Artist: Joan Jett and the Blackhearts

Title: Back It Up

Album: Up Your Alley

Played on: Tue Mar 10 2026 07:31:11 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time)

For a period of time when I was in my teens I was consumed with the desire to read coming out stories. I first turned to the LGBTQ forum on the website students.com which was mostly filled with teens talking about coming out or wanting to come out (it was around the time that Gay Straight Alliances were becoming a big thing in US schools). At some point I exhausted that resource and turned to fanfiction to get my fix - although there were a lot of very interesting well written stories I found that in many of the stories the people who the characters came out to fell into two main camps - either they were horrible homophobes that kicked you out of your home, or they were totally accepting (and often knew all along - or thought they did).

In my experience a real coming out is much more messy than that - people that love you have a hard time understanding, say something insensitive, unwittingly perpetuate stereotypes, have complicated feelings about how they relate to you, initially respond badly but come around to understanding, etc. And sometimes you have difficulty keeping it secret, opening up, react negatively to people you love because of the shame or fear or whatever.

This book shows the complexities of coming out in a funny, weird, self reflective, vulnerable way and I really recommend it and have enjoyed it immensely.

There are so many wonderfully written snippets from this book

“My sister says Southerners are like other people only more so, and that is the way I made my debut—hard and fast, with no aforethought. Unpremeditated lesbianism. If it was a fate worse than death, I alternated between horror and delight, and smoothed the edges with drugs and booze.” - My Debut - Blanche McCrary Boyd

“However, Maggie was a very sneaky & smart girl. She calmly arrived the following day in her VW bug (custom-painted purple, as are her stars) & said she had come back to collect her belongings, which no one had thought to pack up. Her mother, a master materialist (probably hoping for the veil), was very understanding. The hospital wanted to be accommodating in hope of future funds. So Maggie surprised me by returning to busily pack up not very much. We weren’t allowed to talk, & the nurses were watching us sharply until Ursula, understanding our need, threw her tennis shoe at the TV, screaming. Maggie palmed me a note to meet her by the lilac hedge behind the building, where she had conveniently parked. I left as though going to my new job at the dairy (cow shit apparently being a step up from human shit). The other women realized Ursula’s intentions & took off their keds, too. My last sight of that day room (where I had been declared incurably schizophrenic) was of flying sneakers, screaming technicians, breaking glass, & laughing patients—a really lovely melee. Because, of course, Maggie had returned to rescue me. We pulled out the backseat of her bug & I lay down across the battery. She laid a Mexican blanket over me, while I tried to project looking like a backseat. She piled her boxes, mostly empty, on top of me. The guards at the main gate were distracted by another call from the ward where the women who weren’t strapped down could not be contained. Maggie smiled, they gave her back her driver’s license, & off we went. On the other side of town, Maggie freed me from my seat charade & I tasted the wind in my hair for the first time in more than a year. She drove me to Big Sur, where I’d never been” - Cherry Picker - Chrystos

“Feminism, my foot!” exclaimed my mother as she cremated the meatloaf. “This feminism thing is just a cover for being a lesbian.” Perhaps that is not an exact quote; you see, my parents’ first language was silence and I’ve had to translate here.” What Comes First - Holly Hughes

“Needless to say that at twenty-one I could not fully appreciate the utter majesty of a young, handsome twenty-year-old lesbian trumpet player staring into me while spreading mustard for a triple salami on wheat with provolone" Pot Luck - Cynthia Bond

“It all started my sophomore year in a Philosophy class on ethics and AIDS. It was among the first of its kind, but I remember the room more than the syllabus—forty wooden seats bathed in sunlight and arched around a lectern. One day, I came to class late and sat on what was clearly the gay side of the room. When I realized what I had done, I got this zinging in my ears, a busy churning that felt like change. I stayed as still as I could. To calm myself, I stared at a senior in front of me with wire-rimmed glasses and a brown bob. Everything M.B. said was smart.” Sequins In The Mud - Karin Cook

“So from the time they were five and six, and I’d moved out, and the divorce papers were signed, they’d lived with their father in Kentucky, a fourteen-hour trip by car. I got to see them by driving there or by taking them to my mother’s house, another ten-hour drive. With my friends, I joked that I had gotten “father’s visiting rights,” but that wasn’t true. The terms were much harsher on me, the lesbian mother, than on any errant father. No visits with them out-of-state unless in the presence of my mother or a maternal aunt. No having them in my home if I lived with any other adult. Alternate major holidays (Thanksgiving one year, Easter the next, but never Christmas Day), and some time in the summers. No official child support, but mandated payments into a college fund. Always the threat that if I told the children "too much" about my life, I would lose my scant time with them. I would lose them.” Easter Weekend - Minnie Bruce Pratt

"We've still got time to finish this game of chess before the end of the world, if you hurry up."

(Stephen King The Waste Lands)

CONDITIONS: SIX, a magazine of writing by women with an emphasis on writing by lesbians, 1980. Poems: Minnie Bruce Pratt, The sound of one fork, 1980; Joan Larkin, Blood, 1980