hafnia

On Coming Out and Choosing Joy

Can you remember your first crush? Maybe you can and maybe you can't. I can remember mine. I was in second grade and there was a girl in my class who had long red hair and a big smile. I thought she was beautiful, and I wanted to be her best friend. I didn't have words for what I felt, but I knew I liked her.

When adults teased me, asking if I liked any boys, I always said, no. I didn't. They assured me that I would when I was older, and I never mentioned the girls. I didn't realize that was what they meant. It was the mid-1990s in Utah. Twenty years from Obergefell v. Hodges. Nine years before “civil unions”. Eight years before Lawrence v. Texas. Two years before Ellen would come out on TV and every adult I knew would stop watching. Two years after Don't Ask Don't Tell was instated. I mention these things to give you context, because if you're straight, you might not remember. It wasn't a time when it was accepted that you might be queer. We were on the way, but we weren't there yet. No one talked about it, and not to children. It was assumed you were straight, and if you weren't — well, that was an adult topic.

When I turned twelve I realized I liked boys, and I assumed I must have been wrong about the girls. You couldn't like both. I was pretty sure you couldn't like girls at all. Not that it was forbidden, but that it wasn't an option. No one talked about it, or if they did, it was kept away from the ears of children. Alternative lifestyle was, I think, the phrase du jour, said in the same tone of voice as illicit pornography or double homocide. You didn't talk about it, because it wasn't acceptable.

So, I assumed I was straight — except I didn't even have a word for that. Normal. I assumed I was normal, because I didn't have the words to be anything else.

I didn't learn the word “lesbian” until I was fourteen. It's embarrassing to admit that now, how sheltered I was. It was in a YA book. One of the characters had a neighbor who was a lesbian, and they talked about her the way you'd talk about having a murderer next door: in hushed, fascinated tones with all the detail on who she brought home and what a deviant she was. It was implied that something had happened to her, something had scared her away from men. Lesbianism was bad, I gathered, or the result of something bad happening to you.

The book terrified me. I don't even remember the title — it was one that was popular when I was in eighth grade, but that doesn't narrow it down much. There was a lot about kissing boys in it, and how the protagonist was afraid that she was a lesbian because she wasn't ready to have sex with her boyfriend yet. The book ended with her realizing that it was fine to wait — and nothing else was said about lesbianism, except that it was dark and something to be dreaded.

My friends read it and loved it, and I pretended I liked it too, but it scared me — because it showed me who I was. Liking girls, the way I did, wasn't normal. I was ashamed and scared, and I hid it from everyone. What was wrong with me, if this was who I was? I still didn't have a word for what I was, but now I was afraid that I was a lesbian. I liked boys, but I liked girls, too — and it was liking girls that was a problem.

When I was fifteen, I met the first person I would know in real life who was openly gay. She was one of the most self-assured people I had ever met, and I instantly loved her. Not loved, not romantic love, but she was confident and funny and charming, and I thought she was wonderful. I wanted to be her friend, and I tried to get close to her. I succeeded, too, and then...

It was my English teacher who talked to me. My friend wasn't in her class. She wanted to know, did I know about her? did I know that people said she was queer? Could I confirm that she was? She asked me this in the same tone of voice you might use to ask someone if they know that the charismatic new friend they've just met is a serial killer. Don't you know...

I am still ashamed of myself for how I answered. I didn't confirm or deny it. I deferred. I said I didn't know. I wish I could say that I chose to stand up and say that it wasn't any of my teacher's business, that it had nothing to do with either of us and that it wasn't her place to talk to me about the suspected sexuality of a teenager who was not in her classes and was not at risk. But I didn't.

I took the safe path. The path that left me labeled as the clueless straight girl. Safe, unaware that her new friend was a deviant.

I didn't talk to her after that. We didn't have classes together, in high school. We drifted apart. I didn't talk to the English teacher outside of class. She knew better than to ask me to stay back, and I didn't volunteer anything.

I wanted to hide. I wanted to think that if I pretended I didn't know, I could walk a middle path where I never had to come out and no one would ever know that I was different, that I was queer, too. I felt sometimes as though I had a neon sign hanging over my head: hey, I'm not straight!, but as long as I didn't say anything, no one would know.

I wanted to think that. Of course, I was wrong.

