by Amy Reed
I was filled with an anxiety around being wrong, around not understanding. From third grade on, math class paralyzed me; I still have nightmares about it. I wanted to talk in English class about books and poems but lacked the courage to raise my hand.
It was a community of clubs and teams. The country club. The Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. Swim team and soccer and cross-country. Football and volleyball and baseball and cheerleading and basketball. Choir and band. I was part of none of it. “You weren’t ever much of a joiner,” my dad says now, reflecting. But I don’t think it was so simple. I always felt as though I was on the periphery; I didn’t know the way into anything. Part of me wanted to stand out, to be admired as different. I took guitar lessons and wrote poetry and loved being onstage in drama—but the louder part of me, the part so afraid of getting things wrong, told myself that the best I could hope for was to get through four years unnoticed.
Our freshman year, Amanda and I had French class first period. We were already inseparable, passing notes instead of focusing on our elderly teacher’s lectures. Her glasses magnified her eyes as she glared at us, hawklike, whenever we were late, asking if we had gotten lost at the mall. If any of us did something to distress her, she would tell us, “Go play on the freeway.” The boy sitting next to me sneered and rolled his eyes at the ridiculousness of it all. And then, one day, he passed me a note. I don’t remember what it said, but I imagine that it was wry and funny and probably a little mean.
Soon the three of us were passing notes together, wondering if our teacher was really as bizarre as she presented herself to be or if it was all an act. What motive could she possibly have to maintain this ruse? To strike fear in us, Amanda and I said. No, no, Billy said. To keep herself entertained through decades of teaching basic vocabulary and grammar to obnoxious teenagers like us. Billy had art with me too, but where he enjoyed our French teacher’s quirks, he loathed our art teacher’s rigidity. The only good part of Art One, according to Billy, was that we could listen to music as we drew. At the time I listened almost exclusively to rap, which he loathed, so he set out to change my musical tastes, one mixtape at a time.
It didn’t take long for me to realize that most of the artists on the mixes he made me were queer, and I wondered if I was supposed to understand that he was too. I would have assumed he was gay even without the mixes, but he’d never mentioned anything either way. I figured he’d let me know eventually.
Then one day he arrived to school effervescent with excitement. He’d seen a musician named Ani DiFranco play in the Berkeley High gym that weekend and now I needed to hear her. He clutched a tape to his heart and then placed it into my hands. He explained that he’d meant this to be another mix with many artists, but once he started choosing songs by her he couldn’t stop. He was sure I was going to love her so much that I’d forget all about Tupac and Wu-Tang Clan.
Ceremoniously, Billy removed my Walkman from my backpack and clicked the tape in. He placed the headphones over my ears.
“You’re going to love this,” he said, pressing play. “It’s going to change your life.”
The first song was “Untouchable Face.” It started slowly, a pattern of notes from an electric guitar, simple lines sung at a brokenhearted whisper. And then the chorus began with a passionate “Fuck you,” so full of longing, so surprising coming from this sweet girl voice. I didn’t know how to be angry or messy in the way she was. I listened to her in amazement, wondering, for the first time, if my life would one day open up into one as complicated and vital and real as hers.
* * *
Billy had a secret to tell me. He pressed nervously handwritten notes into my palm for weeks, stating only that.
“So tell me!” I’d say.
“I can’t!” he’d wail, hands covering his face.
I didn’t know why it was so difficult for him. All we talked about now was Ani DiFranco. If there had existed any question that I was homophobic, our mutual infatuation with this bisexual punk/folk singer should have reassured him otherwise. But he was so nervous that for the day or two before he told me I found myself worrying that I had perhaps read him entirely wrong. Maybe he was trying to tell me that he liked me. That kind of secret would have been a problem; my romantic attention was entirely consumed by a senior who would end up being my boyfriend for almost four years.
But no, he was gay. His palms were sweaty, his face bright red. He was smiling, but he looked like he might cry.
“Yeah,” I said. “I mean, I figured.”
“You did?” He dropped his jaw.
I smiled and shrugged. He’d made me mixes composed of Rufus Wainwright and the Indigo Girls, yet he thought I’d be surprised. He came out to his parents next, to mixed reactions, and finally, slowly, to the rest of the school. There was a group of older girls who took him in and helped him start a GSA. It was the first and only club I ever joined in all my years of school, but it was also short-lived and disorganized, and Billy’s growing cynicism obstructed the older girls’ goals of increasing attendance. He was the only openly queer kid in the school. I could see how the club was weighing on him.
Even though this was the San Francisco Bay Area in the late nineties, once the word spread, Billy got slammed into walls. He got hate notes slipped through the vents of his locker. The girls graduated and the next year was worse than the first. When I saw the bruises and he told me who had given them to him, I had trouble believing it. These were boys I thought were funny, even nice. Once I saw the end of an assault from the far entrance of a hallway. The boys headed away as though nothing had happened while Billy pounded his locker with his fist before picking his textbooks up off the ground. I remember he was crying.
