graphic by brian jean
Small-town America is a unique experience unlike anything the big city can offer in some of the best and worst ways. On one hand, there is a tight-knit community willing and ready to jump in and help bring casseroles when someone dies, do yard work (or even bale hay) when someone is sick or care for your neighbor’s children like they’re your own. On the other hand, they’re decades behind in some ways; homosexuality is still taboo. People don’t talk about it except in the context of it being considered a sin. Maybe not all rural America is like this, but it certainly was my experience.
My world was a small religious community that, for so long, I felt safe in. That was until I started to realize I liked girls — it was more than just wanting to be friends with them. I wanted to date girls, I wanted to kiss girls, I wanted to have a wife someday. For so long, I tried to ignore it; I gave excuses for my lack of dating. “I just want to focus on my studies,” or “I’m really determined to excel in sports” or even “I care more about friendships right now than romantic relationships.” I hid myself under Bible verses and self-loathing, convinced I was better off dead than gay. I busied myself with anything and everything because all I wanted to be was straight. I wanted to be normal, and from my vantage point, the only way to do that was to be heterosexual. I didn’t know of any LGBTQ+ people; looking back, I am sure they were there; they were just quiet, scared, and hiding like I was. The only gay person I had indirectly heard about was someone who was kicked out of their church for their sexuality; given that my world was Christian school and church, that terrified me.
Over time, my world grew larger. Through access to the news, social media and television, I learned there was more to the world than my little community. I saw that not everywhere was as against LGBTQ+ people as I had seen, so I started to consider the possibility that there was nothing wrong with my liking girls. Even when I first started dating, I refused to use the label of lesbian. For a while, I called myself bisexual, claiming that I might like guys I just hadn’t found the right one. Once I came to terms with the fact that I had never been sexually attracted to a man and never would be, I liked the label of gay, still struggling with internalized homophobia and shame. I was unable to use the word lesbian, a word that I knew I identified with but was too terrified to use it, scared to acknowledge to myself who I was.
It wasn’t overnight; some experiences stick with you even when you don’t want them to, and for me, that was the case regarding the shame I learned in my childhood surrounding homosexuality. But my world stretched and grew; it was no longer black and white but a beautiful array of colors. I went to school; I moved out of the small town, and I found an identity not attached to the discomfort in myself I had grown accustomed to. I didn’t have to fit within a set of acceptable standards; I could just be. And there, I came to not only consider myself a lesbian but to love the word. As the book, “Mrs. S” by K Patrick says, “(I’m) forever in love with the word. Lesbian. The slow sexuality of it.” Before I knew it, I came to identify more with being a lesbian than being a woman.
Sometimes lesbians get a bad rap; I’ve seen so many harmful stereotypes, assumptions and accusations online. But the truth is that lesbians are resilient, we are world changers, we are beautiful and we don’t exist to make others comfortable. One of my very favorite places is the Lesbian Herstory Archives, a place to celebrate identity and community throughout history. The Archives make me proud to be a lesbian; I get to see the way lesbians were at the forefront of the women’s rights movement. Lesbian rights organizations like The Daughters of Bilitis fought against all odds to grow and thrive under the surveillance of local police, the FBI and the CIA.
Even earlier, in the days of the women’s suffrage movement, many women who loved women were involved in fighting for change. While terms like lesbian and bisexual didn’t exist then, they were often called “romantic friendships” or Boston marriages. Suffragists like Molly Dewson, Polly Porter and even Susan B. Anthony all had relationships with women. Alice Dunbar-Nelson wrote in her diary about “a thriving lesbian and bisexual subculture among Black suffragists and clubwomen.”
During the height of the AIDS epidemic, individuals who were sick needed blood transfusions, and men who slept with men were banned from donating. Because of this, lesbians stepped up; famously, the San Diego Blood Sisters, as they called themselves, held blood drives and ensured that the blood donations went to HIV/AIDS patients. It wasn’t just blood drives either, lesbians stepped up as caretakers, especially when doctors and others refused.
Spending time at the archive, being a self-proclaimed queer history nerd and studying lesbian history, makes me so proud to be a lesbian, and my greatest desire is to stand on the shoulders of the lesbian pioneers who came before me.
People often talk about living a life that your younger self would be proud of, but when you come from an environment like I did that for so long, made you hate and hide key aspects of yourself, I don’t think that’s a realistic goal. I like to think that the younger me would be relieved that I don’t have to live a life pretending to be someone I am not and would celebrate the freedom that I experience. But the truth is, what’s most important to me is that today in this moment and going forward I am proud of who I’ve become, I am proud to call myself a lesbian and what a journey it has taken to get here.