It is so much better to live as a lesbian now, in 2016, than it was in 1952.
That’s what I’ve been thinking ever since I immersed myself in the beautiful new lesbian film Carol last month. Carol (2015), that gorgeous film adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Price of Salt, portrays the blossoming love between two women in 1952. To live honestly as a woman who loves women, Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett) must risk the custody of her beloved little daughter and the status of her moral reputation in society. When Carol and Thereze Belivet (Rooney Mara) walk in public or sit at a restaurant, they cannot touch or gaze at each other too long. They can only express their love in the stolen privacy of rented motel rooms.
As I watched Carol, I felt an immense gratitude that I live and love in this time, in this region of this country. I sat in a Denver movie theater with my fiancee Meredith’s fingers securely intertwined with mine, and all around us sat other lesbian couples openly expressing affection. Because we live in Colorado, a state with a workplace nondiscrimination law that covers sexual orientation, both Meredith and I are confidently out as lesbians in our jobs. Because the culture of Denver is generally supportive of same-sex families, we are also out at our daughter’s school, where the third graders chanted, “Hello, Mitike’s moms!” when we walked into the room to help celebrate Mitike’s birthday in January. We feel safe here. In our neighborhood, we sit on the front step of our house on summer evenings with our arms intimately around each other’s waists, watching our daughter jump rope on the driveway.
In 1952, in Carol’s time, we couldn’t have hoped to live so openly or to marry each other legally, or to adopt a child together legally. We couldn’t have dreamed it.
In 1952, in Carol’s time, we couldn’t have hoped to live so openly or to marry each other legally, or to adopt a child together legally. We couldn’t have dreamed it.
And yet. In 2016, now, I watch the high school students in my classroom. They live post-DOMA, in a state that supported gay marriage before the Supreme Court did, in a nation with high-profile gay celebrities like Ellen DeGeneres and Rachel Maddow and Anderson Cooper. And yet. Their classmates use “That’s so gay!” as an insult; the media shows them primarily heterosexual love; their parents (and in many cases, their religions and their cultures) expect them to enter traditional marriages.
It’s only a little better than it was in 1952.
Outside the United States, the situation for us is often literally dangerous. Over seventy-five countries in the world still criminalize homosexuality, and in many of them the punishment is death.
It’s true that I can hold Meredith’s hand in a movie theater and tell our daughter’s teacher that Mitike has two moms, and it’s true that I can brave being out at the high school where I teach. It’s true that the Supreme Court supports our right to marry each other legally. But it’s still not easy to be out, and often, it’s not even safe. According to the ACLU, only twenty-two states protect GLBTQ+ people from discrimination in the workplace. Almost half of U.S. states fail to include gender and sexual orientation in their hate crime statutes. In Mississippi, gay and lesbian couples are still barred from adopting children. Conservative politicians like Republican candidate Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) still speak about us as if we are diseased or criminal, against God and morality; in August, Cruz called the fight for gay rights a “jihad” that GLBT people are waging against Christians. Another Republican candidate, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), said at the beginning of January, “I do not believe there is a U.S. Constitutional right to same-sex marriage,” and added that he believes children should only be raised by heterosexual parents: a father and a mother. Politics aside, many families still refuse to demonstrate acceptance. On America’s streets, over 40 percent of homeless youth identify as GLBTQ+.
Outside the United States, the situation for us is often literally dangerous. Over seventy-five countries in the world still criminalize homosexuality, and in many of them the punishment is death. That means that lesbian Americans like us have to carefully vet where we travel. Lesbians who live in those countries have to either hide who they are or risk death. Both options are unconscionable.
We will have to contemplate, alongside our love, the fragility of last June’s Supreme Court decision when candidates like Cruz or Rubio move nearer the White House.
On this Valentine’s Day in 2016, Meredith and I will go out for a date at a restaurant in Denver, as thousands of other couples in the city will do. But unlike what Senator Cruz terms “traditional couples,” we will have to be cautious about when and how we show each other affection. We might kiss across the table, but only quickly, painfully aware that someone could yell an ugly epithet at us, or threaten worse. We will hold hands, our matching silver engagement rings glimmering in the candlelight, but, unlike those “traditional couples,” we will have to contemplate, alongside our love, the fragility of last June’s Supreme Court decision when candidates like Cruz or Rubio move nearer the White House. We will discuss our lovely daughter, but in the shadows, we will shudder to remember that some would tell us we hurt our daughter by giving her two mothers. And we will talk about our planned honeymoon to Costa Rica, which we have chosen because it’s beautiful and warm, but primarily because it’s known to be one of the safest and most open countries for gay and lesbian couples to visit. They’ll accept us there.
