Pride

Photo by Nk Ni on Unsplash

“I don’t think I’ve ever felt this lost. My dreams last night were horrible. I was running from a crowd of people, all of them seconds away from catching me. I couldn’t turn around to see their faces. All I knew was that I had to keep running, faster, faster, faster…until I stumbled and felt long, thick fingers dig into my shoulder. I turned slowly, fear pulsing through my entire body, and when I finally saw them, they were laughing at me…faces I recognized and faces I didn’t, all of them dissolving into an angry, laughing darkness, pinning me to the ground. When I woke up, it took me twenty minutes to stop shaking.”

Robin Talley, Music From Another World

This is exactly what it feels like to grow up queer in a homophobic household. It doesn’t matter that Robin Talley’s novel, Music From Another World,¹ was set in 1970s California and I came of age some forty years later in Ohio, her book felt like drinking an antidote to poison, poison I had been ingesting for nearly thirty years. Published in 2020, the novel is a coming-of-age romance between two queer young women—one who knows she is lesbian and one who takes a long time to realize that she’s bisexual—set against the turbulent backdrop of the election of gay politician and activist, Harvey Milk, to the local government in San Francisco, and the anti-gay movement spearheaded by celebrity Anita Bryant of Florida and fielded by conservative Christian congregations across the nation. Reading it, I was constantly struck by how much—and how little—has changed.

The “Acknowledgements” at the back of the book begins with a translated quote from Victor Hugo, “All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.” Harvey Milk wrote that quote out by hand and hung it in his office. He was assassinated a few weeks after this book ends, by a man he served with on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Fifteen years later, April 25, 1993, a million people gathered to march on Washington in support of lesbian, gay, and bisexual rights. It was a historic day. One of the highlights of the event was a speech given by tennis star Martina Navratilova, in which she declared that equal rights could be achieved so much sooner if everyone, everywhere, came out. She emphatically stated:

We need to become visible to as many people as possible so that we can finally shatter all those incredible myths that help keep us in the closet. Let’s come out and let all the people see what, for the most part, straight and square and normal and sometimes boring lives we lead. Let’s come out and dispel the rumors and lies that are being spread about us. Let’s come out and set everybody straight, so to speak.²

I live a straight, square, normal, and sometimes boring life. I have chosen to remain in the closet with most people I know or encounter because I can, and because it’s so much easier that way. I read the transcript of Ms. Navratilova’s speech and I wondered how many people who heard her that day took her advice, and how many suffered for it? I wondered if it was worth it. I wonder now how my life might have been different if I had been able to access my queerness earlier in life, if I had been able to fight that battle with my family and win some measure of acceptance for myself.

Watching Sharon (Talley’s bisexual character)’s story unfold was especially healing and validating for me. Growing up bisexual is weird and confusing, possibly even more so than growing up lesbian would have been. I was into some of the boys I knew, but I wasn’t supposed to show it or act on it in any way. I was also into some of the girls I knew, but couldn’t allow myself to know that because it was too dangerous, so I had no context for recognizing sexuality within myself at all. I knew that I sometimes formed very strong attachments to my girl friends, and was more curious about other girls’ bodies than I was about any of the boys, but I put that down to obeying the dictates of purity culture while also being a teenager. I was dimly aware of what “gay” meant, but I had never heard the term “bisexual.” This experience, I now know, is not unique. In an essay titled, “The World Outside,” writer and editor Julia Sullivan describes her discovery of this important word:

I came across the word bisexual in a biography of Marlene Dietrich, one of my favorite Hollywood stars. The author obviously didn’t think much of Marlene’s lifestyle, but I was riveted to the page. There was a word for it; it wasn’t just me. Marlene loved men sometimes and women sometimes, and she was one of a number of people who did that, and that was one of the things you could do…

It was as though I had found something I didn’t know I had lost.³