I still remember the first time someone called me a homophobic slur. It was in reference to how I dressed. I wasn't feminine enough, so I had to be a lesbian. I got called that a lot, in high school, by people I cared about and people I didn't. I didn't fit the mold for what femininity was supposed to look like, and that, I was assured, was a bad thing indeed. That made me — well, not queer, but another word, one that I’m not personally comfortable using. I don’t think I need to tell you which. This was the days of “gay” as a pejorative, of friends calling things that were stupid, “gay”. It was a different world, one that was much less kind. Some people were brave enough to come out — to admit that they were different and to embrace it, to choose the path of joy instead of hiding — but here I was, paralyzed by fear.

So, I pretended to be straight. Maybe “pretended” is the wrong word here — I assumed that I was, and I tried desperately, frantically, to pretend that the other feelings I had did not exist.

My junior year of high school, I fell in love with a girl, and I realized, suddenly, bleakly, unhappily, that there was no possible way I was heterosexual. I cried when I realized what I was, that I couldn't deny it to myself anymore. I cried because I was still afraid, scared of what this meant for me and what adulthood would be like. I was sixteen and in love for the first time, and it wasn't with a boy — the acceptable narrative — but with a girl, instead. I was terrified. The world had changed a little from my childhood, and I'd learned that there was a label for people who “liked both”. I also learned that most people didn't think we existed. “Bisexual” was the term that was thrown out, with a note that it was used by women who were trying to get male attention, or by people who were too afraid to come completely out of the closet. There were a lot of jokes told, about how you had to “pick a side”, but I couldn't. I liked girls. I liked boys. I could not tell you what drew me to the people I crushed on, just that I liked them for who and not what they were.

I survived high school by buckling down and focusing not on dating, or meeting people, but making friends online. Other queer friends (and there were dozens of us). I met and talked to people who told me that I wasn't alone, that there was a name for what I was and there was nothing to be ashamed of. I tried to believe them. For the most part, I didn't. I focused on studies and tried to get good ACT scores, to participate in all the right extracurricular activities, so I could move out of my homophobic home state and go somewhere new, somewhere I could be out and accepted.

I went to school out of state, and within a month of moving into my dorm, I came out to my suitemates and friends. I didn't know what to call myself. Bi? Gay? I settled on “queer” because it was a nice umbrella term that encompassed what I needed it to and was fuzzy enough around the edges to fit all of me, with nothing left out. I wasn't alone, in coming out. There was another girl in the suite who identified as queer. She had a girlfriend, and everyone accepted them. I thought they'd accept me, too. I talked to my roommate and was met with a serious rebuttal about how if I had a choice to be with a man, I had to be, because that was what God wanted. I was queer, not lesbian, ergo I had to pick a side. No fence-sitters. The other queer girl told me the same: that someday, she'd break up with her girlfriend, whom she loved, and find a man to marry. “You can't marry a woman. I need to find a husband.”

I'd learn later that she'd been raised in an evangelical family who had chosen to treat her coming out and dating a woman as a “phase” she was going through because she had attended high school at an all-girl Christian academy. Once she arrived at college, they were sure, she'd realize how much she liked men and find someone to marry. In the meantime, she and the others I talked to leaned on me hard: if I liked men and had never dated a woman, why did I think I was queer enough to come out? Why was I purposely alienating myself? Was I trying to seem weird? It was bad enough that I wasn't white, that I didn't go to church with them on Sundays, did I have to bring the whole sexuality aspect into it?

I thought about that a lot. I thought about it even after I left that school to come home and transfer to the University of Utah, the bullying from my suitemates too much to take. I wanted to be open, to come out — but was I queer enough?

In Utah, I came out to my high school friends. A good number of them were queer. None of them had a problem with it, and I'm still grateful to them for that, to this day. They reassured me that any amount of queer was “enough”, that I could claim and embrace my identity, and come out on my own terms, on my own timeline — so I did.

I came out to my friends. I didn't come out at work. I didn't come out to my family, or at school. I was afraid. It was 2008. Katy Perry's “I Kissed a Girl” was everywhere. The dialog about how bisexual women were reinforcing and upholding the idea of women's sexuality as being performative, something done for men, was inescapable. I was terrified and single, trying to be true to myself, to date women and be open about who and what I wanted, and instead found myself smack in the middle of the debate about whether or not my identity was valid. Was I queer enough? I tried to remember that I was.

