Immortal Smiles

Imagine growing up gay before the Internet, and the only available info is an old encyclopedia in the library. So you look up “homosexuality” in the H volume, and it says you have a mental illness.

Imagine that the only media representation is news coverage that depicts gay men as AIDS victims getting punished for promiscuity, bisexuals as perverted deviants, and lesbians… well, not at all.

I didn’t know that it was even possible to love other girls. Sure I knew I had intense feelings for certain friends, but I somehow knew I couldn’t dare act on those feelings. So some part of me already knew.

Yet I didn’t recognize those feelings as gay, because the only thing I heard about homosexuality was that it was an evil abomination. And anyone gay would go to hell. My feelings felt normal, heartachingly tender, not evil. I thought that’s just what certain friends felt for each other.

I dated boys, because that’s what you did. I didn’t realize that my dampened, shallow feelings for them weren’t what my other friends felt.

When boys tried to take it beyond kissing, I always backed off. Luckily they were decent humans and didn’t push me further than I wanted to go.

But it didn’t occur to me that other girls desired that stuff. I thought sex was something they just did to keep a boyfriend. I thought I wasn’t into it because I was being a good Baptist. But really I just wasn’t into it.

The first time I let things go further was also the first time I thought consciously that I might be gay. My interest wasn’t in the guys themselves but in appearing normal to the world. My heart wasn’t in it. I had to be intoxicated to fool around with them.

Yet, somehow I managed to fight my way out of the strictures of compulsory heterosexuality and a fundamentalist upbringing and constant negative portrayals in the media to realize that I’m gay. I came out in fits and starts, over about four years.

I was 24 when I kissed another woman for the first time.

I’ll never know where the courage finally came from. But the second it took for my lips to touch hers was a revelation. In that instant I finally understood why people write romance novels, swoon over love songs, daydream about meeting someone special, fall headfirst into this feeling of connecting to another person.

That was what I had missed my entire life. Because everything in my young life was stacked against me ever finding my way to make that discovery. But I did.

Don’t ever, ever think any act of les-bi-pan love isn’t a revolution. It is. It’s an act of resistance against the forces that would collude to keep you alone and afraid.