started, but the day of my birth.
when she was pregnant with me, she noticed how different the pregnancy was compared to those she had with my sisters.
all of the old wives' tales convinced both of my parents that i was going to be a boy: her cravings; the position of her belly; her mood swings; how easy the pregnancy was.
there was no doubt in anyone's mind; they even only picked out boy names.
so when the doctor cried, "It's a girl!" my mother knew that i was going to grow up with gender or sexuality issues; that somehow, even though i was a girl, something in the womb made me more masculine, or partial to a-typical gender behavior.
so began what she later called "The Sabotage."
she and my dad regularly got into fights over it; when i was 7, Olivia overheard them and confronted me.
"Mommy says she thinks you're a lesbian."
"...What's a lesbian?"
"It's when a girl likes girls the way only boys are supposed to like girls."
Uh oh.
and from then on, i was in the closet.
my mother told my dad to stop buying me action figures because they might turn me gay; my dad refused.
"Even if that's the case, I don't want her to grow up confused or hating herself."
so i started to receive mixed messages.
from my dad, that my tomboyishness was okay; we played catch all the time, bonded over Civil and Revolutionary War facts, etc.
my mother subtly tried to press more feminine or "normal" ideas into my head; i wasn't allowed to wear khakis, or cut my hair short, or play the trumpet or drums.
only bell-bottoms, curls, and the violin for me.
as i got older, though, it seemed that they were both more or less aware of how permanent my gayness was.
the only mixed messages i received teetered between hints of them knowing and others of them still wishing otherwise.
"You know, iss uh so saaaaad, about Jodie Fostah. About how people peel like dey can't come out to dah people dey lobe. But I HOPE DEY KNOW DAT, NO MATTAH WHAT, DEY WILL ALWAYS BE SOMEONE WHO LOBE DEM NO MATTAH WHAT."
so when i finally did Come Out, the results were a bit anti-climactic.
not that i'm not grateful for that; it's definitely better than the alternative.
but it did make me reexamine my past and reevaluate how much credit i gave my parents over the years.
how, even with their initial misgivings on how to deal with my Difference, the fact that they were able to catch it early on and eventually come to terms with it, almost no questions asked, is something of a miracle.
i kind of can't wait til i have kids of my own and get to pretend to exercise some form of ESP.
or just collect hilarious/embarrassing stories about them throughout their lives.
and tell all of their friends.
threaten their potential significant others.
