thelesbianlifestyle.com

Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.
~ Virginia Woolf

As you know if you are a frequent reader of this blog, I spent several of my formative years in a northern Florida town called Hampton….I believe the population at the time was in the negative, at present there are something like four hundred souls living there. Growing up in this rural, agricultural community had some advantages, the town was relatively safe for kids to run around like wild heathens and everyone knew everyone else…and everyone’s else’s business which is good for a nosebag such as myself. There is a measure of comfort in small town life and its routines like the Friday night high school football game attended by everyone in the county throughout football season and the Drive In on Saturday nights – also attended by everyone on the county.

With every up side of a thing there must also be a down side, so by relatively safe, I mean as long as you were not a person of color or a Yankee,(a person of northern persuasion, not a baseball player from New York….on second thought – maybe both). For me, the difficult part of growing up in a small town in a Bible belt state was the pressure to conform. Being Yankees, a non-traditional family – we were what is now referred to as a blended family, Mother, Stepfather, kids from both. My Mother was a Catholic and my Stepfather was an Atheist. The other folks in the town were white, mostly Baptists – plain old regular and the more troublesome variety – fundamentalists. There were people of color in town but they lived in a settlement down a dirt road off the highway. The races did not mix in rural Florida in the early 1970’s.

I don’t remember when I first understood that I was more of an outsider than the rest of my family. I don’t believe that I ever was not aware of being different – although the awareness was that of a child – there was no sexual connotation I just understood that I was more like the boys I knew than the girls. I can remember however, when I first learned that it was unacceptable to talk about what I knew. Like every other young teen in America, I got mad crushes on various celebrities, I bought Teen Beat and Tiger Beat magazines, and I plastered my walls with posters of the cute celebrity teens featured in their pages.

My favorites were, Kristy McNichol, Jodie foster, and Nancy McKeon….you get the picture – so did my family. I remember my Stepfather laughing at the posters and calling me gay and I remember my Mother asking me, with an abundance of concern in her voice, why I liked these girls so much. The truth was I had no idea. It never occurred to me to think about it very closely. I also had no clue what the hell the word gay meant, but I knew by their tone and their derisive laughter that it wasn’t something I should admit.

Being a precocious child, the first chance I got, I looked up the term gay – I can remember the crawling fear that swept through me when I read the definition. I was a shy kid and wanted nothing more than to fit in and be liked – being this thing….that I didn’t fully understand – but knew that people hated, was unacceptable. So, I did what every other gay kid in America did (does) – I lied. I lied to myself and to everyone around me. I lied and I lived in fear and shame – shame that I really was this terrible thing, shame that I was a liar, and fear that one of those things would kill me.

The posters came down and were replaced by the more acceptable Sean Cassidy, Scott Baio, and Leif Garret – although the magazine stayed under my bed and the Lindsey Wagner as the Bionic Woman poster stayed up – I mean really – you can’t expect a girl to get all crazy about it – besides, I could always say she was a role model. What little girl doesn’t want to grow up to be an amputee with super duper prosthetic limbs who gets to pick up bad guys and throw them across the room – if it wasn’t for that damn fling with the Six Million dollar Man, the show would have been perfect.

When I was in ninth grade, we moved back to New England. I had to start a new school with kids who could not have been more different from me. Here I was, this kid from a rural Southern town, heavy accent, clothes that were inappropriate to the New England weather, not to mention the semi-urban junior high school in which I found myself. My grades were not awesome, and I started during mid-term – this was when school still tracked kids – so the only “team” that had a spot for me was the lowest performing – the Sweathogs. Needless to say I changed my clothes, hair, accent, and attitude pretty quickly. I became the rebel, I listened to Joan Jett, The Ramones, and The Sex Pistols, I started smoking and acting surely – what I didn’t change were my lies. I would be ok….all I needed was a lot of eyeliner, a good left hook, and to be able to drink Bacardi 151 straight out of the bottle.

I’ve always been a voracious reader so I spent a lot of time in the library during this period. One day I ran across an essay by Virginia Wolfe and I fell in love. I looked up everything I could find on VW and through my research, I discovered the Left Bank Lesbians…Paris in the 1920’s…Salons…the female literary intelligentsia. L’Amazone Natalie Barney and her many lovers, Djuna Barnes, Collette, Radcliffe Hall, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, women who’s existence was a revelation. These women became my lifeline. I read everything they wrote, and everything written about them – they were my secret saviors. These women, although most were dead by the time I discovered them – were who and what I wanted to be; strong, smart, funny – living the lives they wanted to live with purpose and with passion. This was the rebellion that I needed to embrace; I discovered that to be a rebel meant being strong enough to be yourself, being smart enough to answer your critics with a snarky but thoughtful response, to be a no fucks given ever kind of person – this was indeed my chance for a true rebellion and I came out with a vengeance. I lost some friends but made many more and my family, true to their style, pretended not to notice while I pretended not to notice them not noticing. It worked for us and then it got better…and then it became a non-issue.

My coming out was almost thirty years ago, I’ve changed a lot since then – more balanced, less rebel. Living as an out gay woman has gotten better for me and for our community in general. But better isn’t good enough. Last week, five young men took their own lives because they were being harassed, bullied, and tormented because they were gay or some people assumed they were gay. Two of these young men, Asher Brown and Seth Walsh were thirteen years old….13. I decided to write this post with the hope that it might give just one of the kids, I know are out there somewhere, thinking about suicide because they’re afraid, ashamed, or alone a chance to hear another gay person’s story. A chance to learn that folks like you – who know what it’s like to lie, to hide, to be afraid are out here in the world living happy, successful lives.

The gay community is one of the strongest, most accepting, and most enlightened communities of people you will ever meet. High School is hard for everyone – we get how hard it is for LGBT kids – a lot of kids are intolerant, they’re influenced by all sorts of ignorant prejudices and misguided societal mores. People can be narrow-minded; families sometimes don’t listen or understand, teachers and administrators are sometimes too busy to really hear what you’re trying to tell them. Sometimes the whole world makes you feel unsafe. We’re right there with you – and we totally get it. Don’t give up on yourself or your community – and you do have one – find it. Find a phone, jump on a computer and contact any one of the groups listed below….know that you are not alone in the world even if it feels that way. Do everything you can to reach out to us – we will help you to make it better.

Thank for Reading…..T

It Gets Better Project
GLBT National Help Center
CONTACT INFO:
Toll-free 1-800-246-PRIDE (1-800-246-7743)
youth@GLBTNationalHelpCenter.org
The Trevor Project
866-488-7386
GLSEN
PFLAG

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Location: East Coast