It is better for us today than it was for lesbians in 1952. And so on this Valentine’s Day in 2016, I will step outside that restaurant with Meredith, my legal fiancee, and I will kiss her full on the lips.
It is better for us today than it was for lesbians in 1952. And so on this Valentine’s Day in 2016, I will step outside that restaurant with Meredith, my legal fiancee, and I will kiss her full on the lips. And maybe someone who sees that kiss will change his mind about gay rights, or maybe someone will realize her God is love, and love is what she sees between us. Or maybe, horribly, some bigoted person will yell across the street that we are sick, wrong, against God, that we are the problem with America. But I will kiss Meredith anyway. And then we’ll drive home to our cozy little house, pay the babysitter, kiss our sleeping daughter, and crawl into our bed. Our bed. We may not yet live in a completely safe and accepting world, but right here, in each other’s arms, our fears fall away.
Right here, we just love each other. And that is exactly right.
On April Fool’s Day, Google unveiled its new (fake) product, the Cardboard Plastic headset, which enables its wearer to experience, in 4D, “Actual Reality.”
The morning I read this satirical headline on my iPhone, I was standing in line with my fiancée, Meredith, and my daughter, Mitike, at the Orlando airport after three frenetic days at Universal Studios, a place where unreality seems incredibly real — and where a writer on spring break vacation can muse about what is real and unreal, and why it matters.
We visited Universal (which includes the Wizarding World of Harry Potter) because Mitike loves the Harry Potter series. All year, we’ve read the books aloud as a family, watching each movie after we completed the book. For Christmas and her birthday (and possibly next Christmas, too), Meredith and I gave Mitike the spring break trip to Orlando, complete with tickets to Universal. Santa Claus gave her a Gryffindor robe and a wand, with a note: “I think you may need this.” And so the drift from Actual Reality began.
I expected an amusement park… I didn’t expect that, inside Universal, it becomes disturbingly difficult to decipher what is real from what is not.
I expected an amusement park; I expected Meredith and I would share wise smiles at the special effects. I didn’t expect that, inside Universal, it becomes disturbingly difficult to decipher what is real from what is not. Of course, the dragon that breathes fire periodically from the top of the Gringotts Bank is some sort of mechanical creation. Of course, the “magic spells” TK’s new interactive wand could perform are connections between motion detectors. And of course we didn’t reallytake a mining cart down into the bowels of Gringotts.
However, we did sit in a startlingly real old English square and sip butterbeer under the hanging signs of Diagon Alley, and we did converse with a goblin. When we stepped back into the Leicester Square Station, I blinked to see the San Francisco wharf. Later, we took a boat cruise into Jurassic Park, and the stegosaurus looked quite alive, its sides heaving with breath. Back in Hogsmeade again, we wandered into a real Hogwarts Castle, and all the paintings moved and spoke, and I couldn’t remember what was real anymore, actually.
What is real? Our second day at Universal, we stood in a movie theater and cowered at the sound of gunshots in the Terminator 2 3-D show, grinning at each other because we knew it wasn’t real. After all, at the entrance to Universal Studios, serious security guards search every bag of every visitor, and every person has to walk through a metal detector. We were far safer in the Terminator 2 show than we ever are in Colorado movie theaters or Colorado schools.
What is real is terrifying. What is unreal is entertaining.
What is real is terrifying. What is unreal is entertaining — like the ridiculous message in Terminator that robots will someday dominate humans. Let me check my iPhone and ask Siri to make sure it’s not real.
What is real? In the long lines for the rides at Universal, families watch each other. How can that father scold his son so harshly? How didthose two get together? The teenager in that family looks miserable. Why is that twenty-something guy in line for a Harry Potter ride all by himself? And us? What do people see and think when they look at us? So that’s what a lesbian family looks like. Did they adopt that little girl, or did one of them carry her? Do they braid her hair themselves? Or: they’re sinners, living like that.
What is real? In the long lines for the rides at Universal, families watch each other. How can that father scold his son so harshly? How didThe line shuffles forward. We all nod at each other, and smile.
