A few years ago, I took a class at Humboldt State called Queer Women's Memoir. I was taking it at the same time I was taking a creative nonfiction class. This proved to be the magic formula for me to write about some uniquely me, but completely not unique, experiences with same-sex attraction. I struggled and still do with that fact that I get soft and wet for men as well as women. Sometimes it's the other way, women make me soft and men make me gag. In fact, when I was a younger woman, I spent a lot of time in Hillcrest, a gay-borhood of San Diego, completely oblivious to the fact that part of why I loved it there was not because I was safe from bro-dudes rejecting my fat body, but because I was a gay. I just didn't know that. I was still insisting that my intense feelings towards my female friend was some kind of fluke. I didn't like Women, I loved Her. I wasn't a lesbian, because I still had feelings for dudes. Plus I didn't drive a Subaru, or wear cargo shorts, or whatever other dumb lesbian stereotype I believed. I just liked this one woman this one time before defaulting to paranormal heteronormativity. All my experience with men in a romantic sense was awful and traumatic, but I couldn't imagine being in a relationship with a woman. I could only seem to see man, wife, coupla kids, and a dog. Even when that didn't seem to be what I wanted. I was supposed to want that, wasn't I? Denial is a strange town.
Took years and another failed attempt at falling madly for a woman to realize my romantic feelings didn't have to be as cut and dry as society made it seem. It took A Cup of Water Under My Bed, Daisy Hernandez and, especially, Spit and Passion, Cristy C. Road and some help from my self-proclaimed lesbian uncle Heal McKnight, who taught my creative nonfiction class, to see that there are a lot of ways to be a little gay and that that queerness wasn't barred by rules about who, how, or what to love. Spit and Passion married fandom and queerness in a way that respooled my brain. I didn't know other Green Day fans felt as complicated as I did. I didn't realize what Billie Joe was singing half the time or why I loved Dookie so much, but suddenly 20 years later Road opened my ears so now all I hear are the gay parts. She also reintroduced me to the closet. She helped to define my closet retroactively and because of that I wrote this flash piece. Yes, Girls Too allowed me to clarify the closet I (still) lived in and to free the lingering questions I kept about myself. There is a lot left out of this. And I think about expanding it when I re-read it. Someday, maybe. In honor of National Coming Out Day it felt appropriate to share. Yes, Girls Too: a short story about closets.
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March 2021
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