Blake on coming-out stories at Penn

From: blmartin@sas.upenn.edu (Blake A Martin) Message-Id: <200102042308.f14N87623363@mail2.sas.upenn.edu> Subject: IN THE END WE ARE ALL JUST SCUBA DIVERS To: whseminar@dept.english.upenn.edu Date: Sun, 4 Feb 2001 18:08:07 -0500 (EST)

IN THE END WE ARE ALL JUST SCUBA DIVERS

Meet Jen Moore, a junior English major from just outside Philly.  Jen came
out in high school, so she had already worked through much of the
soul-searching and grieving that many young gay adults experience when
they get to college.  When she came out to her mother, her sister held her
hand in the back of the family van, squeezing and saying, "Come on you can
do this."  In the driveway of their house, her mother replied, "That's ok. 
I still love you but don't tell your father yet." 

A freshman at Penn, Jen hung a rainbow pride flag in her room, but did not
make a point to initiate conversations about her sexuality.  Her policy
freshman year:  "I wasn't going to lie if anyone asked, but I wasn't
preaching either.  Some people on my hall asked me if I was gay, and we
talked about it, but my roommate never did.  We're still friends.  I
dunno, maybe she just wasn't comfortable with it." 

Jen was starting third-basewoman for the varsity softball team her
freshman year, and she took her time coming out in that arena too.  She
made a place for herself on the team first, and let people get to know
her.  Jen gradually became more and more comfortable, and eventually it
became understood that she was a lesbian, "I didn't make a big speech or
anything."  There was some implicit mentorship on the softball team that
year:  "One day I asked a senior on the team, 'Where did you get that
necklace?' and she said, 'My friend.' (Jen emphasizes friend.) And I knew. 
I called her up that night and we talked."  Jen's team has been incredibly
supportive; over half showed up at a National Coming Out Day rally where
she spoke. 

Jen on the coming out experience:  "The end result is positive, because
you get to become who you are, who you're supposed to be - getting there
is hard, even coming out to yourself is hard, actually, coming out to
yourself is the hardest part I think, it's just very hard because you're
afraid of how people will react.  Coming out to people is so nerve
wracking, because you can still turn back up to the last minute, I have
something to tell you, uhhh, my favorite color is yellow."  You really are
changing lives, people reform, like this friend on the team, she really
tries, she'll ask me, "is it ok to say such-and-such?"  And my little
brother, who's fifteen, will correct people when they say faggot or
something.  You're changing lives by extension - just by being who you
are, it's like six degrees of separation, it just passes on.  My mom used
to say, "Jen, you can't change the world."  Well, I'm proving to her that
I am changing the world, my own little universe, which will get bigger as
I get older, it's just the coolest thought." 

Dan Fishback is our next newest friend:  (check out Dan's column every
Monday!)

Dan came out of the closet when he was 15.  First he came out to a group
of his close friends, then a sibling, and then, that summer, to his
parents.  He carefully planned the day that he came out to his parents,
and after watching 101 Dalmatians, he pulled the trigger and told them
that he was gay.  Their reaction (and I paraphrase): "You're only 15, you
can't have these feelings.  I didn't have them when I was your age." 
"Within at least six months," says Dan, "they had accepted it.  Everything
wasn't perfect, but they had accepted it."  By the time Dan graduated from
high school, though, he says that they were great. 

I expected Dan to talk about the difficulties of being openly gay in high
school, since it was something that I could not have conceived of at that
time in my life. "I think someone called me queer once," he says,
searching for something more.  Word that Dan was gay filtered through
school his sophomore year by way of an ex-boyfriend.  His junior year he
acknowledged the fact openly.  He went to high school in a liberal area, a
magnet school outside of DC, and his gayness wasn't a big deal. 

"Most of the homophobia I encountered," Dan says, "was in middle school,
when the word faggot was used just as much as the word 'and'.  I think the
damage happens when you're really little - like, elementary school/middle
school."  Dan felt (probably justifiably so) marginalized during those
early, very formative years.  "Mainstream society is to a great degree, a
force that attacked me when I was younger, I can't help but be suspicious
of it now."  How does that translate to his experience at Penn?  "Penn is
a very mainstream kinda place, so I can't meet some people without
thinking, 'You used to beat up kids just like me.' It's irrational, yes. 
And it essentially amounts to reverse prejudice, but it's what I've been
dealt.  I'm dealing with it as best I can." 
  
"Harmless mainstream culture is harmless if you fit in, but it is very
harmful to those that don't fit in."  Dan doesn't think that the gay
rights movement does much to push the envelope: "The gay rights movement
just seems to embrace this idea that "Gay people are just like everyone
else," and a lot are, but a whole lot aren't, and they're the ones who
need to be protected.  Being gay in America is an issue of being
effeminate in America.  It's frighteningly difficult to be an effeminate
man in America or anywhere else.  And it isn't one's homosexuality that's
the issue - it's his manner - something much more abstract than concrete,
easy-to-handle homosexuality, and therefore more difficult to represent in
a civil rights movement."  Dan Fishback, meet Tony Kushner and his
sidekick Belize. 

