How Nana Saved My Life
My grandmother knew what it meant to be an LGBTQ ally, years before most people knew the term existed
“I wish all the fags with AIDS would just die off!”
A high school classmate said those words during a class discussion in the early 1990s. I can still see his smirk as he spoke, and I can still feel my neck and face turn red as I silently prayed that no one would notice the panic and fear in my eyes.
I did my best to hide my sexuality then, because being an openly gay teenager in a small town in Pennsylvania was not safe. A few years earlier I had endured several months of almost daily bullying — verbal and emotional, and often physical — because my classmates sensed I was different. My teachers pretended not to notice. Thankfully the bullies moved on.
And although my high school teacher clearly heard my classmate’s death wish for gay people, he said nothing.
His silence did not surprise me. Back then in that town — and countless other places like it — it was unheard of to hear anyone defend gay people, let alone say anything nice about them. I was lucky that one exception to that rule was my maternal grandmother, who my sister and I called Nana.
I was 13 when Nana moved back to northeastern Pennsylvania with two suitcases, a carton of cigarettes, and not much else. She had been living in California for 11 years and returned to Pennsylvania after she decided to retire. She stayed either with my family or her friend Ellen, who lived nearby, for her first few months back while she looked for an apartment.
Nana moved to California in the late 1970s, shortly after I was born. Her husband — my maternal grandfather — died a little more than nine months before my birth (a timeline my therapists have found intriguing). A few years before his death they lost everything when Hurricane Agnes’s downpours stalled over the region and pushed the Susquehanna River up, over, and in some cases through its banks and into the small towns built along its shores.
I never asked her, but I always assumed that the combination of the flood and losing her husband a few years later compelled Nana to flee the area and her memories, even if it meant leaving behind my mom (her only child, who was not happy about the move), and my dad, sister, and me.
Nana arrived in California without any idea of what she would do for money. She had quit school when she was 13 so she could work to support her family, and she and my grandfather both worked a string of blue-collar jobs throughout their lives.
After a short time in California she found work as a live-in housekeeper for Mrs. Case, a wealthy woman who had a three-story home on Seal Beach, which is just south of Los Angeles. Nana took on several other housekeeping jobs to supplement her income.
Nana was unlike my friends’ grandmothers, as well as my paternal grandmother, who we called Grammy. Grammy had thick grey hair, wore housecoats and polyester slacks, baked poppyseed rolls, and had a tendency to smell like mothballs. She had no use for a man, having divorced my paternal grandfather long before I was born.
Nana dyed her hair light brown, and wore perfume, stylish pants and blouses, and heels. She dated and would rather go dancing than bake or cook. She smoked a lot, but had no shame about it, even if my mother was constantly asking her to stop. Grammy also smoked but hid it from us, only doing it alone in her bedroom, where she blew smoke out her apartment’s back window.
When she lived in California, Nana flew home to visit us for a week or two each summer. We picked her up at the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton International Airport in the evening, after waiting all day as she flew across the country, leaving Los Angeles in the morning. My mom, sister, and I would spend the day cleaning the house to make sure it was perfect for Nana.
We had dark hardwood floors, which needed to be swept and mopped, except where they were covered in oval-braided rugs — orange and brown in the living room; shades of blue in the dining room. As we cleaned we were watched over by Normal Rockwell prints hanging in the living room and cast-iron trivets nailed high on the kitchen walls.
Once we were home from the airport, Nana would unpack and tell us about her flight and whatever other trips she had recently taken. At the time, my mom, sister, and I had never flown. My family didn’t have much money, and my parents had a fear of flying. I remember Nana once telling us about her recent cruise through the Panama Canal, which to me sounded as fanciful as going to the moon.
My family saved our money one year so we could drive to California to visit Nana. It took us five days to get there in our red and white 1981 Chevy Citation, which lacked air conditioning — and our route took us right through the Mojave Desert in the summer. But the long sweaty car ride was worth it to see Nana’s life in person.
