How to Come Out in America, 1992 Edition

Vanna White, Pumpkin Pie, and the Moment I Stopped Lying about My Life

It is November 1992. George H. W. Bush is President, but not for much longer. The biggest song in America is “I Will Always Love You” and Whitney nails it, but you liked it just fine when it was still just your hero, Dolly Parton, and her guitar. Hee Haw has ended and Absolutely Fabulous has begun but you will not hear of it for a few more years, when you see the VHS tape in the library and become obsessed. Malcolm X is sharing movie theaters with Mighty Ducks; they are never a double bill. Audre Lorde, who inspires you, has died; Miley Cyrus, who will inspire your pre-teen daughter, has been born.

The mall of America, Euro Disney, and Barney are new. But you, all of 25, feel supremely old and wise. You are in grad school and are already teaching undergrads. Life is a banquet of possibility. You have performed in a terrible dinner theater cabaret for which you have been paid despite the director’s horror that, the night before the show, you proudly got your first ACT-UP haircut, which makes you look like a melon with a forelock, and exposes your ears, allowing you to show off the single zirconia stud you wear in your right ear because the “right-is-wrong/left-is-right” rule only applies to boys who are straight, which you are not.