What is real? A woman walks by us in the New York part of Universal, trailing her two children and her husband, fixated on her phone. She smiles to herself as she scrolls through the family photos that she has presumably just posted on Facebook — photos of the four of them in the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, which they’ve just left. But this woman is missing the way her little daughter stares up at the fake New York skyline in awe, and the way her son tilts his head toward his father to listen. This woman is missing, too, the gentle angle of the late afternoon sun on the lagoon, the real way her family is here together. She nearly collides with us, so absorbed is she in the unreal world of her phone.
What is real? On our way to the airport in Denver, at the beginning of our trip, Mitike called to us from the backseat, “Look at how beautiful the mountains are! Take a picture on your phone!”
What is real? On our way to the airport in Denver, at the beginning of our trip, Mitike called to us from the backseat, “Look at how beautiful the mountains are! Take a picture on your phone!” The Front Range glowed orange in the sunset, and I murmured, “Once, people just enjoyed them without worrying about how to post their experiences on Facebook.” Meredith laughed, “Once people just worried about how to cross them.”
True. But at Universal Studios, twice, I caught myself admiring the etched silhouette of the mountains, glad I could glimpse them, until — twice — I had to remind myself that I was standing in flat central Florida, and that those “mountains” were a movie set Steven Spielberg had designed for the “King Kong: Skull Island” experience. The set is quite convincing. It looks real, even to a Colorado girl.
What is real? We lament that Donald Trump’s candidacy “can’t be real.” When our children have nightmares, we reassure them: “It wasn’t real.” When tragedy strikes, we cry, “This can’t be real!” When a friend’s brother visited her in Alaska, he exclaimed, “The glacier looks like a movie set — it doesn’t look real!”
What is real? We long for it — be real with me, we tell our close friends, our lovers — but it’s elusive. The moment we think we have glimpsed it, it shifts, and we don’t believe it anymore. You love me? Is this real?
What is real? We long for it — be real with me, we tell our close friends, our lovers — but it’s elusive. The moment we think we have glimpsed it, it shifts, and we don’t believe it anymore. You love me? Is this real?
Universal Studios does not try to answer any of these questions about reality for its thrill-seekers. Unapologetically, the park encourages visitors to leave their Actual Reality glasses at the entrance gate with the security guards. The intention, as with every movie and novel, is to forget reality a while, to visit an invented space.
But maybe we also visit places like Universal — and read novels, and watch movies — because visiting the invented for a while reminds us to recognize and love what is real. At the Orlando airport on our final morning in Florida, just as I finished reading the headline about the Google Cardboard Plastic headset, the TSA agent nodded at the three of us to move forward. “One of her moms can go through the scanner with her,” she said, pointing at our daughter. Without blinking.
What is real: people in this country have begun to see us as a family. I smiled at Meredith. No Cardboard Plastic headset needed — sometimes, the 4D experience of Actual Reality is sweet.
What is real: people in this country have begun to see us as a family. I smiled at Meredith. No Cardboard Plastic headset needed — sometimes, the 4D experience of Actual Reality is sweet.
I loved visiting Universal Studios. I returned to Jurassic Park again and again, the little girl in me ecstatic to see dinosaurs “for real.” I loved watching my daughter’s open-mouthed wonder inside Hogwarts Castle, and I loved Meredith’s appreciation of the quiet (fake) San Francisco wharf. I love drifting away for a while into imagination. But I also love returning.
Right now, for example, I’m writing from a corner of the deck at my in-laws’ in Evergreen, Colorado, gazing every so often at the real skyline of mountains, the real blue sky, enjoying the real sun on my shoulders. A three-toed woodpecker and a chickadee take turns visiting the bird feeder to my right, and all around me, the spruce and pines stand in stately silence, real snow at their feet.
At the moment, I want only this Actual Reality: my daughter, running out to hug me and to ask if she can eat a piece of chocolate; my dog, who sprawls happily beside me in the sun; and Meredith, who is napping upstairs right now (still recovering from our Orlando trip), who intends to marry me in two months, and who loves me, for all that I am. For real.
This is a letter to those of you who have stayed. Please: listen to me, before it’s too late.
I’m writing from the city of Vancouver, BC. The Canadians have been welcoming to the thousands of us who have fled across the border in the past seven years: immigrants, Muslims, dissenters, and those of us who are GLBT. The Canadians have accepted all of us, as far as I know. Do not believe President Trump’s incendiary anti-Canadian rhetoric. On this continent gone mad, Canada has become the last refuge of democracy.
