My first night at the women’s retreat in Paradox, NY, we sat around the fire talking and drinking beer until midnight. That’s when I went to bed; the others talked until dawn. I didn’t know anyone, didn’t have a lot to say, and could only drink a couple of beers before I became drowsy. It was a time when I was less confident, more withdrawn, and unsure of myself.

The cabin was quiet when I got up the following morning. I had a quick bowl of cereal, grabbed my camera and took a walk. I heard voices from the school down the road, but otherwise everything was still.  I saw a large spider web by the road, its dewy strands lit by the morning sun. I felt free.

Forty-five minutes later everyone was still asleep, and I was bored. Wearing my trusty blue Keds, I took a basketball I found and strolled down the hill to goal.

Soon I was Bob Cousy driving to the basket or Willis Reed making his dramatic appearance at Madison Square Garden. “And the crowd goes wild….”

A head popped out of one of the A-frames at the bottom of the hill. Diane yelled, “What the hell are you doing? It’s 9 o’clock in the morning for crisakes! Wanna hold it down?” The door slammed, and I stopped dribbling.

Rule #1: even if you’re not one of the people staying up late, be quiet until everyone is awake.

When I got back to the cabin, I crept upstairs, got the book I’d brought and read until 10 o’clock when I heard people stirring. Soon the smell of freshly brewed coffee filled the cabin, and people rustled around in response.

Everything was muted until Malia’s arrival perked everyone up. She had an effect on women that had to be seen to be believed.  She told us her girlfriend Diane had gone back to Poughkeepsie, and she wasn’t sure when or if she’d be back. Malia wanted to go to Montreal that night since it was only three hours away. I decided to stay at the retreat, as did Wendy, who looked decidedly droopy from the previous late night.

I spent a lot of time with Marta that day. Someone took a photo of me sitting in the sun reading the looseleaf binder of her poetry, and it remains one of my favorite pictures of myself. I am barefoot, of course.

Malia borrowed a van from the school for the excursion to Montreal. Wendy and I took an evening walk after they left after supper. Even though she had a flashlight, when I heard noises in the underbrush I decided the stroll wasn’t a good idea. It was August, and we were in a remote area of the Adirondack Mountains after dark. I didn’t know whether or not bears were nocturnal, but didn’t want to find out.

I made a fire, and we drank beer and talked about our lives. She was married, had two small sons and lived near Poughkeepsie, NY. She was active in a women’s center near her home and had come to the retreat with her friend Ruth, a lesbian who had been trying to get her to sleep with her for months. Wendy wasn’t attracted to her, but valued their friendship and the attention since her marriage was unhappy.

A sweet woman, Wendy felt stupid. Her father and her husband were both college professors and had spent years belittling what they saw as her lack of intelligence. I understood, because my dad was a college professor and my husband, while not a professor, had two masters’ degrees and worked at Yale. No one ever belittled me or made me feel intellectually inferior, but her story was common in the 1970’s when men were valued and women were not.

Tuesday morning I saw the van outside and knew the Montreal group had gotten back safely. After a piece of toast, I read until Wendy came down and made coffee. I joined the group for a mid afternoon swim at the waterfall, and I felt comfortable enough to go al fresco. Looking around I saw I didn’t have a weird body. Even though no one was looking at me, I will admit to setting a new land speed record getting from my pile of clothes into the water up to my chin.

Shortly before dusk, a car drove up, and Diane came into the cabin. She and Malia took a walk and came back holding hands. Later that evening, someone realized we were running low on beer, so Malia said she and Diane would make a beer run. Wendy and I both volunteered to go along.

We drove to the closest bar which was empty except for a woman tending bar. Malia made arrangements to buy a couple of cases of Schaefer, and while the woman got them we sat at the bar had a beer. Malia and Diane went to the jukebox, picked out some slow songs which they danced to. The bartender glared at them, but when some fast ones started up, I didn’t hesitate. Wendy and I headed to the floor. My Baptist background hadn’t included dancing as an approved activity, soI didn’t know how to dance. I just did watched Wendy and did what she did. She closed her eyes and smiled, moving easily to the rhythm. It was the first time I’d seen her happy, and I was captivated. She was a different person.

I don’t know how many dances we danced or beers I had, but when we got back to the retreat we found everyone was already in bed. Malia and Diane dropped us off and headed to the A-frame they stayed in. I knew something was going to happen between Wendy and me and was scared to death. I freely admit that I used the alcohol to bolster my courage.

We didn’t even talk about it. She just came up to my bed, and we tore at each other’s clothes. That’s really about all I remember. It was so big, so monumental to me that I understand why I did it that way.

The two “rooms” upstairs didn’t have doors and when we came down to breakfast Wednesday morning, we were teased mercilessly by the rest of the women. Apparently they had lain in their sleeping bags under the eaves, heard everything we did and said, and laughed out loud at our fervor. We never heard them.

©2009 jgschenck

I got way too drunk for my own good last night. I ended up getting wasted on a couple of bottles of wine, removing various items of clothes and then dancing and singing to old reggae songs. It wasn’t my finest hour, but I had fun anyway. Paid for it this morning though when I woke up and vommed. Bad times. I woke up to 4 very lovely texts from Jay. He was drunk, but it obviously loosened him up a bit because he was being such a sweetheart. I thought he would go all shy and deny them this morning but he was cool about it and said he meant the things he was saying. Bless!

Anyways, there is a point to today’s post. I was chatting with a guy yesterday (you should all check out his blog HERE) and I promised him that I would right my coming out story. And so this is it….

I will try and keep it short and sweet.

I was 15 when I cam out to my mother. I had known all my life that I was gay and it was never one of those things I suddenly had to come to terms with, I just always knew and accepted it. I come from a family made up mainly of men. I have 4 older brothers and so I kinda had a lot to live upto in terms of following them into sports and ‘man stuff’. My dad skipped out on us when I was 2 and so I never really bothered with him much, and my mum was both parents and my main role model, and we have always been amazingly close. I would say she is like a best friend to me.

Anyways, I probably would have come out when I was about 13 had it not been for the fact I felt I was letting my brothers down. I had had sexual encounters with guys and knew that that was what I was into, but I always kept it as my secret. One night when I was about 14, me and a friend got drunk on a bottle of whiskey we found at her house. I remember for some reason admitting to her that I was gay. She didn’t believe me at first, but then I started telling her some stuff about what I had done and she was soon convinced. I remember how free I felt, telling my best friend and having her not give a damn in the slightest. Once I sobered up the following morning though I was mortified and immediately rung her to say it was only meant to be a joke and I couldnt believe she fell for it. She was having none of it though, and my secret was out for good.

Everything was fine for a few months, I used to confide my stories in her, and she always kept them to herself. We used to go around in group, as kids do, of about 15 or 20 of us. We used to hang around the park or whatever, not causing mischief, just being teens. Anyways, this guy started hanging around with us called David. He was a few years older, as camp as tits and a screaming homosexual. I became fascinated with him for being so out there. Every guy I had ever been with was sharing my closet, so to meet and befriend someone so open with their sexuality was refreshing.

One night we were walking home, just David and I, and we were talking about random stuff when he asked me if I had ever kissed a guy. I lied and said no, and he asked me if I wanted to try it. I said yes, probably a little too eagerly, what with my hormones kicking in, and we stood there in the middle of the street making out. I didnt find him attractive. It wasnt a sex thing at all. To ask me now, I have no idea why I kissed him, but I was 15 and horny I guess, so I did. i went home and thought nothing more of it.

Now, most people come out. I think I was dragged out kicking and screaming. A few days after our kiss, David had told everyone. It’s one thing keeping a secret from friends, but I wasnt willing to lie, so when questioned (see: Spanish Inquisition) I admitted that his story was true. Some of the guys didnt believe it at first, others thought it was hysterical, but despite the barrage of questions, not a single one of them said anything negative about it. I realised then how great my friends are, and how much I love and value each and every one.

I knew that with so many people knowing, and living in such a small town as I did, that it wouldnt be long until the rumours would get back to my mum, and I knew I would have to tell her. I left it a couple of days, but I thought I owed her the respect to hear it from me and not someone else.

On the day I decided to tell her, things were pretty shitty. I had had a crap day at school, had rowed with my mother the night before, and was generally just nervous as hell. In what was probably the least smart move of my life up to that point, I managed to get myself a flagon of cider and got wasted before going home that evening. I had two of my friends on standby incase things got ugly, and I went home intent that I wouldnt leave again until my mum knew everything. What I had forgotten however, was that my mum was having a dinner party that evening, that I was supposed to be there for. Her, me, and 8 guests. I genuinly had forgotten, but she thought I missed it on purpose because of our arguement the night before.

As soon as I got through the door she knew I was drunk. She gave me that look that only a mother can give and I knew things werent going to go smoothly. She calmly told me to sit down at the table, but then changed her mind and told me to get upstairs. I have never seen her look so embarrassed. I was falling about everywhere and mumbling rubbish to myself. In the end she lost it a bit and started raising her voice. I started storming up the stairs, banging each step as I went. I heard her shout something to me about being grounded and without even registering what was going on, I stood at the top of the stairs, in full view of everyone and screamed

“You just hate me because I’m gaaaaaaaaaaaaaay”

I barely managed to register her expression before tripping over my own foot and falling down the stairs and passing out drunk against the door. The next thing I remember was being propped against the sofa with my mum staring at me. Everyone had left except for Susan, my mums best friend and I could tell they were waiting for answers. I didnt really know what to say so I started giggling to myself.

From there on out, it all got a bit horrible. My mother gave me the ‘I will always love you, but…’ speech and I lost it. My mum, the person I was closest to in the whole world, wasnt scooping me in her arms and telling me that everything was going to be alright. We ended up having a blazing arguement and I told her I was leaving. I phoned up my friend and stayed at hers. It was January 11th 2001 and I remember walking through the snow, drunk and crying my eyes out. I cried my eyes out all night.

