Maybe Amber’s avatars were her “ring of keys.” At any rate, it didn’t last—once again, her parents checked her computer history and discovered what she was up to. By then they had divorced, and her father had moved out of state. Amber remembers an airport handoff, sitting in her mom’s car while her parents conferred on the curb. “It happened again,” she heard her dad say grimly. Later, her mother asked Amber why she’d chosen male avatars, but before Amber could answer, her mother fed her the response she wanted to hear. “She said, ‘You just wanted to see what it was like, right?’” Amber recalled. “And I was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s right—I wanted to see what it was like.’” If her mother harbored any ideas about her daughter’s sexuality, she didn’t let Amber know.
It doesn’t take long for kids to exceed their parents’ competence online. By eighth grade, Amber was savvy enough to erase her browsing history, create untraceable free e-mail accounts, cover her tracks. Posing as a boy named Jake, she built a fake MySpace page, posting a profile picture she’d downloaded of a cute guy from her school and claiming to be from Los Angeles. If you’d asked her at the time, she wouldn’t have been able to say why she was doing it; only in retrospect can she connect her behavior to her sexual orientation. For two years she used the page as a cover to flirt with what she described as “oodles and oodles” of girls. None of them ever caught on, even when they spoke to her on the phone. (Amber demonstrated her quite credible imitation of a teenage boy’s voice.) She did make one mistake, though: she gave them her real cell phone number, attributing its midwestern area code to a recent move. That was six years ago: she still gets texts from some of those girls. “I got one the other day out of the clear blue sky that said, ‘I miss you,’” she said. “It’s sort of weird.”
It occurred to me that perhaps the ideal imaginary boyfriend for a teenage girl might very well be another girl pretending to be a guy. Who would better know what she wanted to hear? Amber agreed. “I think they look back to when they were in high school and think, ‘Oh, I remember that one guy: he was so nice, and he always really understood.’”
Recalling that period herself, though, brings Amber pain. She feels ashamed and guilty about deceiving other girls. “It bothered me for a long time,” she said. “I’m mostly over it now, but then I get these text messages and I’m like, What the hell? They come out of the woodwork. You’d think after you’ve watched enough Catfish episodes, you’d realize that I probably wasn’t actually a real person with the wrong area code.
“It’s sort of sad,” she added, “when you think about it.”
If Amber was impersonating a boy online, in real life she was learning, after a fashion, to impersonate a girl—or at least a certain kind of girl. Up until puberty, Amber passed as a “tomboy.” She wore loose clothes, slicked back her hair, sometimes pretended to shave with her dad. If she was occasionally mistaken for male? Well, that was fine with her. No one forced her to change, exactly, but as she hit middle school, the expectation was clear. Her mom had been a cheerleader in high school; her dad is an orthodontist. Appearances mattered to both of them. Maybe her parents had their suspicions about Amber’s sexual orientation; maybe they were hoping to stifle it. At the very least they were eager to have her behave like a conventionally feminine girl. They encouraged her to wear skirts, and her mom taught Amber to apply makeup. “I didn’t want to be the ‘weird’ kid,” Amber recalled. “So I just had to, you know, go with the flow. I’d wear mascara and I would say, ‘Oh yeah, I love Zac Efron!’ because I wanted to fit in. But I was always tugging on the clothes, I never felt comfortable. I was just going with the flow—I was always going with the flow.”
Amber tried to join in as her friends experimented with “relationships” that would last a week or so, but whenever a boy put his arm around her, she pushed it off. “I’d tell my friends he was weird or creepy or clingy,” she said. “Then I’d ask them to ‘break up’ with him for me.” At fifteen, though, Amber met a boy who, coincidentally, was named Jake. She was drawn to him immediately. “We were best friends. My mom used to say we were like the same person in different bodies. We would play video games and watch movies. I would hang out with his family; he would hang out with mine.” She didn’t encourage a romance, but, she said, as with the miniskirts and lip gloss, “I was going along with things, so why not go along with having a boyfriend, too?”
