Ch 12: The Second Coming (Out)

Six years earlier, a nun outed me to my Mom. Now it was my turn to out myself.

I unlocked my apartment door, tossed my briefcase on the couch, and threw my coat on top of it. I’d worked all day, then had back-to-back meetings well into the evening. On the short drive home to my apartment, winter’s chill sapped every bit of energy I had left. All I wanted to do was change into warm sweats and curl up on the couch to watch TV. I knew, though, that would have to wait. I promised myself I would call Mom tonight. I usually called Mom on Sunday afternoons but the previous Sunday I’d chickened out. To call her on a Thursday would raise her antennae. She’d know something was up. But I didn’t want to wait. It was time to get this over with.

As I sat down at my kitchen table, a train whistle interrupted my thoughts. My apartment in Albion stood just a block away from the same train tracks Mom, Jarrett, and I had traveled years before on our way to Denver to become a family with Dad (see Chapter 1: You Can Call Him Dad). I liked hearing the train whistle blow when it approached the intersection behind my building. It reminded me of Dad. I missed him and wished we had had more time to get to know each other as adults. Maybe he would have come to trust me with the truth about whether he was my father, and maybe I would have come to trust him with my truth.

Dad’s death and the secrets we never shared is what made me finally decide I had to tell Mom the truth about who I was. Six years had passed since Sister Barbara told my mother about my “unsavory relationship with another girl.” (see Chapter 8: Holy Outing). Since that time, I’d done everything I could, including getting engaged to a man, to cover up who I really was, at least to Mom. I wanted so badly to be back in her favor. Even after I told her the engagement was over, I obfuscated when any discussion of my personal life came up. But I grew tired of hiding the truth.

I’d grown up around so many secrets, so many things we didn’t say to each other, so much I didn’t know about the time before I was born—and about the time after. I wanted Mom to know who the daughter she had raised to adulthood had become. I wanted her to be proud of me, to know she’d a done a good job, and if that wasn’t possible, to at least know the truth about my life.

On the table in front of me was a small tape recorder. I brought it out the previous Sunday when I first decided to make the call. I don’t know why I had the urge to record the conversation. Something told me I should. So much of my history had been destroyed, intentionally erased to hide the truth. I wanted to do things differently -- to start preserving the truth, even if it might be painful.

I paced around the apartment, first to the kitchen, then to the bedroom, then back to the living room. What would I say? I hated this. I hated telling her something I knew would upset her. But I still knew I had to tell her, even if the news would make her feel like a failure, as I suspected it would. What she wanted most for me was to be ordinary, to fit in, so I wouldn’t be hurt.

That was Mom’s highest aspiration for me: to be ordinary. If I were ordinary, no one would talk about me, no one would judge me, no one would have any reason to be mean to me. To Mom, being different made you vulnerable, made you a target. Maybe I shouldn’t tell her? Maybe she’d rather not know. And yet I knew if we were going to have any kind of relationship, she needed to know who I was.

I rubbed my palms together, and then rubbed them on my pants to dry the sweat. My stomach already felt like stone. I exhaled, then forced in another deep breath. Sometimes I thought deep breathing was overrated, but this time it at least gave me the courage to pick up the phone. I had to do this, not for her, but for me. I dialed Mom’s number, and at the same time, pressed Record.

“Hello?” Mom always answered the phone with a suspicious, questioning tone, like “who are you, and why are you calling me?”

“Hi, it’s me,” What now? Damn it! Why didn’t I plan this better? Where was that courage now? After a few minutes of small talk, long enough that we had run out of things to say, I held my breath and dove in. “I want to talk to you about some things, about some decisions I’ve made.”

Silence. I imagined her hand tightening around the receiver. She would know it wasn’t good news. It never was. To Mom, news only came in two kinds: bad and worse.

“I’ve decided to leave Albion and move to Boston.” I pressed the phone to my ear with my shoulder so I could fiddle with a pen. I had to do something with my hands. I broke off the pocket clip. I dropped the pen and grabbed the receiver again.

