Reclaiming a Queer Identity
How publishing a novel nudged me out of the closet . . . again
The woman across the table from me went quiet. We were sitting together in a small coffee shop so that she could tell me what she’d thought of the manuscript of my debut novel, Give. At the time, she was not a friend, although I wanted her to be: she was smart, candid, and literary. And so, several weeks before, I had asked her tentatively if she would mind reading my manuscript. I wanted the opinion, I told myself, of someone who knew books, but who didn’t know me.
Now, she leaned forward in her chair, hesitating. She had just sung the book’s praises, and I was glowing a little. But her sudden hesitancy scared me, and I shifted in my seat.
“I was just wondering,” she began, her voice low, “how you made all that lesbian stuff up.”
Give is not explicitly an LGBTQIA+ book. Although it wades through a lot of contemporary themes, the novel is mostly about the timeless question of what motherhood means, and all that mothers give — and give up — for their children. But there is a major character who falls in love with another woman, and I had not shied away from telling their love story, sexy details and all.
When I was writing those parts of the book, I barely gave them a second thought. I’d watched the first season of Orange is the New Black, after all; women loving women — and even how they do it — hardly seemed radical anymore. And still, I was not prepared for the subtle (and not so subtle) ways that publishing Give would push me to publicly claim a part of my identity that had, for the last decade, been mostly private and wholly personal.
I came out as a queer woman in 1993. It was my first year at college, and within months of my arrival, I had fallen head over heels for a smart, sexy, guitar-playing woman from Massachusetts. My feelings for her were unprecedented, but still, I was not completely surprised. How had I not realized all those years? It was just like the Indigo Girls said in the song that my new girlfriend put on my mix tape: “I missed ten million miles of road I should have seen.”
But despite the accepting atmosphere of my liberal arts college, being queer in the world in the 1990s was not what it is today. It was the decade of the brutal deaths of Matthew Shephard and Brandon Teena; awareness about the ways LGBTQIA+ people are harassed, discriminated against, and harmed was only beginning to creep into mainstream society. Even in progressive California where I moved after college, homophobia was omnipresent. After a girlfriend and I checked into a quaint bed-and-breakfast on the Mendocino coast, we found a scribbled note on the windshield of our car: “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” When, on a date at a small San Francisco restaurant, we held hands over the table, all the kitchen staff came out to the dining room to gawk.
Still, there was an acceptance, even a celebration, of the gay community in the Bay Area that I took for granted. When I moved, some years later, to North Carolina, my father, a native of the state, took me aside.
“It’s not San Francisco,” he warned me. “Be careful.”
I bristled; I was not in the habit of hiding. Asheville, I’d heard, was the San Francisco of the South; I’d seen the rainbow flags myself when I’d visited. My father hadn’t lived in North Carolina for forty years. He couldn’t know how things had changed.
Two months later, the principal at the high school where I was teaching called me into his office. A student had complained to him that we’d discussed gay marriage in class one day.
“You’re not in California anymore,” the principal cautioned.
Being a young queer woman in Asheville was not what I’d imagined. Even if the town was far more queer-friendly than the surrounding areas, dating in a tourist town of sixty thousand was simply not what it had been in the Bay Area. When I finally met a fellow dyke my age, I asked her about the queer scene here. Was I missing something?
“Nope. There are six dykes and we’ve all slept with each other,” she said bitterly. She was packing her car for California, she told me.
Meanwhile, I began carpooling the thirty miles to work with a fellow teacher named Don. We both loved teaching, running, and mountain biking, but as a straight, mainstream man from Georgia, he felt light years away from who I was. Still, I enjoyed his company and would stop by his house on my bike on the way to lunch with a lesbian group I’d connected with online. Those women were mostly middle-aged and partnered — with the exception of one bi-curious teenager — but being with them at least made me feel slightly less untethered from the queer scene I thought I’d find here.
The other elements of my new life in Asheville were exactly what I’d hoped for: I loved the mountains, the seasons, the small-town feel. I was also overjoyed by the community of close friends I was forming, something I’d struggled to find among the multitudes of the Bay Area. And, slowly, I found myself falling in love with Don. This was not what I had planned; I had moved to Asheville to find the woman with whom I would share my life. And yet it seemed silly to eschew the happiness and excitement I felt with him for the sole sake of adhering to the queer identity that had been mine for the last ten years. Two years later, we were married.
