This Magpie Mind

this is an unexpected homily I had to write and deliver for today’s service celebrating “Standing on the Side of Love Day”.  Some of you may recognize that it is cobbled together from some past blog posts from my former blog.

When I was 11 I read a book that had a gay boy in it. It was the first time I’d ever come across a depiction of one in literature. I knew, vaguely, that gay people existed: it was 1986 and my mother’s cousin was currently dying of some horrible disease because he was gay. At the time, real life was often fuzzy and insubstantial to me, but books. Books were solid. I read this book, with its minor gay character – a teenager, even – and wondered, for the first time, about the nature of being gay, what it must have felt like. I wondered what this fictional gay boy must have felt when he realized he was a freak who was going to die. I wondered if he’d cried. I wondered how I’d feel when it was time for me to realize the same thing. I spent a few panicky moments imagining the certainty of knowing, completely, that you are fundamentally alien from everyone else and that this alienness was not something you could hide and would lead to the loss of everything and everybody you loved – even your life. And then I calmed down. After all, he was a gay boy. And, he mental exercise of trying to put myself into his position was too strange – I was not a boy, did not want to be a boy, and though I was beginning to realize that I did not want to love boys, THAT reality was not reflected in this one gay character. Lesbian invisibility at its finest: All the women were straight and all the gays loved men. And so I closed that thought the way I closed that book.

When I was a senior year in high school 1992-93, our school got a Lesbian. A transfer student. She and her Girlfriend (who went to a different school) would sit in the halls and make out. She was gothy and dressed bad, she was aggressive and in everyone’s face. She was a soprano in our choir and sat in front of me. She talked loudly about how there was a teacher at another high school that was going to help form a gay club. I was in the middle of a suicidal depression that I was working desperately to hide. She tried to be my friend. I don’t know if it was because she recognized the depression, she was attracted to my darkness, if she recognized my queerness, or if she just thought I was cute. Or maybe she was just lonely and I wasn’t as mean as everyone else. She tried to include me in her conversations about the nascent club. She invited me to hang out with her. I rejected her publicly and as rudely as was possible for me. I felt I had enough problems without people thinking I was “like that.” She kept trying, and then she disappeared. I don’t know what happened to her. I don’t even know her name. But she put ideas in my head that later helped me find my way back to myself, and if I knew her name I would look her up and try to tell her that and apologize for the way I treated her.

A couple of years later when students DID try to form a “gay club” at East High school, and the district responded by cancelling ALL extracurricular clubs, I went to my first protest in support of the club. My sign read “build bridges not walls” and I assured my parents that I was going because it was the right thing to do. “but people will think you’re one of THEM” they said. The problem was that I already knew I WAS one of them. I just wasn’t brave enough to reach for what I wanted. I avoided friendships with most people, I kept myself isolated. I looked at the announcements in the University Student paper for the LGB Student Union and thought about going. But THIS. This protest. This was something I could do. I’d been raised on stories of my parents protesting Vietnam. I could protest for the rights of people braver than I. And so I faced down my parents and went.

A few months after that I screwed up my courage enough to actually attend a meeting of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual Student Union. I faced down my mother again that night when I told her I’d be late coming home from school because I wanted to attend a “meeting about being fair to gays and lesbians”. Again, she was upset that people might think I’m one of them and she asked me to be careful. I had an anxiety attack on the hour drive back to the U thinking that my mother was going to find out, but still I said it was the right thing to do. But as I sat in that group I began regretting my attendance. On that particular night they’d scheduled a debate about whether or not their bylaws should be amended to include transgendered people. Now, at that point the idea of transgendered people was not completely alien to me – the sitcom Night Court had had a positive storyline featuring a man who’d had a sex change operation to become a woman. But it was still a pretty new thought to me. And still, I was appalled that anyone, particularly anyone who was still currently so marginalized as gay and lesbians, could debate whether or not willfully excluding a category of people was the right thing to do. I sat in there and I thought to myself: I am not perfect. I am full of hatred and fear and cowardice. But if I’m going to risk my family’s love, my safety, my privacy to join this group (because I knew that regular attendance of the group would lead to my needing to come out) then I wanted to do so because I was inspired and supported by people who were stronger and braver and, most importantly, kinder than I. The meeting ended with no decision on the matter, and I walked out and didn’t return.

I came out to my parents two years alter when I was 22. By that time I felt secure enough in my identity to be able to handle challenges to it. Besides, I thought it was merely a formality. I was sure they already knew. Not only had I been supportive of gay rights issues for a couple of years, but I lived at home and my queer theory books (including one about how to tell your parents that you’re gay) had been laying around and sometimes moved back into my room. But no, I’d done too good a job at painting myself as only a straight ally. It was a bad night. It was a bad summer. It was a bad couple of years. They made 3 requests: 1) I had to go to therapy (I went, and spoke with the therapist without my parents in the room, and the therapist came out and said that I was perfectly fine, but she was willing to work with my parents to help them come to terms with my gayness) 2) I couldn’t tell any of the family or my siblings (I had already told my aunt through books, but they didn’t know that) and 3) I couldn’t bring any “visibly or militantly gay” people around. And you know what? I went with it. I kept quiet. I was insecure myself, and young, and vulnerable, and I had a lot of unexplored internalized homophobia. I listened to them and removed my true self from interaction with my siblings and extended family. And my siblings and extended family saw me pull away and didn’t know what that was about.

