TWENTY TWENTY HINDSIGHT

Things have gotten pretty serious between my virtual girlfriend and I. We Gchat roughly forty hours a week and text on the weekends and she sent me an adorable drawing of the two of us with our three future children, Rocket and Panda, who she will gestate, and Sushi, who we will adopt from an undecided East Asian nation. I returned her romantical mailing with my own—a mixed CD and a love letter that went something along the lines of, I want to make out with you and buy you things with other peoples’ money. This is how serious it is: Virtual Girlfriend (VG) came out to her parents. Frank, Betty, she said, I’m gay on the Internet. Frank and Betty may have been a little confused because they are slightly older than average and may not be entirely sure what the Internet is, but I guess they got the point, which is that their daughter likes to put her head in other girls’ laps.

So, in honor of my dear sugar bitch VG, today’s episode is all about tearing down that closet door. I realized I’ve alluded to my own coming out in previous posts, but here’s the story, real talk style….

I had a friend growing up who was obviously a boy. I mean, she was a girl, but she looked like a boy. This didn’t really change as we got older. She always had really short hair and was built like a guy. Very handsome. I realized at some point that she was probably a dyke but we never talked about it. I also remember thinking that I was really glad that I wasn’t like her, that I wasn’t a dyke. Just like parents who think that their son’s life will be difficult because he likes to shop at Banana Republic and bend over for guys who shave their chests, I didn’t want my life to be difficult. My life was already difficult. I was sixteen. Life is difficult for everyone at sixteen, especially for androgynous boy/girls in a school where the mascot is a Confederate army general. I was glad the gay disease wasn’t something else I had to worry about catching. My butch friend didn’t come out until after high school, but no one was surprised. What was surprising was that a lot of my other friends also came out after high school. We never talked about girls. We may rarely have kissed boys, but we talked about them the same way all teenage girls do. Turns out we just had to leave the vast hell of a small town to be who we are.

I made out with boys for a while in college, but anytime I found myself looking at the curve of some woman’s hip, I held my boyfriend’s hand tighter and told myself that I just really appreciated beauty. There was no way I was gay. I mean look, I’m holding hands with a boy! But then I met A—, and, along with making me crazy, she made me gay.

My friends at school were unfazed when I came out to them. My brother and sister were equally flapless. I was the only girl in Little League. Of course I’m gay. I did not, however, want to tell my parents. This wasn’t because I thought they would be upset—my parents would be more upset if I married a Republican or became a youth pastor—but because telling your parents you’re gay means telling your parents that you aren’t just emotionally and mentally gay, you’re also gay with other gay girls. Like, naked gay. I didn’t even tell my parents when I got my period. I definitely didn’t want to tell them that I was a sexually active person. You know how weird and terrible it is to think about your parents having sex? Think about how much worse it is for them to think about you having sex. You’re their little girl. You sat on their laps and giggled when they tickled you and cried when they spanked you for starting a small and completely manageable fire in the neighbor’s yard. And now you’re telling them that you not only have sex, you have the kind of sex that won’t give them grandkids no matter how hard you try. Not a conversation I really wanted to have.

About a month after A— and I got together, we drove from Asheville to the Outer Banks for a romantical weekend. Before we could get there, however, we were rear-ended by a dump truck on I-40 and crashed into a construction barrier. The air bags popped. The windshield shattered. Traffic was stopped for hours. The car was totaled. We went to the hospital and got prescriptions for completely unnecessary painkillers and stayed at a nearby friend’s house that night and borrowed her car the next day so we could get to the beach and back home. While we were at the pharmacy collecting our completely unnecessary painkillers, my sister called. She happened to be visiting our parents that weekend and said that our mom knew I was homo and was really upset. Like tears upset. Like, what-if-you-had-died-before-we-talked-about-this upset. I got that sinking stomach thing right away and started screaming that I was an orphan as of right now, this very second, no longer a member of my very own nuclear family just because I’m a big gay, fated to a Christmas alone with afternoon movies and Chinese takeout.