At first, I intended to stay. Like so many other Americans, I intended to commit civil disobedience and fight the racist policies of Trump—and of his chosen vice president, Ted Cruz. When Trump and Cruz were sworn into office in 2017, I was an English teacher at a large high school in Denver, where many of my students were Muslim. Within weeks of the inauguration, Trump had ordered the National Guard to shutter all American mosques and to enforce “anti-terrorism codes” against praying to Allah, wearing identifying clothing, and quoting the Koran in public. To this day, Trump claims he has not banned Islam; people continue to be free to practice their religion in the privacy of their own homes, he has said, “just as they are free to engage in all manner of adult activities in their own homes, if you know what I mean.” But the new codes sanctioned harassment and intimidation. In many instances, Muslim people were beaten, fired from their jobs without cause, and ostracized from their communities. I joined several teachers at my school in creating secret safe spaces for our Muslim students to pray in private, and for Muslim families to meet to discuss their options. It felt right to disobey the injustice of Trump’s policies, and to act.
At first, I intended to stay. Like so many other Americans, I intended to commit civil disobedience and fight the racist policies of Trump.
But then, in early 2018, Trump and Cruz unveiled their plan for mass deportations of immigrants. Most of the students in our high school were immigrants or the children of immigrants. Suddenly, our classes began to shrink: immigrant families were forced to slip away into hiding or risk becoming “disappeared.” Stories abounded of children who woke in the morning to empty houses, their parents deported in the night. Our small group who had been supporting Muslims now risked greater civil disobedience: we offered entire immigrant families refuge in the basement of our school, in our houses, and in our churches. We used Facebook to set up an underground railroad, but Trump blasted through it all, creating the Foreigner Watch in the fall of 2018 and ordering the arrest of anyone who aided or abetted the millions of immigrants he intended to deport. People kept disappearing, including three of my teaching colleagues who served in the underground railroad with me. A fourth teacher I knew was arrested and held for months in jail. For some reason, I was never caught, though several of my students lived hidden in our basement laundry room for months. Every day, the deportation buses growled south toward the gates in The Wall at the Mexican border.
Suddenly, our classes began to shrink: immigrant families were forced to slip away into hiding or risk becoming “disappeared.”
Finally, in 2019, Trump and Cruz turned their hatred toward me and all other GLBT Americans. Their Supreme Court overturned the gay marriage decision that year, and the states followed obediently, declaring our union illegal and our child “endangered by an unnatural family situation.” In every speech either of them made, Trump and Cruz railed against our immorality, our “sick” desire to live outside of “normal” relationship, our “sinfulness.” They made no new laws, and yet their vitriolic words fueled their supporters’ loathing for us. By the spring of 2020, countless gay, lesbian, bi- and transgendered Americans had been fired from jobs, barred from entering public places, beaten, and in some cases killed. I lost my job at the high school. The official letter said I had been “released from duty for moral turpitude.” My wife lost her license as a psychologist. Two friends—both women—in San Francisco lost custody of their biological children after a school social worker investigated their “unnatural circumstances.” In a few short years, our government had bullied us back into the closet, slamming the door and locking it behind us. Conservative preachers gleefully praised Trump and Cruz’s “morals.” “America has suffered,” one minister told a crowd at a reelection rally in 2020, “because we have permitted such abominations, but now we are on our way to greatness.” The crowd roared its approval.
Meredith and I knew we had to leave. We were in danger. Every day, we were afraid someone would come and take our daughter from us. And so we fled north. Here, to Vancouver. We had to.
In a few short years, our government had bullied us back into the closet, slamming the door and locking it behind us.
America is no longer America for me. Maybe you don’t care about this. Maybe you don’t care that my family and I will probably stay here in Vancouver, where we are safe: where our marriage is honored as legal, our daughter is protected as our own. In the composition classes I teach at this university, my immigrant students breathe easily, unafraid of deportation or state-sanctioned discrimination. Canada is not perfect, because it is a government by people, who are ever flawed. But here, people still believe progress means moving toward embracing all kinds of people, recognizing the rights of all people to live free of fear.