The following day I went back to my mums and spoke to her soberly. She told me that she wasnt annoyed with me that I was gay, but that I put her in a very awkward situation by telling her in front of everyone else and just expecting her to deal with it, which years later makes more sense than it did then. Things were a bit odd between us for a while. Neither of us knew what to say to the other, and the subject was never raised again until about 3 years later. I spent that whole time thinking that it was because my mother was in denial about it, but when it was brought up again, and I questioned her about it, she told me that it was never an issue for her, so she never felt the need to bring it up for no reason, and sinse I never raised the subject, she thought I didnt want to talk about it. I think sometimes it is easier to just to be open about things and that way wires can’t get cross.

I am happy to say that in the end everything worked out brilliantly. Me and my mother are closer than we ever have been and me being gay means nothing more than my eyes being blue. Its a part of who I am, not the whole of who I am.

I suppose the only thing more daunting than telling my mum was having the rugby boys find out. In a very heterosexual sport I thought I would be thrown off the team, but that also went really well. My first day back at training after everyone found out was one of the scariest things of my life. I needn’t have worried though. Every single guy on the team was fine about it and when I got to the changing room they had taped the soap to the wall with duct tape and written in shaving foam ‘nobody bends over for the soap unless Ryan wins us the game this weekend’. They then continued to wind me up for, well, they still havent stopped.

Part I:

1.) What specific experience will you undertake the task of, and take responsibility for, expressing? What is the concrete historical context?

I believe I want to express the experience of confusion and apprehension that accompanies a child while “coming out”—publically expressing their sexual preference—to those around them (friends, parents, family, and strangers).

A. Historically, I want this expression to take place in the late twentieth to early twenty-first century. An era in which homosexuality is widely accepted, although still highly debated. (Vermont’s 1999 same-sex benefits, Hawaii’s ruling against same-sex marriage in 1999, Canada’s same-sex benefits Supreme Court ruling in 1999, Quebec and Ontario recognition of same-sex marriages in 2002-03, Mass. Gay-Marriage legalization in 2003. According to A Decade of Violence: Hate Crimes Based on Sexual Orientation, 13,798 reported hate related incidents have occurred based on sexual orientation in the US from 1993-1998). I would also like this expression to take place in a Southern state where “old South” traditionalism would antagonize the situation.

B. This expression will explore the realm of identity discovery, and the controversial issue of sexuality. This issue can be tied to various other degrees in the “matrix” of  life, including religion as well as family dynamics.

2.) “Explanation” or “account” of this experience from a conventional view? What is the dominant understanding?

In the very recent era, there have been several key events that can add an understanding of this experience. Although homosexuality is now more widely accepted than in the past, the reversal of several key Supreme Court decisions giving gay rights widespread validity has brought the issue to the forefront of the media and the lives of homosexual/confused/experimenting individuals within the US, primarily those of a young age striving to understand their identity themselves. It is the dominant understanding in modern society that homosexuality is not a “violent” issue, however, it causes vast emotional struggles between said individuals and those around them.

Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Homosexuality, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/homosexuality/

3.) Personal resonance for you in the present?

Being a homosexual female in the modern era who disclosed her sexual preference to her parents a mere two years ago, I feel I have an extremely strong sense of familiarity with this subject. My own personal struggles with family, friends, and the public in general  in regards to my lifestyle will be instrumental in constructing the expression of the experience of my imagined protagonist. Because this topic is so controversial and there is no “correct” or even “usual” response across the public, it allows for great creativity as well.

4.) One cultural narrative or image that is prominent in your memory?

One of the most disturbing depictions of homosexual hatred and identity confusion I have ever seen was in the form of Boys Don’t Cry (1999), a movie starred in by Hilary Swank and directed by Kimberly Pierce that expresses the experience of Brandon Teena, a transgendered teen who was brutally raped and murdered by two “friends” upon their discovery of his lifestyle choice.

I viewed this film approximately a year after I came out to my parents, a phase in which I was very interested in exploring my lifestyle choice on a broader level. Although I obviously encountered nowhere near the amount of resistance depicted in this account, it made me realize how blessed I was for the support of those around me, and instilled in me a sense of empathy for those who cannot be open with themselves because of those around them, as well as a need to help those individuals.

5.) One “forgotten” (overlooked, neglected) aspect or element?

This topic has been so greatly explored in modern popular culture (literature, cinema, etc), that I believe almost all aspects of the issue have been depicted in one way or another. I’m sure this answer will come to me upon further thought.

6.) One lesson (abstract) and one technique (specific) from one of our relay novels, that you will implement?

I believe one of the most useful lessons I will implement in regards to the expression of my proposed experience can be witnessed in Silko’s “Ceremony”, allowing us as readers to understand that cultural background (belief, religion, family) is an instrumental and influential feature in the manner in which we shape and grade our actions.

Perhaps I will use intertwining literature from various sources while expressing this experience to bolster the emotions felt and understood by my protagonist. (song lyrics, poems, literary quotes, etc.)

7.) A potential interface? A potential figure? (expressively)

I believe a cultural interface would be most useful when constructing my expression. Perhaps my figure will be musically or literarily inclined (such as myself), and I will be permitted to use allusions and citations from a myriad number of sources to reinforce the experience.

Part II:

“Pain. I seem to have an affection, a kind of sweettooth for it. Bolts of lightning, little rivulets of thunder. And I the eye of the storm.” (Jazz, Toni Morrison)

“And I don’t want the world to see me, ‘cause I don’t think that they’d understand. When everything’s made to be broken, I just want you to know who I am.” (Iris, Goo Goo Dolls)

This song quote expresses the feeling of hopelessness felt by someone who believes he/she is not understood by those around them. It also expresses a sense of desire for identity, “soulful”, personal understanding by one person around them, the “you” in reference.

The station wagon rambled along the dirt road until the woods cleared and a series of A frames and small buildings were clumped together. Farther along I saw a vast meadow with two A frames off to the right in front of a discarded fishing boat and a narrow road disappearing up a hill next to them. We took the turn off, stopped at the top of the hill in front of a log cabin, and parked alongside several other cars.

When we opened the door, everything was absolutely silent. The women who had picked me up in town stopped and listened, as did I. The whole downstairs was open, no walls, just a gigantic stone fireplace in the center, separating the kitchen and eating area from the living room.

The woman who was in charge has warned me never to write about any of this. She was really angry when she threatened me, so I’ll use fictitious names in the hope that this will protect me. The events, however, are all true. I’m not sure why she was upset. It’s isn’t as if we were running drugs from South America.

I will call her Malia, a Hawaiian name, which is appropriate since she became known as the Great Kahuna. I could not find a name meaning big bully. I’ll call her girlfriend Diane and will give everyone else fictitious names as I go along.

We rounded the corner into the living room and saw a group of incredibly unhappy women sitting in chairs in a circle. Malia told me to take my belongings up the stairs, find a place that wasn’t in use, and then come back down. Upstairs I found two small sleeping areas with beds and an assortment of sleeping bags under the eaves. One of the two rooms (no door) was available, so I put my pack and guitar on the bed and went back to the living room.

I’d only had snacks since leaving New Haven and was hungry and thirsty. A glance in the kitchen showed me someone had begun dinner, but it had been abandoned on the stove. I grabbed a glass and got some water. Someone had pulled up an empty chair for me.

Everyone was sitting silently and looking miserable while two women on the sofa, one white, one African American, argued. Since I had no clue as to what was going on, I looked around trying to figure out who I thought might be gay.  I tuned into the argument when the black woman called the white woman Buckwheat.

Then she turned on the rest of us, accusing us all of being racists. I couldn’t believe it. I was as far as I could get from Alabama and the days of the Civil Rights movement, had finally gotten up the courage to leave my husband, come out to my family and friends, was sitting in a log cabin in the middle of the Adirondack Mountains and my first vacation experience was to sit in a group of strangers and be accused of racism. After an hour of listening, I suggested that since none of us really knew everyone there our time might best be spent learning about each other, as opposed to labeling each other.

The minute I spoke, my hint of a Southern accent made me the prime target of Carol’s anger. I sat through a ten minute recitation on what African Americans endured in the South before I walked into the kitchen and made myself a piece of toast. After I left, Carol continued to argue – is it arguing if no one else is talking? – about white privilege among feminists.

Eventually the group broke up, and Carol’s friend Elizabeth came over to me. She explained that she and Carol were lovers and had a fight which Carol believed revealed Elizabeth’s hidden racism. She then called a group to explore everyone’s racism and talk about racism in the women’s movement. Elizabeth told me not to take it personally. Inside my head, all I could hear was my new mantra: what have I done, what have I done, what have I done.

After dinner, I met some of the other women – a poet named Marta from New Jersey, a large woman with razor sharp intellect and infectious laugh, a woman named Lara who had hitchhiked from California and hated listening to music by anyone not a lesbian, and two women from the Poughkeepsie area named Ruth and Wendy. Ruth was a tall, earthy woman with a loud voice and a loud laugh, while Wendy was tall, big boned, red-haired and quiet. There were the two women who had been swimming during the group session, but I couldn’t even bring myself to look at them.

Dinner was served family style at a picnic table in the kitchen area. I had never been a proponent of health food and was unfamiliar with much of what I ate. However, the beverage of choice was beer, and there was a lot of it.

I’d gone to a Baptist college and married two days after my last exam. My husband was not a big drinker, and we hadn’t had a lot of money anyway. I had never sowed wild oats, but that was about to change.

©2009 jgschenck

Nancy and Joan are together ....

The holidays have been strange for me for about…well 22 years. The idea of spending the holidays  ”with family” becomes a complicated one when your family is not welcome by your family, or some of your family … see it’s strange.

In the December 2009 issue of Curve Magazine Victoria A. Brownworth writes about how all of us have to find out what family really means. “This season, consider whether that trip home will make you feel good or bad, affirmed or nearly destroyed. Consider whether the people who share your DNA also share your values and sense of self. Consider whether “home” is a reality or just a word.”

Joan and  I smirk every time we are asked at a restaurant if we are “together or separate?”  It took us way too long to affirm to our families that we were “together”. Together for twelve years in a relationship, watching pronouns and getting separate tabs was exhausting.  Now ten years later having lived and committed to each other for over two decades, every time we say “together” to some unsuspecting waiter or waitress…it’s like, we’ll it’s like coming home.

So, for the record – we’re together.

