by Dan Savage
“Different” was always okay. But by the time middle school hit, I’d say seventh grade, something started creeping up my spine and settled uncomfortably in my brain. It made me feel different in a new, uneasy way. It was a question without an answer, something so foreign to me as a twelve-year-old in 1990 that I couldn’t even think about it.
Am I gay? a voice whispered quietly. I didn’t even truly know what “gay” was. There was no Will & Grace. There was no out-and-proud Ellen. There was no Adam Lambert. There was nothing, really. But I knew my feelings, I knew who I had crushes on, and I knew it wasn’t “normal.”
I kept my feelings to myself because they felt wrong. After all, I had crushes on boys. I loved the New Kids on the Block the same way all the other girls did. But things were off.
I pushed my feelings way, way down. Packed them down so deep they turned into concrete in my stomach—and my heart. They plagued me day and night. What you’re feeling isn’t normal, they whispered. You’re not normal. You’re weird. You’re a freak. You’re different. You’re wrong. And the very worst one: You’re a bad person.
Here’s the catch: No one else was bullying me. I was bullying myself.
Year after year the feelings were there, as was the voice in my head. The self-bullying continued. The feelings got stronger. The voice got louder. The bullying got worse. I was my own worst enemy. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was destroying myself. By the time I reached tenth and eleventh grade, You’re a bad person morphed into You’re a bad person and a bad Jew.
One by one, my dreams started crumbling. Marriage. Children. A happy life. I might be alone forever, I told myself. I couldn’t see my way out. I felt doomed.
A loop of self-made insults and self-loathing swirled in my head day and night. I joked around in high school, did well in classes, and had plenty of friends, but I felt crushed and breathless all the time. Instead of hanging out with my friends, I cried alone in my room, scared to death of my feelings. Scared to death I’d be shunned by my family, shunned by my friends, shunned not only by an entire religious community but also by G-d. Looking back at it from the safe distance of a happy, open adulthood, I don’t know where all the self-loathing came from. After all, no one in my family ever said anything bad about gay people. No one, absolutely no one, told me that if I was gay, or had an attraction to anyone of the same sex, I would be anything less than a good Jew. But you see, all of those feelings—those feelings of being wrong, being a freak, being a bad person—are indoctrinated in us as we grow. I’m a perfect example of that. I’ve always been a free thinker. I grew up in the New York metro area. My parents are open-minded. But I got the message from society at large: Gay is different. Different is bad. Gay is bad.
And so I stayed quiet. I stayed quiet until I came out to my high school best friend in a fit of tears and shivers in the middle of the night just a few days before our senior year started. I came out to her because I literally was making myself sick. I had prepped myself for our friendship ending once she heard my secret.
Instead she wrapped her arms around me and told me it was okay.
“Really?” I said through my tears. “You still like me? You still want to be friends?”
“Of course I want to be friends!” she said, smiling. “I don’t feel any differently about you. You’re still Jessica. You’re still my best friend.”
A huge weight was temporarily lifted off my shoulders. I had told someone and she didn’t care. She loved me unconditionally. But I was sixteen. And even though I wasn’t completely sure about my sexuality, I knew, deep inside, that I would have a long way to go because I didn’t love myself.
I’d like to say that I replaced fear and shame with pride and happiness, and came out to everyone that was important to me, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. I didn’t feel any better about myself. And I would continue carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders, and continue bullying myself until I literally made myself sick—sicker this time—finally coming out to my parents when I was eighteen and in college.
And you know what? When I told my parents, they didn’t care either.
No one, not one person, who I’ve come out to in all the years since—and I’m thirty-two now—has ever cared. They don’t see me as “gay.” They see me as Jessica.
If you’re struggling with this right now, I want you to go to the mirror, look at yourself and say “I’m (your name).” If the words “gay” or “bi” or “trans” or “queer” are on your lips, replace it with your name. Because that’s who you are. That’s the core of you. I hope you can understand that. It’s something I didn’t understand for far too long.
I wasted years—years!—feeling bad about myself when I didn’t need to. It’s hard enough when you’re a teenager. You don’t want to be seen as different. Maybe “different” in the sense of you’re a cool dresser or exceptionally creative or something like that. For me, being gay was the last straw. I already felt like I didn’t fit in. It pushed me over the edge. But it didn’t need to.
I felt so alone, so completely alone, when I was closeted in high school. But let me tell you something: When I got to college everything changed. Everything! I started meeting like-minded people. I started meeting people of every sexual orientation and background. My world opened up. Like a screen door in a windstorm—BAM! And suddenly I wasn’t alone anymore. I started becoming the Jessica I once was as a kid, before worries about my sexuality came along in middle school and high school. I started coming into my own. And I started to realize, hey, I am normal. I am totally and completely 100 percent normal.
And you don’t need to go to college for that to happen. Once you expand your world—meet new people, go new places, graduate from high school—things will start changing. Because if you’re living somewhere now where people don’t accept you, or are bullying you, there are so many places where things will be different. You just need to hold on. Even if your family doesn’t wind up accepting you, families don’t always have to be blood relatives. We can make our own families. And if you haven’t come out to your friends or family yet for fear of being rejected, give them a chance. They just might surprise you.