“To where?” she asked as if she hadn’t heard me. I suspected it was her turn to stall.

“To Boston.”

I heard her exhale, then nothing. I waited for her to take in this piece of the news. It’s not that I was in a hurry for her to respond because that would lead to the next piece of news, and then the next. I knew this slice would be hard enough. She liked coming to visit me in Michigan; it felt familiar to her, like coming home. She wouldn’t like the idea that I was moving to someplace she’d never been. Michigan was home to me now too. I’d lived there seven years, almost as long as I’d lived in Arkansas, longer if I counted the first five in Michigan before we moved to Denver.

After what seemed like enough time to drive to Boston, she asked, “Why?”

What Mom didn’t know was that this was the easy part; there was more to come. “Well, let me explain some other things first, OK?” This time, I didn’t wait for her to answer.

“Over the past few months, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about me, and who I am, and how happy I am–those kind of things. And in fact, I’ve even seen a counselor to help me sort through some things. I feel like I’m in a place now where I really like who I am. I feel really good about myself. But the one -- the thing that I’ve discovered is, um, that I’ve come to accept in myself, and I’m not ashamed to say is that,” At this point, I paused, inhaled, prayed for more courage. I had to say it if I was ever going to live with integrity. “I am homosexual.”

I said it just like that, with all the prefaces, the hemming and hawing, and the word “homosexual.” I know that because I discovered the cassette tape in an old box of memorabilia several years after Mom died, almost thirty years after that night. When I picked up the tape, I wasn’t sure what it was. The label said: “Conversation w/ Mom re: Boston, et al. 11/30/78.” I stared at it for a minute before it all came back to me. I had completely forgotten this existed.

This cassette tape captured everything I said to my Mom that fateful night.

It took a few days to scrounge up a cassette player to listen to the tape—not a common thing most people had laying around in the early 2000s. As soon as I heard my much younger voice say, “Hi. It’s me,” it instantly catapulted me back in time to that dark night sitting alone at my kitchen table in Albion. My palms started to sweat, my heart began to race, and I felt my mouth go dry.

I strained to hear Mom’s voice on the tape. Given that I could only record one side of the conversation, I could only make out a few words and her tone and inflection as she spoke them. I’d give anything to hear all of her words.

It was an interesting choice that I used the word “homosexual.” Even in the late 1970s, I didn’t use that word when I thought about myself. I called myself lesbian – not “a lesbian”—that felt like a slur someone would hurl at me. Without the article, it sounded more like something I could claim as intrinsic to me. “I’m French, Irish, German, and Lesbian.”

I’d just spent a year in therapy, trying to claim other words for myself, like “dyke,” “butch,” and “queer,” to take the sting out of them when someone used them against me, and to claim their power, when I used them for myself. I wasn’t quite there yet. A lot of people, especially men, used “gay” to describe themselves. Today, “queer” has been reclaimed by the LGBT community. But back then, I’m sure I didn’t want any misunderstanding. Mom might think I meant “happy” if I used “gay,” and “different,” if I used “queer.” So, in this conversation, I chose to use an unambiguous word, “homosexual.”

A word I’d heard her use once before when she flung it at me as an accusation.

Mom fell silent after I made my pronouncement. Then, “You are?” It was more resignation than question, but I answered anyway.

“Yeah, I am.” I closed my eyes and braced for her reaction.

I hated that I couldn’t see her. What is she thinking? Why isn’t she saying anything? I wondered if those words hit her the same as hearing that Marlee had polio. She blamed herself for that–thought God must be punishing her. Was this really much different to her?

In this second silence, I continued with my admissions, “I’m going to Boston with an old friend I’ve fallen in love with. And we’ve decided we want to be together.”

Hope, a friend I met while still in high school, had come to stay with me over the summer. She was in a graduate program at Harvard and wanted to get out of Boston for a few months between semesters. I invited her to stay with me in Albion.

