A Clean, Well-Lighted Closet

Strangely little to say about the Family Holiday Festivities (though we've still got the Aunt to go today.) In the meantime, I've finally tackled this post I've been avoiding since Day 1. Which is fitting, because it's about silence.

I came out to my parents in the summer of 1993, just after I'd finished college. I figured I'd finish school before I did the deed in case they disowned me. I also purposefully came out to them as "lesbian," even though I knew the truth about my attractions was far more complicated than that. I just figured if I told them I was attracted to both men and women (I hadn't yet considered trannies or genderqueers), they'd say, "Well then, we expect you to choose men."

I have no idea if I was right or not -- it's not one of those things you can do twice to find out which is better. As it was, they struggled mightily with the news, screaming, crying, suggesting it was just a reaction to my having been raped the year before, and doing their best to forbid and/or blackmail me out of speaking about my "lesbianism" to anyone they knew, including my entire extended family.

But over time (meaning, several years), they really worked hard to understand. My girlfriend got invited to family holidays. My mother let me know she supported equal marriage rights.

And then there was D. D. was the very first transman I got involved with. You don't need to know much about him, as we didn't last very long, but it was being with D. that opened my eyes to the realities of the closet. Namely: there isn't just one.

There I was -- an out, proud "lesbian" lying to my increasingly accepting family about whether or not I was dating anyone. I refused to use female pronouns or a female name for him with them, even though he wouldn't know. It felt like too big a betrayal. And as far as they knew, I wasn't attracted to men, so I couldn't just suddenly be dating one. How could I explain D.? This was before Boys Don't Cry, even.

After D. and I managed to disentangle, I got involved with a woman quite seriously and figured that particular dilemma was in the past. My folks loved her, they wanted to know when we were going to get married. We fell apart at the two year mark.

Almost immediately, I met and fell for the person I've been referring to on this blog as "my ex." For the purposes of this story, I'm going to call him Bob, though I'll probably go back to calling him The Ex so that newer readers don't go, "Who's this Bob guy, and why doesn't she get with him?"

Anyway, Bob and I fell hard and fast and there was no possible way to pretend to my mother that he didn't exist -- I'm just not that good of a liar. But, at the time we met, he had a very laissez-faire attitude toward pronouns. His official policy was "call it like you see it," and while I had immediately taken to using male pronouns with him, he understood why I might want to use female ones with my family -- he himself hadn't yet come out to his family as trans. He also happened to have one of those names that can be "either" gender. So I skirted the issue for a while. This didn't mean I wasn't closeted. It just meant the closet was roomy and well-lit and had a glass door.

The thing I'm trying to get at here is the feeling of lying to my family. So literally familiar and simultaneously this intolerable pressure. I've been lying to my mother since the days of "Who broke this?" "It wasn't me!" Sometimes it's still like that: an act of self-preservation, an elision of consequence. Sometimes it's because I don't think she really would want to know the truth -- about my politics, my sex life, my cleaning habits, my generally debauched and radical ways. It's a way of maintaing her idea of who I am, an idea that serves us both. Most of the time.

A few Christmasses ago, we were at the home of a friend of the family, and for the first time in memory there were no minors present. Talk turned to drinking, and my mother claimed to have been drunk only twice in her life. Someone cracked that this was because shopping and drinking don't mix. I offered that the last time I'd shopped while drunk I'd bought a feather boa, and I hadn't regretted it one bit. My mother was shocked. Not that I'd been drunk (she's not that naiive), but that I was someone who would own a feather boa. Of all the people she knew, she said, I seemed the least likely to own such a thing.

If you polled all of my friends and acquaintances and colleagues, even the ones I don't know very well, and asked them how likely it was that I own a feather boa, I guarantee you no one would guess under 90%.

I understood completely and suddenly: she didn't know me because I had protected us both too much for that. It's like feelings -- if you cut yourself off from grief, or anger, or heartache, or whatever awful thing you'd rather avoid, you cut off the joy and passion and love and creativity and all the juicy stuff, too. There's just one spigot. I never got to share with her the very first story I had published in a book, because it was in an erotica anthology. No pronouns, no boa.

To be fair, my fears are not unfounded. I wore a dark red lipstick to Christmas this year and she called it "goth." When I teased her about the size of the American flag she was flying one Fourth of July, she asked me, only half joking, if I was a Communist. We just returned from seeing The Good Shephard, and while we agreed that it would have benefitted from a firm editor, my dad thought it completely useless because it wasn't the action thriller he'd expected. He literally said, "I don't want to be thought-provoked." Anyone who veers from the norm -- and make no mistake, the norm is considered to be white, affluent, suburban, them -- is derided, at least at first, as weird or deviant or wrong in some way.

Still, after that night, I've tried little by little to loosen my grip on what parts of me, well, come out. I explained to them about Bob and trans, and it freaked them right out, but once again they worked hard to understand and really came around, to the point where they still think I made a mistake in leaving him. But they also reinforced some of my original fears -- there were several points during my four year relationship with Bob that she asked me, if Bob and I were to break up, would I date men then?

And now I am. But they don't know that. In fact, as far as they know, I haven't had a single date since Bob & I split in May. Again with the boa: they think I'm sad and chaste and overworked, when in fact I'm just having casual sex with men, pining after a 22 year old trans punk (whom I haven't mentioned to them b/c of the age thing and the dramarama), and my sexual identity is complicated. (OK, it's true I'm sometimes sad and often overworked, but that's got nothing to do with it.)It's not that they don't ask. It's that I lie.

Or maybe I should say, I lied. Pretty effectively, it would seem, based on this very silent holiday visit. Eerily silent. The sound of dozens of coupled-off friends and relations decidedly NOT asking me anything. Which is completely uncharacteristic for my family. It's been a blessing in the short term, however it came about, but long-term means the ball's now in my court. If I want to say anything at this point, I'm going to have to bring it up myself.

I tell myself I'll come out to them again when and if I get involved with a guy in an ongoing way. That's not a lie -- I'm sure I will, if I do. But lately I've been wondering, why am I waiting? Why would it be different then? I think I really fear I can't put this genie back in the bottle. What if I wind up getting serious about a transman or a woman, either now or at some point in the future? Once they know I date men, I can't undo that. And I'm afraid after all of these years of struggle and accpetance and love, I'll find out they're really homophobic and judgemental after all.