As the years passed and my parents became reassured that I was still the same person I always was, and that my being gay really was No Big Deal, they relaxed and we told my siblings, but there was still the big bogey of our tightly-knit, fiercely devout LDS extended family. My father’s side got told the first Christmas that I was with my ex-partner, K, because we all thought my grandmother was dying and so there was going to be this big family party. I said that I wasn’t going to go without K, and I wasn’t going to pretend that she wasn’t family. So, I told everyone that I was gay and K was my partner. Most of them were fine, some of them were jerks. And my Father put his foot down and informed them that if they were going to continue to be rude to me, and to exclude me and K, then he wasn’t going to be participating in the family activities anymore, either. And the jerks got quieter and everyone moved on with their lives. But because of that my mother was afraid to tell her family — for fear that they would reject me and she’d have to defend me and her whole family would be torn apart.

Because I’d separated emotionally from my extended family years before, at this point it didn’t matter to me that my mother’s side didn’t know. I went on living my life without close contact with them. I skipped parties and weddings and events because I didn’t want to hide and I didn’t want to evade, but also because I had built a life without them. But then K and I had a commitment ceremony in Oregon and were planning a reception for our friends and family in Salt Lake. Because everyone on my father’s side of the family knew, I invited them all, just as if it were a heterosexual wedding. But my mother was still so nervous about her family finding out. So I handed her the invitations for all of them but the one for the one aunt that I knew already knew, and I told her that I didn’t care anymore, and that the burden was on her, and that if they found out later and were upset that they had been kept from this day, that responsibility was going to fall back to her. It wasn’t until the morning of the reception my father called me because my last aunt had just been told — a very devoutly LDS Aunt who had always thought that I should have been her child. She was finally told because my father pointed out to my mother how this aunt might feel about being purposefully left out of one of the most important days of her favorite niece’s life. And that aunt and her husband came, shaken and upset (but mostly because they hadn’t been told for so long), to my reception, and they brought a gift. And I was touched. But years of hiding and withholding myself from her out of fear and deference to my mother’s wishes had done their damage.

And still, no one told my mother’s father. Everyone said that there would be no way he could handle The News. So the years passed. And I brought K around. And I bought a house with her. And my grandparents were there, and they came to visit. And K was at every holiday celebration except for the ones where we went to HER family. And still my grandparents thought of her as my “poor friend with nowhere to go” and they thought of us buying a home together as a practical way for two old maids to share expenses. And I grew frustrated with the situation and frustrated with my mother’s adamant stance that they could not handle being told.

See, over the years I have developed my own theory and plan of action to living an out life: let others be the jerks. When I invited everyone on my father’s side of the family to my reception, there were people who didn’t come. And they looked like jerks for it. When I continually make overtures of friendship and familial love, and they continually reject those overtures, who is the one who is hurt? Not me, because I set no store by whether they come or not; it would be great if they reciprocated, but when they don’t I just turn to others who do. And they sit in their rancor and fear and watch everyone else having fun. And, sometimes, they change. Like my father’s oldest sister, who, when K was pregnant with our daughter, J, was left off the baby shower guest list by someone who doesn’t follow my “let THEM be the jerks rule” and who sent a handmade blanket right before J was born. She’d rejected numerous overtures in the past, but this time, if my rule had been followed, she would have come. Because she was tired of being the jerk. And the person who left her off the guest list came to me and apologized with not following through with my rule. Because though it sounds harsh, by constantly re-offering new opportunities to NOT be jerks, it allows people to change without making a big deal of it when they do. This is a hard lesson to learn. It opens you up to a lot of pain and rejection. You have to find ways to support yourself, a strong support network to hold you up when people you love choose to be jerks. And you have to be strong enough to stop protecting the people you love from their own jerkiness. That’s the hard part.

My mother wanted to protect her father from being an jerk. And that protective instinct betrayed the fact that she thought he would be one and that he would be incapable of changing. It betrayed that she didn’t think enough of him to trust that he could love me despite the fact that I was lesbian. But, when K got pregnant, I gave her an ultimatum: tell my grandfather that he has a new great grandchild on the way, or I was going to tell him, because this wasn’t something that could be hidden any longer.

So, with much emotional build up, she finally sat him and his wife down and she told him everything. And he was quiet for a minute. His wife piped up in the silence: “so, when’s the shower?” And then my grandfather said: “so, how is that possible?” And he didn’t mean, how is it possible that I am gay. And it didn’t mean how is it possible that this could happen. No, he meant that he had no idea how two women could get one of them pregnant and he was genuinely curious.

And that was that.

No drama. No fuss. No nothing. The baby was born and they came to see it. And K’s birthday was shortly after the baby was born, and I didn’t think to tell them about it (because she’d been in the family for years and we’d never told them about her birthday) and when they found out that they’d missed it they were very upset. And the next time they saw her they gave her the same thing they give each of their grandchildren (and those children’s spouses) for their birthday – a card with $5.

For me, this is what standing on the side of love is all about. Not only leading your best life, but creating the space and opportunities for other people to lead their best lives, too. Even if that means you set them up to be jerks on a regular basis. See, when you exempt people from the Let THEM be the Jerks rule, you set yourself up to be the jerk. You take on the burden of Jerkiness for them. When you deny people the opportunity to show that they can change, then you end up being part of the barrier that holds them back.