I know you think none of this applies to you. You think you are safe today in America because you are not Muslim, you are not an immigrant, and you are not gay. You think you are safe in America because you are a white American descended from Europeans, like Trump, a practicing Christian, a proclaimed conservative. You think you are safe in America because you cheer at the mandated Trump rallies in your town and dutifully pledge allegiance to him. When a majority of you Americans reelected Trump and Cruz in 2020, you showed the world you actually like his “moral” policies against people like me and my wife, his “pro-American” policies against immigrants, his “keep it here” trade restrictions, his unsympathetic crackdown on all forms of crime. But these are not political issues. They never have been. They are human rights issues. And now that you have begun to vote against the rights of certain groups of people, a day will inevitably come when someone will vote against you. And who will speak for you, when you have been so silent?
But these are not political issues. They never have been. They are human rights issues.
Trump and Cruz and their followers will tell you America never wanted people like me and my students, anyway. Good riddance. But listen in the darkness, Americans: do not burn every good intention of those people who wrote “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and “we the people, in order to form a more perfect union.” Trump and Cruz have cranked open a rusty valve in America and let the ugliness that has long simmered beneath the country’s surface surge forth. That ugliness is fueling a new regime that only mirrors Adolf Hitler’s: certain groups banished, the triumphant tide of exclusion rising. Stand in the present darkness of your country, Americans, and remember history’s grave errors. The “great” America Trump and Cruz have made is openly xenophobic, homophobic, and racist. Its current actions—including the unapologetically brutal war America has begun waging in the Middle East—only echoes American “accomplishments” like slavery, the Indian Removal Act, segregation, and lynchings. How Christian you all are, you Americans, to exclude and deny and hate! Jesus would have done the same, I’m sure.
America doesn’t have to continue down this path. Once, we lumbered toward light: toward a more representative government, greater income equality, increased acceptance of every human, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, religion, or ethnic origins.
Up here in Vancouver, my family and I have begun to make a new life. Some days, I don’t even care that America doesn’t want us. I feel relieved that we left. But then I think of everything I love—the Rocky Mountains, the open road through the high desert, the little towns in the Iowa farmland where I was raised; all the proud ideas of freedom and justice for all; all the hard work of progress American activists have achieved over the last two centuries—and I feel overcome with sorrow for my country again. America doesn’t have to continue down this path. Once, we lumbered toward light: toward a more representative government, greater income equality, increased acceptance of every human, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, religion, or ethnic origins. Did you know the founders of America even imagined their created democracy would lead to peace? America could strive to be good and whole again. You could.
Close your eyes and remember 2016, seven years ago: you could have voted against Trump and Cruz. You could have chosen a different America.
You could have. And now—all the people forced to hide or flee, disappeared, deported, beaten, killed—all because of their origin or their religion or their sexual orientation or their unwillingness to praise Trump and Cruz—now it may be too late.
In Owl At Home, Arnold Lobel’s 1975 illustrated early reader, solitary Owl scolds winter for coming into his house. He is frightened by a creature under his covers, which turns out to be his feet. He makes himself cry in order to enjoy a pot of tear-water tea. He runs up and down the stairs in order to be in two places at once. He worries about the moon.
Throughout these five short episodes, Owl never encounters any other animate creatures. He talks to the weather, his legs, objects in the sky. He doesn’t seem perturbed by the fact that they never reply.
“If I am looking at you, moon, then you must be looking back at me. We must be very good friends,” Owl says.
Aha, the reader thinks, the moon isn’t a real friend—it just seems like it’s there for you. The moon begins to follow Owl and Owl shoos it away. He feels sad when he is home safe in bed and cannot see his friend—and relieved when it reappears from behind clouds to shine in his window. Poor, deluded Owl.
At another point, Owl tells himself vignettes of small things and objects, about wasted potential, and isolation, in order to make himself cry:
“Spoons that have fallen behind the stove and are never seen again,” said Owl…. “Books that cannot be read,” said Owl, because some of the pages have been torn out.” … “Mornings nobody saw because everybody was sleeping,” sobbed Owl.
“Soon,” Lobel writes, “the kettle was all filled up with tears.”
And yet, while the episode chronicles small moments of stunning loneliness, the chapter ends on a note of optimism. “Owl felt happy as he filled his cup. ‘It tastes a bit salty,’ he said, ‘but tear water-tea is always very good.’”
After his recitation, Owl’s decision is to be happy—to be nourished by his temporary sadness. He seems to be the master of these sad stories.