I remember not knowing what to do, and then doing nothing. At night, in my quiet room, I imagined myself a different girl, a braver one. One who knew the right words and how to use them, who would have hurled a perfect insult, who would have made Billy feel protected. This version of me would not have cared that the guys were nice most of the time. She would have held them accountable for their cruelty.
Maybe in the future I would be this way. Not so silent. Not so confused.
I practiced speaking up in my government class. We were nearing an election, and on the California ballot were a number of propositions that I knew in my heart were ethically wrong—one attempting to try minors as adults and another restricting marriage to that between one man and one woman. (Same-sex marriage was already not allowed; this proposition was to make it extra not allowed.) I can still see the seating arrangement and the faces of my classmates and feel how difficult it was for me every time I raised my hand and made an argument. Some of my classmates saw the discussions as purely philosophical, but every time I spoke my voice shook and I was close to tears. These were people we were talking about. Real lives. I was making myself heard for the first time in my life, but it wasn’t enough, and I knew it. Billy still had bruises. I still smiled back at the boys who shoved Billy into walls when they smiled at me.
Billy still wrote me notes, but now they were long revenge fantasies about our classmates and the teachers who either turned a blind eye or joined in his ridicule.
As time passed he adopted a tough style. He practiced a hard gaze and an aloof posture. None of it worked. Eventually, he dropped out and finished high school by way of independent study through the continuation school.
I missed him often, but especially in French, when I thought of how he’d use our latest vocabulary words to ponder whether or not our teacher was a con artist or just severely jaded, his expressions animated, his accent graceful and precise.
And I was struck by the injustice of it. Our school boasted 100 percent graduation rates and nearly as many students feeding straight into four-year colleges. But it’s easy to graduate students and send them to college when they’re Eagle Scouts or soccer stars. I stayed awake at night thinking about it. Each time our principal walked past me in the hallways smiling, I fumed, knowing he didn’t actuall
y care about the students who needed him. Amanda and I discussed the hypocrisy of it on our walks to school. Billy was so smart and so worthy of support, and yet he was so easy for them to let go.
Billy and I kept in touch, talking on the phone at night in our respective bedrooms. Sometimes he came over and had dinner with my family. More often we met up at the café one town over.
In my family, we didn’t express anger. That feeling was an underground stream, so silent and invisible I forgot it existed. If anger appeared at all, it was in a flicker of an expression: tight lips, furrowed brows. A retreat to a bedroom, a door shutting until the feeling was contained and we emerged smiling, ready to get on with our lives.
Billy wore his anger in smudges of black eyeliner and coats of black nail polish and drugstore black hair dye to cover his blond. He smoked angrily and he spoke angrily and his taste in music and art got darker. Every movie he loved was so violent I’d feel sick after watching it. I didn’t know how to look anger head-on, and he was covered in it. I knew that everything he felt was justified, but I didn’t know where to rest my eyes when I sat across from him.
Eventually, Billy and I stopped meeting for coffee. We stopped talking on the phone.
* * *
On the carpet of my bedroom, face close to my boom box speakers, I promised myself that I would always love Ani DiFranco’s music. Imagining a life as an adult who wasn’t moved by her songs terrified me. Would I grow up and lose myself?
Or would I live the kind of life she described—independent and difficult and real, full of fraught romances with men and women, studded with descriptions of surprising beauty. I was in love with her fierceness and her frenetic strums and her voice, which could switch from impossibly soft and sweet to primal in a moment. I listened to the love songs she wrote about other girls and something in me wondered. And then, on the first day of my second semester at college, the wondering was replaced with certainty.
I went to San Francisco State University, where the school’s population alone was double that of my hometown, and I relished the anonymity. I remember walking across the campus feeling invisible and free. So when Kristyn strode into the classroom of my women’s studies course with a group of friends, joking around, all of them so comfortable with themselves, I didn’t have to worry about what anyone would think of me. I didn’t have to worry over the way the sight of her sent a jolt to my heart. I was capsized. I was sure. It took me another year—and the miracle of one more class together—to work up the courage to talk to her.
My coming out lacked drama. I had a crush on a girl; it was that simple. Amanda and I talked about it on the phone daily—me in San Francisco, her in Tempe, Arizona—and the small group of new friends I made in the city were complicit in the grand scheme of winning her over.
It worked. Kristyn and I started dating, and six years later, in 2008, we were legally married by the state of California.
* * *
By that time, same-sex marriage was legal in the state of California, but we married in the midst of a volatile campaign waged by anti-LGBTQ rights groups and religious organizations that wanted to take the right to marry away from us. While we were planning our wedding and writing our vows and dreaming of our future together, we were also faced with crowds of protestors with signs in support of Prop 8, yet another amendment to our state Constitution that would revoke our rights. We were faced with crowds waving signs every time we drove across town to my parents’ house for dinner. Every protestor, a living reminder of homophobia. Every bumper sticker and yard sign, a hate note in my locker.
