Coming Out and Going Home

I am pansexual. I have known this from a very young age, around 5. In August I finally came out, as a political move, to my parents. My parents are both very conservative, religious, and straight. It was quite shocking and foreign to them that the struggles of the queer community could effect anyone they cared about. Or that they should care about those struggles at all, much less from a personal perspective. My coming out angered my father who insisted that I “stay open minded and don’t make any decisions yet,” a sentiment my maternal grandmother later shared with me over Thanksgiving break. Over the course of the last year I have come out to most of my extended family, only excluding my paternal grandparents neither of whom I am very close with. It was shocking to me that my own family would think that I am ‘close minded’ for being open to anyone as far as who I can love. It was also surprising to me that none of them suspected. It’s not exactly hard to pick up on the fact that I’m not straight.   

Going home for breaks and the holidays is by no means time off when it comes to my family, especially since coming out. My parents have become hyper focused on queer representation and blocking it, my mother is constantly pointing out “nice boys” who I should, of course, unquestioningly go on a date with, and my little sister likes to throw the word lesbian at me like a knife. In short, home is not a comfortable place to spend extended periods time in. However, my family has allowed me to stay with them, they continue to support me and send me to college, and they are there to lend a helping hand when needed. I by no means am unlucky. I know people who have been kicked out, cut off, and even beaten by their family for being who and what they are. And for them, the holidays are anything but a time of celebration.

The fact that in this day and age there still needs to be resources specifically for homeless, queer youth who have been kicked out of their own homes, whose parents tell them that they are dead to them or that they would literally rather they lost a child than had a queer child, the fact that conversion therapy is still legal and acceptable to practice. It’s outrageous to me. It’s unacceptable to me. For me, it’s heartbreaking that these people, my friends, are not safe in their own home with their own family. I think things are changing but not as fast as they should. I hope someday to provide a safe home for my own kids and their friends, for children less fortunate who have been kicked out. For now it is enough to volunteer, donate, petition, and raise awareness for (homeless) queer youth. Please remember to keep them in your thoughts these holidays and do what you can.  

Story Time! (and heteronormativity)

By all accounts, my grandmother was the perfect housewife in the fifties, sixties, and seventies. She was a debutante and got a major in home economics at her college and married young. She had two kids, stayed at home, and cooked meals and sewed and supported the family.

And then somewhere in the eighties or nineties, she got a divorce and went back to college and became an accountant in Dallas and owned a ranch with horses. She had a successful financial planning business whose specialty was figuring out the budgets of professional athletes who would then do her a solid and help her move furniture when she moved from house to house. She ran what she called a home for wayward cowboys on her ranch, where she would say that a carton of cigarettes and a case of beer would get a hell of a lot done.

She and I were sort of pen pals where every now and again I’d send those precious crayon atrocities that four year olds make and she’d send back little letters and gifts . After she died her special friend Maureen picked up the habit for a few years. It took me a long while to figure out that Maureen was my grandmother’s girlfriend.

Tracking out her life is a little complicated because my family doesn’t exactly bring her up since she died when I was four. It’s taken longer than you’d expect for me to piece together even this much information about her, honestly, and in writing this I am in a way reminded of Middlesex and the winding scope of family sagas and family secrets. Because she died when I was young, no one is particularly inclined to talk about her, and since she had divorced my grandfather, he wasn’t interested in having that conversation either.

Her life sounds like a hell of  a good story, though, even though it’s not what is expected by any means. The end of this story could easily be her in a Florida retirement home, or teaching knitting to a community college, but instead she decided to live on a massive ranch with horses and her girlfriend. But we don’t talk about that, and my uncle still doesn’t accept that his mother could ever have been gay.

But for a long time she prescribed to what was expected of her and lived the life that she was supposed to, likely because she had limited options, based on the way she seems to have been funneled from high school to college to a respectable marriage.  And then eventually decided to say fuck it and did what she wanted and got a “real” education and to some extent got out of the closet and away from the required heterosexuality in her life and live how she wanted. Which was honestly in a way that’s pretty stereotypically “masculine.” She owned her own business and owned a ranch and too care of her own shit and decided what exactly she wanted to make out of her life, even if it 

took until she had college-age children.

Point is, live your life and be gay if you want to be.