I was lucky enough to never have experienced bullying by other people. But I think what I experienced was just as bad. I bullied myself.
If you’re bullying yourself, please stop. I promise you things will get better. Go easy on yourself. You are a good person. And you will find your way.
If you’re religious, please know that G-d loves you no matter what. Do you hear me? Gay, straight, or anything in between, no matter what. If anyone tells you anything different, ignore them. Shut them out. Because it’s untrue. Do you know how many LGBT-friendly houses of worship there are? Tons! And you’ll find yours one day, I promise.
Life as an LGBT person can be happy, extremely, gloriously happy. And normal. When I was twenty-two—just six years after I came out to my best friend in high school—I met holly, who would become my partner of now almost ten years. She is the love of my life! We have so much fun together. I feel like the luckiest person in the world. We got married not just once, but twice. And you know what? We are ridiculously normal. As in: We fall asleep on the couch together and watch movies and go grocery shopping and do laundry and go to Starbucks and make meat loaf. We have a home and it’s filled with love. And you’ll have that one day, too. You really will. I promise. You just need to have faith. And give yourself time. And talk to someone you can trust if you feel so hopeless that you’re considering taking your own life.
Because you need to be here.
You hear me?
You need to be here. You deserve to be here. I want you to be here. Holly and I want you to be here. We all want you to be here. You might not know us but we’re out here. And the people closest to you—that you might not think care—they care more than you know. You need to stick around so you can meet all the awesome, fun, impossibly sexy people that are going to help make your life not jus
t bearable but totally and completely awesome.
Don’t bully yourself the way I did. Don’t worry about things that are going to work out just fine. I bet you’re not all that much different than me. And I’ve managed to figure it out. And you will, too.
I didn’t know at your age that it could get better. But it does and it has and the craziest thing? It just keeps getting better. It gets much, much, much better.
Jessica Leshnoff is a freelance journalist and copywriter with over a decade of national and regional writing experience. When she’s not writing, Jessica can be found drinking coffee, taking city walks (sometimes while drinking coffee), fawning over other people’s puppies (usually while walking), listening to music way too loud in her car, and reapplying frosty lipstick. Incredibly hungry impossibly early, she lives with her partner in Baltimore, Maryland, and chronicles their lives on her blog, Lunch at 11:30. Visit jessicaleshnoff.com.
YOU ARE A BELOVED CHILD OF GOD
by Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson
CHICAGO, IL
As the presiding bishop of the largest Lutheran church in North America—the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America—and a father of six and a grandfather of four, I’ve listened with pain and shock to reports of young people taking their lives because they’ve been bullied and tormented for being different—for being gay or being perceived to be gay. For being the people God created them to be.
I can only imagine what it’s like to be bullied for being lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. But I do know how bullying can destroy someone. One day I came home and found our daughter curled up in the fetal position on the floor, weeping uncontrollably. She was struggling to know who she was as a biracial young woman. She felt bruised by words people had spoken about her—words that ate away at her sense of identity and self-worth. I sat down by her on the floor, holding her in my arms.
Words have the power to harm and the power to heal. Sometimes the words of my Christian brothers and sisters have hurt you, and I also know that our silence causes you pain. Today I want to speak honestly with you and offer you the hope I have in Christ: You are a beloved child of God. Your life carries the dignity and the beauty of God’s creation. God has called you by name and claimed you forever. There’s a place for you in this world and in this church.
As a Christian, I trust that God is working in this world for justice and peace through you and through me; it gets better. “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39).
May it be so. Amen.
The Rev. Mark S. Hanson is presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) and former president of the Lutheran World Federation. The ELCA is one of the largest Christian denominations in the United States, with approximately 4.5 million members in 10,400 congregations across the fifty states and the Caribbean. The Lutheran World Federation is a global communion of Christian churches in the Lutheran tradition, with 145 member churches in seventy-nine countries all over the world representing more than 70 million Lutherans.
TRANSGENDERED AND SELF-EDUCATED IN MAINE
by Jean Vermette
BANGOR, ME
I’m a fifty-six-year-old, postoperative transsexual woman who lives in Maine. And I think the best way to explain to you how it gets better is to tell you a little about my life.
I knew there was something “different” about me by the time I was three years old. That’s when I began to have a concept of myself as a “gendered” person; that’s when I knew that I was supposed to be a girl; and that’s when I began cross-dressing whenever I could.
But I grew up in a religious household, Roman Catholic, and I knew, even from a young age, that for me, as a male-bodied person, to associate and be so attracted to feminine things and feelings was not going to be appreciated. So even my earliest cross-expressing was done in secret.
It stayed that way until I was almost thirty-eight years old. Looking back, I almost think of myself as lucky that my trans identity wasn’t so overwhelmingly strong that I couldn’t hide it with some effort. After all, when I first had these feelings, it was 1957 and Christine Jorgensen (the first publicly recognized transsexual) didn’t even flash onto the front pages until 1959.