It was a hard weekend. A— and I were still freaked out about the wreck. We weren’t farther than arms-length away from each other for three days. When she was in bathroom I waited outside the door just in case she got sucked into the toilet. But it wasn’t just the whole near-death thing that freaked us out. It was the conversation I would soon have to have with my mom, a conversation I would rather have with my cellmate than my mother, a conversation A— also hadn’t had with her mother yet, a conversation that would make everything real. Alas, I like my mother and was still on her insurance, so I at was also a conversation that had to happen. I avoided her pleading messages until we got back from the beach and popped a few of the completely unnecessary pain killers and drank a few completely necessary beers and sat on my porch with A—, holding her hand like we were trying not to get torn apart by a tornado. The conversation went exactly like this:

Me: Who told you, my brother or my sister?

Mazog: No one. You’re father has gaydar.

And while I do think that my father’s gaydar is probably better than average because he kind of walks on his tiptoes, I suspect the big giveaway was less my hair cut and more the way A— and I interacted with each other. I had taken A— to my parents’ house one afternoon to borrow their canoe. I hadn’t done this with any of my other friends. All my parents knew about most of my friends was that they littered cigarette butts on my front porch and wiped with coffee filters because we never had any toilet paper at my house. But it wasn’t just that. It was the way we were with each other. Not touchy and not fawning and not overtly together, but still together, like there was a string that connected us and only us. The string, of course, broke. But I’m still gay. That’s not going to break.

And so, welcome to the family, VG. Frank and Betty will get over it when they meet me.

I was nine years old when I found out that Santa Clause doesn’t exist.  I don’t know why my father chose the moment he did to drop the first real disillusionment bomb in his twin daughters’ lives, but he told Betsy and I on a summer day that was so hot and far removed from Christmas that the words coming out of his mouth hurt not just for the truth but for the shock.  Not quite to the part of the summer when malaise takes over and even the community pool offers refreshment but little else, we weren’t even thinking about Christmas yet, much less evaluating our behavior over the past twelve months to assess our chances of seeing matching black and neon green Rollerblades under the tree. There we were, fresh from fighting a battle in a neighborhood where alliances were as flexible and ever-changing as governments—one day you’re fighting alongside the Taliban/girl next door and the next you’re allied with Poland/the boy up the street—and in a single moment we entered the adult world of the disillusioned.  Our dad softened the blow, There’s no Santa, with the caveat, And there’s no Jesus! which we already knew.  A guy born in a barn to a woman so ashamed of her own sexuality that she tells her husband she got knocked up by a dude with a heavenly zip code?  Right.  Her baby daddy was part human and part celestial but obviously an above-average lover if he  impregnated her from the moon.  And Jesus’s step daddy was probably gay if he was willing to accept that Mary didn’t have a thing with the papyrus man but was actually knocked up by a wispy dude who lived on a cloud.  Not exactly plausible.  But Santa?  Now that was a shock.

My parents are not the churchy sort. The combination of two fairly traditional religious backgrounds—she was raised Catholic, he was raised Baptist—ensured that their children would have only a cursory awareness of religion. If not for the prevalence of religion in our conservative hometown—warnings of eternal damnation are broadcast from billboards on I-40 with statements like, What if she had aborted Jesus?—I suspect I would have started college wondering why so many people wear ts around their necks. As it was, however, our brother Adam, Betsy, and I could not be shielded from the Christians around us. I learned about baptism the same day I learned that I had a one-way ticket to Hell that could only be refunded if I let a preacher dunk me in a river in a white dress in front of people holding snakes and convulsing. As unappealing as dresses and getting water in my nose was, learning that Betsy and I would be the sole third graders to spend eternity in that underground hotbox was seriously depressing. I became convinced that my only way off the heathen cafeteria table was to be re-born, the mere idea of which was confusing because even if my mom wanted to go through childbirth again, there’s no way I could fit in her womb. When I approached my mom about my fear of forever sunburned isolation, she quietly told me that it was fine if someday I wanted to join the church, but there was plenty of time to think about it. She made salvation seem like drinking or sex—adult things that I was free to choose but shouldn’t until my gray matter stopped growing. I imagine my dad saying something like, “Don’t worry. There’s no such thing as hell.” but I suspect his response was more like, “The only reason to go to church is for gospel music and cornbread,” before reminding me about our family mascot, the HMS Beagle.

