Coming Out Story by Kathryn

This is the first installment of my coming out queer, white, feminist, femme, lesbian, bisexual-it is a performative piece I am working on.

"But you still like girlclothes?" My mother asks me

I stare out the window of her four-wheel-drive pick-up truck. Tears are streaking down my face. We pass cornfields and farmland on the way to our house and I stare at them wondering what it would be like to be a stalk of corn just blowing in the breeze. I am scrunched up pressed against the passenger-side window as absolutely far away from my mother as is possible in a two passenger truck.

I have just come out to her. "Mom, I'm dating a woman," I manage to say the words. "Her name is Sarah, and we have been having a relationship. I didn't expect it, it just kind of happened." I have the taste of metal in my mouth as I speak, it is dry and I hope that I can just make it through the rest of the conversation.

"But what about Daniel," she asks genuinely confused.

I met Daniel my second week of college and we had been together for about two years. He was my first love and my feelings for him were genuine, just not ideal. My tone is getting somewhat defensive as the tears turn to words of anger. "We have been broken up for awhile now and he knows about Sarah. He isn't happy about the situation but he loves and respects me. You know he wants to get married and have babies, those are things I have always honestly said I did not want."

"I didn't know you were serious," she responds quietly. I see her hopes and dreams for my heteropatriarchal future disappearing before both of our eyes.

The truth of the situation is that while I loved him I didn't want the life of normalcy often situated in heterosexual relationships. He was an amazing man, a feminist, was much tidier than me, and with a knack for doing whatever he could in order to improve my life. However, in the end Daniel was still training to be a high school history teacher so that he could be a football coach and I was worried that one day he would come to me and ask me to make brownies for his team of hungry, hormonal teenage boys. And that thought frightened me to all hell. That was in fact my hell, a life of normativity, marriage, children, houses, and picket fences and that was what I saw as my future if I didn't get out. I don't want to trivialize my relationship with him, or diminish the fact that I truly loved him, I just knew that in order to be truly happy I couldn't be with him.

"Have you always been this way?" She continues the rapid-fire question and answer session.

I feel the tension rising in my voice and choking my throat. Oh goodness-how honest should I be I think to myself? "Well Sarah is not the first woman I have been involved with, although it is the most serious." It was true I had had minor flirtations, a college girl when I went to church camp, a friend in high school, and the ephemeral crushes on girls I saw in coffee shops or restaurants. I had even kissed a woman prior to Sarah, but never anything more, never a more intimate connection emotionally and physically.

I begin to sweat. The metallic taste in my mouth increases. Everyone had assured me that my mother, my feminist of a mother would be fine with my being gay. My best friends since high school had convinced me that my mother would think that this whole thing was no big deal. "She's so supportive of you I really don't think this is going to change any of that." I had in fact convinced myself that she would not think it was a big deal. This was not going the way I had expected.

"So are you a lesbian?" My mother does this thing where she grabs her mouth with her hand and sort of pulls at the sides and the corners while it is covered. She has shared with me on occasion that she does this to keep some words from coming out of her mouth-she in effect silences herself at times. I see she is doing it right now and I become worried-this is not turning out well.

Oh god! Panic ensues, the tension creeps up higher and higher. The one question I didn't want to get into. I mean it's so complicated right? It's not easy to just say yes or no in this case because I believe my sexual identity to be so much more complex than this. But I want to explain this to her in a way that isn't scary, that won't find her completely closed off to my radical thinking. I'm pretty sure with my progressive feminist politics and values she already thinks I am a little bit crazy. I didn't necessarily want her thinking that I had chosen this sexual orientation (although in many senses I believe that I did), I didn't want her to think I could just switch it back from gay to straight, or turn it off altogether. I also didn't think introducing the term "queer" right at that moment was exactly appropriate. Maybe I should have, maybe I should have given her the whole spiel on queerness and performance, in retrospect I probably should have, but I didn't.

"Well no, I am bi-sexual." I shrink sown further into the fuzzy soft interior of the truck. Maybe eventually I will just be sucked into it. Bisexual. BI-sexual, Bye-sexual, Buy-Sexual. ACK! I hate that word, BI-SEXUAL-the fact that it implies that only two sexes exist and that I am equally attracted to both, and that I am just overtly sexual and can't make up my mind-I hate it. Unfortunately I don't know exactly how to explain it any other way. I decide that of terms to use this one was however, the most useful and at least describes my relationships thus far in my life, one significant with a man one significant with a woman.

My mother's eyes grow wide with even more confusion. I can tell she is trying. Trying to listen. I don't think that she hates me, yet anyway...

I try to offer a disclaimer, "I mean I just love people mom, despite their sex." Again, not exactly my feelings but in the context I want to try and help her understand without completely dislocating her from my life. I don't like that this argument seems to imply an attitude of indecision, flittering back and forth between the known and the unknown of sexuality. This concept which is usually called fluidity makes my anxiety rise because it seems to lack introspection and reflexivity and seems to refer to an overt insatiable appetite for sexuality (which is cool too-it just isn't my feeling.)

