When I was in high school, Mom picked me up from school two hours early for being gay.
“What are you?” she asked me. “Some kind of queer?”
I flinched. We were driving home in the backwoods of West Virginia, where no one used the word “queer” unless some poor sonofabitch was about to be smeared in a game of backyard football.
“No,” I said, pinching the door handle for support as Mom took each curve like a race-car driver. “Why? Did someone say something?”
Our small town had fewer than 5,000 warm bodies, many of them belonging to nosy housewives who had phones growing out of their ears and kids with eyeballs who went to my school. That it had taken this long for Mom to find out could be considered one of the Lord’s own modern miracles.
She pressed harder on the gas. “They called and said you’ve been walking the halls with your hands in another girl’s back pockets. Dear Jesus, tell me you ain’t one of them queers.”
“I’m not. They’re lying.”
I was, and they weren’t.
“Why have you never had a boyfriend, then?”
I shrugged and kept my eyes on the door. Mom pressed on, unaware that I was considering opening it and rolling across the asphalt.
“What about that little blond boy I seen you with? You like him?”
Though I’d never told her, I did have a crush on the blond boy, but like most of the boys at my high school, he was more likely to ask me how it was hanging than to go out on a date. By ninth grade, my waist had spread to a size 18, and my breasts were big, like your grandma’s, requiring underwire as thick as guardrails. I covered myself with extra-large band T-shirts that hung to my knees.
The blond boy treated me like one of the guys and dated my skinnier best friend.
Mom thought a woman needed a man to fix the sink and keep her from being robbed, raped and murdered when she went out after dark.
“Nope, I don’t like any of them.” I lied, because to admit to Mom that boys my own age thought I was revolting seemed as humiliating as her finding out I was a queer.
Mom thought a woman needed a man to fix the sink and keep her from being robbed, raped and murdered when she went out after dark. I thought that if I told her I was too fat during my prime man-catching years and might have to go it alone, I’d drown in her pity.
She looked at me for the first time since I’d gotten in the car and asked, “But you ain’t gay?”
I shook my head as if trying to jar loose the image of Jodi, the girl in whose back pockets my hands had been. During our last sleepover, Jodi had dropped her bra on the floor — it was big like my bra, not tiny and covered in flowers like my small friends’. When she’d turned to face me bare-chested, I’d wanted to trace her areolas, dark and tiny like dimes, or press mine, translucent and wide as salami, against hers.
In the car, I said, “I’m not gay. Do you believe me?” I was begging.
Mom gripped the steering wheel so hard her knuckles turned pale. “You’d just better not be.”
Mom talked about Jesus like he was a real person coming to dinner. Her upbringing by Wesleyan Methodist fundamentalists taught her that it’s a sin if women cut their hair, get divorced or share long tongue kisses with each other. I knew I’d never change her mind and decided not to bother when I’d made such a better liar than I did a queer.
I felt sorry for my gay cousin but couldn’t relate — he only liked men, while I considered myself lucky to be one of them bisexual queers.
A few years after our car ride home, Mom asked me over the phone, “What in the world possesses a man to want to kiss another man?” She was referring to my cousin, who’d recently outed himself on Facebook.
“Hard to tell,” I said, like I didn’t have an insider’s perspective. By this time, I was in college and had been kissing girls for years.
I felt sorry for my gay cousin but couldn’t relate — he only liked men, while I considered myself lucky to be one of them bisexual queers.
I liked boy parts just as well and, as I’d gotten older, had been able to find whole piles of them belonging to men who didn’t care what size I was. All I had to do was bring a boyfriend to Sunday dinner each week and ask him not to mention the occasional threesome we’d had with other women—and presto-change-o, like hetero magic, I appeared as straight as my married-with-two-kids sister.
The only problem was I wanted more than threesomes. I craved full relationships with these women, but I didn’t admit that to anyone, least of all myself. Instead, I buried the truth deep inside like the shittiest Easter egg. I joked with close friends (and total strangers when I’d had enough to drink) that I was waiting for Mom to die before having a real relationship with a woman. The very morning she was gone, I promised them, I’d leave my dolt of a husband a note on the refrigerator and put up an ad for a lesbian to be my date to her funeral.
“Mom doesn’t need to know everything about me. Cheers to keeping the peace!”
We’d clink glasses; they’d congratulate me for being so mature; and I’d ignore the fact that every time I saw two women holding hands at the mall or on the cover of a movie poster, I’d burst into tears and curse Mom under my breath.
When I was 23, my college boyfriend took a job in San Francisco and asked me to come with him. The tech mecca was a natural fit for my tech degree, so I packed two suitcases and went. For the first time, I felt like I could be as big as I wanted, as loud as I wanted and as gay as I wanted, without fear of a neighbor calling up Mom to tell her they saw me marching down Folsom Street wearing nothing but nipple pasties.
In California, a button on my phone could summon a nice lady with a Prius and a bag full of marijuana to my door faster than any town in West Virginia had ever gotten me a pizza.