Once, when exiting the freeway, we saw a Prop 8 sign attached to a fence that was obviously city property. It was bad enough when people had the signs in their own yards, but I couldn’t stand the sight of it hanging where it was, as though it belonged there in the city my wife and I had called home for many years, a city that would vote overwhelmingly against it. “Pull over,” I told Kristyn, and then I opened the door and ran across the street to tear the sign down. A man in a white truck saw us and pulled over. My heart sped up as he got out.
“Is that sign yours?” he called from across the street.
The campaign’s graphics were confusing and offensive: a stick figure family, each of them a different bright color. It was a rainbow family, standing in opposition to gay families. A rainbow family, asking for protection from us, when all we wanted was to be a family together with the same rights and protections as any other family.
“No,” I called back. “It’s not mine.”
“Then why are you taking it down?” he asked.
“Because it’s hateful,” I yelled, eyes burning. I ripped the sign in half and dashed back to the car. He followed us, aggressively, to my parents’ house, slowed as we stopped but then sped away. I was part victorious, part shaken. I was afraid he’d come back and hurt us. I was standing up for myself, but doing so terrified me.
It was a tight race, and we had a lot of allies. As election night grew later, I watched the television graphics of county results coming in, shading the state of California in patches according to how people voted. It was too close to call, and I stayed awake in hope and dread. When it was finally clear that we had lost, despair set in. It was an echo of seeing Billy slammed against his locker, an echo of learning that Billy wasn’t coming back to school, an echo of the ways in which people and authorities and institutions fail those of us who need protection, time and time again, until enough of the population finds these failings unacceptable and demands better. But this time the pain and anger were deeper because now it was about me. I couldn’t stand silently at the end of a hallway, pretending not to witness it. My wife and I had said our vows and signed our names and celebrated with our families and friends less than a month prior, and we wondered what would happen to our marriage. And even more than that, I felt the poisonous hatred of my fellow Californians. I knew that the vast majority of people in the Bay Area had voted in our favor, but I still found myself consumed by distrust. Every person I worked with, everyone who rang me up at the grocery store or sat around me in cafés, every stranger I interacted with in any small way was now a potential enemy.
No matter how engaged we are, no matter how much we stand up for our neighbors and friends, when we aren’t directly affected by injustice we have the luxury of turning away from it. We know that whatever happens, however terrible and however much we care, it won’t directly impact our lives. We sympathize, but we don’t fully understand until we’ve feared for our own safety and security, or that of our family members or closest friends. With marriage came security. The knowledge that it would be my legal right to be in my wife’s hospital room if she became ill or injured, the knowledge that she could be in mine. With marriage came the certainty that when we had a child, both of our names could be on her birth certificate even though she would only carry the genes of one of us. And now these certainties were shattered.
A few days after Prop 8 passed, I thought of Billy. I hadn’t heard from him in years, but there I was, scouring the Internet. His name is a common one, and false leads were everywhere. Finally I found the right Billy on a social networking site designed to reunite classmates. The site was intentionally misleading, making it seem like people were signed up when they weren’t, but I wrote him a long message there anyway, despite a lack of a profile picture or any indication that he would receive it. I told him that I had fallen in love with a girl when I was in college and that we had gotten married. By that point I’d had years of practice coming out, but I deleted and retyped the lines over and over. I thought I should say something self-deprecating. It was so convenient that I discovered I was queer when in college in San Francisco instead of our high school. How nice for you, I imagined him thinking with his signature smirk.
How are you? I asked him. I feel bad about how our friendship ended.
I wanted to hear back from him that he was okay. Happy, even. I wanted him to have a career and a boyfriend. I wanted to know where
he lived. I wanted to hear that he’d made it to the other side of those dark days, that he’d grown up and moved on.
I wanted to learn from him. When you have the courage to know who you are, the courage to say it out loud and not hide it, and in return people ridicule and shame and shun you and you are left defeated and afraid—what happens after?
I don’t know if he ever got my message. I never heard back.
* * *
I will be honest with you: My deep fear is that I’m still standing at the other end of a hallway, watching something violent and unjust and struggling to act or make sense of it. I have been on both sides now—that of an observer, understanding injustice but not feeling the impacts of it on my life, and that of the persecuted, knowing that policies and laws will hurt real people, my family among them. But I am far from silent now. I pay attention and I call my senators and I talk about what matters to me in front of large groups of people in schools across the country. That grief I felt when Billy left our school and again when Prop 8 was passed—the profound cruelty and wrongness of them—returned on November 8, 2016, as the night grew later and the results were clear. And I’ve felt that way ever since.
Something about the feeling makes me want to connect to that girl on her bedroom carpet or walking the corridors of her high school, headphones on, aware of the way she doesn’t belong. I remember the delicateness of my realizations: that some boys who act nice are also cruel, that the school administration didn’t care enough to hold on to Billy.
In a way I was fortunate that my understanding of the world was formed by these early disillusionments. Thanks to those experiences, it was horrifying and gut-wrenching but not entirely unexpected that almost half the voting population—not only blatant bigots but also seemingly nice people, those who, I imagine, bring dinner to neighbors during times of need and read their children bedtime stories and even profess to care about the innate worth of all people—rallied behind a terrible man. In doing so, they denied the humanity of so many of us.