I didn't know what I wanted. I went on dates with women and men. All of the men were awful. Most of the women were, too, truth be told. The one person I liked the most was a beautiful archeology student at the U. We went on a handful of dates and she stopped seeing me after she found out I wasn't out to my family or, indeed, most of my friends. She'd dated people who were in the closet, she said, and after coming out herself, she never wanted to go through that again. I told her I understood and wished her well, then went home and sobbed.

So, I didn't date women. I told myself it was OK. That, social pressure being what it was, dating guys was easier. I didn't want to explain to anyone else that I wasn't out to most of my world.

I dated strictly men. I moved to Oregon, I started grad school, I decided that I was going to be out all the time. If people asked, I'd tell them I was queer. But how often does someone ask how you identify, if you're in a “straight” relationship? I can think of a handful of times I have been asked, since moving here — all of them in the context of DEI for work or school. What do you identify as?, the little box you need to tick so someone from NSF or DOE or some other federal agency knows how to sort you. Not personal, confidential, shared with no one, demographic information that's collected and aggregated.

Sometimes I volunteered it, when I was talking to someone and they mentioned that they had a wife instead of a husband, or that they (a guy) were going on a date with another guy. Mostly, it didn't come up, and no one knew.

In 2017, I broke up with my long-term male partner. I was single again, and I felt ready to date. I put up an online dating profile and I thought, “OK, this is it.” I checked the box that I was interested in everyone: man, woman, nonbinary, agender. That I didn't have to give myself a label, didn't have to pick straight or gay, was a revelation. I could be as broad or as granular as I wanted. I talked to men and women alike, and I made plans to go on dates...

You know how this part of the story goes, I think. I made plans to go on a date with a really nice woman from the next town over, and then Max and I went to California on a road trip, and on the way back, I realized I wanted to be with him. Two days later, I told him, and we started dating. I deleted my profile, and that was it. No more broadcasting to the world, “Hey, I'm here and I'm queer” — except.

Something changed. Not thanks to Max, though he's great. I went to therapy and it somehow, improbably, came up. I don't remember why.

What I do remember is the therapist asking me why I felt like it was something I had to hide. I didn't have an answer.

I graduated from therapy and I kept thinking about it. Why did I feel a need to hide a fundamental piece of myself? My therapist never pressed me on why I felt the need to hide (he grew up queer in Utah too! small world!), but he encouraged me to consider why it was that I was still hiding.

I didn't have a good answer, so I stopped.

If it came up, I told people. Sometimes I told them even when it didn't. I was more vocal about it, and I found out that I was far from alone.

I married Max last year. I kept my own last name, and very little else changed. We got married for practical reasons — health insurance, medical proxy, taxes — and when we did, it occurred to me how many more assumptions people make about you when you are a woman married to a man.

Getting married didn't make me straight. I didn't “pick a side” or magically become uninterested in women. I'm still queer. I still tell people. I'm telling you, now, if you didn't already know. I'm queer, I'm not straight, I am any one of a number of labels. I picked Max because I love him, and I am happy to be with him, but he didn't “fix” me. I'm not broken. I am not suddenly magically completely heterosexual. I'm still queer.

I am still here, I am still queer. I am tired of hiding a fundamental piece of myself, of feeling like I need to be sad and scared when I consider who in my life knows or does not know. I am choosing to be brave, I am choosing joy, and I'm telling you: hi. I'm queer.

The world is radically different now than how it was when I was growing up, but visibility still matters. I want to think that someday it won't be a question of visibility, that we won't make assumptions, but right now we still do. I'm here to challenge yours.

So hi. I'm Jenn. I'm a PhD chemist and I live in Oregon with my husband and our two cats. I like cooking and playing tabletop role-playing games, and I'm queer. I'm married to a guy I adore, and I'm still queer. I'm in a straight relationship, and, you guessed it — still queer. It's not performance, it's not seeking attention, it's not indecisiveness writ large.

I know who I am and I'm comfortable with it.

I'm 33, and I am secure and happy enough in my identity to tell you: I'm queer and I'm choosing joy.