My parents were very loving but “old-school” Catholics, as well. If I had come out back then, there’s no doubt they would have rushed me off to some psychiatrist in an attempt to cure me. It would have been done out of love, and worry, and with good intentions. But it would have been just as utterly disastrous for me then as it is for kids today whose parents march them off to reparative treatments and ex-gay programs.
Then, and throughout all of my school years, it wasn’t okay to be gay or lesbian or bisexual, and no one knew what it meant to be transgendered. So, as a result, I stayed in the closet and didn’t try to find support, because there really wasn’t any to be had.
Following that path pretty much kept me from getting beat up or otherwise harassed, but in order to keep that secret, I had to withdraw into my own little world. I became a loner; I focused on my studies (even though I absolutely hated school); I avoided most social contact; I could count on one hand the number of friends I had. It was a very lonely, confused, and sometimes depressing life, one I wouldn’t wish on anyone, especially not you.
By the time I was thirteen, I knew I was transsexual, not gay, and was trying to figure out how I was going to deal with it. And I was realizing that all the hateful and negative things that everyone was saying about people like me was just ignorant bullshit.
When you’re young, you don’t necessarily know what’s true or right, or helpful, or loving. The adults in your life tell you that they know what those things are, and they generally seem to know a lot more than you do, so you believe them.
As you grow older and learn more about the world, you realize that those same adults aren’t perfect and that they can be mistaken just as easily as you can. At that point you start thinking for yourself, questioning what you’ve been told. It became undeniably obvious to me that a lot of what people were thinking or saying—about life, about how things were, about people like me—simply couldn’t be true.
At the age of seventeen, after discovering that it was possible to do and with my parents’ hesitant support, I quit high school and began educating myself. It was fantastic, and even though it took more time for me to negotiate my transsexuality and to come out, these years were mostly free of the mind-numbing negativity about LGBT people that I had experienced previously. That freedom helped me work out who I was, how I could fit in, and what I had to do to get to that point.
Once I was out of high school, I flourished. I became much more outgoing. I got my diploma by taking adult night classes, an agreement I made with my parents, and I began studying things on my own. I studied whatever I wanted, as much as I wanted. I took a series of jobs, mostly manual labor, where I met all kinds of interesting people with incredible knowledge and varying experiences, and I quickly came to understand how limiting much of our educational system is and, as a result, how limited some of the people who go through it can become. Those bullies who are harassing you now . . . they’re definitely “limited.”
At the time I came out, I was working in the construction trade and I figured if anyone was going to give me a hassle about having a sex change, it was going to be a bunch of blue-collar construction guys. But you know what? It didn’t happen! Oh, there were a few folks who stopped talking to me or wouldn’t work with me, but only a few. And I was floored by the number of folks who came up to me and said things like, “Wow! That was such a brave thing you did. Thank you for sharing that with me. I wish that I could do exactly what I wanted to with my life but I can’t. So I really respect you that you did it.” Life is not always what you expect. People can be kind. And, ultimately, more
people are going to support you than be against you. But to experience that, you’ve got to stay alive.
And you’ve got a lot to stay alive for! I’ve had a wonderful life since high school and done a lot of interesting things: I worked in professional theater for eleven years doing setting and lighting design, and a little acting. I owned a company that made stained-glass lights. I worked for several telephone companies (and I’ll tell you, climbing a telephone pole in Maine, when it’s ten below zero, is an interesting experience!). I’ve been a computer programmer; I’ve been a dishwasher; I got a paralegal degree; I started a small educational company that trains mental health and medical professionals, businesses, and college kids about transgender issues. And now I’m a licensed electrician, one of the few female electricians in the state. I also have a partner! We’ve been together for nine years now, and we’re building a house together in the Maine woods, near a bunch of lakes and the ocean and Acadia National Park.
So you see, it does get better; we’re not pulling your leg. We’re telling you it gets better because our experience proves that it does. But to have those great life experiences you’ve got to stay alive, stick in there, and go after what you want. And you can do it! We know you can do it because we did it, and we don’t have superhuman abilities or unusual psychological strengths. We did it, and we’re just like you.
So whether you’re gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgendered, or even if you’re a straight kid who’s being bullied and called gay, you can do it, too.
Author’s Note: In high school, I read a book called Summerhill, about a different way of educating kids, by creating an accepting, imaginative, and supportive environment that utilized the students’ interests and personal strengths. I wasn’t going to a school like that but it made me realize that if we were given love, and the freedom to pursue our goals, then there’s no limit to what we can accomplish. A lot of folks tell you that if you can only hang in there through high school things will get better. That’s true, but I’d also like to offer you another option. If you really think that school is just too unbearable, and you have the gumption, you can leave the small-mindedness of high school and still get a great education. That’s a lot better than taking your own life. To explore that option, check out Summerhill by A. S. Neill and The Teenage Liberation Handbook by Grace Llewellyn.