Facing one another, we sat on the living room couch. My middle school daughter had just returned from a week-long camp for adolescent girls. Themes of growing into womanhood were woven through art, dream work, ritual, nature meditation, fireside conversation. She had found the solitary forest meditation and the chats with the other girls particularly enriching. Now she was sharing one of those discussions with her mother. “I believe I'm a Lesbian, Mom. Another friend says she is Bisexual.” I wasn't shocked, but I was stunned. Can a person know who she is when she is only fourteen? I absorbed my daughter's message, and intuited she was right. I gave her a tremendous hug and shared one of my visions: “Before you were born, I thought that if you were to be a Lesbian you would have chosen the best possible family.” She smiled and indulged her mother who years ago told her about the awake dreamlike, pre-birth, little girl image I had of her.
There was no question about my total love for my daughter the day of her “coming out.” But as I listened in awe to her maturity, thoughts and questions swirled around inside my brain: What discrimination, limitations, even hate, would she face? Would getting married and raising a family be an option? How could her father and I support who she is and fight if necessary for her rights? Little did I understand then that this journey of my daughter's self-discovery would be my journey to a completer knowledge of what it means to be an authentic, courageous human being. Now, over eight years later, I can definitely say, my daughter's “Queerness” has been and is an incredible gift.
Getting up from the couch, I felt lost, not certain what being Gay might mean. During college I slowly became involved with women's issues and women's consciousness raising groups. Sheltered throughout my childhood and young adulthood, it was my eventual move to Oregon in the late seventies that opened my eyes to Lesbian women. I met and became good friends with a woman who happened to be a Lesbian and together we ended up leading a “Lesbian/Non-Lesbian” group. Our aim was to try and bring Gay/Separatist/Straight women together, despite our differences. During our difficult, often heated meetings, I grew up tenfold.
As part of my graduate school curriculum, I chose to study Women's Literature. The university even had a Queer Studies department, but back then I shied away from the Queer word and from delving into understanding the Queer world. My daughter's coming out that day made everything more personal and more relevant. For me the personal absolutely did turn into the political. I spontaneously met a thirty-years-together Lesbian couple who led me to a local chapter of PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians, Gays, Transgender, Bisexual, Intersex and Queer). Through PFLAG I found a weekly Youth Group for Queer and Questioning Youth, which my daughter eagerly and regularly attended. Through PFLAG, I became my daughter's staunchest ally and LGBITQQ supporter/activist. But this story isn't about my parenting, but about a daughter who became her mother's teacher and opened up my naïve, narrow definitions of gender, sexuality and truth.
As a middle school student, my daughter dressed completely in black. She once mentioned she wanted to be invisible, to fade into the background. But I never really connected this statement then with her increasing awareness of her difference. I knew she hung out with the boys rather than the catty girls but I didn't realize how many put-downs she heard between classes, or how isolated she felt by being who she was.
But she had been attending the LGBTQQ Youth Group for years and I credit this group and its adult facilitator for giving my daughter the strength, the bravery and the survival skills for embodying and voicing her truth. She spoke out at PFLAG fundraising dinners about her school experiences and became acquainted with the PFLAG President, Elise. With Elise, she went back to her middle school and spoke to several classes about her growing up experiences as a young Queer student. This daughter didn't blame or shame, but simply wanted to convey the need for tolerance and acceptance so that future Queer middle schoolers wouldn't have to hear the hateful, hallway whisperings.
In high school, she never sought attention around her Queerness, and yet she never wanted to hide herself either. She and her then-senior girlfriend were the only non-heterosexual couple to attend her girl friend's prom. Her girlfriend was of a more activist bent, and organized Day of Silence/Pride rallies. When the girlfriend was asked to be interviewed for the local paper about young adolescents coming out, my daughter went with her and the two were photographed for a city section article, “New Generation, Out and Out Loud.” Through this visible statement, a friend of my daughter's later shared with her that it gave him the courage to come out to his family.
Near the end of her high school years, my daughter became the school newspaper's Commentary Editor. She wrote several thoughtful essays about being an “out” LGBTQQ teenager and supporting others who chose to do so. Though earlier a member and semi-leader of the school's Gay/Straight Alliance, it was during her senior year that she created what she called “The Pride Club.” Once a week this group would hang out after school in a favorite teacher's classroom and simply talk about everything and anything. The teacher later confided how joyous it made her to be sponsoring this gathering.
Tears readily surface whenever I write about my incredible daughter. She was a humble, unintentional adolescent activist for equality. I understand completely the courage it took to be her authentic self during the teenage years when no one wants to be different or stand out in any way. She worked through her “black period,” her initial social withdrawal/possible depression and stepped forward into the light. As David Kato, the slain Ugandan Gay Rights Activist stated before he was killed: “If we keep on hiding, they will say we are not here.”
And this is my Queer daughter's treasured gift: She has known who she is all along. She has known that not everyone is born heterosexual, that we are born on a long continuum encompassing degrees of Gayness and Straightness. I would never have had these countless enriching experiences if it were not for my Queer daughter and my joining PFLAG. Befriending a transitioning Transgender woman taught me even more about the expanding definition of gender. The qualities we readily assign to male and female are like the yin and yang of humanity. Each human is not totally male or totally female. We have both the feminine and the masculine available to us. The presence of Queer allows each of us to become more completely and authentically ourselves.
I want so desperately to shout to other mothers who would discriminate against who my daughter is that homosexuals are born, not made and are here for a definitive purpose. They are our gifts to a wider world of loving and living. Diversity is richness; differences are celebrations. I am in deepest debt to my out loud, Queer daughter for an ever expanding circle of “coming out” friends and family, who enrich my existence. I agree with the Native American writer, Sherman Alexie, when he states, “..Years ago, homosexuals were given special status within the tribe. They had powerful medicine. I think it's even more today, even though our tribe has assimilated into homophobia. I mean, a person has to have magic to assert their identity without regard to all the bullshit, right?”
© 2012
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