Evolution of the story: Naked In The Hallway

      The first person I wanted to come out to was my therapist. I’d been thinking about my sexuality for 3 years. Was I or wasn’t I? Is it possible to be 40-something and have not figured that out? It took a lot of research, reading, writing, watching, trips to the library, contemplating interactions I’d had throughout my lifespan. It took 3 years to grapple with it and to come out the other side, ready to live honestly and shamelessly. I don’t know why, but in order to do that, there had to be a proclamation, “Hello world! This is who I am and I won’t hide it one more minute!” I imagine standing with my feet apart and my arms outstretched so that they make the letter X as I scream it in the middle of the street. It reminds me of the person who has decided to give themselves to Christ. Why is the ceremony of baptism so important? Can’t a person let Christ into their heart and that be enough? No. No it is not but not for the reason that the nuns in my Catholic school told me. I do not believe that the purpose of the ceremony of baptism is about “being saved”. I do think there is something to the notion of a clean slate, of shedding what was, the pretense you’d slaved to uphold. In this sense, I like the term “washed clean”. I can’t think of a more apt description for what it felt like to come out. Whether your proclamation is about your sexuality, your gender, your artistic aspirations or your belief in Christ, until you can stand on top of the mountain and shout your truth for all to hear you cannot fully inhabit who you are. We have to come out of the closet to shed our shame. This is the point I had come to after those 3 years. I wanted to embrace myself, to stop hiding, to shed my shame and to shine this little light of mine. I had to tell someone.


For the Christian who has made a decision to turn their lives over to Christ and to be baptized in a country where it is safe to do so, there is little to fear. They will be surrounded by other Christians who will applaud and sing songs of praise and welcome them with a warm embrace. Such certainty of outcome is not a given for the person making a proclamation about their sexuality or their gender identification. For this reason, I chose the person who had been the most accepting of me and all my shameful parts, my therapist. Let’s call her, Mindy.


I was ready. I’d made the decision. I sat on her purple couch facing Mindy in her green armchair with the mug of water she kept on the small table next to her, the one that held the Kleenex and the small clock which faced her. I sat in the middle of the couch and looked at the floor trying to get up the nerve to say what I’d come to say.


It was like the time my mom stopped me in in the hallway. I was naked with a towel wrapped around my little body. Perhaps I just felt naked or perhaps I’m remembering the black and white snapshot of me, naked and bent over sideways with a towel wrapped around my shoulders, and have inserted that snapshot into this memory. I had just gotten out of her bathtub and was making my way down the hall to my room when my mom called to me from behind.


“Were you the one who left the heater on?” she asked in a tone. You know the one. It's the tone that says she already knows the answer. It's the tone that accuses.


“Noooo,” I said averting my eyes.


I loved that heater. It was one of those electric ones with metal coils which creaked and glowed red, the kind built into the wall just above the baseboard.


Softening, she said she wasn’t mad but I could tell the change in her tone was purposeful. She was trying to get me to spill the beans. She said I could tell her if I had left it on. It was just that it was dangerous to leave the heater on unattended, she said. It could cause the house to burn down. “So did you leave it on?” she asked one more time.


I wanted to tell her the truth, I really did, but then I’d be admitting to lying and I didn’t want to be a liar. Nobody likes a liar. I knew she knew I had lied and I wanted speak the truth. I wanted to please her, but the words wouldn’t come out. That’s how I felt sitting on the couch across from my therapist with her short white hair and glasses, her chin lowered as if inviting me to place whatever it was that was concerning me onto the floor at her feet.


When I was in 9th grade, my best friend left home to attend a prep school in New Hampshire. She'd come for winter break and we were spending the night together. Her parents were out and she had it in her head that it would be fun to make this thing she called a Hurricane. She started opening kitchen cabinets and pulling out bottles of Liquor. She took a little from each, pouring them into a thermos, the kind we’d fill with Lemon-Lime Gatorade to drink on the tennis court She carried it up the street and across the road to the beach. I’d never been to the beach under the cover of night. It was breezy, cool even, by Floridian standards. We found a spot in front of the beach grass, at right about the same spot the sea turtles would come to lay their eggs. She opened the flip spout on the thermos, took a swig and handed it to me. It smelled awful and tasted worse. We passed the thermos back and forth, her drinking and me pretending. I watched her get more and more intoxicated until she vomited a pool of Creme De Menthe colored liquid into a basin we carved in the sand. She asked me questions that night, questions I might have answered had I been swallowing the Hurricane. She asked me if I’d kissed a boy yet. She began kissing boys at the end of 5th grade when birthday parties became co-ed and the main attraction was the game, “RCK”, run, catch, kiss. I stood on the backdoor patio and watched while my friends, one by one, ran out on the lawn to join the game. I could not fathom why anyone would want to play this game. Even the squarest of us squares was into it. I felt like a train had come, loaded up my friends and taken them away, leaving me standing there all by myself. I wanted nothing more than to fit in, to be liked, to be normal, so as much as I wanted to share myself with my oldest of friends and as much as she was asking me to, I simply could not. I did the only thing I could. I said - Yes. Yes, I had kissed a boy. Like the time I was naked in the hallway with my Mom, I’m pretty sure my friend knew I was lying.


*****


When I came out I wondered about this thing called the GLBT community I heard about. It was in the newspaper and on the radio. I wondered when I would be assimilated into it. How would I know? I imagined I would suddenly have this new group of friends, be invited to happy hour at some lesbian bar that I never knew existed before, that I’d learn the secret handshake that would make me official. I assumed that lesbians were “my people” and as soon as I met one there would be an instant click. LIke dominoes, one meeting would lead to another and another. Before I knew it, I would know this thing called the GLBT community. I would be included, a part of a collective. I thought I’d belong.


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The first person I came out to was…...