I mean I know that on a daily basis I want my intimate relationships to be negotiated with people who are QUEER and if those people happen to have vaginas I am going to be even more thrilled-this is not something I am "fluid" about. Who that actual person or people happen to be-that's where I am more open and flexible. I am not sure she is ready to know and understand this yet. I don't know that in this moment I truly understand and know this about myself yet. What do I know I am a crazy fool in love, my first girl-love. I am excited, I am nervous, and honestly I am scared-shitless.

"Is it my fault?" my mother asks timidly. "I known you don't really have any good male role models. I mean my relationships with men haven't exactly been the best. Or is it because you were…you know…"

Oh no! My other place of worry, she blames herself and she blames my lacking relationships with men. She thinks I am this way because of men because men have personally hurt me and violated my body. She thinks I am this way because I was molested as a child and raped as a teenager. She thinks I am this way because of her relationships with men and the fact that she has been personally hurt and violated by them.

I don't know if this is true or not-if this is why I might be queer-I am not ready to rule it out as taboo and politically incorrect as it sounds-I just honestly don't know why I am the way I am. I don't like to think things are quite this simple, that my sexuality is a direct effect of a man or even more generally of masculinity in my culture-I am also not ready to completely dismiss that my sexuality might have a link to the fact that as a social creature I saw my mother's and other women's unhappiness in their boring heteronormative lives, internalized this and decided that I would rather be with women in order to avoid this potential sense of unhappiness I interpreted as being with men. I also cannot say that a piece of me, as anti-essentialist as I am, that somewhere my brain doesn't blame masculinity for having hurt my body and made me feel at times safer around women-I know this is silly, but I believe those men that hurt me were social creatures too. I don't know if I should say these things to my mother-the fact that even I question where my sexuality came from . I don't want to blame anyone especially her, she has enough guilt in her life.

"No" I reply, "It's not your fault and it is not because I was raped either." I am disappointed in myself for not trusting her enough at this moment with my feelings and my story for not giving her everything but censoring what comes out of my mouth so as not to offend her .

I realize it is hard to come out as a queer academic (and I use the term academic loosely as a 21 year old undergraduate.) It is not as easy as simply saying, "Mom, I am a lesbian, or mom I'm gay." In my realm of existence it is so much more complex than that. And maybe it is this hard for everyone because sexuality is such a contradiction for many different reasons, I just know that my knowledge of big words like queer, negotiation, performativity, and contingent all play a significant factor in my realm of understanding my sexuality. I am glad it is complicated and complex-I also know this makes it no easier to explain it to anyone outside of academic discourse.

But how do you approach a "coming-out" that is not really a "coming-out" story in the conventional sense of the phrase.

How do you start a conversation and say mom, "I'm not a lesbian but the romantic relationships I will mostly be persuing from here on out will most likely resemble what we typically think of as a lesbian relationship? The difference will be that I do not wish to be considered normal or normative-even with a female as my object of desire. I do not want to partner up and live in a house with a picket fence in the suburbs. I will not fight for my right to get married because I do not want to marry anyone, EVER. I do not wish to reinforce an institution of the dominant heterosexual, capitalist patriarchy (hooks). I do not want a lesbian wedding or a commitment ceremony. Instead I will do what makes me happy, complete with negotiating queer sexuality on a daily basis possibly through butch and femme encounters, femme drag performativity, sadist and masochist sexual practices, and more generally deciding the kind of person I am going to be with based off their embodied sense of politics." I will never ever make the brownies for a female partner anymore than I would a male. It's not exactly easy to say these things to one's mother.

"But you still like girlclothes right?" My mother asks me sliding the words girl and clothes together into one word.

"Of course" I assure her, "Just because I'm bi-sexual doesn't mean I am a different person," I find myself choking out the words and laughing a little to myself. I picture the most stereotypical looking lesbian imaginable complete with black dyke boots, flannel shirt, and mullet haircut, I then picture this identity on me. I chuckle a little harder.

In this moment I realize how inextricably linked my sexuality and gender presentation have become. In this moment my mother has helped to normalize my sexuality by ensuring that I will in fact continue to be feminine in my appearance. I decide that to be accepted by my family in this moment I probably shouldn't play with my gender appearance too much, despite the fact that I might secretly desire to do so. I will just gave to find other ways to be queer. The message becomes loud and clear-it's ok to be gay (not desirable perhaps) but what is really necessary is that I continue to make sure I look feminine because once that goes everyone is going to talk.

"I just feel like I don't know you anymore. There is a part of you I will just never understand now." My mother says sadly as though I have just offended a best friend-someone who knows you as well or better than you know yourself. It is as though I have offended my mother mostly by not confiding in her sooner, she is hurt that I have held back and not invited her into this part of my life.

I think to myself-you don't know me anymore-because I haven't let her know me, I haven't been honest and I haven't given her my entire story. How could she know me when I am holding back, when I am the one unwilling to be vulnerable, unwilling to share my true experience with coming out, coming out in my own queer white academic feminist femme lesbian bisexual way?

I say nothing but continue to press my body against the door and window of the passenger side of my mother's truck. The arm rest is digging into my side and I continue to cry-quietly this time, almost in complete silence. I stare aimlessly out the window staring at the corn between my tears running down my face. The snow begins to fall and we ride the rest of the way home in silence.


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Kathryn
http://thelesbianphallacy.blogspot.com/
http://perform-i-tivity.blogspot.com/