To Amber’s relief, Jake was a devout Christian who planned to remain a virgin until marriage. So, she figured, she had “nothing to worry about.” For a few months, through the fall of her sophomore year, the couple did little more than kiss. While Amber didn’t enjoy it, neither was she unwilling. “I never really had any feelings when we were doing it,” she recalled. “It didn’t turn me on. It just . . . happened.”
In January, Jake invited her to their school’s winter formal. She said yes, though the idea of grinding on the dance floor in a short skirt was not appealing. She found a knee-length red dress that, as she said, “was edgy, but didn’t show any boob” and wore stiletto heels (“but not strappy,” she said; “and they had a closed toe”). As for the dancing? She tolerated it—which, truth be told, was the case for many of the straight girls I spoke to as well. Afterward, Jake suggested they grab a soda at a McDonald’s drive-thru, and then sit and talk in the car for a while. Amber agreed. “I’m thinking, it’s me and Jake, you know?” she said. “So, fine, whatever.” They pulled into a church parking lot. Jake turned off the motor and leaned in for a kiss. Then, without warning, he slid his hand under Amber’s skirt. She broke out in a cold sweat and her stomach clenched, but she remained silent. When he suggested they move to the backseat, Amber, yet again, “went with the flow.”
She went with the flow as Jake took her hand and shoved it into his pants. She went with the flow as he slid her underwear aside. “Then,” Amber said, “God, he was only a sixteen-year-old boy—his finger goes in the wrong place. It goes up my butt hole!”
Jake was mortified. “I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry!” he repeated. Amber assured him she was fine—she didn’t want him to feel bad, she said—but the mood, such as it was, was shattered. He zipped his pants and slunk into the front seat. “It was actually the best thing that could’ve happened,” Amber said now. “Because it ended things. He just drove me home, and I was like, ‘Yes! It’s over!’”
Though of course it wasn’t. Since she’d allowed him to touch her once, Jake assumed he could do it again. And Amber never did say no. She also never said yes, and he interpreted her passivity as consent. She would sit unmoving, hands at her side, staring into space as he groped and rubbed against her. “Once he asked why I didn’t make the same noises as girls in porn videos,” she said. “He watched a lot of porn. I told him I was quiet because I was so into it. So, he thought I liked it. He thought it was normal, and I let him think that. Because I was go-with-the-flow Amber.”
Most of the gay and bisexual girls I met had gone through a period of trying to pass as straight, sometimes experimenting with lesbianism under cover of heterosexuality. A bisexual high school senior in San Francisco, for instance, would go to an all-ages club so she could make out with other girls on the dance floor. “They were doing it mostly to get attention from boys,” she recalled. “Whereas I wasn’t. But they didn’t know that. So it was really great.” Later, she went further, bringing a second girl into bed with her boyfriend; by her freshman year of college, she was dating a woman. In general, girls have become more open to same-sex attraction in recent years, more accepting of sexual fluidity. In the early 1990s, for instance, only 3 percent of women who identified as heterosexual in The Sex Lives of College Students reported some same-sex experience; by 2008 nearly a third did (though, again, no distinction was drawn between girl-on-girl action performed mainly to titillate guys and the real thing).
For Amber, flowing with the hetero current became increasingly difficult. She knew she did not—could not—feel about Jake, or any boy, the way her friends did. “Th
ey would pull out pictures of guys they met over the summer or on Facebook and be like, ‘Oh, he’s so hot, I just want him to fuck me,’” Amber said. “And I’d be like, ‘Um, yeah, me, too.’ That was all I could say. Or sometimes: ‘He’s really attractive.’ I never said a guy was hot or even good-looking. I never thought any of them were.”
