My Coming Out Story

I hope that everyone can realize that the act of coming out is not something that happens in a day, but is a lifelong journey of self-discovery and bravery.

Everyone knows I’m gay. This is not a shocking controversy. How I came out was my mom just straight up asking me if I was gay because it was so fucking obvious, and honestly no one in my family cared enough to make me feel bad about it. While I of course have at some level been ostracized from normal society, some of which was my own doing due to internalized homophobia and sexism, I’ve managed to carve out a nice little life for myself while being gay because it’s 2016 and I live in the Bay Area.

But what I really want to come out as today is a queer, butch, hairy weirdo dyke. Because that’s what I truly am. While gay visibility in the US is at an all time high, where are the varied stories about butch, hairy, strong independent dykes in popular culture? Sure they exist on the periphery with awesome talented women like Allison Bechtel, but we are still often the butt of jokes if not completely ignored. I’m tired of taking a back seat to the more photogenic lipstick lesbians, lezbo jocks, fairies, twinks and bears. I’ve been in hiding too long, it’s time to raise my fist in solidarity and expose my smelly, hairy armpit.

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It occurred to me that I was different the first time I was in a popular girls’ bedroom.

Up until about 5th grade most of my friends were boys; my best bro friend the boy across the street. We played hockey together, traded X-Men cards and played Mortal Kombat both on screen and in real life. On summer nights we played man hunt or softball on my front lawn, and when Space Jam came out we played the soundtrack on repeat while trying to learn how to alley-oop on the basket ball hoop attached to his driveway.

Then that whole puberty thing happened. I began feeling uncomfortable around boys because I was afraid that my intimacy and friendliness was misleading, that they wanted more from me than I was willing to give. That I owed them. I just wanted to learn all of the secret MK cheat codes, not make out, y’know? I didn’t know what to do, but everything was telling me this feeling was just a part of growing up.

So I started to venture out into girl world, trying to find like-minded ladies. This was the height of No Doubt being all the rage, so I figured it should be easy: Just follow the rad chicks in ball & chain chokers with baby clips in their hair. I became friends with a few “popular” girls who liked talking about boys, movies and music and tried to play along. I stopped playing outside with my hockey friends and hid my X-Men cards away, replacing them with Seventeen Magazines and days shopping at the flea market for Bug Girl and Milkfed outfits to go with our patent leather platform sneakers.

The first time I got invited over to a popular girls house for a one on one hang, I realized how different she was from me. She and her mother talked about teeth bleaching and tanning in the kitchen (her mother was drinking her coffee out of a straw, having just come from the dentist), and her room was big, clean and pink. In it I felt dirty, smelly and hairy. She had a pink formica vanity filled with make up and nail polish and pictures of Devon Sawa and Leonardo DiCaprio (she was into scrawny blondes with mushroom cuts) inside of her matching pink formica media console. I didn’t want to touch anything, let alone sit on the bed with her. Then she would know.

The only thing I recall we were really able to talk about was the new Green Day album she had just bought on Compact Disc. While I wasn’t the biggest Green Day fan because even at 12, I found their songs about masturbation juvenile and isolating to my female sensibilities, it was some common ground. It’s not that I had a crush on her or even wanted her in a romantic way, I’m not sure at the time I even had the vocabulary for what that would mean. I just didn’t want her to know that I was, whatever I was, which was obviously not like her.

It was possibly the first time I was at least somewhat conscious of my other-ness and my inability to comfort other people about my own sense of strangeness, thus likely also making them uncomfortable. Nothing of note really happened, other than me trying to figure out how I could feel less gross in her house the next time she, or any other girl, invited me over. What’s the female version of having a “beard”? Thats what I wanted, something to make me feel less like a boy. Our friendship, along with most of my other friendships with the “popular girls” petered out around middle school when they started seriously dating, smoking, drinking and doing other things popular girls do.

And so, I was a gal without a group. It remained that way for a long time because I wasn’t quite sure where I fit. I was one of those floaters who had friends here and there, some were close and loving and supportive. But was never really invited to big parties, I never had a crew. I threw myself into my education, after school activities and sports knowing that people would be forced to interact with me there even if I was weird. Because if I was good at something, they would at least have to respect me even if they didn’t particularly like me. At home I obsessively binged on books, movies, television and collected music. I got really into Bjork. My favorite thing to do on a Friday night was take a walk to the blockbuster by my house and pick out my very own movie to watch alone. Really I was just looking. Looking for someone who looked like me, who felt like me. I needed to see myself reflected back to me, to prove that what I was feeling was real. I think the closest thing I found at the time was Jodie Foster. What other 14 year old girl watches The Accused (the movie Foster won an Academy Award for about her being a victim of a gang bang rape) alone over and over again on her summer break, having exhausted her interest in Silence of the Lambs?

When I was in college I saw a poster for roller derby. The girls on the poster looked weird, some were hairy and dirty. Even though I was intimidated I figured it couldn’t hurt to check it out. And from all of my years playing hockey I was a decent skater, so even if they didn’t like me they would at least respect me because I would provide my talents. I was right. I finally had my crew. I became a coach, captain and all-star, and through my training helped female skaters all over the world feel stronger on their feet.

While I am proud of that accomplishment, I never actually felt like myself most of the time I was skating. Ultimately it was because I wasn’t nurturing myself. I was too busy trying to figure out how to hide my true self, which is a weird, hairy weirdo dyke with a caramel nougat center, to be truly happy. I didn’t feel entirely safe in that community because it didn’t encourage introspection and honestly, my breed of athleticism was deemed to aggressive, too masculine to truly fit in. This prevented me from having a sense of self worth outside of what I could do for others. Perhaps it’s my masculine desire to to feel needed because of my capableness of providing for others coupled with my female trait of putting myself second in order to nurture others, but I honestly never took a second to think about who I am outside of everyone else until a few months ago.

So I am coming out. I’m not just gay. I can now say with pride that I’m a big, fat, granola-crunching, hairy-legged, pussy-eating, Gloria Steinem-reading, Rachel Maddow-watching, yoga-doing, hiking boot-wearing, confrontationally-liberal, unapologetically-feminist, butch dyke.

And I don’t care if you like it.