LGBTQ Landscapes
My Journey from Ignorance to Ally
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WARNING: The following contains offensive language.
(This is from the archives. For Pride Month, and for the 1400 subscribers I have gained since it was first published, I am reposting it now, with some light edits. If you’ve read it before, thank you for your patience. Happy Pride Month! 🌈)
A Memory
“Hey, faggot!” someone calls from the back of the school bus. I keep my head turned toward the window, imagining I’m on a shiny new mini-bike, racing alongside the bus through the tall grass and gravel-lined ditches, flying over brooks, hills, cars, whatever gets in my way.
“What? You gonna cry, sissy?” Another voice, as whiny as a Cox model airplane.
My forehead hurts from juddering against the cold glass but I keep it there.
“Fucking faggot.”
The downward inflection of the first bully’s gruff voice is a relief; the back-of-the-bus crowd are done with whomever they’d taken an interest in. It’s not me, thank God, and I don’t want to know who it is.
A Journey
“Faggot” and “sissy” were common slurs thrown about in my Massachusetts town in the 1970s. The above sketch is an amalgam of many such memories. I won’t claim to never have used the words myself, following the example of my older brothers, though the f-word was actually the bigger crime, much worse than those common homophobic expletives. (I still remember the first time I tried out that sinful word, whose utterance could land me in hell. Alone on a quiet path in the woods, I glanced through the understory and up into the treetops, then spoke the word softly, then again, a little louder, wondering if He’d heard. Or cared.)
I think of poor Alfred, my sixth-grade classmate whose long, shimmering black hair and angular features would have earned him some status with the in-crowd if he hadn’t been so shy and effeminate. They called him a sissy as a matter of course. One day while the class was reading quietly—or so I thought—he suddenly sprang from his seat, sending his books clattering to the floor, chucked his pencil down the aisle, and cried out, “Everybody hates me!” as he ran from the room. That’s when I first understood the depth of the underhanded torment he’d been bearing, on top of the more observable daily bullying.
The hatred behind those words that I took for granted was very real, and enduring; one local boy-tyrant, a member of an evolving pack of teens who moved through our neighborhood looking for fights and entertainment, would, in his thirties, be tried and convicted for beating a gay man nearly to death.
At twenty-one, I visited Provincetown for the first time and saw men holding hands. I was affected of course; my preparation for such an anomaly was nonexistent. Well, no, that’s not quite accurate. I was prepped, all right. Like most of my friends, I was positioned to believe that “homos” were living in violation of nature and God. Walking along Commercial Street that day with my seventeen-year-old girlfriend, I took her hand, and she said, “Better hold on tight.” She was amused to believe I felt threatened and needed her “protection.”
Men holding hands. It was like witnessing a car accident. Or a little person, a fire victim, a drunk sleeping on the sidewalk. I wanted to look and I didn’t want to be seen looking.
On that same trip I met a clerk at a gift shop wearing a button on his oxford button-down: Straight but Not Narrow.
I remember that blond-haired cashier and his button as well as I remember the men who unselfconsciously held each other in the street. Somewhere in my heart I knew that I wanted to be like him. Tolerant, kind, bright. Unafraid.
I didn’t even know what “liberal” meant at the time. And I don’t think the word “ally” was in use yet. I just know that I admired the young man’s demeanor, and without even realizing that it would, the moment became a life-long memory.
Ever so slowly we come to understand who we are.
I kissed a guy in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was tall and good-looking, with a French accent. I was thirty-six. A group of us, fellow backpackers and travelers from the hostel, sat around an outdoor table at the Cowgirl Café, drinking beer, snacking on cheese-covered tortilla chips, waiting for a friend who’d soon be performing her acoustic set. He stood behind me and I turned toward him. He leaned down and it just happened. Very quick. I don’t remember if it was a dare, but someone asked him how he liked it. His faint grimace was not intended to hurt. “I don’t like beards,” he said.
The kiss didn’t tell me anything new about my sexuality. I was just trying to be progressive, to fit in with my new friend group: so cosmopolitan, so modern and freethinking.
More important to me than this experience was the friendship I developed with another young man at the hostel a few weeks later (I was on an extended stay in New Mexico at the time, recuperating from a terrible divorce). I’m not sure what the boy saw in me—he was about ten years my junior—but he latched onto me, accompanying me on hiking excursions and museum visits. Kept me close even when socializing with his younger friends. It was flattering, if a little awkward.