Me on Day 141

MY NEWS TODAY:

From today and for the remainder of the year, I am reducing my hormone and anti androgen blocker, For the Hormone I am reducing from 6-mg Progynova to 2 mg Progynova and the Cypreterone Acetate I am reducing from 50-mg a day to 25-mg a day.

I am doing this for 2 reasons, the 1st reason is health, I am not sure how healthy it is for me to be on such a huge dose, and 2nd the reduced dosage will stretch my present supply much longer, thus saving money. With not working, and jobs scarce on the horizon I am not sure if I will be able to afford a full dose each month I am here, so I am doing this.

I have been suffering from debilitating chronic fatigue and mood swings, I am not sure why, I wonder if it has to do with the hormones, so with the reduction I am hoping to moderate the highs and lows I have been suffering from.  I know that this is a form of self medication, but what can I do, I am not in the UK yet..

MY OTHER NEWS:

My great news is, I was chatting last night online with a wonderful woman in the UK, from Manchester, and we got onto the subject of work or rather the lack of work, and the fact the both of us are unemployed, I mentioned that I was a video editor and I would like to at some point get into the UK industry, and she said her neighbour or a friend has been commissioned by the BBC to edit a nature programme, and said that if I know my stuff there is a great chance of finding work…

This is such huge news as I really want to get into editing for the BBC, that will be huge.. Make it worthwhile to learn the software.

So I am giving myself a few weeks to allow the reduced dose to have an affect to see if I become less tired, and the mood swings are reduced in the poles.

So until I know anything I am going to try and learn the software, and I wonder if my friend can help me and maybe direct me towards an area I should close in on, maybe specialise in a certain part of the suite or be a general editor. I don’t know I am confused about this.

Later Alligator

Justine Paula

ADAM LAMBERT’s most recent performance in AMA MUSIC AWARDS has indeed cause huge screams amongst the music industry.  The performance itself has raised eyebrows from some conservatives and skeptics. But for some, including me, LOVED the performance.

The performance itself is just a reflection of the song ‘For your entertainment’ which may have been ‘why’ did they use the S&M theme. Listen to the lyrics and watch the video.

can you handle what i’m about to do

i’m about to turn up the heat

i’m here for your entertainment

     I remember a time when I was twelve and I was  in love with my first girlfriend.  I thought I was a freak for sure. It was a very lonely place to be. This gorgeous girl with green eyes and freckles was in my sixth grade class. She was beautiful by twelve year-old standards, with a thick southern drawl and a sweetness I continue to seek in women to this day. She’s been married for years to a man named Ted and has children. I ran into her about twenty years after that crush and she was all married and grown up and as beautiful as ever. She kissed me in the sixth grade at a slumber party and I’ve never looked back. She taught me that I love women.

     I am SO thankful for all the women and lesbians in my life for so many reasons. I love the men too, but for some reason it’s the women that have all the influence over me. In their gentle and kind way, they teach me new things all the time. They cook for me, make love to me, nurture me and laugh with me. I am thankful for so many people in my life, with women always at the top of my list.

Why I Give Thanks for Lesbians and Other Women

1. Women have soft skin.

2. Women are nurturing.

3. Women understand me in a way men can’t.

4. Women are sensitive.

5. Women have curves.

6. Women are cute.

7. Women like to shop with me.

8. Women are strong and fearless.

9. Women fight for their family and children.

10. Women show you they care.

11. Women smell nice.

12. Women have soft voices.

13. Women are gentle.

14. Women like flowers.

15. Women are intuitive.

16. Women are passionate.

17. Women take care of you when you’re sick.

18. Women are great cheerleaders for others.

19. Women care about the way things look and smell.

20. Women clean their house and always have enough toilet paper handy.

21. Women wrap gifts in beautiful paper and bows.

22. Women actually read the greeting card.

23. Women make me weak at the knees.

24. When a woman smiles at me and looks into my eyes, it makes me dizzy.

25. When a woman says she loves you she means it.

I was brought up by parents who practice a faith know for its particular brand of zealotry. Maybe you’ve heard of it? The preferred nomenclature is Latter-day Saints but most people just know them as Mormons. I don’t really spend the holidays with my family anymore but days like today still remind me of what growing up in the Church as a queer kid was like.

So it was  I found myself sifting through old messages and e-mails that I re-encountered this story by Connell O’Donovan. A very good friend of mine linked me to it shortly after I came out and it brought tears to my eyes then and still affects me today. So I’d like to share it and say that I’m thankful for all the friends and strangers who have helped and supported me over the years:

Losing My Religion

by Connell O’Donovan

This is a tale of two Ward dinners.  The first dinner was all too real, while the second one came to me in my dreams; both forever changed my relationship to the Latter-day Saint Church.

Deeply wounded after the painful break-up of my first Gay relationship in July 1986, I scurried back to the security of Mormonism.  I tried re-orientation therapy one last time through the University of Utah Counseling Center to make me heterosexual.  A Mormon therapist there named Randall F. Hyde (now an adjunct professor at BYU and chair of the Psychology Department at Utah Valley Regional Medical Center in Provo) put me through several sessions of extremely debilitating hypnotherapy, which culminated in a session during which Hyde hypnotized me and then had me split myself into “Gay Connell” and “Straight Connell”.  He then had me visualize Jesus coming down through the ceiling and utterly destroying Gay Connell to dust and then a wind blowing all the dust away.  This is the most emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually damaging experience of my entire life.  Some 18 years later I am still healing from that traumatic “therapeutic” experience.

Around that same time I had found a small group of relatively liberal, young, straight Mormons to hang out with.  Most of them attended the Emigration 2nd Ward (for single young adults only, most of whom were, like myself, University of Utah students) in the Avenues of Salt Lake City, so I began attending church services with them.  I then moved into the Ward boundaries and had my membership records transferred to make my attendance official.  I was soon called to be a Gospel Doctrine Sunday School teacher, and my class quickly became the most popular of the three Gospel Doctrine courses taught in our Ward.  Every Sunday morning there was “standing room only” in my classroom.

Soon however, I grew tired of having several single women from the Ward hit on me often and regularly. I was the regular recipient of love letters, poetry, and cookies left on my doorstep from well-meaning young women.  Exhausted from living a life of pretense and hypocrisy, on Sunday, February 1, 1987, I impetuously came out to my Ward during Fast and Testimony Meeting!  Later, I recorded in my journal,

“I stood up and asked my Ward to learn compassion and mercy, especially in relation to those who are ‘different’ in any way.  I then told them that I am Gay, and that they had a responsibility to treat me with compassion.  I feared total rejection; in fact I was [literally!] planning to escape to Northern California, if necessary.  I had my car parked outside, half-packed and ready to move within the week.  But the Ward’s immediate reaction was admirable. I merely related to them who I am. I told them I’ve been dealing with it [my sexual orientation] for years, but now I’m tired of the secrecy.  I said, ‘I’m comfortable with who I am.  It’s your turn to deal with it.  The ball is in your court.’  I then sat down amidst profound silence, interrupted only by a sniffling crowd.”

The Ward members were initially very supportive of me, although I was released from all my church callings, pending further ecclesiastical investigation.  While Bishop Ross E. Kendell and I began to meet regularly to discuss my “situation”, the general members showed me a lot of sympathy and understanding.  In fact, the Elder’s Quorum president (a warm and compassionate straight man) discreetly informed me that the church’s prejudiced policies on homosexuals had long concerned him and he had fasted and prayed many times already that the hearts of the Mormon prophets would be softened enough to humbly petition God for a revelation that would somehow resolve all the anguish over and answer all the questions about homosexuality.  Two other Gay men in the Ward also decided to come out of the closet after seeing how well I was being treated.  I actually began to dare to hope.  The faintest glimmer of light shone through the depths of the spiritual tunnel I found myself in.

Unfortunately, by March and April of 1987, things started looking very grim.  Victoria Harris, at that time the only black woman singing in the Tabernacle Choir, had also begun to attend our Singles Ward, since she and I had been good friends for two years.  While she watched me struggle with so much prejudice and bigotry, her own faith in Mormonism was being sorely tried, just as mine was.  Racism is alive and well within LDS culture and she was exhausted by confronting it so often.  However, even in our “liberal” Ward, it got so bad that she and the three of us out Gay men in our Ward all sat together in the pew at the very back of the chapel.  Twice that Spring, during Sacrament Meetings, I hung up a sign on the end of our back pew that read “Coloreds and Faggots Only”, to emphasize our growing sense of rejection and alienation from the other Ward members.  I personally found this cathartically funny but other Ward members weren’t quite as amused as I was.

In May of 1987, again suicidal over my prospects with remaining in the church, and feeling more and more like an outcast, more and more adrift amidst an immense sea, I made a desperate phone call to Carol Lynn Pearson in California.  Her book, Goodbye I Love You, had just come out, about her life with a Gay husband who eventually died of AIDS in her home.  We talked for a couple of hours that first night and she sent me an autographed copy of her book.  I promptly read it four times through, crying all the way, and then followed more phone chats with her, correspondence, some poetry exchanges, and eventually several months later we would meet in person and begin a long friendship that I am delighted still reaches to this day.  I will always be grateful to her for letting me have my dramatics, letting me wail and feel victimized and grieve for my lost innocence.

After a three-hour interview with Bishop Kendell on June 1, 1987, he informed me that no High Council Court would be held (which meant I would not be excommunicated) but that he would convene a Bishop’s Court for me on June 23rd.  That meant that the worst that could happen would be getting disfellowshipped.  Bishop Kendell, who was then the president of KeyBank Utah, told me that his two counselors, Ted L. Wilson (the former governor of Utah who was running for mayor of Salt Lake at the time) and O. Rhees Ririe (another successful businessman and part owner of Salt Lake City’s dance troupe, the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company) would be in attendance.  Kendell also told me that I could bring any witnesses to the trial that I wanted.

As my court approached I became more and more scared.  Several of the Gay men in my Ward (both out and closeted) rejected me, and I was losing some of my straight friends too, which saddened me. Carol Lynn Pearson, Victoria, and my dear friend Lorette remained my greatest supporters however, and I relied on them heavily during this anguishing time.  I also informed my usually distant mother about the impending trial and surprisingly, she became very irate at the Bishopric and acted very protective of me, even offering to come to the trial to testify about my life and character.  I was really shocked by how supportive she was, but I declined her offer.  I felt that I needed to face this trial on my own.

