Luckily for me, these moments all ended happily. I never experienced the difficulty of losing friends, or having relatives turn their backs on me.
For several years after coming out to my parents, I lived life as a loud, proud, out gay man, eventually earning a job writing and editing a GLBT magazine called Lavender. Still not out to my grandmother and extended family, I walked a tightrope between being proud of myself and living the lie I created so many years ago. Just a few months ago, my grandmother happened upon a copy of Lavender. She saw my picture, and read my coming-out story. It was both awkward and interesting to find myself back in the door frame of my closet, taking the final step out.
When I was younger, struggling to come to terms with myself, to be comfortable in my own gay skin, I read a lot of books, watched a lot of television, and listened to a lot of people talk about homosexuality, and I never saw the rainbow that I see today. Maybe it was the fact that gayness was always the punch line of a joke, or the insensitive remark used to hurt, rather than the adjective it really is. Gay is not positive or negative, it just is. And being gay is not a good thing or a bad thing, it's just a part of who you are. For me, it has proven to be a big part of who I am, and in many ways contributed to aspects of myself that I am extraordinarily proud of. Knowing what it's like to be different has made me tolerant and accepting of diversity. Recognizing the benefit of diversity has shown me the value of being different. And being different has given me the chance to discover myself.
But the world is still a scary place, and we are still in the minority. We live in a day and age when being gay is not nearly as difficult as it was decades ago. We exist in a society that, while not fully accepting, is far less hostile and intolerant than in the past. The world is changing, and we are a part of that change. Someday we will win the war for equality, but not simply by virtue of being the good guys. Someday coming out will be a non-issue; but until then, we will continue to fight for the right to be different.
We have all heard the saying that hate is a learned behavior, but acceptance is also a learned behavior. I've watched firsthand as friends and family members have learned to be accepting of homosexuality. Today my relationship with my parents is wonderful. They accept me, and will welcome into our family whatever man wins my heart. But that didn't happen overnight. My father had questions, my mother had concerns, and they both had to struggle with their inability to understand. Some people will take longer than others, and some will never quite come around. That's why it's important for us to be visible and tell our stories, because that's how we win the acceptance and the understanding of the mainstream community. And the straight allies we earn in that struggle are the allies we will need as we continue to push for GLBT equality, and same-sex marriage, and employment nondiscrimination, and the host of other issues that we need to create a more accepting America.
We must continue to tell our stories in hopes that others are listening.
Unlike my fairy tale, I'm not so sure how or when that acceptance will begin, but I am confident it will. When it does, my happy ending will have just begun, and we will all live happily, or at least equally, ever after.
A Boy in the Girls' Bathroom
by Dylan Forest
I was fifteen the first time I used a men's restroom. I was fifteen when I first saw a urinal. I was in high school when I did something that most little boys do as soon as they don't need their mom to help them up onto the toilet or button their pants.
I hadn't been into a public restroom in almost a year. See, I didn't stop going into the women's room when my mom no longer had to help me. I kept going into them because when I was born the doctor gave me to my mom and told her she had given birth to a healthy baby girl. I'm sure if I hadn't been so disoriented, I would have given him a funny look.
So there I was, fifteen years later, squeezing my legs together and gritting my teeth and trying not to pee my pants, all because of that doctor's mistake. I guess any doctor would have said it, or any person at all, really. Anatomically, that's what I was: female. And every report card or ID or legal document reminded me of it with a big fat F. It felt like my grade in life.
But I tried. I wore frilly dresses on holidays and smiled for the camera on picture day and grew my hair so long that if I wasn't careful I'd sit on it. I was my mother's little girl. I got good grades and never got in trouble. In fact, I barely ever talked at all. Everyone told my mom what a good little girl I was. I was perfect. I was miserable.
The first time I got my hair cut short I stared at myself in the mirror for so long I started to get dizzy. Looking back, it was a terrible haircut and the woman at Supercuts hadn't understood what I wanted at all. But I loved it. All of a sudden I could see myself. I could see glimpses of the boy I had felt like all along. I could see him in the angle of my jaw and the broadness of my shoulders, and he looked back at me from the mirror with fearlessness in his eyes. That just made it more real and more frightening. I bought a lot of girly underwear after I got that haircut, like I thought a floral print or a little bow in the front or the color pink would turn me into a girl. But a boy in frilly undies does not miraculously transform into a woman. Believe me. I know from experience.
How do I possibly explain what it's like to just know something about yourself despite everything and everyone telling you otherwise? The best way I can describe it is that when I see myself, I see a boy. It's not about the little things like how I dress or what my hobbies are. I can't say I always knew I was male because I didn't like dresses or Barbies when I was little. The truth is, a ton of girls fit that description. I don't base my gender identity on stereotypes. It wouldn't work if I tried, really. I'm not a stereotypical guy. I'm terrible at sports. I cry regularly at movies. I'm a feminist. I'm not straight. I'm not gay, either, although that stereotype would fit better. I'm just me. And part of who I am is the fact that I am a guy. I'm not a man; after all, I'm still a teenager. But someday I will be a man.