Back then, Mrs. Case’s home was the largest I had ever been in. I remember the furniture and kitchen appliances all seemed new, large, and spotless — shining surfaces, clean lines, and sharp angles. The dining room had floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the Pacific Ocean.
Nana lived on the ground floor, and her back door opened onto sand and looked out at the wide sky and blue water. Even after the sun had set the entire home seemed airy and bright.
We met some of Nana’s Los Angeles friends while there, and she told us about others we wouldn’t have time to meet, including a gay man named John. She mentioned him and his boyfriend in a nonchalant way, which for the early 1980s was unusual, especially to my rural Pennsylvanian ears.
I was too young to understand what it meant for a man to have a boyfriend, but I remember it resonating in a very specific way. I also remember briefly wondering what my dad thought of John. I wanted to ask him, but I somehow knew I shouldn’t. She continued to mention John in our conversations over the years. She did it in a very ordinary way, just like she talked about any of her other friends.
A few months after she moved back to Pennsylvania, Nana found an apartment in West Pittston, which was about 20 minutes from where my family lived. The apartment was in a government-subsidized building for low-income senior citizens. Nana was less than thrilled with this situation, but it was what she could afford as a retiree with no assets. She had no objection to being in subsidized housing — it was admitting she was a senior citizen that upset her.
The apartment building was about 12 stories tall and made of red bricks and maroon cinder blocks. It squatted on a square of land next to a local police department and an old playground. A set of rarely used railroad tracks ran alongside the edge of the property.
Like Nana, I was not happy with her new apartment. At the time, I thought she was the most glamorous person on the planet. Her apartment and northeastern Pennsylvania were not places where I thought a glamorous person should live.
In the years to come, I would dread visiting her. In the summers she kept the air conditioning blowing nonstop, which made me shiver and feel restless. In the winter the heat blasted, making me sweaty and tired. I also felt sad for her, as her dancing days dwindled and her international flights and cruises became bus trips to Amish country in southern Pennsylvania. To save money, she stopped getting her hair dyed and set.
After I moved away for school and work, Nana and I would write each other letters a couple of times a month, and occasionally speak on the phone. The distance meant I could talk to her and not feel trapped in that apartment, or (worse) have to see her trapped in it.
I remember a phone conversation we had in my mid 20s, shortly after I came out to her in a letter. After some small talk, she raised the topic of me being gay. “I’ve known since you were a little kid. I’ve been waiting years for you to tell me. I mean, I lived in Los Angeles so I knew actual gay people, kiddo. And I mentioned my friend John to you a lot because I wanted you to know it was ok to be gay. I knew you didn’t have anyone else to do that for you.”
I’d be lying if I said that in that moment I suddenly remembered a time when Nana’s words saved my life. Although I often felt depressed, lonely, and hopeless while growing up, I have no recollection of Nana coming into my mind when I was at my lowest and bringing me back from the brink.
But she was someone who I always felt safe with, and I never worried about what she’d think about me being gay if I did come out. I often worried about losing or at best being harshly condemned by everyone else in my family: parents, sister, aunts and uncles, cousins, and Grammy. But never Nana.
Perhaps that subtle, constant comfort — invisible to everyone else — was exactly what I needed at a time when more overt or visible acceptance could have put my physical wellbeing at risk. The late 1980s and early 1990s in that part of Pennsylvania were not a time for big, flashy pro-LGBTQ pronouncements, as my classmates showed time and again.
That day after we hung up, as I sat in my cramped Brooklyn apartment, I realized that what made Nana my favorite family member had nothing to do with where she lived or how often she danced or how brazenly she smoked.
It was the courage she had to leave Pennsylvania and try something new when her life was at its worst.
It was her willingness to do what was best for her — to be herself — even if it wasn’t what others expected or demanded.
But most of all it was that she saw a scared gay kid and quietly — and carefully — helped him believe he would one day be ok.