The day before my court I spent three hours at the Church Historian’s Office, preparing my defense.  I xeroxed some of my poetry (which I described at that time as being full of “pubescent homoerotic angst”), all of Mark E. Petersen’s homophobic editorials from the Church News dating to 1977-79 that had profoundly wounded my self-esteem as a teenager when I had first read them, and the virulently anti-Gay “Crime Against Nature” chapter from Spencer Kimball’s The Miracle of Forgiveness. I made three packets of these materials, one for each member of the Bishopric. For all three packets I then highlighted (in lavender, of course) all the negative, homophobic words and phrases to be found in these articles – words like repugnant, abominable, hateful, vicious, unnatural, vile, deviant, perverse, pernicious, detestable, ugly, polluted, disgusting.  All used by these “apostles of God” to describe me and other homosexuals whom they had never even met! (Little did I know at the time that these articles were the very first documents in what would become my extensive archives on Gay Mormon history.)

Then came my trial.  It was a horrible experience.  I honestly didn’t feel loved or sustained by these men at all during the whole three-hour ordeal.  I sat in a room with three of Salt Lake’s most powerful businessmen and politicians, and tried to explain what a cross my sexuality had been to bear because of the church’s homophobia; that the blatant injustices I had suffered for my sexuality far outweighed any sinfulness that my desire to love another man might be.  But the Bishopric wanted me to repent.  They wanted me to say that I was sorry for being Gay and that I was sorry for having loved a man so intimately.  Yet I wasn’t sorry for those two things.  I was sorry that I hated myself.  I was sorry that I had broken solemn baptismal, temple, and sealing covenants; my word and my honor are of vital importance to me.  I was sorry that I had trusted ignorant, misinformed homophobes.  And I was sorry that I felt incomplete, unwhole without the intimate love of another man.  But I had given these men the power and authority to tell me that my fruitless sexuality was my cross to bear.  And honestly, I was gladly willing to shoulder that cross…if I could just get back my temple recommend!  That’s really all I wanted, to return to temple worship.  Frankly, I found the rest of Mormonism rather boring, but I really felt holiness whenever I was in the temple.

During the hour-long interim between my trial and the pronouncement of the Bishopric’s judgment, I grew alarmingly suicidal, fearing the worst:  I really thought that the Bishopric would recommend a High Council Court after all, so that I could be excommunicated eventually.  I had my journal with me and wrote in it that, “I could have, and should have, lied to them.”  I also recorded that I felt they were so concerned for their “beloved little institution that they forgot that I’m an individual.  Goodbye Mercy.  Hello Justice and the Letter of the Law.  But I’m a living, breathing, sentient being.  My heart is made of flesh while the law is carved on crushing, grinding, unyielding stone.”

Despite my written dramatics, Bishop Kendell called me back into his office to let me know that I was only “on probation”.  Not quite in full membership but not quite disfellowshipped either.  I distinctly remember Ted Wilson telling me that he was deeply concerned with my “messianic pretensions” because in my self-righteous zeal, I felt I had a deep moral duty to cleanse the church and all of society of homophobia (something I still feel very strongly about, “messianic” or not).  We discussed the terms of my probation, which were that I could have church callings, and could speak in meetings, but the one thing I wanted most would be denied me. I would not be allowed a temple recommend.  Instead it would be used through the next few months as a carrot on a stick, or perhaps more appropriately, a bull-ring through my nose, to lead me around and manipulate me into repentant obedience.

Still, with almost two decades of hindsight, I see now that this was the best decision that those men could have made for my own good.  I was in such a fragile state that a more castigative decision would have pushed me to suicide.  Total exoneration would have kept me careening aimlessly in that religion for several more years.  But the probation was just severe enough to anger me, without making me despair.

Besides the denial of a recommend, there were also a series of charges given to me in how to conduct myself that rankled me a little at the time.  This uneasy feeling increased significantly over the next few weeks, growing eventually into anger.  Numbers 2 and 3 below especially stuck in my craw.  I felt bound and gagged by these commands, and my inner-rebel (the part of me that demands free agency) started to panic.

A letter from Bishop Kendell showed up at my home on 2nd Avenue on August 5th, reiterating the boundaries of my probation.

Part of the letter listed the following:

During the period of your probation, the Court specified that you do the following:

1.   Strictly adhere to the law of chastity, including all sexual relations with other males.

2.   Avoid encouraging homosexual activity by others by any words or actions.

3.   Avoid unnecessary notoriety about your homosexuality with Ward members and any others.

4.   Perform intensive service to others, shifting focus from self to lightening the burdens of others.

5.   Continue diligent daily scripture study and prayer.

6.   Pay tithes and offerings.

7.   Place your life in order so as to achieve temple recommend        worthiness.

8.   Continue to wear temple garments both night and day.

9.   Monthly visits with your Bishop.

10.   Diligently seek the termination of the probationary period.

In November 1987, for the Ward’s annual Thanksgiving Dinner, a dessert competition was announced.  I had planned on making something for the competition but then had forgotten about it until the very last moment.  I quickly whipped together an easy custard recipe that is baked inside of a hollowed out pumpkin.  After baking it, I placed it on a silver platter, tossed some autumn leaves around it and hauled it to the chapel, left it on the judging table, and then pretty much forgot about it.

After the main Thanksgiving meal had been served that afternoon in the Cultural Hall, the dessert judging began and the judges (the Bishopric) started announcing the winners. Several prizes were given out in lots of categories.  Most Colorful Jell-O Salad.  Greatest Amounts of Chocolate and Cool Whip in a Single Dessert.  Most Creative Use of Deep Fried Ice Cream.  With each award, it slowly began to dawn on me that only women had submitted desserts for the competition.  That is, with one significant exception.  Me.

Then the judges got to the biggie – Best Overall Dessert.  The Bishop stood up on the stage in the cultural hall to make the formal announcement that the award was going to…that’s right, the custard baked inside the pumpkin!  This took me completely by surprise.  I had no idea, had all but forgotten about my dessert, thought it had been totally bypassed in the judging.  Then I realized I had actually won the grand prize and needed to go up to the stage to accept the award from the Bishop.  As I stood up and people (especially the Bishopric) realized that a MAN had won the dessert competition – and not just any man, but the Ward Fag had won – chaos broke loose.  Half the Ward was on the floor rolling with laughter.  The women who had been in the competition glared at me like they were fit to execute me on the spot.  The Bishop was blue then red with humiliation and disbelief, shaking his head in his hands as though the cruelty of the gods had become too much for him to bear.  Later, a woman named Karen drug me into another room and literally yelled at me, “You’re gay!  Oh my heavens, you’re GAY!”  She sobbed that I was such a spiritual person, was so faithful and strong in my testimony, that she had assumed that over the past few months somehow I was turning straight.

The fact that I so easily, so simply, so unthinkingly transgressed firmly established gender roles was just too much for the Ward to bear.  My stupid little custard ended up breaking the camel’s back.  The men of the Ward suddenly grew extremely distant, distrustful.  And the women felt betrayed, because a man had so easily dominated the one realm in which they were allowed by the church to excel.  The Ward’s rejection of me was quite solid and unwavering from then on.  I was stunned by their reaction to my custard, and my soul-searching took a whole new path after that.  I began to pray fervently that I would receive much-needed guidance on how to proceed.

Some two months later, once again deeply torn in two over my relationship to Mormonism, I had the most significant dream of my life.  Even now, 17 years later, I can recall every single detail of it with crystal clarity.

In the dream, there was a Ward dinner being held in some generic Ward Cultural Hall.  I arrived late and snuck in the back, near the kitchen.  I could see a generic Mormon bishop standing at a podium, head bowed in an endless, generic Mormon prayer.  What struck me at first as being so odd was the utter silence in the room, other than his droning voice.  Right in front of me was a table piled several feet deep with food.  In fact, there was so much food on there that the table was bowing from the weight of it all.  Every kind of dish you could imagine was there, wafting its delicious odor throughout the hall.  That’s when I finally realized why all the people were so quiet.  They were all emaciated, glassy-eyed, nearly catatonic from advanced stages of starvation.  Yet with all the food nearly breaking the table under its weight, each person had on their plates merely a tiny dollop of mashed potatoes, a couple of peas, a tiny serving of this, a half a spoonful of that.  And the Bishop’s prayer droned on and on and on and on.  But I was STARVING.  And the beauty of the feast before me was too much to bear.  Ignoring the fact that the food hadn’t been blessed yet because the Bishop hadn’t got that far along in his monotonous liturgy of thankfulness for his many blessings, I dove into the feast laid out before me, devouring anything I could put my hands on.  Several people nearest me temporarily came out of their zombie state to shush me and glare at my audacity but none had the energy to stop me, so I continued gorging myself on the abundance before me.

I awoke from this dream and fell into a fit of tears of relief and lamentation.  Something I had been missing finally fell into place inside my soul and I knew with every fiber of my being that Mormonism was spiritually starving my Gay Soul to death.  I could at last see that the feast was so readily available and yet none dare partake of but a morsel.  The feast laid out was far too huge, too expansive for the Mormons to appreciate, let alone take advantage of.  They were too bound by the rigidity of structure, hierarchy, unquestioned obedience, tradition, authority, while my soul hungered to be fed with the tender mercies of the Spirit. My ravenous spirituality finally cast off the fetters of Mormonism with that dream and I have never looked back, never regretted for a single moment that Mormonism would never grip my soul again.

Four years later, on December 5, 1991, I finally had my name removed from the roles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (and made the pages of the Salt Lake Tribune for it, but that’s a whole other story).  This only formalized what had already happened in my soul as the result of two nightmarish Ward dinners. And I’ve never stopped feasting since then….

Connell O’Donovan

The morning.

Bi Girl needs to realise sometimes we don’t want her there. It might look like I’m being really unfair and mean and everything, but seriously, she had absolutely no clue when the Russian and I were going to the cinema, it was actually a date. Or at least she seemed not to. Even while she kept proposing movies we were all against and even though I finally saw a way to get her out of there by choosing This Is It. It’s the last week they are showing it and the Russian said four weeks ago he wanted to see it.