Right after I got my haircut I started getting “mistaken” for male. I didn't like it because it was pushing out in the open something I had been trying to hide my whole life. I was ashamed, but what I hated most was the fact that I lived for the few times a day a cashier or waiter or bus driver would call me “son” or “young man.” My cheeks would burn with shame, but my stomach would rise up into my throat in pride. I was battling myself. There was a full-on war going on between who everyone thought I was and who I really was. Who I really am.
So, to put it simply, I let go. I let go of my mother's daughter and my grandmother's granddaughter and I stopped trying to be who everyone expected me to be. But it didn't happen all at once. I didn't wake up one day and decide to embrace something that was such a source of pain and humiliation for me. It took a long time, but gradually I learned that the only way it was going to stop hurting was if I stopped running. So for a while I was very antisocial and introverted. I read a lot, I spent a lot of time alone, and I got more and more comfortable with who I was.
I started looking more and more like a boy. Strangers called me “he” more often than “she,” and I stopped feeling uncomfortable when I was seen as male. People would stop me when I tried to use a women's restroom; they'd tell me I was in the wrong one. And most of the time I felt like agreeing with them. I was in the wrong bathroom. So I stopped using public restrooms unless they were unisex. I learned how to not use a bathroom from the time I left in the morning to the time I got home, and sometimes that was more than ten hours.
It's very hard for me to verbalize how it feels to finally feel right. The way I felt the first time a guy my age acknowledged me with that brotherly nod and the first time a girl flirted openly with me in public or little things like getting called “man” or “bro.” It was relief, like eating something delicious when you haven't eaten in days, like coming home. Things were finally starting to fit.
I started to feel more and more comfortable socially, but physically I was still far from home. It's very easy t
o blame all of this on my body. It would be easy to hate my physical self because that's where most of my problems come from. Many transsexual people have terrible body image and absolutely despise their bodies, which is entirely understandable. I've been like that most of my life. Puberty made me want to die; I felt like I was being betrayed by my own body. I've lived with hatred for myself for much too long.
It is much more difficult to accept than it is to resent when something makes your life much harder. But when it is something you will have forever, no matter what, acceptance is something you need to work for. I am not perfect by any means and I still have issues with my body. Sometimes I still look at myself and wish with every thought in my head that I had a flat chest and bigger, tougher hands. I wish my cheeks were like sandpaper, I wish my body had less curves and more angles. But I will never be exactly what I want to be. I will never be able to take a shower in a men's locker room. I will never have a Y chromosome.
This body will carry me through my life. Every memory I have is from within this body and everything I will ever do will be experienced from here. It will change in the course of my life, but it will still be this body. Someday I will have a flat chest but I will have scars to remind me that it was not always that way. Someday male hormones will fill my body and my voice will drop and I will grow facial hair, but I will never have the one thing that most people see as the defining characteristic of a man. I will never have a penis.
It would be easy to dwell on that. I could cry for hours in my bed because I won't ever be able to have sex like they do in the movies. I've lived like that before, and I still have nights when I do. But I am learning acceptance. I am teaching myself to love the one person that will always be in my life, without fail.
This life is hard. It has been almost unbearably difficult at times, and I'm only sixteen years old. But I'm getting to a point where I am happy with the person I am, both inside and out, and a majority of people never get there. I don't regret anything. I love who I am, and I wouldn't change it even if I could.
Our Space
by Jovencio de la Paz
We are the sum total of our places. Our lives accumulate the cities we visit, the rooms we occupy, the doors and windows we touch in passing. Like magpies we gather our surroundings and hide them in the nests of our subconscious.
My first memories are of open spaces. I recall the wide green valleys of Oregon. I remember limitless passages of water, rivers that went as they pleased. There was no place to stop, no ditch or barrier to deny my passing from point to point. I remember vastness. The names of the places are forgotten, but the vastness remains. I knew that there was truth in the openness. The namelessness meant freedom. When I entered high school, the fences came up. Suddenly open fields grew streaks of boundaries, white posts grew from the ground, and beams of wood shut away acres of free-flowing grass. Walls were built. Down rivers, dams burst through the surface, altering the direction of the water after millions of years. I desired parameters, safety, definition. To know where one area stopped and another began. And to know where I belonged.
I took him to such a place. Somewhere I belonged. We sat together and watched the sky, noting various heavenly bodies. We sat together in empty fields in the middle of the night, surrounded by idyllic space. Sometimes he would smoke and I would watch the glowing end of the cigarette move like a living thing in the dark. I watched how he sat, his posture, the length of his arms, his hands moving from ground to lips.
We sat together in empty fields and talked. For hours we discussed the intricacies of youth, the promise of the future, the strangeness of love. The 2 a.m. sky filled with the sounds of our chatter. I don't remember what brought him to me. His girlfriend had broken up with him. He was having a hard time with relationships. Something had happened in his life and he needed some-one's sympathy. At any rate, he arrived. He came to me like a boy from my past, the boy I never was. At the time I was preoccupied with the arrival of college and the departure of my childhood. When he came into my life, he gifted my childhood back to me. He recalled the Saturday-morning cartoons that, for fear of embarrassment, I chose to forget. He resurrected the silly superstitions that belonged to schoolchildren, the rhymes I had put away for the coming of adulthood. Once again, boys with bedsheets as capes were still superheroes and summer days slowed to the speed of molasses. Time did not move but bent to allow us to see it and what it was doing to us. He smiled as he avoided the cracks in the sidewalk.