And yet…if Owl understands the illusory nature of these stories, does he know that his friendship with the moon is also not real? Does it matter, if it makes him happy? Is Owl in command of the narrative? Are we?
Arnold Lobel is perhaps best known for creating Frog and Toad, who make up one of the funniest, most poignant relationships in children’s literature.
The first book, Frog and Toad Are Friends, came out in 1970. The pair is a classic odd couple: Frog is sunny and energetic; Toad frets about buttons, swimsuits, and about not being able to think of stories. He has moments of deep and deeply real insecurity and melancholy that always find reassurance in Frog’s abiding friendship. Frog and Toad can also be seen as a portrait of male-male love. In total, Lobel wrote four Frog and Toad books. (Another two were discovered more recently and released by Lobel’s daughter, Adrianne.)
It is hard not to read some of Owl’s loneliness—the wasted potential that he cries about in the tear-water tea, the ignored history of objects and creatures—as being about Lobel’s personal, hidden tragedies.
When reading the Frog and Toad books, it is difficult not to draw parallels to Lobel’s life. In a May 2016 piece for The New Yorker, Colin Stokes traces Lobel’s origins as a children’s book author and illustrator—sometimes in collaboration with his wife Anita Kempler. Stokes also notes that Lobel was gay. Lobel was one of the early casualties of AIDS and died of complications from the disease in 1987. He had come out to his wife and children in 1974. Owl At Home was published in 1975. It is hard not to read some of Owl’s loneliness—the wasted potential that he cries about in the tear-water tea, the ignored history of objects and creatures—as being about Lobel’s personal, hidden tragedies.
But perhaps we don’t have the right to look at Lobel’s story—his stories—through that lens. Lobel’s books, after all, are ultimately happy. They affirm friendship. They show that people (or owls and amphibians) need and find joy in ties, even while acknowledging that relationships are as ephemeral as life.
My experience of Owl at Home has always been social. I likely first encountered the book during one of those important early kid’s events: story time.
Between kindergarten and third grade, my class went to the school library at least once a week for a reading with our librarian, Ms Wilkins, and to take out books.
To this day, the memory of Ms Wilkins—of sitting cross-legged on a low carpet of the library surrounded by other kids, of listening to her read in her low, scratchy voice—brings me immense comfort.
Ms Wilkins was tall and gray-haired. She wore a heavy man’s watch, which I sometimes stared at when she read. She introduced us to Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. She read us Ezra Jack Keats’s The Snowy Day and paused to explain to us how the author used collage to make up his illustrations. I still remember the care she took to talk to us about each book that she selected, about how pictures and words were put together. She was teaching us how to see, what to look for in narrative—something that I don’t think anyone had ever really done for me before. I remember her as a reserved woman—not the kind of person whom one would peg as someone who wanted to work with kids. But as my reading advanced, she listened to me quietly when I told her I wanted books like Nancy Drew and the Bobbsey Twins. She didn’t grimace or laugh—and she steered me to Enid Blyton, P. L. Travers, and Dodie Smith.
To this day, the memory of Ms Wilkins—of sitting cross-legged on a low carpet of the library surrounded by other kids, of listening to her read in her low, scratchy voice—brings me immense comfort. It was this same feeling of intimacy and sharing that I tried to bring to my daughter when I read to her about Frog and Toad, and Owl.
In the wake of the US election, I have been thinking a lot about the uses of reading and writing. I dwell on how useless writing—my writing—seems to be. I consider this while taking refuge in stories that conclude happily and unhappily—in narratives that have the courtesy to end while our reality continues rudely and dangerously on.
I tell myself this when I write: that a book may be an inanimate object, but it is also contains the words of a person reaching out. I tell myself that empathy works even when results are not immediately visible. Or I tell myself nothing and just go on.
We do think of reading and writing as solitary pursuits—perhaps they’re even selfish. But reading can take the form of a parent reading to a child, a story time for a class of eager kids. Or it can be one person and a book.
I tell myself this when I write: that a book may be an inanimate object, but it is also contains the words of a person reaching out. I tell myself that empathy works even when results are not immediately visible. Or I tell myself nothing and just go on.
At the end of Owl at Home, Owl has fallen asleep. The moon is still shining on him. It is there if Owl needs it.
Subversions. I like the way the word tastes on my tongue.