She explained to him the plot of The Time Traveller’s Wife with a very enthousiastic undertone. He said, “Well that sounds absolutely shit.”

She went to fetch the cinema’s mag with an overview of all the movies.
He said, “There she goes. Our clueless little blonde..”
I rolled my eyes.
He said, “Am I too much?”
I said, “Yeah.”
She returned, flipping pages and asking what the conversation was about.
He said, “In a bad way though?”
I said, “Nah.”
She said, “What?”
We both didn’t explain.
She said, “We could go to Love Happens.” (Well Love doesn’t Happen if you stay any second longer.)
He said, “That’s Jennifer Aniston right?”
I said, “What’s your problem with Jennifer Aniston?” although I knew the answer.
He said, “She’s in Friends.”
She said, “Yeah, what’s your problem with Jennifer Aniston?” although she didn’t know the answer.
He said, “Jennifer Aniston just ruins everything!” in an attempt to be an even cuter jerk. He’s good at cynism. In fact it’s his preferred way of expression.

In Literary Science, I said, “You gotta be careful what you say to Y, you make her feel insecure.”
She said, “Sometimes you look at me like you’re thinking all kinds of things about me.”
He said, “You can’t handle it when I’m thinking. I’m so scary when I’m thinking.”
She said, “I mean all kinds of weird things.”
I said, “See. You make her feel insecure about herself.”
He said, “Oh, but you don’t need me for that. You do that yourself.”

Bi Girl said, “If you’re going to This Is It, I’m going home.” She didn’t. She just stayed. She almost acted like we were trying to persuade her to stay. Well we weren’t!

He said, “I’m sorry. I thought she’d leave.”

Later the Russian texted she probably just didn’t care if we wanted her around or not. I think he has a good point. Look Bi Girl is insecure and tends to try her best not to show it by shoving herself in everyone’s faces. And normally I don’t mind that. Normally I even play along when she looks at me all ‘hey you’re bi too let’s have some fun’, even though she’s blonde and generally not at all my type when it comes to personality. (And I’m not so blonde so not very much her type. I don’t get her obsession over blonde people.) Because I don’t mind pretending to flirt with someone if we both know it’s crap anyway.

I’m still not out and I feel like I’m lying to the world at large. All this hiding, you know, it breaks you down. They are right when they say closets hurt. And I can now finally see that, probably because I’m now in an environment where there are no people who make childish homophobic comments in class. There are no good solid reasons to not be out anymore. But I stopped adding Facebook friends from Amsterdam the moment I realised this thing with the Russian was for real. I’m now at a point where I just can’t come out to anyone before him.

The dilemma is as follows: text him to prevent any further delays or wait a week. And if I wait a week, be totally unsure of whether or not I can decide to come out this time. Apparently it’s not in my control.

I’m going for texting. The difference between coming out to him and coming out to, say, your parents, or friends who have known you since you were eleven, is that those are relationships that already exist. That one week doesn’t matter. But here it is something I knew from the start. I knew it when Bi Girl came out during that barbecue in the introductory week and I leaned forward to hear the conversation at the other end of the table, and the Russian looked at me and I knew the entire situation would have been perfect, but I couldn’t say it. My mind is still set from all those times attractive people seem to loose interest after a few weeks. So I didn’t get into the discussion over whether or not Scarlett Johansson was the best-looking woman on Earth. (She isn’t. Hello, Angelina Jolie? It’s the blonde thing again.)

Because I knew it, I feel like I have been lying. I just can’t live with myself like this for another week.

The evening.

I texted him at 10.16, the time my train was supposed to leave. It had a delay (again). Around me there were Spanish tourists and I was not paying attention to them. I sat on a bench and stared at the tiles in the platform, pressed send and hoped I was not waking him up. Imagine waking up to that.

2.04 pm. Is that also because you can’t choose?

I was standing outside the lecture room we just had Swedish in, with a few of my classmates who were deciding whether or not they would attend Research. Ch, a European Studies major, said something to me. I asked her to repeat what she had said. “I asked if we would go eat soup. But seeing your enormous grin I can see why you didn’t hear me.”

I texted I knew he was going to say that, which I did, and that it wasn’t true. For instance, I’m not all that into blonde. (Thanks to typing the previous bit out in the morning, I could come up with that so quickly.)

2.20 pm. I am. Maybe that could become a problem. xD

Second enormous grin. Y, my previously mentioned friend from Swedish, stopped halfway her sentence. She was waiting for Research with some Norwegian majors, where I had just arrived. “Are you having fun?”

She had no idea how much fun I was having. But she is currently having dinner with Bi Girl, and practicing prosody. I know for sure because they just called with a silly question. Y promised me she would bring the Russian up in conversation. And more importantly, the Russian in relation to me. Bi Girl is probably going to shout something like, why didn’t they just say that, and I thought Gwen was gay. Which is her own failure to understand how sexual orientation works, a mistake she made when she once said I wouldn’t be interested in how some guy friends of hers looked, and I was too baffled to answer.

Elisabeth told me she thought I was brave. I said, that’s what you get for free, having to come out. It’s true, no? It’s something we have to learn to deal with. I don’t really care about brave at this point.

All I know is I can’t put into words how happy I am.

Hi All

Today is a really bad bad day for me, I am trying to deal with the issues of not working and the crushing boredom thus brought on…

My heart is really funny, and I am suffering deep depression, and a very deep tiredness, and this does not help me, I tried to sleep and when I woke up, it took a long time for the brain to come alive, to be able to function properly..

This is getting worse by the day, I am sure that it is a pump problem, maybe it is something else, I dont know, the medical professionals dont seem all that concerned about it. Thus it must not be a problem, even though I feel terrible, it cant be that bad! Must be in my head!

I was asked why suicide: Well I dont really know, I am tired of all the pain I have, of carrying all the guilt around,  of being a failure in life, I have yet to really achieve anything worthwhile. I feel that I am not going to be much in my life, and that I have seen myself as far more than I really am…

A vw beetle is a vw beetle, it may want to be a porsche, but it is only a vw beetle, I am the same, I see myself as more than I am, and the lesson I have to learn is that I am far less than I see myself.

I wonder when the tide will turn and I will be able to be a success in life, I am not craving wealth or fame, just to be me, a female tv news video editor, that is all, nothing fancy or special, just having fun cutting together news inserts, I love that, that is all I want to do with my life, now why is this so difficult for me to do?

Later Alligator

Justine Paula

The decision to come out is an important part of any gay man’s life. It’s the chance to finally let the people you love see you for who you are. With Thanksgiving fast approaching, you might start thinking that there is no better time to come out and finally be yourself. Equal4All sat down with two gay men as they shared their views about coming out on a holiday.

“Holidays are very family oriented and I get that it’s a comforting time,” said Jon McPhee, 22, but he doesn’t believe that you have to come out on a holiday. “You should find comfort in coming out anytime of the year, you shouldn’t have to fall back on a holiday. But if that’s what it takes for you to come out, more power to you,” he said.

McPhee, who came out earlier this year, also mentions that the relationship that you have with your family is a huge factor in the coming out process. “Ultimately, it’s your own decision when you want to come out, but I just hope that the reason why people come out on holidays aren’t so they can fall back on it because they fear the outcome. It’s always sad when you hear that someone’s coming out process is a trying experience rather than a positive one.”

Colin Sullivan, 22, had similar feelings about coming out on a holiday. He came out to parents earlier this year and said that he may come out to his sister during the upcoming Thanksgiving. But he too, is unsure if coming out on the holiday is the right way to do it. “I don’t think I could do the ‘tell one, tell all’ type of thing. I wouldn’t want such an important part of my life being associated with the holiday,” he said.

“It’s really just such an important time for a gay man, so when you’re ready to tell people, you should regardless of the circumstances, but just try and be aware of what the reactions might be,” Sullivan said.

Though Thanksgiving wouldn’t be the ideal time to come out for a lot of men, for some, it is. “If you want it to be out there quickly, then jump into the deep end and do it, It’s different for everyone; all I know is that I wouldn’t be comfortable doing it that way,” Sullivan said.

So, if you are planning on coming out this Thanksgiving, just make sure you do it on your own terms and that you’re ready for anything thrown back your way. Sullivan said, “Just be strong, be prepared for any reaction possible … but no matter what they say, or how they react, everything gets better with time.”

What are your thoughts on coming out at Thanksgiving? Please share your ideas below!

-Lindsay Dahlstrom

Photo Source 1, 2, 3

This is long, but it’s exactly how it happened.