One day, he wanted me to go along with him to the hostel’s common area and took my hand for two or three minutes as we walked down the hallway. I released his hand as we entered the busy lounge. But this was another of those moments that change you a little bit. He was not trying to date me or have sex with me. He was just an affectionate and tactile person. A person who did not see any significant difference between male friends and female friends. (It occurs to me now that he could have seen me as a father figure, but I don’t think we were that far apart in age or maturity.)
I don’t remember his name or where he was from, but I am grateful to him for his tenderness. It helped further awaken my awareness that gender is largely a social construct.
Just a few years ago, I was substituting at the local high school. I used the male pronoun with a student I thought was a boy, and got the stink-eye in return. For an hour I fretted, wanting to apologize but not actually sure if I had made a mistake, and not wanting to embarrass the student if I hadn’t. That issue was never resolved and I regret that at least one person in the world now resents my ignorance. (But then, for my own peace of mind, I really do need to let things like that go.)
This past year I befriended a gracious and lovely person at my meditation group, about my age (I’m fifty-nine). During one of our monthly meetings, my new friend disclosed that they are transgender, adding, “If anyone has any questions about that, please feel free to ask.” I thought that was such a generous offer.
It’s not always going to be the case. Not everyone is interested in sharing their private business. And it is private. Each person’s sexual orientation and gender identity is their own business. I subscribe to these humorous instructions I once read on Facebook: If you meet a stranger and you’re not sure if they are male or female, take the following steps. Step 1: Don’t worry about it. (There are no further steps.)
Gender Queer, by Maia Kobabe, the most challenged and banned book in the US, really hit home for me how broad is the concept of gender and how difficult can be the lives of those confronting questions of self-identity. This coming-of-age graphic memoir made me cry. When a book or movie makes me cry, it gets an automatic five stars.
Kobabe, who identifies as non-binary and asexual and uses the pronouns e/em/eir, writes of the struggle to find words for eir own gender and sexuality. For many like Kobabe, the concept is not just a matter of “gay versus straight” or “male versus female.” The author writes, “I began to think of gender less as a scale and more as a landscape.” Kobabe’s own aunt, a kind and supportive woman who herself is a lesbian, rejects her niece’s non-binary thinking as a form of misogyny. This really struck me; how complex humans are, and how even those who consider themselves open-minded can still hold conditioned assumptions about what it means to be a human being.
My new friend from meditation group is on the board of a local transgender relief organization. We happened to be talking about some recent news. A person had been struck by a train. I had read about it in the local paper but my friend informed me that the victim was a transgender youth who died by suicide. The news was a punch in the gut. Tears filled my eyes. I felt angry. He said, “Don’t be angry. Channel that energy into something helpful.”
I’m not an activist, I haven’t chosen to devote my life to LGBTQ+ rights or anything like that. But it is the one issue that really gets to me, deeply. I think because the daily attacks this population must endure are so unfair, and its victims are often amongst the least able to stand up for themselves. I want to help in some way, to counter the unfair treatment they must endure. LGBTQ+ people suffer from depression, suicide and suicidal ideation, homelessness, housing insecurity, and poverty at a significantly higher rate than others.
Of course, I’ve donated some money to the relief organization, and I’ve offered my pick-up truck if anyone needs a ride or help moving in or out of a new place. I guess the best I can do is to remain compassionate and understanding. To challenge that cousin or acquaintance who calls gay marriage a sin, or proclaims that pronoun variations are just a cry for attention. To vote for progressive, compassionate politicians. To listen to people’s stories.
When I asked my friend if they would look over this essay, to be sure it was appropriate, in the right spirit, and not ignorant or offensive, they replied, “Of course, and I’m glad you think of yourself as an ally.” The comment actually initiated some self-doubts: Am I an ally? What is an ally? Do I have the right to call myself one? I talked about it with my wife. She said allies, by definition, agree to support their friends in both word and deed, and to stand ready to defend those friends when called upon. I am most certainly doing that. I am here.
BOOKS MENTIONED
Kobabe, Maia. Gender Queer: A Memoir. Oni Press, 2019
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The world is constantly changing come he or she observe androgynous animals sea horses, frogs and birds of a feather. Which way to go? Snails have an answer to survive each swaps eggs and sperm to pass the genes along. Tis time for the bi-ways to be free to cross the heart lands from sea to see people holding hands love electric in the land.
'...even those who consider themselves open-minded can still hold conditioned assumptions about what it means to be a human being.'
I think that's the key word here: conditioned. Therein lies the main problem, whereby we've been heavily conditioned by our society, culture, and religion to think in such regressive, and even harmful ways.
We need to challenge and break out of such ways of thinking in order create a truly better, fairer society.