No More Mother May I

College C

Eye of the Storm

Dirty Walls and Starry Night Blue

I wrote this paper for an Advanced Composition class my sophomore year at Emporia State.  Essentially, it outlines my coming out story through my experiences with my mother. We are, of course, older wiser and closer now, but this piece really captures the turbulence of that first year.

I've been staring at a blank screen for over an hour. I sat down, my essay fully developed with key points and themes and even a bit of humor, resting in my mind ready to be released from my fingers and flow onto the page. I even chose a title. "Mother May I?" Yet when I sat down, all the words fluttered away and I knew that I couldn't write another paper about my mom without telling the truth. I love my mom, I do, but when I write about her the feelings are conflicted, and I don't know if I should say how she has put her own life on the back burner and worked double overtime to put me through school. Or if I should instead try and express the pain that seeps through me when she says the word "lesbian" as though it was a disease, a curse, something she didn't deserve in one of her God fearing children. I promised her I wouldn't write about being gay. 

Yet I am gay. I have been gay my whole life, and God willing, I plan to live a long and rich and full life and still be gay. My mom would laugh if she read that. "God willing," she'd say. "How can you believe in God?" I do believe in God. A God who is loving and honest and believes in me, not in spite of the fact I am gay but because I am gay. I wonder how many times I will have to say "I am gay" before my mom will accept it or even just believe it and not say it is a phase, or a sin, something that I will grow out of in due time to marry a nice man and live in a nice house and maybe give her a nice grandchild or two. Sometimes she still refers to my future children and I laugh. "You could still have children," she sighs, sighing as though by not providing a next of kin, I am betraying her. "You could adopt," she proclaims and I laugh again. 

I'm sorry, Mom, but I am going to write about being gay. I have to write about it because if I have to change one more name from Mandy to Mark and make one more "she" a "he," if I have to explain why one more "best friend" doesn't call anymore, it is going to kill me. 

I first admitted I was gay for a split second my sophomore year of high school. I knew, long before, of course. I think on some level, we always do. There was a girl, when I was just a child, who I knew I loved more than I could ever love anyone else, and I never understood why it hurt so much when she told me with excitement in her voice that some boy had asked her out. Mom, you knew, too, because when we stood in that isle at K-Mart and I softly fingered the gold lockets, you said to me, you said "You already have a locket," and I agreed. I told you, though, that it wasn't for me and you looked at me with disgust. I still remember that. I was in the seventh grade and you told me that girls don't buy lockets for other girls and walked away. I didn't know there was a word for it. I didn't know that it wasn't wrong. 

My sophomore year, however, I met John, and he changed my world. We discussed great books while everyone else watched Space Jam, and I could feel there was something he wasn't saying. I knew there was something he needed to share. He pulled me aside outside the gymnasium on a cold, rainy day and he told me. He even said that word. He said "I am gay," and without thinking, I said, "Me, too." Reality dawned just then, and I took back the words. "No, no I'm not… why did I just say that? I'm not gay. I don't know why I said that. I'm not. But it's okay you are." I told him it was okay, and the way he looked at me, he looked so sad. I realized there was this little thing that I was hiding, even from myself. 

It's such a little thing, this being gay. A little thing that had grown so big by the time I finally accepted it, it almost tore me apart. I was a junior, then. I was working concessions at the Gage 4 Movie Theatre and telling anyone who would listen about my great new best friend John who also happened to be gay. Looking back, I must have been testing the reactions of my friends to such a powerful word. I remember very clearly that my least favorite coworker, and I had struck a momentary truce and we were standing in the Stand, just the two of us, her wiping down a register and I poking at the heads on the soda dispenser. 

"I want to tell you something," Lisa said and I looked over, wiping my sticky hands on my dirty denim work shirt. And she said the words. "I'm gay," she said, looking me right in the eye. I knew what she wanted me to say but I didn't say it. I nodded, and I looked away, and I nodded some more. 

"Okay," is all that I managed and from then on it was our secret. I became her confidant and soon everyone at the theatre was questioning what we spent so much time whispering about. She was dating a girl on the east coast and wanted to move there for the summer but didn't know how to even begin to tell her parents. She wanted to come out at work first. We talked about it constantly and one day, a whole group of us were sitting around the office, doing the various things we did between shows, Lisa and I passing notes to one another. Our manager that day was not one of my favorite people. She was nosy and lazy, the worst combination. She somehow got a hold of the notes and finally, Lisa just told everyone, right there. Suddenly I was terrified they would think I, too, was this word that by then held so much meaning and fear to me that blushed when I said it. I quickly explained that I was most assuredly not gay but I fully supported Lisa. I don't know if they believed me but I knew I didn't. 