Within a year, Aaron and I fell into a polyamorous community where we were accepted as a couple who date women together. Mom called every other day to make sure Aaron was still around, protecting me from what she imagined as muggings and gunfire during my daily commute, but all she could do was imagine — the rest of my life was a complete mystery to her. I had total freedom, and she had total peace of mind. I should have been gloriously happy. Instead, I still had that same empty feeling as I’d had in college, a knot that made me cry in the bathroom every time one of our girlfriends left our bed to go back to her own house.
But there was one major upgrade.
In California, a button on my phone could summon a nice lady with a Prius and a bag full of marijuana to my door faster than any town in West Virginia had ever gotten me a pizza.
One evening last spring, I’d been puffing on a new strain called Raspberry Cookies when I noticed the date on my phone — May 21st, Mom’s 70th birthday.
I called her. I’m sure what I meant to say was “Happy birthday.” Instead, a few minutes into our conversation, I heard myself ask, “Isn’t it weird how so many homosexuals own funeral homes?”
Mom paused to think. “Mhm, that is strange. I know a queer fellow who’s got a funeral home a few towns over. I’d hate to die a man over there — he might molest you, don’t you reckon?”
She laughed, and I laughed, too, because I was too high to process what she’d just said. When I did, fear set in. Mom thought gay people were the same as child molesters? She thought child molesters were abominations who should be strung up by the genitals. She thought that about me, her daughter.
My high mind felt as though I was having 10 life-changing revelations in place of where I usually had just one measly thought, but each was moving too fast for me to do more than watch it fly by and fear the next.
Maybe that’s why when I finally grabbed hold of one, I spat it out before it could get away.
“What would you have done if I’d ended up with a woman?” I asked Mom.
“Don’t even talk like that. I’d be devastated!”
Mom’s response was reflexive, immediate and gut-wrenching to me. “But why?” I asked, surprised by how much my voice sounded like a little girl’s whine. “Why wouldn’t it be OK? If I was happy?”
The line was so quiet that I could nearly hear her forehead wrinkling.
“Well, because it’s against the laws of nature, and the Bible says it’s wrong. And it’s just sickening.”
My stomach turned to concrete. Maybe the pot had raised my hopes (or just lowered my IQ), but I’d expected to hear something from her I hadn’t already heard. I felt a flash of anger and humiliation that I’d been suppressing with pretense and jokes for almost a decade.
“You’d just stop talking to me if I liked girls? Disown me?” I said it as a challenge, daring her to stop loving me even as my voice shook with fear that she might. “Because I do like girls, too, and I always have.”
I heard her get up from her recliner chair, then the sound of the screen door slamming shut as she shooed her cat outside. The silence afterward was so unbearable that I might’ve opened my mouth to take it back when Mom said, “I’m gettin’ a beep.”
She was gone on call waiting for what felt like four long minutes.
“You there?” she said finally.
I was, but I’d lost my nerve and probably my high. I did what I do best and lied, saying I needed to go have dinner.
“Listen,” she said. “Don’t go yet—I gotta tell you something. I wouldn’t stop talking to you, not for all the love or money, you hear? I love you no matter what, forever and ever.”
I’d been telling myself a story in which Mom was the warden and I was her jailbird until she died. Now I knew I’d been wrong — after a certain point, I’d been my own jailer, with Mom as nothing more than a figurehead.
Mom’s offer of unconditional love, the thing I’d have thought I wanted most, hung there in the silence between us waiting for me to reach out and grab it.
Where were the trumpets and the fucking confetti?
Instead of texting all my friends and celebrating with a self-indulgent Twitter post — “Just came out to Mom on her 70th birthday, woohoo!” — I hung up the phone and turned on Netflix, feeling disappointed and ungrateful like that spoiled brat in the movies on Christmas who gets everything he wants and still sits in front of the tree with his arms crossed.
Weeks of moping around the house helped me figure out what had inflamed the familiar knot in my belly. I was finally grieving something I’d never before been able to admit I’d lost: time spent exclusively with other women. I’d been telling myself a story in which Mom was the warden and I was her jailbird until she died. Now I knew I’d been wrong — after a certain point, I’d been my own jailer, with Mom as nothing more than a figurehead.
I wasn’t protecting Mom or protecting the peace but protecting myself. I was making the world an easier place for me to live in by passing for straight, by not learning how to date a whole other gender, by having threesomes that were one-night stands instead of whole relationships with other women. I’d been lying again—this time to myself—and coming clean was going to be a slow process.
Mom still doesn’t condone my queerness. When I tried to bring up a specific girlfriend a few months after our phone call, she politely stopped me and said, “You don’t have to share that with me. We can talk about other stuff.”
She’s still holding the gay part of me, the revolting part of me, away from her at arm’s length, with her nose pinched shut. It still stings as much as it did that day in the car. But this time, I’m not going to turn her revulsion inward.
She can keep it — I’m free.