About midway through her stay, Hope and I acknowledged something we had never let ourselves admit before—we were in love. This wasn’t a new feeling for either of us, but for years, neither of us had acted on our feelings. Now things were different. I’d finally ended things with Michelle, and Hope and I were both ready to start a new life together.

We agreed she would return to Boston for school in August. Then by the end of the year, I’d quit my job, pack up my things, and join her. After I got settled in and got a job, I would apply to graduate schools myself.

Mom ignored who I was going to Boston with and zeroed in on my giving up my job. “How can you be so confident you’re going to get another job?” “What kind of job?” “What if you don’t find anything?” “How will you live?”

It was like waiting for a flood. I knew those questions were the leaks around the edges of the dam. At some point, when she couldn’t hold herself back anymore, the dam would explode, and a river of blame, guilt, and denial would come roaring out. It didn’t take as long as I expected. “Are you like this because I wasn’t a good enough mother?” she asked.

“You are a good mother,” I countered, then realized it wouldn’t matter. She would just come up with another reason. “There’s not a why, Mom. There’s not a why. It’s not anybody’s fault. It’s not something that happened to me. It’s just the way I am.”

“You’re not really like this. It’s just something you’ve talked yourself into being.”

“Mom. I know it’s hard for you to understand, but I don’t want you to feel guilty about it either.”

“How can I not feel guilty?”

“‘Because it’s not your fault. I know that you’re going to take on all kinds of guilt, all kinds of regrets, but it’s just not worth it.”

“I might as well just go crawl in a hole.”

“Mom!”

“I don’t have anything left.”

“You still have me.”

“I won’t be able to visit you anymore.”

“Why won’t you?”

“I can’t…”

“Why can’t you?”

“I just can’t!” Her voice raised a decibel or two, but neither of us was shouting. We didn’t do that. If you couldn’t say it calmly, it shouldn’t be said. Mom‘s voice was more forlorn than angry, “Why is God doing this to me?”

The conversation went on like that for almost an hour. I feared the cassette tape would run out and yet Mom’s tape kept running: It’s a sickness, it’s wrong. It’s God’s punishment for her sins; it’s her fault. It’s because I wanted to hurt her. It’s because I wanted to make my own rules. It’s because she let me go away to that boarding school. It’s because I don’t care.

“I do, Mother, I care a lot.” Addressing her as “Mother” instead of “Mom” helped distance myself from the pain I was feeling. “I wouldn’t be telling you in the first place if I didn’t care. I could have just shut you off completely, but it was important to me that you know because you’re important to me. I love you very much.” I paused and let that hang in the air.

I hoped she might say it back. When she didn’t, I went on trying to make her understand, and perhaps, trying to make myself understand why I was telling her this.

“Certainly, this isn’t easy for me to do either, because I know how much it hurts you. But it’s important for me that you know who I am, and to know that I’m happy in who I am.”

I asked her if I could help her understand, if I could send her something to read that would help.

She said no.

When there was nothing left to say, we said goodnight. I pressed Stop on the recorder, ejected the tape, got up from the table, and threw the tape into my desk drawer. As I closed the drawer, I took a breath and whispered to the empty room, “It is done.” Although I hoped for a different reaction, I got what I expected, and now it was up to me to figure out what that meant going forward.

Some people say that homosexuality is a choice. Mom certainly thought so. She thought I could talk myself out of it—be normal—if I tried hard enough. I knew differently. My sexual orientation was not a choice. The choice I faced was whether I would spend my life in the closet, afraid to let anyone know who I really was or live my life in the open with integrity and confidence. I didn’t know if I was capable of the latter, especially without Mom’s support. I prayed I would find a way.

Who knew I would catch my first glimpse of the possibilities at, of all places, a wedding? And not just any wedding, the first same-sex wedding I ever attended.

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Ch 13: Smoke and Mirrors

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