Our rejection of religion in a religious town made us different. My parents didn’t teach us the Golden Rule; they taught us Kant’s categorical imperative. When my dad and I took walks in the evening, we talked about the history of human evolution: australopithecine, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo sapien. I knew who that our short and furry ancestor Lucy was named after a Beatles’ song before I knew long division.

But even though our parents rejected religion in their own lives and never made it a part of our lives, they realized that banning us from attending church was not a battle they should invest a great deal of ammunition on. So their son wanted to go to youth group because all his friends did? Fine. At least that was be a couple of hours the local cops wouldn’t harass him for skateboarding. So Adam went to a church basement every Wednesday evening, surely less interested in Jesus than in the youth groupies. Adam’s Christian education included watching a film that claimed that rock ‘n roll music can boil an egg. The intention of broadcasting this dubious fact was supposed to scare impressionable youngsters that if the Rolling Stones can turn raw eggs into brunch, it can likely do the same to your brain. Adam saw through Christly claim, and decided to prove the invalidity of the movie through his eight grade science fair project, Can Rock Music Boil An Egg? Despite blowing out the stereo during the scientific process, our parents were proud when Adam not only disproved the Christian right but won bronze prize in the science fair.

Although we may have been self-conscious that our parents let us play silent shepherds in bathrobes in the Methodist Church Christmas pageant but only attended a single performance and didn’t stay for the actual preaching part, while the other parents went to each painful rehearsal during the weeks leading up to Jesus’s birthday (we waited outside the church after the play ended and the preaching began with the boys whose parents were followers of Meher Baba, a 20th century guru who inspired the Bobby McFarin song, Don’t Worry, Be Happy), their refusal to be part of an establishment so fundamentally silly was later a source of pride. When I was in tenth grade, my mom had Christian Heritage Week, five days in which the school principal or a member of one of the school’s multitude of Christian clubs read a prayer during morning announcements, canceled with a call to the ACLU. This defense of civil liberties was not surprising by a woman who dressed her second grade daughter as her hero, Harvey Gant, a black man running for North Carolina senate against the arch conservative Jesse Helms, for Halloween, and who encouraged her daughters to sing and dance to the Neville Brothers Sister Rosa at a fourth grade school talent show.

There was a brief time when religion was the cause of a mildly strange family dynamic. As a junior in high school, Betsy attended a protest at the School of the Americas, a Georgia military operation that trains Latin American soldiers and police to violate human rights in support of American interests. Betsy spent much of the protest with Jesuit priests and nuns who risked their lives working for justice in Latin America. They were married to God, yes, but they also fought the corrupt establishment. Betsy was inspired. When she returned home, she said she had something to tell us. I braced myself for her confession of lesbianism, sure that she was going to stop shaving her legs and start saying things like, fuck patriarchy before spitting on the sidewalk, but next words out of her mouth were far more shocking: I’ve found Jesus. No one knew how to respond to this. It was the ultimate rebellion. Indeed, years later, when I was gently prodded out of the closet, it was essentially a non-issue. When I asked my mom who told her, she said, “No one. Your father has gaydar.”

Betsy lost Jesus after a few days, but there were, of course, other acts of rebellion: staying out late, underage drinking, smoking weed out of homemade bongs after our parents were asleep. But one thing has never changed: we have never forsaken our parents’ values—their beliefs in freedom and equality, their respect of science and reason, their suspicion of authority, their interest in the world. My parents gave up the dogma they were raised with. My mom left Catholic school after she was kicked out of her senior prom for bringing a black date. My dad’s teenage involvement in the Baptist Church ended after a summer working in a kitchen at a Jesus camp. He talks more about the butter sculptures he built in the slow hours than then any religious element of his summer job. I have friends who have rejected the gods they were raised to believe in and others who found religion later in life. But I have nothing to rebel against. I agree so fundamentally with my parents on the things that comprise my sense of right and wrong that the rejection of the values instilled in me is as likely getting pregnant by my girlfriend. Why rebel against reason, against justice, against equality? They raised us differently, yes, but they raised us well.