Sexual identity is complicated. Who and how we love is deeply personal, and yet we live out those loves publicly: at restaurants, bed-and-breakfasts, parks. People in same-sex relationships put themselves at risk every time they make their identities visible.
As I settled into a heterosexual marriage and threw myself into raising my kids, I knew what some people thought. I had chosen the safe path, the easy path, the path of least resistance. And, yes, it was nice to be able to hold the hand of my partner in public without raising eyebrows or turning heads. But, by choosing to marry a man, there was also a lot that I risked losing. I mourned losing the sense of belonging I’d felt in the queer community, the fellowship I’d felt among other dykes. More personally, I worried how I would cope with setting aside my attraction and desire for women. But that was the choice I made, the turn my life had taken. My queer identity, however significant it still felt to me, lay low and quiet. It withdrew to the realm of dreams and memories, not the public space.
And then I published Give. I soon discovered that the early reader who had questioned the authenticity of the lesbian love story was not alone in her preoccupation with the queer themes in the book. An early reviewer said she had enjoyed the book until two-thirds of the way through, when “the lesbian theme took over and ruined the story.” Even my publisher asked me curiously, within minutes of meeting me in person for the first time, why I had felt the need to include the lesbian sex.
Meanwhile, I read an article in The New Yorker by Louis Menand about authorial authenticity in today’s publishing world. “The view that certain characters are out of bounds for novelists who don’t share their identities, although it seems to contradict a basic premise of fiction writing, has penetrated the world of publishing,” Menand wrote. Even my local leftist bookstore stated that they would not carry a book if the author’s identity differed from that of the protagonist.
Suddenly the question of my sexual identity seemed much less private. Who are you to write this book? I could imagine a reader asking. We’ve read your blog; we know you’re married to a man in North Carolina and have three kids. And, while I disagree that authors’ imaginations must be limited to creating characters whose identities they share, I also felt the need to defend the authenticity of my voice.
Suddenly, I was coming out at conferences and bookstores, to individual readers and rooms full of people.Yet even as I publicly claimed an identity that had been largely private for over a decade, anxiety crept over me. I had not been “out” in the public domain since the early 2000s, and my unease felt like the legacy of an earlier time. I promoted my book wholeheartedly to anyone who might read it, but, privately, I worried. What would my boss think? My co-workers? My husband’s colleagues? My in-laws?
There’s nothing on my book’s cover that would hint that a love story between two women lies inside. There’s a picture of two sisters, because, at its heart, that is what the book is about: two sisters from a fractured family — one of whom just happens to be a lesbian. But even the book’s packaging as general fiction made me anxious, as if the queer theme were a hidden snake that could leap out and bite someone unexpectedly.
And then, a chance encounter with an elderly woman from Alabama went a long way to putting me at ease. I was doing a small event at a Chattanooga bookstore, and this woman and her friend had come to the city for the day, where they’d stumbled across my event. Afterwards, she had me sign her copy of Give and assured me she would love it. She was a stepmother herself, she told me, and already she knew she would identify with one of the characters.
As she jotted down her name so that I could friend her on Facebook, she confessed, “I mostly read Christian literature, but I’m going to read your book.”
My heart stopped in my chest. “Thank you,” I muttered, taking the scrap of paper with her name, certain that once she’d read the book, I’d never hear from her again.
A week later, she contacted me on Facebook Messenger. “I finished your book in one day,” she wrote. She confessed that she’d been out of her comfort zone, but thought the book was well-written and would resonate with many. She was glad to have met me, she concluded, and signed the note, “your friend.”
Her message elated me, even as it exposed my own prejudices. She was elderly, Christian, and from Alabama; for all of those reasons, I had assumed she would condemn me. But it also underscored what I believe to be the essential reason that readers read and writers write: to share our unique perspectives in a world of dizzying diversity, and — ultimately — to find our shared humanity, even as we risk sharing our true selves with the world.