Like Lizzy, Amber had not to her knowledge personally met a lesbian, though she had seen them on TV shows such as The L Word. She worried that her feelings wouldn’t be seen as normal, that she would embarrass her mother, disappoint her father, alienate her friends. By the fall of her junior year of high school, the effort of keeping up the straight-girl facade was leaving her exhausted and depressed. So she turned to the only outlet she could think of: the Internet. “I needed to find someone to vent to,” Amber recalled. “I thought I would release it all and that would be enough; I’d be able to suppress it again for a few more years.” She searched Tumblr for gay blogs, something I tried myself and that, at least initially, returned an array of photos of men: some kissing sweetly; others naked, stroking outsize erections; ejaculating onto one another’s faces; performing oral or anal sex in duos, trios, or larger groups. The results for “lesbian” were equally graphic, though adding “teen” pulled up, along with the XXX fare, a smattering of angsty quotes, pictures of dancing cats, and carefully curated selfies. On a page called “Girls Who Like Girls,” Amber stumbled on Hannah, who was squarely in the nonexplicit, angsty quote camp. Hannah posted her own writing as well as pictures of places she dreamed of visiting in Paris, London, and Rome. There were no photos of her face, Amber recalled. “That made it seem like she really just wanted to talk.” She also lived far away, in Ottawa, Canada. “It was perfect. I was going to vent to her about all the fucked-up things that I’d done, and then I would never talk to her again.”
Amber paused, shaking her head. “So wrong,” she continued. “So wrong.
“Hannah rocked my world.”
Coming Out in the Twenty-First Century
On another winter evening, a few months after we first met, Amber introduced me to Hannah. They were nearly three thousand miles and an international border away from my California home, but thanks to Skype, we were all in the same room. Hannah jumped up every few minutes to check on a chocolate chip banana bread she was baking for Amber. (“It’s her favorite,” she explained.) They talked about the party they went to on New Year’s Eve; about how, for Christmas, Amber took Hannah ice skating and gave her a necklace; about the last time they were together with their families. They sat close, draping their arms around each other, touching constantly in the way of young lovers. Amber wore a hoodie from Hannah’s university; Hannah wore a T-shirt from Amber’s college, her long dark hair covering the school’s insignia.
Five minutes after Amber sent that first, fateful message, she got a reply from Hannah suggesting they Skype. They did, and ended up talking until four in the morning. “I told her everything,” Amber said now, gazing at Hannah affectionately. “About the fake MySpace profile, about getting caught by my parents, everything. It was crazy. I knew in, like, a split second that I didn’t want to talk to anybody else ever for the rest of my life. She was the first person to tell me my feelings were okay. And I realized: this is what a relationship is supposed to feel like. You’re supposed to feel appreciated and accepted and comfortable and able to say anything.” Hannah’s eyes welled up, and Amber pulled her close. “Why are you crying?” she asked.
“Because you were so sad,” Hannah replied. “You needed someone to listen to you. I remember thinking, ‘This girl really needs someone to tell her it’s okay.’”
Within a few weeks, Amber’s relationship with Jake fizzled, and they agreed to split up. While she was now free, she was only sixteen, and the new object of her affection lived in Canada. There was no way Amber could see Hannah in person—not, at least, without coming clean to her parents.
YouTube is full of “coming out videos”—that phrase returns about twenty-one million results. There are poignant and funny videos, and some that are heartrending, as parents accept or reject their children live on-screen. There are videos of twins coming out together. There is a subgenre of “how to come out” videos, and another of songs people have written about coming out. Amber watched dozens of them, trying to get up her nerve to talk to her mother. She resolved to do it over winter break, but as Christmas turned to New Year’s, she continued to put off the conversation. Finally, just before school restarted, she invited her mother out to lunch, not something she typically did. It was a strategic choice: her mom wouldn’t make a scene, Amber figured, in a public place. They agreed to meet at a deli. Amber was so nervous that morning she was shaking: she still wonders how she drove there without crashing the car. Her mother was already at a table, looking stricken. “Are you pregnant?” she burst out, before Amber was even seated. Amber laughed, and said, “No, Mom,” thinking to herself, “The farthest thing from it.”
