Ancient History - My Coming Out Story

National Coming Out Day is October 11, and I have been thinking about when I came out in 1987 and what it meant to me then and means to me now.

The events aren’t fuzzy in my mind but the dates are.  I thought I was 26 turning 27 when I came out, but I am sure it was 1987, and that year I was actually 25 turning 26.  It was the fall.  I had received a call, I think in early September, asking me to take a job with the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence.  I left where I had been working, at Women Against Abuse in downtown Philly, and took the job in Reading PA.  The understanding was that this was temporary, for less than a year, until they could do a real search, for which I would also be able to apply.

Taking this job allowed me to move from downtown, where I had been working, to a more suburban part of Philly (Mt. Airy) which had more of a Jewish community.  My brother was living there and we rented an apartment together.  I’m not sure the sequence of events that fall – what happened first after the new job – the move or the monumental conversation that changed my life.

It sounds kind of funny, naïve and trite, but this is what happened:

I was working with a brilliant lesbian attorney and we were travelling the state.  The head office was in Harrisburg.  We also had meetings all over the state – I think we tried to meet each month in a different county with legal advocates.  Mostly this involved driving.  We also had trainings several times a year in different parts of the state.  Early in the fall, Ellen Pence, may her memory be a blessing, came to do a training.  I don’t remember where it was.  I remember of course how brilliant she was.  I don’t think it was the first time I heard her speak, but being in a room with her was always wonderful.   I read something online after she died that so captured the way she was in a room – at the same time making you feel really good and also challenging you to be so much better.

So my boss, me and Ellen were in one of our hotel rooms after this training.  And somehow the topic came around to me, and how I “thought I was not a lesbian.”  And Ellen told me that I was making a mistake if I thought I was going to marry a man, and that it was a bad idea, because one day, I would be working on a committee with some woman, and I would look into her eyes and fall in love, and if I was married to a man it would be a messy divorce, maybe a custody battle.  She presented it very romantically and I laughed and said, “Will she wear glasses?”

I said, “Why do you think I’m a lesbian, just because I am masculine?” and she said, “no you’re not, you are a fembot.”

Ellen was such a huge personality – when she tells you something about yourself, it’s not something you can shrug off.  Or maybe had I been more straight I could have, but as it was, I started thinking.

And I asked myself, “is it possible I am a lesbian”?

And the answer that came to me was that I had no idea, because for me any kind of feeling I might have for any woman was locked behind a door that said “don’t come in here”.  I couldn’t know if I was attracted to women or any woman because it was not something I allowed myself to feel.  Opening that locked door to wonder was a step toward finding out about myself.  In the words of Geneen Roth I read just recently, it was a beginning toward treating myself with kindness and curiosity.  It was an opening to learning about myself rather than trying to force myself to be what I thought the world wanted me to be.

It was about accepting myself and being myself.  What a concept.

Now that I have a 10 year old daughter, I see the process close up of how we (especially girls but probably boys too) try to mold ourselves to be what we think the world (in the form of our cruel peers, our teachers and others) wants from us.

What I felt in the coming out process was that all of a sudden I could re-access my 8 and 9 year old self.  I had energy, exuberance, and joy.  My 8 and 9 year old self had wanted to be a rabbi.  And lo and behold, I suddenly felt free to apply to rabbinical school.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

First I spent a month, a whole month, not telling anyone about this.  I spend a month driving 75 minutes each way to work and crying, wondering if I could be a lesbian and trying to figure out what that would mean in my life.

One day on my return trip from work I heard Joni Mitchell’s Song for Sharon.  And cried over the first verse:

I went to Staten Island, Sharon
To buy myself a mandolin
And I saw the long white dress of love
On a storefront mannequin
Big boat chuggin' back with a belly full of cars
All for something lacy
Some girl's going to see that dress
And crave that day like crazy

I cried because I was so sure I would never wear a wedding dress, cried again that January when I saw a photo of Jan Pierce in her wedding dress, after she died suddenly and I guess I was with her daughter looking at her old wedding album.

And I knew at the same time that if what I wanted from heterosexuality was that day and that wedding dress, it probably wasn’t enough.

Stay tuned for Part 2!