music, books, love and kindness

 

 

You can feel pretty far from normal when very few of your friends, if any, are gay and your family is extremely homophobic...

snippets from a book on the history of lesbian pulp fiction...Katherine V. Forrest

  

There are some days where the only way I get through them is by pure daydreaming...get it all out of my system and move on.

I have a fight (disagreement, really, since it does more good to just listen than to argue back) with my parents, for instance, and I imagine the way I wanted my life to turn out, not the way it is.

It's so funny, in a way, because when I was younger, I distinctly remember being in the Walden Books at Security Square Mall and seeing a book about Fire Island with two men on the front. I remember flipping the book over and the word "gay" jumping out at me. When we got home that night I asked my mom about the word.

She didn't flinch or make a face or anything like that. She went on to tell me that gay people were just people who were "lost and confused," but that we should never hate or judge them. I remember that like it was just yesterday, even though it was the early 80s.

Now, now, the word "gay" (or "lesbian") brings out nothing but fire and brimstone in my mother's voice. I'm not saying what she told me when I was younger was right, but it was certainly kinder than she feels now and no matter how hard I've tried to explain, she just won't (or can't) believe that I am the very thing she once said shouldn't be judged or hated.

I've mentioned (ad nauseam, I know, and I keep hoping to get past that) that this is a huge issue between my parents and me, one that I know will never be resolved and I've only been able to accept at all because I've never met anyone who could feel the same.

But on days when it gets really hard, I go to my happy place, which is sometimes Hawaii (goodbye, cold weather!), but is more often somewhere big and more likely to swallow me up whole...like New York City. I'm sure The Big Apple has its share of homophobia, but I feel like being in love and together with another woman wouldn't be the heartache it would in my real life.