And finally, this is 'Anne,' a sophomore who happens to be a closeted
lesbian: 

"Sometimes I feel like the representative for all lesbians - I used to try
to act straight as I thought I could so that when people found out I was
gay, they'd realize I was "just like them."  I thought also that as long
as I was mostly perfect - with an impressive GPA, attitude, repertoire of
songs I could play on the piano, or anything else I could think of -
anyone who found out I was gay would feel more kindly toward [gays],
because how could they dislike me if my only fault was my sexual
orientation? 

"Being lesbian is by no means the most important part of who I am, but
sometimes I feel like that's all there is to me because I have to put so
much effort into leading myself through the process of growing into my
"gayness." 

"My realization that I was gay coincided exactly with the start of my
relationship with another girl - in contrast to some people who know long
before they date someone of the same sex - and in that way, being gay had
a lot less shame attached to it than it could have simply because I
associated it directly with falling in love, and a beautiful, if
turbulent, relationship. 

"The hardest part of having parents who don't know you're gay is hearing
your father make jokes about homosexuality and being afraid to defend
yourself, because you don't want him to know you're defending yourself. 

"A distant relative of mine is gay, has a partner, and recently adopted a
baby.  When my mother went to the store, the clerk asked for the name of
the father, to put on the card, which my mother gave as my relative's: 
Warren.  When the clerk asked for the mother's name, my mother flushed and
couldn't bring herself to say, "Jim," so she said there wasn't one, which
I guess is true, but in a tricky, hateful sort of way.
	"My mother still thinks I dated a guy named John at Penn last year.
Last summer I told her this guy was a black-haired math major named John,
whom I met on the way to calculus.  This story had particular irony for me
because my girlfriend was a blond English major with an extremely
distinctive name, and also because the boy who walked me to calculus was
gay.  I told all sorts of people about "John" - everyone from neighbors to
favorite teachers back at my high school.  However, while I felt no
conflict lying to people I feared would be homophobic, I was truly unable
to tell this lie to one of my best friends, who was straight.  I felt like
she deserved better.  So, I invented a different lie for her: I had a
boyfriend, but his name was Tom.  I remember driving home during the
summer from the super market, trying to devise a last name for him from
the brands of cereals and shampoos in the back of the car.  I wanted it to
be a good lie.
	"Eventually I told her, and the whole thing became sort of funny,
but I think it's really more sad than funny to have to lie to your
friends. 

"Some of my struggles with defining myself as a lesbian are amusing.  I
decided that something that lesbians do is wear those small, silver,
circular earrings, so I bought some.  But I can't for the life of me
figure out how to close them when I've put them in, and I caught myself
thinking, "Is this something lesbians are supposed to know how to do?" 

"I've tried to get in touch with my "gayness," and usually it doesn't work
very well.  I bought some Sappho poems, but I don't' really like them. 
I've read several novels or semi-autobiographies by lesbians who talk
about coming out, but somehow the stories seem to disintegrate into an
author's confusion about what comes next.  I don't' feel very connected to
"the lesbian community in general," whatever that is, so I don't have any
sense of sisterhood or solidarity.  But I tend to be too independent for a
lot of things - I've never liked being part of a group. 

"Sometimes being gay is exciting - there are certain code words you can
drop, like mentioning Ani DeFranco, to gauge the reaction of the person
you're talking to, whom you suspect to be gay.  Then there's the "pronoun
game," in which you refer to your exes, but without using any pronouns to
such an extent that eventually it gets a little ridiculous and one of you
ventures to ask for a name.  But at the same time it sucks.  Why does my
life have to have code words?  It's not a game. 

"Like a lot of people, I tend to get compulsive about grades, and my image
in general.  I really, really did not want to be gay.  My senior year in
high school, I was smitten with a girl who is now - because of my
persistence in getting to know her - one of my best friends.  My whole
journal for that year is one rationalization after another about why I'm
so interested in everything about her.  I refused to acknowledge that I
was smitten with her.  In the spring of my senior year, this girl started
dating another girl - who is now one of my best friends - and I got to
sort of "preview" through watching them figure out what in the world they
were doing.  Aside from this, I had absolutely no model for anything
related to dating women, and I think that had I not known them in the
context of their relationship, I would probably still think I was
straight.  These two girls and I became very close, and because I was
afraid to discuss my relationship with anyone else, we were often the only
supports any of us had.  They have been enormously instrumental in
developing a healthy attitude to being gay. 

"One of my greatest motivations in initially trying to conceal my
lesbianism was my fear that anyone who knew would react to me in the way I
had reacted to gay women for most of my life.  I was raised in a liberal
town, and had had P.C.-ness shoved down my throat, but no matter how
tolerant anyone had instructed me to be, I still had a clear aversion to
having any kind of physical contact with a lesbian.  You can psychoanalyze
this in any way you want, but all I knew was that I thought anything could
be a physical advance.  Now I feel guilty for it.  It seems like such a
ridiculous fear - like thinking that someone who is a scuba diver is
always going to try to sell you a pool.  Scuba divers do a lot more than
just swim." 

See you tomorrow,

	BLAKE