Growing Pains

Ah, lezzie's they grow up so fast....

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Before I knew it my own summer of lust was ending and I was on my way home back to Virginia.

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To say that my next two years of high-school were awkward may be an understatement.

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This is preferably where I would insert a story of triumph and courage in the face of adversity. 

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However, (I'm sad to say) when it came to high-school I don't really have any. It's not that I shelved every part of my summer at Sexplo (puh-leeze), but my journals from that time are a mix of boy and girl craziness.

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I was fascinated by guys and yet always found myself having to mentally prepare when it came to intimacy (see: beyond first base).

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On the other hand I also wanted to be with women,

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but I didn't want to add to my already eccentric reputation.

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Somehow I thought that if I could just make eyes long enough at the few out girls in school, maybe they would notice and lend a helping hand.

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How were they to know? 

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Some attempts I made at keeping it awkwardly real:

• Cutting my hair into a baby dyke cut on several occasions.
• Watching every gay/lez movie I could find in search of helpful tips.
• Befriending the few openly gay girls at school.
• Falling for one of the tough bad asses of the group only to find out she was dating another closeted friend (insert epic heartbreak here).
• Dressing like a British school boy on a regular basis. 
• Falling for the same straight girl all of my male friends liked.

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• Reading all of the feminist lit. and listening to all of the female, tear your panties off with my guitar, music I could find. 
• Worrying if I was supposed to like my bestie just because I liked girls. (Note: This is a common newbie mistake, it's okay either way.)
• Developing crushes on and dating femme boys.

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Somehow in the midst of all of this I just kept hoping (and not hoping) that someone might just call me out in some embarrassing undeniable way.

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Still how could they when I wasn't even fully out with myself?

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At that age I wasn't really sure if it was just a phase or maybe a fetish that I could out grow (Oh, how that Southern Baptist guilt even got to the liberal Jewish kids.).

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I assumed that since I enjoyed the company of guys that I could also enjoy having sex with them just as much as women. Right?

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However, my past still dogged me. So I decided to try and find a way to leave home again the following summer. 

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That summer I left for a theater internship at Vassar College (gay, gay, GAY!), with participants ranging in age from 17 to around 40.

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Every person had their own dorm room (YES!). Which meant that so as long as everyone pulled their weight we were pretty much left to our own devices.

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Finally my summer of love was here and this time I was not going to screw things up.  

It Takes a Village to Raise a Queer

      It was summer of 1988 and I was sixteen years old when I came out of the closet for the first time. 

I was away at a summer program at Wellesley College and I saw a flyer up for an LGBT meeting and decided to attend under the guise of "questioning". 

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    Sure I had seen a few gay movies, and stared longingly after a few girls in my time, but I hardly thought that qualified me to be a certifiable pussy bandit. I was fifteen after all and growing up in a largely homophobic area of the South.

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Being in New England I thought it might finally be safe to stick my toe in the luke warm end of the kiddie pool. 

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    However, when I arrived at the meeting spot a number of other teens were waiting just to see who showed. At first I almost didn't step forward. 
     I was just "questioning" after all (right?). 
So I wasn't really sure if it was worth it to spend my summer being hazed by my peers after taking it on the chin back at home. 

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     In the end I decided that this was bullshit and I decided to move forward. 
I had expected that usual taunts from home, but instead I was met with silence and stares. 

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    Okay so I did have an unusually large rack at that age, and I was a bit of an eccentric dresser, but looking back I think it might have been something else...

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     Before the descriptor had been placed in heavy rotation, I was femme. Sure I liked to mix it up with school boy vests, mens pants, dress shirts and ties too. However, for the most part I was pretty damn femme.


Which meant that either to my benefit or to my detriment almost no one suspected that I might be queer. 

      
    This left my peers a little confused, but once I was able to re-arrange my lipsticked balls, I went in and sat down.
    There were about ten teens in that first meeting, most of whom lived in New England or New York (each were out in their communities). 
     Myself and another guy from England were the only two still sitting in our respective closets. Both of us lived in similar conservative communities (although his came with added religious pressure):

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 As each person in the group shared their story I was at first struck by their incredible bravery in the face of adversity.

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However, something else  hit me ever harder. 


In the mist of their mistreatment, each of them had found places in their community where they felt supported. Friends, family members, youth groups, gay rights advocates and community centers that had taken them in and offered support. 

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Outside of movies, I had never known that type of support might be possible.

So when it came to my turn to share my story, I cried.
There was a fair amount of crying that went down that day, but mostly out of relief and joy. We were both just so happy to feel that we weren't the only ones anymore. That we never really were the only ones. 

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To be continued....
Next time's topic: The end of summer and one hell of ride back in the South. 

Please feel free: to offer any comments, memories, stories on here or e-mail me at anunexpectedlez@gmail.com