You hear your parents tell you over and over again how you must not tell anyone. You hear how your stepmother lost her job at the YWCA because she was gay. You hear about Stonewall and Harvey Milk and all the unnamed men and women beaten and sometimes killed by gay bashers. You are told how if your parents lose their jobs, you will lose the house and you don’t want to be homeless. You don’t, however, hear the word lesbian. Gay is the word your mother prefers, as it sounds more neutral, less sexualized. Lesbian is a word she will claim much later.
You hear a rock hit your living room window one day, and the whole family goes outside to look at the golf-ball-sized hole in the glass. Your stepmother cries, “They threw a rock through our window because we are gay!” But you didn’t hear any name-calling, and you didn’t see any note, nor did you see anyone running away. You live on a busy street and think it was just as likely that a truck kicked up a rock as that someone threw it intentionally. This assumption of harassment doesn’t sit quite right with you, but you are quick to use this story as an example of how you were persecuted, even though you were never really sure if it was true. It was only one way to look at the hole in the window.
In eighth grade you no longer had to keep the secret — somehow the students at school found out, and the story was everywhere. Unfortunately, your name starts with “L” so “lesbian” pairs up with it quite nicely. You are called Lara the Lesbian for the rest of the year. “Lez,” “Lesbo,” and (inexplicably) “Fag” are yelled at you in the halls between classes. Even a few people you thought were your friends write, “To Lara the Les” in your yearbook. You get into a fight with one of your closest friends, and she gets the last shot in, looking at you with hard eyes and saying, “Maybe you really are a lesbian like your mother.” Years later, you will forget the reason you were so mad at each other, but her parting words still echo clearly in the cavity of your chest.
You are asked, “But don’t you have a father?” over and over. Back in the seventies and eighties, artificial insemination was not an option for gays and lesbians. The first test-tube baby was not born until 1978, so it was a legitimate question. But your father happened to move across the continent and not all of the kids at school believed that he even existed.
“But who is your real mother?” This question infuriates your mother. She and your stepmother want to be viewed as equal parents. But they can’t erase your father, and you don’t want them to, because not only do you love him, he is your one connection to the straight world. He is the one parent you can talk about without hedging pronouns, and he looks really good on paper. Besides that, you want to be very clear to all interested parties who you got your DNA from. Any ambiguity as to who your mother is diminishes her importance to you.
Teenaged boys will ask to look in your windows, even though you assure them that nobody wants to see your parents naked. You compare your stepmother to the androgynous Pat on "Saturday Night Live," and it is an accurate description, even down to their shared first name. Your Pat loves the skit and tries to mimic the character as much as possible.
In high school, every single straight male you meet asks, “Did you ever think you were a lesbian?” or some other permutation of that sentiment. You spend your teen years on a quest to prove your heterosexuality. It sounded like, “Look, I have a boyfriend, so I can prove I’m not gay.” Of course you don’t tell anyone about the tingling rush you feel when you look at the supermodels on Cosmopolitan magazine’s covers in the checkout line. You push any thought of women as sexy deep down inside, as deep as you possibly can. At night, you are afraid that you might wake up and find that you have turned into a lesbian in your sleep, and then you would have to live this sad, furtive life forever. You know that your stepmother knew she was gay since she was twelve, and you were relieved when you passed that age and still liked boys, but you also knew that your mother didn’t turn gay until she was in college and became involved in the feminist movement. College was still a few years away but you refused to become a feminist, just to be on the safe side. You don’t want to be the kind of feminist you see—unshaven, man-clothed, angry all the time. You want to be Mrs. Brady, Mrs. Anybody, and you want, more than anything, to be beautiful, sexy, a head-turner.
But you also don’t see why anyone would think girls aren’t as good as boys. Of course girls can be anything they want. Of course they are just as smart. Why can’t they be anything they want and still shave their legs and wear high heels and stay at home with their children? You want, more than anything, for your mother to stay at home, but she works full-time and that’s not something that is ever going to happen in your lifetime. When you tell your stepmother that you want to stay home and have children, she follows you into the front yard, yelling, “You will not be a housewife! You will be a business woman!” You jump over the hedge at the side of the yard and take off running for high school. You don’t know what a business woman does exactly, but it sounds boring. You only know how much you yearned for your mother when you were small. You want more than anything to raise children who don’t have mother-sized holes in their chests.
You hear your stepmother berate your brother over and over, like a broken record. “If I had been born a man, I could have been a minister, or a doctor. If I had been born a man I would be so much more successful. White men have everything—all the power, all the money, all the good jobs. Look at you, you were born a boy, you were given every opportunity from birth and you just squander it. You’ll never amount to anything.” So many words tell you that men are the ruling class, and you want to hitch yourself to a rising star, so you don’t have to rise yourself. You’re not sure you are as smart as your mother thinks you are.
If you have to choose between being a man-hater, an abuser, and being soft, feminine, gentle — if those are the only options you think you have, you will teach yourself to be submissive, you will make yourself as sexy-beautiful as you can, and you will even vote Republican. You will look for a strong man to defend you against everything that scares you.
* * *
Your parents’ sexuality complicated things. Everyone treated you as a fascinating specimen under a microscope, asking probing questions about being raised by lesbians. You knew gayness was something that must be hidden and lied about and you had been given no other words for what was wrong in your family, so lesbian was the only word left to explain why you never felt safe in your house. Especially when your stepmother’s particular brand of lesbianism was of the man-hating variety, when the rage spewed over the dinner table was often directed at men in general, your brother in particular. It was an easy out, but you knew it wasn’t quite right. Red wool socks are both colorful and scratchy, but the red and the scratch are independent of each other. Other red things are not scratchy; other scratchy things are not red. But as a child you did go through a lesbian-hating phase, though it only lasted a few months, because you only had one word for the two conditions that defined your stepmother. You knew there was something more to what was wrong at home than just same-sex union, but it gave you a target for your impotent rage.
If you write this the wrong way, how will people look at Babs Walker? Your mother’s friend, the one who untied your sneakers to tickle your feet back when you were three or four, who didn’t know that you couldn’t tie your own shoes yet and were sensitive about it. The one who you refused to speak to for two solid years? And how many years did she keep coming over even though you were a total snot? She kept drinking coffee in the kitchen with your mother until one day you let your guard down and forgot that you were punishing her for untying your shoes and instead let her pull you onto her lap and everyone laughed about that resentment you held for so long. Babs painted her house the exact raspberry color of Bubblicious bubble gum, and she gave you your very own paintbrush and bucket even though you were too small to do anything resembling a decent job.
You picture Shirley and Betty giving you little presents every Christmas Eve, and letting you and your brother watch TV in their bedroom as you stayed up for the eleven o’clock service at church. They had cats and lots of books and a big garden. You remember Marty, who always made you feel like what you had to say was important, and who was always smiling. You don’t want your words used against them. You want to show the world how sweet and normal they were.
You remember them and all the other nice lesbian couples who weren’t weird or different or scary and how your stepmother’s mental illness drove them all away. You don’t blame them, but the problem with having a family made up of friends is that once they decided to leave, you didn’t run into them at weddings and funerals. Once they left, you never saw them again.
Excerpted with permission from "Girlish: Growing Up in a Lesbian Home" by Lara Lillibridge. Copyright 2018 by Skyhorse Publishing, Inc. Available for purchase on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Indiebound.
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