The question kept coming up. John, my other best friends Brett and Anne, and my brother DJ, everyone wanted to know. Was I gay? Wasn't it obvious to me that I was, they pressured and finally, I almost said the words. I was in my neighbors' yard with the cordless telephone to my ear, sitting on the stone steps. They were out of town for the summer and I was talking to John in the only place I could find any privacy. My house was always so crowded in those days. Even then, Brett was in the yard in front of me, talking to someone or maybe just bouncing around, as she's known to do. I had the phone pressed so tightly to my ear and I whispered, "John, I think I'm bi." 

He laughed and he said, "Of course you are," and for a moment I didn't think he believed me. Then I understood that he'd known all along. He didn't doubt I liked girls. He only doubted that I still liked boys as well. I told Brett that same day and her reaction was nearly the same. They all already knew! I didn't understand why they hadn't told me. I didn't know that no one could tell you that you're gay. You have to find out such things all on your own. 

The anti-climatic reaction of my closest friends gave me confidence. I mustered up just enough courage to come out to a group of mutual friends at a party for another friend's graduation and it was then a girl first actively pursued me. My confidence grew and the more people I told who reacted well, the more I felt I could tell other people. I finally accepted that there was no part of me that ever really saw boys in a romantic light and I finally admitted, to myself and to anyone who would listen, I was gay. 

Except my mother. By the time I left for college, everyone knew. My friends, my brothers and sisters, my high school Psych instructor, yet I could not look my mother in the eye and admit my girlfriend and I were anything more than close friends. Not that that kept her from asking. The first time she found a "gay" movie in my possession she asked what I would want with that. "Research," I quipped but something inside my sunk. She was on to me. She asked me why I didn't date the boy who I took to my semiformal and I laughed. "He's a boy," I said and before I could stop the words, her eyes were searching me for a confession. I quickly changed the subject then left room, seeking refuge in my cool basement room where I rested my cheek against the stone wall of my closet and cried. I needed to come all the way out and I didn't know how. 

My first weekend away at college was, by far, the most traumatic weekend of life. I came out to one of my two roommates our first night in the halls. She had joined a friend of mine and I outside for cigarettes and conversation and my friend, also gay, had forgotten herself and spoken of her girlfriend. My roommate was not fazed as I stammered, that I, too, was only interested in company of the female persuasion 
. 
I had another instant friend. Yet there was still the question of our other roommate, one who could prove not nearly as understanding. 

The weekend after "Move-In Day," the other roommate, the one who didn't know, went home. Saturday afternoon, there was a message for me that she needed to talk to me and no one would tell me what about. When she did call, she told me she was moving out and I asked why. 

"You know why," she said. I didn't, so I asked again. "The whole gay thing," she said and her words knocked all the wind out of me. 

"What?" I asked again. I didn't follow. It was such a little thing, how could it come to this? I tried to understand, I know I said "Okay" a lot and reassured her that I wouldn't hold it against her. Inside, I was numb. I had come to consider it to be this little thing that no one really paid attention to and the next day, as her parents glared at me and her boyfriend and her rushed her few belongings to another room, I sat in a daze. I curled up on my bed and I cried for almost a day and there was no one to call and no one to turn to. Eventually I reached Lisa back home and she was just as surprised as I. She was angry. She wanted me to fight it, named all the rules that were broken, including my privacy and the room freeze and equal opportunity laws. There was more, but I didn't really hear her. I didn't want to fight it, I wanted to curl up and die. Then the worst possible thing happened. I realized I had to tell my mom why my roommate left. 

I, in usual character, didn't for a long time. I made up a story about friends in another room to buy me time and then I chickened out so many times that I don't even remember my first attempt. I do, however, remember quite vividly the last. It had been over three months and I had taught my mom how to use the Internet. Was it horrible and wrong? Yes, but I came out to my mom in an instant message conversation while we were 45 miles apart and she absolutely refused to accept it, to talk about it, to even acknowledge that I had put it out there. It was as though a little piece of me died. 

In all the people I have come out to since, I have never felt so small. I have been called names and even had things thrown at me, but I have never felt like I did when my mom told me that she couldn't handle her daughter "thinking she was a lesbian." Silence became the rule and "gay" was the only swear word we still recognized. We fought. We fought about everything except my sexuality but it was the only thing we actually disagreed on. She asked me not to talk about it, not to write about it, not to let it exist at all. I'm sorry, Mom, but the silence ends here. I am not so small a person anymore. I have rights and feelings and I will be who I am. I will write about it.