Amber unfolded a piece of paper, a letter she’d written a month earlier and carried with her ever since. “I love you and I don’t want to disappoint you and I always want to make you happy,” she read. Then came the two words: I’m gay. But when she got to them, she choked. “I couldn’t say it, I think because I had not accepted it myself. Finally, I don’t even know how, it just came out.” At first her mother seemed relieved. Her daughter wasn’t on drugs. She hadn’t stolen anything. She wasn’t pregnant and didn’t have an STD. Nor did Amber want to move in with her dad. Her mother hugged Amber, told her it was fine, just fine. “I love you,” she said. Then the conversation took a turn. “How do you know you’re gay?” she asked. “Maybe it’s just a phase.” Maybe, she continued, it had something to do with the divorce, with having a poor masculine role model. “There was no way in hell she was going to believe I was born this way,” Amber said. “She just didn’t understand.”
As the age of coming out has dropped, parental support has become more crucial than ever. It’s one thing for your mom and dad to banish you from the home at twenty-five; it’s quite another at twelve. In a survey of more than ten thousand teenagers, those who were LGBT-identified listed tolerance and their family situation as the things they would most like to change in their lives; other kids said finances and their weight or appearance. LGBT kids also cited family as their “most important problem”; other kids said grades. According to Caitlin Ryan, family acceptance is the single biggest factor in an LGBT child’s well-being. Ryan’s organization has linked rejection by parents to increased risk of suicide, depression, abuse of illegal drugs, and HIV/AIDS. To a degree, this would seem self-evident. Less obvious is what teens experience as “rejection.” Parental silence, for instance: one girl mentioned angrily to me that while her mother’s Facebook page was plastered with pictures of her brother and his girlfriend, there was not a single photo of her and her girlfriend. Kids also consider the kind of comments Amber’s mom made (“Are you sure?” or “Maybe it’s a phase”) as profoundly hurtful. Letting insulting comments by extended family slide is right up there as well. That said, Ryan found that most of those negative or ambivalent responses come from a place of love. “Parents are often expressing fear and anxiety exacerbated by misinformation,” she said. “They wonder: ‘What’s going to happen to my child in the world? How do I deal with this in my own family? How do I reconcile conflicting beliefs?’ The good news is that a little change in their response can make a huge difference.”
It would take months of arguments and tension for Amber’s mother to come around; it certainly did not seem the right time to tell her about Hannah. So Amber put that part of the conversation off, and then put it off some more. Meanwhile, the two girls continued to Skype late into the night.
“Who are you always talking to?” Amber’s little sister would ask.
Amber would shrug. “A friend,” she’d respond.
That did not satisfy the younger girl’s curiosity. She began to grow suspicious, hostile. There was t
he time she snuck up behind Amber in the family’s laundry room and said, “You’re a fag, Amber. You’re a dyke.” Other times she would hiss, “You’re such a lesbian.”
“I think my sister just didn’t know a healthy way to get me to come out to her, and she really wanted to know,” Amber said. When I admired her generosity of spirit, she added, “Well, it definitely hurt my feelings. And even today it puts a damper on our relationship. I mean, who does that to their sister?”
Coming out, of course, is not a one-time deal. A person has to do it over and over, not only to people she already knows, but to everyone she will ever meet. Amber tried confiding in a few trusted friends, breaking the news, perhaps unsurprisingly, over Facebook chat or text. “I could never do it in person,” she said. The girls always assured her that nothing had changed, but they wouldn’t mention the conversation again, and invariably the friendships drifted. “I would think, ‘All right, I guess you’re just busy.’ But, looking back, I realize they didn’t want to be friends with me anymore once they knew I was gay.”
Amber never did work up the nerve to tell her mom about Hannah—not directly. One day, though, while she was in her room, her mother stormed in, pushing the door open so hard that it banged against the wall. She brandished Amber’s cell phone. “Who the hell is this?” she yelled.
She had read all Amber’s and Hannah’s texts, including the ones in which the two declared their love for each other. Amber just stared. “It was the worst possible way she could have found out,” she recalled. “It was so upsetting. Because if she wasn’t really accepting about my being gay, she sure as hell was not going to accept a long-distance relationship with some random girl.”
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