When no one was waiting for me in Schroon Lake, I panicked and then remembered I was supposed to call. There wasn’t a public phone in sight. The village center was at most two blocks long. One side of the New York Route 9 had no shops at all and the other side only a few. There was a café, an ice cream shop with a window for walk up service, a t-shirt shop, the bus ticket window, and a hardware store. The other side had the church, a small town hall, a miniscule post office, and a lodge of some sort. A block to the right was a drive-in sub shop. I dragged everything across the street, and using a borrowed phone from the ice cream shop called the retreat. I told the woman who I was and where I was. I told her the woman in charge was supposed to pick me up, and she said someone would be there shortly. I got an ice cream cone and dragged everything back to the spot in front of the church. It offered a great view both to the right and left, even down to the lake and was well out of the way of pedestrians. After about fifteen minutes, a dark blue Dodge sedan came into town from the north and slowed down across from me. It unloaded three teenagers who went into the ice cream shop and pulled away. I opened my guitar case and bean to play. After playing every song I knew, I checked my watch and saw I’d been waiting an hour. I called the retreat again and was told the woman in charge was still not in. I asked that someone, anyone, come pick me up as soon as they could and was assured someone would. I went back to my spot across the street and waited. Every car’s appearance lifted my hopes, but each time they drove past. The teenagers who’d been dropped off earlier walked down to the lake. I looked at my watch again and was startled to see I’d been waiting over two hours. I didn’t want to make waves, but was considering getting on the next bus and heading back to New Haven. I was very annoyed. Before I did, I thought I should call one more time. I was told someone would be right there. The letter in Ms sounded very professional. There would be group sessions, foot massage, reflexology, counseling, and recreational opportunities. I hoped there might be other lesbians I could talk to. I’d left my husband, come out to my family, friends, and co-workers, but had never had sex with another woman. What if I was really bad at being a lesbian? I’d already flunked heterosexuality. I’d waited for over three hours and was on a first name basis with the town policeman who periodically drove to the lake on his short circle patrol. I also knew the woman at the bus ticket window, the people in the café and ice cream shop. Maybe one of them would take me in for the night. Then I heard a car. Actually, I felt the vibrations before I heard the sound. Looking up, I saw a large brown station wagon, covered in dirt, its windows smeared with dirty streaks. I was aghast. I was waiting for a professional woman, someone who might wear jeans, but would certainly wear a knit pullover, someone with clean socks and a professional manner, and a clean car. This driver could not be the psychologist I had written. Its muffler throbbing loudly, the car pulled over at the sub shop and a small woman in jeans, a denim shirt and an extraordinary amount of hair got out. Whew. Then car came unerringly towards me then went past. Before I could sigh again, it made a U-turn and pulled up next to me. This was the car. The driver’s left hand rested on the steering wheel, holding a cigarette. Her right arm casually lay across the back of the front bench seat, an open beer car in her right hand. If possible, she had more hair than the other woman. Even with her sitting, I could tell she was tall. Her breasts were visible under the blue denim shirt she wore open to her navel. I focused on her eyes. I was considering running away when she asked if I was going to the women’s retreat. With no time to fashion a lie, I heard myself say, “Yes, I am.” She told me her name and patted the front seat. Clouds of dust rose, momentarily hiding her face. “Throw your stuff in the back and sit up front with us.” I wondered how easy it would be to get out if I got in the car. What if part of women’s liberation is that women get to be serial killers and advertise for their victims in MS? I opened the back door and noted the rear window of the station wagon was gone. The woman said, “Yeah, it sucks all the dirt in the county in here.” My pack and guitar case stored, I closed the door and opened the front door. There were seven inches of dirt on the front seat. At least seven inches. She patted the seat again and more dust arose. “C’mon.” I looked at my new gold brushed velour jeans, then at the dust on the seat. I knew that by sitting and sliding I would grind dirt into my new pants that would never come out. This wasn’t New Haven dirt. This was country dirt, and it was laughing at my pants. I got in the car carefully, lifting my butt as I moved. Perhaps the pants could be saved. She drove to the sub shop where the small woman was waiting. “Scoot over,” she said as she opened the door. Lift the butt. Move. Lift the butt. Move. Perhaps I could still save my new pants. “Here, baby,” the woman said. Reaching across me, she handed one of two Italian subs to the driver. Hmm. There was a real possibility these two women were lesbians. Not like any lesbians I had ever seen or thought of or imagined, but lesbians none the less. The small woman introduced herself in a husky voice. Where the driver was tall and ample, she was small and wiry. Her blue jeans were as tight as the other’s, but her denim shirt was only open to her breasts. Her sandwich in one hand, the driver juggled a cigarette and a beer in the other. “Hold this a minute, will ya?” She handed me the beer as she unwrapped the sub. With one end of the sub exposed, she reached for the beer can. A tomato, completely encased in olive oil, squirted out, slid down my new tan canvas jacket and settled on my pants. The woman to my right reached to grab it, inadvertently grinding tomato and oil farther into the fabric. Unfortunately, she was still juggling the beer can and cigarette, and the end result was a flurry of ashes, a tiny cinder, and a generous splash of beer all landing on my pants. Fortunately, the beer put out the cinder before it made more than a small hole in the material. It was over. I couldn’t save my clothes now. As we drove along the beautiful upstate New York roads, the women told me there were six other women at the retreat. When the car turned onto a dirt road I understood the full extent of problem with the rear window. Conversation became difficult, if not impossible as I coughed and choked on the dust. The driver stopped the car at a small bridge. On the right side of the road, she pointed out a small waterfall. The lake above the falls, she explained, was where they went swimming. It was a lovely spot, and I was glad I’d brought my camera. Suddenly a voice hailed us. At the top of the falls, a woman stuck her head out of the water and waved. Someone from the retreat, I learned. I smiled, and we all waved. Then the woman stood up. She was totally naked. She wore absolutely nothing. It was impossible to only look at her eyes. My mind was totally blank. There were no previous experiences to which I could relate this one. Southern girls just didn’t see other girls without their clothes. I don’t know why, but they didn’t. It was probably a good thing. I was aware of a buzzing in my head, as well as the car starting up again. And I knew my mouth, which had dropped open when the woman stood up, was still open. The two women in the car assumed I was the same person they’d picked in town, but they were wrong. The New Haven me, with my proper job at Yale, my religious family, and twenty-seven years of assumptions about life, was gone. The new me didn’t know anything about anything. Everything was up in the air. Not everyone looked as I did or thought as I did or behaved as I did. I no longer stood on solid ground, able to see where I’d come from and where I was going. I stood on the rolling deck of a ship at sea in the middle of giant swells, trying to keep my balance, feeling seasick, unsure of what was coming, aware of the danger of being swept away, but unwilling to miss the trip.

©2009 jgschenck

Before I left my husband July 4^th weekend, 1974, we had planned a three week vacation in Yugoslavia. I had been captivated by photos I’d seen of its mountains and the beauty of pre-war Dubrovnik. After I had moved out of our apartment, he called to ask if I was still going. I was incredulous – of course not. He wanted me to go with him anyway, but I refused, even when he said we couldn’t get our deposit money back.

I took very little when I left and selfishly left the rest for him to sort through and dispose of. It wasn’t my finest hour, and I knew then that it was unfair and self-centered. I have no justification. I believed I was running for my life, but I knew it looked irresponsible and heartless. I didn’t tell many people at Yale the truth as to why I left, because when I told my former boss she reacted very negatively. She was the one person I thought I could count on, but I was very wrong. A staunch feminist, she took what was then a common stand against homosexuality. Where I thought feminism set me free, she thought lesbianism tainted the fight for women’s rights.

One day in late July I was in the Provost’s office talking to her assistant, someone who didn’t reject me. I explained I had three weeks of vacation coming, but didn’t have anywhere to go or a lot of money. My husband had switched his plans around with the travel agency and went to England for a couple of weeks.

My friend told me she’d just read a letter to the editor of Ms Magazine about a women’s retreat in upstate New York. She got the magazine out, and read the letter to me. The place was in Paradox, New York, and offered a place for women to go who were re-assessing their lives. That sounded like me.

We got out a map, found the town, a tiny dot outside Schroon Lake, and I copied down the address. That night I wrote the woman a letter, explaining my situation and asking what the rates were. I told her when I would be coming – I decided to go for one week since I didn’t know anything about the place or the woman running it – and a week later received a reply. She gave me the sliding scale rates and told me to call when I arrived in Schroon Lake on Sunday, August 4, 1974.

My friend Mary helped me shop for a couple of new outfits, appropriate to a less formal lifestyle. No more hose or heels for me. She told me I had to have a denim shirt. All lesbians had denim shirts, and I couldn’t be without one. I also bought a pair of burnt orange brushed velvet jeans – remember, this was 1974 – and a pair of dark brown suede boots with gum soles.

I read incessantly, but came to hate evenings and weekends because I was so incredibly lonely. Mary spent weekends and evenings with her girlfriend. I walked around the University, often through areas of New Haven that weren’t really safe, but I didn’t care. Every evening I rode my bicycle over to hear the carillon concerts at Harkness Tower. One Saturday, I rode up to the top of East Rock and back, a ten-mile trip, but I was reminded of climbs I’d made with my husband up West Rock. I was restless and anxious, waiting for the trip to New York.

The bus left New Haven at 9:15am, and Mary came down to see me off. I was more than a little annoyed when she teased me about falling for someone during the week. Neither of us knew that the trip would change my life. The bus stopped in Springfield, MA, then on to Albany, NY, where I changed for the trip up I-87, the Northway. I dozed off and on, read a book I’d brought, and wondered what I’d find at the end of the five hour ride.

A teenage girl got on in Lake George and sat next to me. She babbled quite a bit about a church group or camp located in Schroon Lake and asked if I was part of that. I assured her I was not and asked about the woman’s retreat, but she had never heard of one in the area. That made me somewhat uneasy.

When I got off in Schroon Lake, I felt I was looking at a postcard. The majestic Adirondack Mountains soared around me. A road next to a white church ran down to a beautiful deep blue lake. From my bus companion, I knew that Schroon Lake was where the movie “Marjorie Morningstar” had been filmed. The lake was dotted with white sails and the sandy beach covered with people in brightly colored swimsuits.

I took my pack and guitar and sat on the hill in front of the church. No one was there to meet me. I felt very small.

©2009 jgschenck

I’m becoming a different kind of lesbian and a different kind of femme, and it has all been surprising.
I quit shaving my legs about 2 months ago.
I’m becoming the type of lesbian who gets excited about canning and pickling.
I’m that girl who gets excited about baby making, and sewing cloth diapers and pureeing my own baby food.
I’ve been thinking a lot about capitalism, and its role in my life.
I want to know more about where my clothes and food come from.
I’m feeling less and less concerned about grad school and more and more concerned about becoming a responsible human being who tries do to with less.
My cravings for a more open and poly-leaning relationship are waning dramatically because the One I’ve got keeps on seeming more and more like the One I want. Other People ™ are too hard to manage.
What I’m craving now… there is a long list of things… nature walks, community meals, cooperative parenting, knitting groups, quilting circles, vegetable and fruit gardens and cotton summer dresses…
To think I haven’t worn a high-heeled shoe in months, and only recently purchased clothes at a retail store for the first time in almost a year! My sewing and knitting repertoire keeps growing, and so does my skill at home cooked meals. I know how to make pie crust from scratch!

Life is so different for me lately. Am I still femme if I don’t shave my legs? I think so. Do I still count as lovely, sexy, beautiful? Yeah, I think so. But all these words mean such drastic different things from when I was first beginning to belong to this bright glimmering butch-femme community. It would seem that I’m in the process of refining and redefining my femmeininity all over again. How does it happen that way? Just when we decide that we’ve figured ourselves out, something throws a wrench into the gears. I’m taking apart the cogs and unscrewing the wheels, trying to decide what to change when I put it back together next…

Anyone interested in a holiday card, some of my Grandma’s cookies/recipes, or just a little surprise treat of my choosing, feel free to write to me with your mailing address. If you’re feeling vulnerable, but would still like to remember the art of hand-writing letters, I’ll give you my address first.