Subversions. As in, ways to act subversively. As in, small erosions of The Way Things Are. In the Online Etymology Dictionary, a “subversion” is a “physical destruction, demolition, ruination; [an] overthrow of a system or law.” The word comes from the Old French for “downfall.” As in, after these subversions, the world will never be the same.
Subversions. As in, after these subversions, the world will never be the same.
I don’t look like a subversive person. Walk into my classroom where I teach English in a large city high school in Colorado, and observe me: I’m tall and big-boned like my German ancestors, I dress in too much brown, I’ve neglected to buy myself new shoes for years, and I need a haircut. I look like just another earnest English teacher trying in vain to cajole teenagers into caring about punctuation and literature.
Except, like most of us, I’m not all I appear to be. Some of my more observant students notice the photograph on my desk of me smiling beside a woman and a little African girl. Is that your sister, Miss? some of them ask. No, I tell them, still practicing bravery, she’s my fiance, and that’s our daughter. And all the assumptions about how I seemed to fit neatly into the acceptable system fly out the tall historic classroom windows.You’re gay, Miss?
Yes.
Like Eve, I often stood on tiptoe and tried to peer outside the Garden into which I’d been born. But I walked straight down an aisle. I behaved.
I didn’t set out to be subversive. For the first twenty-eight years of my life, I worked hard to follow the rules of the system into which I’d been born, though I never felt comfortable. The rules for being good: grow up on a quiet, orderly farm in eastern Iowa, learn to be a good girl, attend a good Lutheran college, marry a nice Lutheran man. I was very good, if that was the rubric. It’s true that I squirmed in the church pew and asked too many questions in confirmation class. It’s true that, like Eve, I often stood on tiptoe and tried to peer outside the Garden into which I’d been born. But I walked straight down an aisle. I behaved.
And then, in a sort of storm at age twenty-eight, I shattered all the expected patterns for my life (or life shattered them for me): I fell in love with my best friend, who was a woman. Another friend asked me on the phone, “Do you think you’ve realized you’re lesbian?” and I gasped. “Lesbian? But I have long hair!” Nothing in my life had prepared me to be subversive. I didn’t want to be. I wanted to have children and nest into a cozy home like my gram’s; I wanted a secure life. Suddenly, all I could hear was wild wind.
Suddenly, I was twenty-eight and divorced. And a lesbian. Same brown sweater, same bad haircut, but I stood hip-deep in the shards of What Had Been Expected.
It’s terrifying to become subversive.
It requires courage.
You’re gay, Miss?
It’s terrifying to become subversive.It requires courage.
Yes. And here is what I won’t tell you, Student, because it’s too much in this small moment in a classroom: I’m gay, and that means that when I still wanted to be a mother, I had to travel halfway across the world to Ethiopia to adopt my child. I’m gay, and that means that when my former partner died five years ago in Alaska, her ashes were mailed to her ex-husband, and the obituary failed to mention me. I’m gay, and that means that every day I teach, I have to decide whether it’s safe to be out. I’m gay, and that means that my fiancé, Meredith, and I don’t hold hands or kiss in public unless we’re certain we’re surrounded by accepting people. I’m gay, and that means Meredith and I only won the right to marry each other legally last June.
I’m gay, which means my life itself is a subversion. The System was not constructed for me, and so every act of mine threatens to overthrow it. Meredith and I walk hand in hand into the elementary school Open House picnic with our African daughter’s hands in ours, and the law of “this is a normal family” shudders. We send out wedding invitations with graphics of two brides holding hands, and the ancient system of marriage trembles. We snuggle into bed at night, our arms around each other, and we rewrite the old rules about who protects and who is protected and who is nurtured and who nurtures. As a writer, I write about women who love women, forcing the old narratives, which never contained our names, to shift aside. Here are all the little subversions. The demolition of an old system.
Evidently, I wasn’t supposed to live a safe life as a straight wife in a small Midwestern town. I was meant to learn about discomfort and grief, fear and discrimination.
Evidently, I wasn’t supposed to live a safe life as a straight wife in a small Midwestern town. I was meant to learn about discomfort and grief, fear and discrimination. I was meant to learn about the surprising joy of being different, of the certain slant of beauty in stories the system never imagined.
I’m still afraid. The systems hate to be shaken, and they do not wish to be destroyed. But the few of us who have glimpsed other narratives, other avenues, other worlds — we are speaking. We have always been speaking, though sometimes we have been required to whisper. Listen. Listen, and maybe you’ll become a little bit subversive, too.
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