He sat up and I saw his impression left on the grass in that huge, empty place.
He told me about his past, his family, the beauty he found in everyone. He had an ability to see the world innocently and describe it without the fear of honesty. Our intimacy came from this honesty. Because whatever he saw, whatever he feared or whatever joy or love he felt, he experienced without pretension. So when he reached out to me, it was easy to reach back.
We were not afraid of being alone in the middle of nowhere so early in the morning, so early that the faraway lights of houses turned from yellow to orange and finally disappeared completely. In fact, there was safety in the open, empty space. We trusted that openness and that openness was reflected in us.
Being in an open place pushes you close to who you are near. So he told me about the girls he had loved, girls with long hair and incredible eyes and fingers that made sounds in the dark. Girls who moved their hands to tie ribbons, pulling hair back into buns. Girls of all colors, round like fruit or thin as blades of grass. He would shut his eyes and tell me about their lips, the architecture of their kisses, the structure of an embrace in sudden passion or in quiet grace, and I dreamed of a time when I would understand that closeness.
And though I did not know the name of our closeness, I could not avoid its presence. Though I did not know what our relationship was, I held it close to me the way I held my memories of open fields. I thought back to my boyfriends, the boys who came and went so casually, the ones who smiled and said nothing and were nothing to me. And I realized that I had never been so close to anyone.
We only appreciate the largeness of a place when we are standing in it. So we stood and he put the cigarette out on his shoe and we walked toward a better view of the field. I followed him. We came to a place where there was a fence, and he climbed over it. I did not. We both looked down its length. It stretched out, turning slightly to the right and then up a rise in the earth, dipping behind to where we could not see it anymore. The fence went on in the other direction, breaking the openness of the place, cutting it into two distinct parts, signifying that there was a limit to the field. I could not join him. So we sat and watched each other from opposite sides.
We sit at the edges of many fences. We find things around us filled with barriers. I see the walls crisscross and stitch the landscape and segment what was vast and new and open. I remember when the valleys and fields of grass flowed into each other, the way one melted into the other so it was impossible to separate one from its neighbor. Now I see the formations of the limits. I see where I could not be close to him, the reasons why he could not be close to me despite how close we were. We learn to recognize those borders. And we know where we stand.
We are the summation of our places: the total worth of the borders we define for ourselves.
Four Photos
by Justin Levesque
I.
“the sun is down, the blue glow of the tv is on his skin and my body shakes, with a stranger's glance, the first touch, imprinted, permanent, rushing running blood, everything so fast and everything spinning, here you are, with the world's gravity pushing down, whispering ‘forever …’ ”
II.
“with his hand, falling fast, and my eyes going to the sky, finding meteors, moving so quickly, from this spot seeing all, seeing so many eyes around, seeing me, rooted by the ground, shake no tumbling, because in the silence, in humility, he got what he wanted, and i, blushed and torn, with indigo brands, and i, not making a peep, and i, without a name �
��”
III.
“him, so far away, distances, the reaching, sending waves, spinning around, the lines, the lines they are stretching far and wide, across and through doorways. snapping shut at the closure of knobs and clasps. and they are snapped and propelled back, falling, losing footing, last second reaching for anything, and standing. a little unsteady, a little unsure, but standing.
the aching heart, pushing on our ribs, filling through our ears….”
IV.
“this early morning, having left him, the thoughts rampage through my head, i am never resting always going, thought after thought, swelling, coughing thick syrups of doubt and guilt, and happiness, and guilt …
… my patience is not infinite …”
Break-up in Slow Motion
by Joshua Dalton
So my first boyfriend and I, I guess we kinda bypassed the whole “dating” thing and stumbled right into deadly serious commitment. It was a matter of availability, mostly; I only knew one other gay guy at my school, an overweight Queer as Folk wannabe, and was still hardly comfortable enough with the whole homosexual thing to waste the emotions on him. Of course, it probably didn't help that Ryan and I were both lonely, introspective teenagers, still naive and overly romantic, overflowing with testosterone.
The first time we met was straightforward enough. My friend Courtney brought him along as an afterthought to see The Ring with us; he'd been at her house when I called to invite her, and it would have been rude to just send him home. In my dad's pickup, Ryan and I shared the backseat, a big pit with two little chairs that faced each other. His knees kept brushing mine, and both of us kept turning our heads to avoid the awkward business of being two strangers staring directly at each other. The only word to describe him, really, was goofy, with his overly large head, laughter that burst out like a sputtering engine, random clothes, and wild eyes. He bubbled with this endless manic energy, fidgeting and tapping his fingers. When we ate, he spun the coasters around and shared lame jokes, looking around and laughing whenever an awkward pause crept up, anything to break the silence. There was something so relaxed, so self-assured and cool about him.
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