I love you all so dearly…

I cannot belive i am at day 137, i know it is just a ordinary day, what is special about 137, well it a nice number, 1+3=4+3=7 and 3*4+1=13..

Just kidding, it is just a good day, I may have aced a job in the UK starting in June or July, which is a long time from now, but hey a job is a job…

I am sure that this will be a great chance for me to work hard and start saving for my gender reassignment surgery which I would like done in Thailand in 2 years time, that will be cool…

http://www.chet-plasticsurgery.com/

please press the the link if you are 18 or older…

This is where I am hoping to have my srs surgery done in the next 2-3 years, hopefully before the next school reunion in 2013.

Me on day 137

So I’m a little late on the uptake for this one.  I tried my damnedest to find some way to watch it on the TGDoR, but nothing really wanted to work out for me on that day, period, and I wound up stranded at my trans-non-sympathetic friend’s house.  He accepts me well enough, but he doesn’t really see that there’s a tragedy going on with these people, thinks the surgery is “cosmetic” and didn’t do more than shrug when I told him what day it was, or the Statistics.  I started thinking, sometimes the ones that don’t care are worse than the ones who damn us.

But then I watched Boys Don’t Cry.

Don’t get me wrong, I know the story front to back, watched the documentary on Youtube, read the blogs and news journals, but they don’t take you into the experience of the story like the movie does.  And I tend to relate very heavily to a given character when I watch a movie, whether I’ve got much in common with him or not.  Brandon was Me in too many ways for me to even feel comfortable with, before we even got to the bad part of the movie.  (Well, except in the juvenile delinquent sort of way.)

Anyway, I got to sit down properly with my boyfriend last night and watch it (until his mom got home, at which point I got to sit down awkwardly and stiffly and watch it.  I don’t think she likes me and she’d like me even less if she knew I was a guy.)  But as awful as it was, it was worth watching.  He gripped my hand tight through the worst of it.  The rape scene WAS the hardest part to watch, but I think most of the horror of it all washed over my head until the end of the movie.  I think I sat there staring blankly at the screen for about five minutes.  And then his mom told us dinner was on the stove and she left the room, and then I got my plate and sat with it and I couldn’t eat, and then I noticed there were tears dripping onto my plate, and I just sat there like a statue until reality snapped back and I had to go to the bathroom to blow my nose.

I’m trying to think of the only other movie that made me cry.  I can’t remember.

(Might have been Wrath of Khan.)

So on one hand it kinda left me feeling scarred for life, and on the other hand it brought home how dangerous it is out there, really sort of made the danger and hurt mine to own and internalize, really sparked a spirit to do something about this in me.  I’m not sure what yet, but it’s brewing.  After all, I’m only 20.

…

And that brings home another point.  Last night I stared at my boyfriend’s calendar and started shaking when I realized I have no more than three weeks to come out to my dad if I want him to know about this before my 21st birthday.

I don’t know how to cope.

I’m just scared of how things are going to change around here when he knows.  We’re really tight these days; he’s slowly been turning me into a Trekkie by ordering the first season of Star Trek through Netflix.  Whenever we go out to do yardwork or something together, I call him Captain and he calls me Mr. Spock.  It’s really dorky but it’s something we share, and I think he’s somehow slowly coming to understand me by it.  I don’t want it to end, but in that same way, I don’t want our relationship, as good as it is, to be fake in any way.  I don’t want to be whatever he wants me to be just to preserve our friendship.  I have more respect for him than that.

…

On a happier note, I came up with a name for my… upper region that’s better than “tumors” or even “moobs”.  They are my chestnuts.

wOOt

I’m in my second year of a PhD program in mathematics.  This year, I start the process of finding a thesis adviser.  The search for an adviser in grad school is often likened to dating: the student first meets the professor by taking his class, thus having the opportunity to talk with him/her in a low-pressure situation.  The student then nervously asks the prof if he/she would like to do a private reading course the next term.  If the reading course goes well and student and prof hit it off, reading slowly morphs into research, and after several terms, the student musters the courage to pop  the question: will you be my adviser?  It’s a delicate dance.  When a prof and student don’t work out it can be for any number of reasons: the prof’s math doesn’t interest the student, the prof manages the student’s work too little or too much, or perhaps there’s just a clash of personalities.  If a student wants to work with a particular prof, it’s important to foster a good working relationship from the very beginning.

So here’s where I’m at: I’ve found a professor who I can see myself working with in the long term.  He does interesting math and we get along.  He’s very old, maybe 80 or 82, and he’s eccentric to say the least.  He’s a genius who can’t attach things to emails.  He drinks nothing but grape Crush.  And he happens to have read me as male upon first meeting me.  In fact, I recognized right off the bat that he was chummier with me than his female student, who was a friend of mine.  He felt free to tell certain stories to me that he wouldn’t disclose to her, for instance.  And he made an assumption, however subconscious, that I was a good mathematician.  I didn’t have to prove a damn thing for him to think that; he just assumed it was so.  Being a woman in math is different: once you show that you are indeed as good as your male counterparts, you are generally accepted as an equal.  But as a default, many profs are skeptical of women at first.  It’s an incredibly subtle trend in math, and unless you’d experienced it you’d probably think it was imagined or exaggerated.  But this professor treated me differently than he would have if he’d thought I was female, I am sure of it.  It felt a little slimy, but I must admit it was nice to feel that privilege.

I’ve been working with this professor now for only a couple weeks.  Last night, one of his other students told me that he had heard that my “real” name was Anna.  He was confused and asked her if it was true. Bless her, she said, “No, his name’s Adrian.  And why are you asking me instead of him?”  Oh fuck.  My secret is threatening to burst out of the closet!  I have never been stealth to anyone before, and it’s never seemed to matter.  But now, I want him to continue to think I’m a boy, because that gets my foot in the door.  If I worked with him for six months and gave him evidence that I really am good at math, then my trans status would probably be a non-issue.  I don’t know if it will be an issue as it stands, but I am so scared that it will deter him from working with me further.  This is the first time that being trans has threatened to negatively impact my career.  It’s easy to be out and proud and appear brave and confident when you’re not the one targeted for discrimination.  Now that I might be (and I don’t even know if I will be) that target, I am desperately pulling the closet doors shut!

I’m hoping for the best but damn, am I scared shitless.

Thanksgiving is a weird holiday for me.  In some ways it’s a very personal, introspective time.  For the last three years it has come right after the anniversary of my discovering that I’m not straight, and the immediate EUPHORIA that discovery brought.  And also, for the last three years, just after the return of this euphoria (and it always returns, hooray!) I gather with an extended family for a traditional holiday.  I think that regardless of how my family is structured, I will probably always gather with these people on this holiday – well, not always, but as long as the older members are alive…  I appreciate the spirit in which my family has accepted me.  I married into this small, kind clan, and they continue to regard me as theirs.  I expect that will always be the case.

But in the midst of this, I wonder about insulation versus isolation.  I wonder about the slowness of my coming out process.  I wonder about what next Thanksgiving will bring.  And when I say “wonder” I mean both “wonder” and “worry.”  I mean, I like the feeling of insulation that this family situation provides.  I like feeling accepted over time, through some rather radical changes.  I like knowing that I can blog here and then get up and take care of my children every day.  I like knowing I can be out where I am ready to be out, and, frankly, that I can hide where I’m not ready to be out.

But – BUT – this insulation also brings isolation.  I have a community of women who are ready to embrace me.  I meet up with them occasionally, and they are soooooo supportive and so wonderful to me.  And I have folks I’ve “met” online in various ways, who have offered support for the authentic core of myself that I’ve shown here and elsewhere.  But staying where I am means  – well, staying where I am.  It means NOT reaching out to that community of women who I know for a fact are reaching out to me.  It means NOT being able to be available, totally, as MYSELF, to others.

It’s a fine line.  It’s really my decision how out I am in any given situation.  And it’s really my decision how I decide to treat myself – which is where the loneliness comes and goes.  So of course my Abe-Hicks quote for the night, the one that came RIGHT up on my start page, heh, fits exactly:

You would all be all right with who you are if you had been making your decisions based upon how they feel to you all along. But it is because you have been trying to evaluate yourself through the eyes of others… Oh, it is really an interesting thing how whatever powers-that-be choose the way you should look. And then you compare with that and come short almost every time… Because they have AIR BRUSHES and really good lenses in their cameras… You are so hard on yourselves when you are someplace different than where you want to be. And that is what this message is all about. You must soothe yourself into emotional comfort before your desires can become manifest. You cannot hold yourself in disrespect of self and get what you want.
- Abraham-Hicks -

See?  I look at my family of origin and through their eyes I am a sinner.  I look at the family I married into and through their eyes I’ve changed a whole lot and they’d probably be happiest if I stayed at this level of changed-ness.  I look at the community waiting to embrace me and through their eyes I’m really moving slowly.  I look at my online support network and I wonder if all of this processing just looks like hubris.

But if I look at MYSELF, I see a woman on a life-long journey to self-discovery and self-actualization.  If I look at myself, I see a woman who has navigated the wide open spaces of enormous change.  I see a woman who has expanded, rather than narrowed, her relationships and her base of support.  I see a woman with a big heart.

My friend turned forty just over a month ago.  She comes from an extremely close-knit family, and she is the youngest sibling.  For every sibling, when they turn forty the family gathers and her mother (a gourmet cook who, based on photos I’ve seen, would with Culinary Throwdowns without breaking a sweat, wow!) spends a week cooking a huge feast from scratch.  The siblings take turns toasting/roasting the new forty year old, and everyone leaves happy.  Last night was my friend’s forty-year-old party.  Her husband is one of those super sweet fellas who, when it came time for him to toast his wife, teared up and became unable to speak for several moments, after which he stammered out “You have my heart.”  This gave way to many grizzly and ribald jokes about heart surgery and so forth, after which my friend’s siblings asked her husband if he wanted his heart back.  Everyone was practically rolling on the floor laughing, and of course he, still teary-eyed and verklempt, said “No, she can keep it.”

