Gay is NOT my personality (anymore).
By Olivia Robertson
Friends of mine from high school have started coming out all over the place. They’re gay, bisexual, genderqueer, and every other identity that exists under that big rainbow umbrella. Some of them are still straight, but their numbers are dwindling. New pronouns are popping up in people’s Instagram bios. Girls who swore to me that they weren’t attracted to women are posting odes to the beauty of their new girlfriends. I know that this is part of an age-old pattern: leaving home for a new environment and expansive freedoms, a person is bound to learn some new things about themself. The university setting seems especially well-designed to facilitate a change in identity, on every level. A huge group of people your own age, living in the same spot, taking advantage of the distance from their parents and the other authorities in their lives … something is bound to happen.
I’m happy for all my friends. I really am. I’m happy that they get to live their truths, be young and in love, flirt with whoever and express themselves honestly. I’m happy. But this would be a pretty short piece if that’s all I had to say.
Not too far beneath that joy I feel on their behalf is this ugly, seething bitterness. It feels like a rotten spot of mold on my ribcage. I’ve been trying to ignore it, cover it up, downplay it, but it’s one of those things that will metastasize if left untreated.
I did not come out in college. I came out when I was fourteen, living with my parents, walking to high school every morning. I came out to one friend, who outed me to another. I came out to someone else crying on the floor of the handicapped stall while everyone else was having lunch. I didn’t come out to my boyfriend, but I broke up with him without giving an honest explanation. Nine days later I tried to see if I could hang myself in my bedroom using a scarf my aunt gave me for Christmas, but I didn’t get the knot right. There wasn’t any visible damage but there was a tight collar of soreness around my throat that I could feel for the next few days, whether I was sitting through math class or watching TV with my family. A silent, painful, nagging reminder of all the things that were wrong with me.
I want to make a few things clear before I continue. I am not from a rural or conservative place: I’m from the suburbia of Northern California, where nobody would have anything bad to say about gay people if you asked them to their face. And this wasn’t the 80’s or 90’s, but the year 2013. Ellen had her career back, the L Word had finished its run, every new sitcom had exactly one obligatory sassy gay comic relief character. These are key details in the narrative I’ve been telling myself and others for years. I was lucky. It wasn’t that bad. It could have been worse. All of that is true, but that dark spot of bitterness keeps whispering, “It could have been so much better.”
I wasn’t the only gay kid at my school. I can say this with confidence because I was friends with the other two or three. They were the people I spent almost all of my time with, even if we hardly speak at all now. At school, we stuck together, so I was never totally alone, but there weren’t that many of us either. Knowing there was another gay person in another room across campus didn’t make me feel that much more secure when the boys behind me in Spanish class were making liberal use of the word “faggot.” Or when the girl who had recently cut her hair short posted a tearful video on Facebook, crying because she was so devastated that people were accusing her of being gay. “Not that there’s anything wrong with being gay,” she said, choking on her own sobs, “but it just hurts so much to be called something that you’re not…” Of course, her statements and her actions didn’t quite mesh there. I have never felt the urge to post a video of myself crying on social media when someone assumes I’m straight. (Maybe I should start doing that.)
Despite the good intentions (or the façade of good intentions) coming from most of the faculty and most of my peers, despite the presence of a few queer friends and parents who accepted me even if they’d just as soon never bring it up, I felt isolated. I wasn’t on the same page as everyone else. I made a big show of self-acceptance, became GSA president, chose queer themes for every paper I was assigned, just to have sense that there was queerness in the world around me, that it wasn’t just a fluke, that there was a place and a time where I would finally have some sense of belonging.
Come to find out, a few years later, that people who could have given that to me were there the whole time.
I know this isn’t fair to them. That’s why I’ve been trying to squash this feeling down. These are kind and generous people who supported me the best way they knew how at the time. They were on their own journeys, I’m sure, dealing with their own internalized homophobia and various forms of repression. It’s the inner child in me, the fourteen year old version of myself who, at moments, would rather have been dead than be gay, crying out about all that pain I’ve been covering for years in that blanket of “it could have been worse”. These were the people who could have made it better.
I’m voicing these thoughts because they’re uncouth, incorrect, inappropriate, and inescapable. I know that there must be other people who came out in high school who feel the same way, and those are the people I’m writing to. What I have been able to give myself to soothe the bitterness is the knowledge that all of this served a purpose. Even if other people might not have been able to provide me with the sense of community, normalcy, and comfort in my queerness that I was looking for, I think that I was able to give some of that to them. Starting in high school and extending through college, people have come to me, some of whom I wasn’t close with, because they were struggling to figure out their own sexual identity. Because of my visibility, they knew that I was someone they could turn to. And even if privately, I had moments of internal conflict and struggle with who I was, publicly I think I made a pretty big show of self-acceptance that, hopefully, showed the people around me that being gay wasn’t something to be ashamed of.
The other elements of my being were cut down in anticipation of the space this one facet of me took up. I took on a role as the steward of the queerness that my friends were not ready to claim yet. But now I can share the joy of queerness with all those people from high school, and when they claim it, I become lighter. There is so much space inside me for other things now. I have the opportunity to flesh myself out in new ways, but with that comes a new sense of loss for my fourteen-year-old self as I realize all the things she was missing. Her loneliness and pain are still real to me, but gay doesn’t have to be my personality anymore. So, instead, I am learning to accept and appreciate the richness of my present: my loving partner, my emotional stability, and my supportive community, including the people who have loved me in more ways and for more time than I could have known.
Olivia Robertson (she/her) is an Art History graduate student with delusions of literary grandeur. She has two published pieces: her short story "Vegetable" in the Summer 2020 edition of Open Ceilings, and her short story "Friday at the Air and Space Museum" in the third issue of the Quip Literary Review.