I want to remember this story, because I love a good love story; and because in remembering it, I feel more in touch with my own heart.  Families, friendships, lives, can expand and contract as needed; and at some points both insulation and isolation might feel worthwhile.  But love always wins.

The triumph of love.  That’s what I see when I really look at myself.  Sin?  I don’t think so.  Stasis?  Not forever.  Hubris?  Maybe… but so what?  I want to live in a state of love that expands borders; that trips on its own feet in its eagerness to go somewhere new; and that even embraces loneliness.

I’m on my porch, an empty rocking chair or two or ten lined up next to mine, and tonight I’m feelin’ the loneliness of that.  But it’s OK.  The moon is out, the weather is cool enough for warm clothes, and somehow I do feel embraced.   Aaaaaahhhhh…

I sure hope so! I am a stranger in a strange land. Having moved to a new state this summer, many things are new, different, displaced, and fresh.

I am feeling the inkling to look for a place to worship that is welcoming. I attended a Lutheran church in OR. for several years. It look me quite a while to barely crack open the door and peak inside. I wanted to be safe. Sometimes there are not an abundance of safe and affirming places for LGBT Christians to express their faith and worship. This church in OR. was unique — I believed — because of the pastor at that time, and the warmth of the congregation.

I have not only moved out of state, but since I left that church the pastor has changed. So much in fact, that he was leading his congregation to have a church wide vote on whether to withdraw from the ELCA because the 2009 Churchwide Assembly of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) voted to open the ministry of the church to gay and lesbian pastors and other professional workers living in committed relationships.

Wow! Really? Yes. Really. There was even a group on facebook for some members of my former church to express their opinions on the issue. There were some encouraging posts, and there were of course the typical posts containing the “proof texts” with standard dismissal of LGBT Christians.

Needless to say, I am slowly reaching out, and one more time may just crack the door open a bit to peek inside to see whether God’s people, in the congregation I am looking into here, are indeed building bridges to LGBT Christians. I have posed this very question on their facebook page. I’ll keep you posted!

glbtq-christians

Me Day 132

This is me at Day 132, I am feeling OK, I am wondering about if I will ever work in the TV industry again, or has my ride come to an end?

I really hope it has not, as I have really been good at my job as a video editor in the tv news dept in Durban, and this is something I really enjoy and I am very good at, and something I could do for the rest of my life, as I know that I am skilled at storytelling

I have had to re-install Leopard as the Snow Leopard Operating System does not work on my laptop very well, and it has been such a mission to re-install Leopard, and all my software again, and this took so long, and there was so much to update and this took so long and so much data….

I am so sorry I have lost all my photo’s of myself that I had been taking for my video of my transition, so I will have to make do with far fewer pictures of myself.. I am so sad about this, I really could not believe I did this… I am such a fool…

Later

I’m feeling baffled and lonesome today.  Not only did my car break down so I couldn’t go to any trans sympathetic events today, but all of my friends seem to be busy.  But if I have to light a candle all by myself today in remembrance, I’ll do it.  This day is weighing heavier on me than I thought it would.

I couldn’t sleep this morning.  I got up before 6 and started writing my coming out letter to my dad.  It’s now probably around five or six pages, and from here it’s just paring it down into something he can process.  I needed to start working on it today, even though I’m planning on not coming out until shortly before my 21st birthday next month.  I want to have time to let it sit and ruminate, decide what to share and what to keep.  Even now I feel I’ve left a ridiculous amount out, but I don’t think it’s the kind of thing he can take in one sitting, anyway.  I want to provide him with so much so that he can understand it- I just don’t know how much he can get his head around in one letter, and if he can’t, what the most important thing is to include on his first experience with this, just in case he won’t want to listen to any more of it.  I may post my rough draft next time I post.

…

I’m on a quest to find other trans people in the county, because I’ve heard rumors through a friend of a friend about a friend or two they may have.  I don’t really have enough information to go on, but I’m pretty good at internet sleuthing, so I feel that if I dig around with just the right nugget of information, I may uncover something.  I just feel like I’m on the coattails of finding someone around here who’s like me.  I don’t find much support in the queer community, that’s for sure- I’m tired of hanging around with people who either need to be educated, or don’t want to hear it.  I need to get to know someone who already knows.

But, of course, there’s the whole problem of said possibly-existant person being the sort who loves their stealth and doesn’t want it uncovered by anyone, even other trans people.  I don’t know how to broach that line.  All I know is, I don’t want to be alone in this anymore.

…

One of my old friends from high school- one of the first friends I made, in fact, in Math- I just came out to him.  He sort of figured it out on his own.  I was never actually too incredibly close with him, he was just more of a fun guy to be around but not listed among my top friends.  But the funny thing is, he’s taking this trans thing like a regular pro, treating me just like one of the guys- just the way he’s always treated me, really- and trying harder than anyone to get my name right.  It’s great, he’s like a brother.  We got in an arm punching contest yesterday- I think he stopped pulling his punches when I punched his arm with such force that he stumbled back into his porch door.  It was awesome.  Now I have some bruises that feel just great.  No, I mean that.  I’ve never actually been in a fight before, and I don’t count slugging contests either.  I don’t think I have nearly enough battle scars.  It feels good to get some aggression out once in a while and I’m thinking about getting into some kind of combat class, maybe a martial art, maybe boxing.  I know for a FACT I want to start working out at a gym of some sort- I wish I could afford a membership, but I think the community college equipment is available with permission.  But I’m really getting off track here.

It’s just awesome to have a guy friend who I can joke around with and be a guy with- a straight guy friend, no sexual tension, I’d like to emphasize- and one who really knows what I’m about.  I think this is a major uplift in my life right now.

…

I’d like to do only one thing for sure before the day is over.  I’d like to rent and watch “Boys Don’t Cry.”  I think one of my other friends is coming over to pick me up today, so I was hoping we could stop and grab it at the video rental.  It’s important to be able to watch it today, on this day, if nothing else.  I wish I could spread the word to as many of my friends as possible about the dangers of being trans, but for now all I can do is keep writing, light my candles and watch a movie.

I feel a little… useless today.

Several people have emailed me asking what happened to the woman with whom I went to the movies that long ago Halloween night. Put simply, nothing happened between us. Ever. I was terrified of the feelings she elicited and kept my distance. However, my husband and I were invited to a party at her house, and I met her husband.

Clayton was a jerk, and Lucy spent the evening apologizing to me for his behavior. He had a tank of piranha fish and kept daring people to put their hands in it. I never saw her outside of work again, but years later, after we had divorced, my then ex-husband returned to Chapel Hill to work. He told me she’d left Clayton and become a lesbian which made me think I wasn’t the only one who had felt something.

My relationship with my husband was such that when I became infatuated with a woman, I always talked to him about it. I was never unfaithful to him, regardless of my feelings. Over the course of the next five plus years, there were three or four women to whom I was seriously attracted. I only told one of them about my feelings, and that resulted in one of my suicide attempts. It didn’t go well. She wasn’t understanding and, in fact, teased me. She came into my office and shut the door, then started massaging my neck. Once I put my hand up to touch hers, and she laughed. “No, no, no!” she said and left laughing. That pretty much slammed the door of my closet where Chapel Hill was concerned.

In 1972, we moved to New Haven, CT, and both worked at Yale University. Yale had just gone coed, and agitation for women’s rights was surfacing, despite continued anti-war protests.  Stonewall had happened three years earlier, but gay rights wasn’t even a blip on the radar of anyone I knew.

I joined a women’s consciousness raising group at Yale, the idea being we’d sit around and talk about the things we couldn’t talk about in front of men. We supposedly bared our souls to each other, but I never once told them I was gay. I didn’t believe being a radical woman at Yale included an understanding or acceptance of lesbians.

Yale had a gay hot-line, and I called that several times, but hung up. One day as I left the Yale University Press building on York Street, I saw two women on the other side of the street holding hands. I couldn’t move, so I stood and watched them, my jaw dropped to my knees, until they were out of sight.

A few months later, I ran into a former co-worker from the Personnel Office. She’d moved away with her husband almost a year before. Shy and demure at the time I knew her, she had clearly changed. She suggested with have lunch one day, and I agreed.

Soon we were lunching together almost every day, and I soon learned that she had left her husband for a woman she’d known at Yale. They were not living together, because she wanted to experience personal freedom which she felt she’d not had while married.

About the same time, my brother graduated from the Baptist seminary in Louisville, and my husband and I drove out, camping along the way, for the event. Somewhere between Chillicothe, Ohio, and the banks for the Kentucky River, we heard on the radio that the New York state legislature had voted down a bill calling for equal rights for gays. I was furious, and my husband interrupted my rant to ask why I was so upset. I told him that I considered myself gay. He didn’t ask me what that meant in terms of our marriage, and I don’t know what I could have told him at that point.

Not long after our return from, he planned to go to New York for a weekend conference. As we were eating sandwiches on the quad in front of the library, I took a deep breath and asked Mary to stay with me that weekend. I’d never even kissed her, but thought perhaps this was an opportune time to do something.

She looked at me and said no. No? I asked. No, she said. Mary said that would be a sleazy thing to do and I could never do anything like that, because I wasn’t sleazy. Are you sure? I asked. Yes, she said.

I went home that day and told my husband I was going to leave him, because I had to find out if I was a lesbian. I’d been willing to kill myself thinking I was, but I didn’t know. I said I’d move out for six months to explore my sexuality, because I had to know one way or the other. He was devastated, and I remember wondering how I could be so cold to him when I knew I loved him. Hadn’t I promised I’d stay with him forever?

It was as if the optometrist was showing me different optical prescriptions. Was this better or that? Staying was fuzzy and leaving was as clear as could be. Once I’d made that decision, I knew it was the right one.

I got a small apartment near the campus. Mary helped me move, but that was it. She continued to be my friend for several years, but now I’m grateful to the universe that I was spared being drawn into a group of people who had Bloomsbury Group parties and dressed up like those characters. I shiver to think of it.

I know my leaving hurt my husband almost beyond belief, and I carried that load of guilt for years. However, he has been married for many years to a wonderful woman who shares his love of books and appreciates his sense of humor.

Now I know we were part of each other’s journey, but not the final destination. I am at peace and at home within myself.

©2009 jgschenck