Misfit or Popular Kid?

Have you ever been popular? Did you run with the popular kids in high school or in college? I hung out with the misfits in high school only to find myself as a popular lesbian in college.

My experience as a misfit taught me to live my life on my own terms. So that when I came out as gay I was emotionally prepared to be my own person. And to hell with everyone else and their petty small-mindedness anyway.

So that's how it went with me. When I came of age at 22 and as a popular lesbian, my devil-may-care attitude made me a little dangerous (and a little desirable too.) But mostly, being a popular and out lesbian meant I didn't have a lot of competition. It wasn't like lesbians were rushing sororities in those days. We only had gay and lesbian groups and newspapers. And I was the editor of one of those newspapers. My position gave me some visibility and a vehicle for my thoughts.

Those years of popularity made an impression on my young psyche. I "believed" myself likable, desireable and intelligent. I had no idea how vain I was. I just thought I was confident. Actually, it was like I went through an "ego-building boot camp" that would help me endure the hostilities that I would encounter outside the UCLA campus and the world beyond.

But the one thing I still have from those popular days is a personal sense of specialness. Everyone should be popular for a while just to feel that special. And if we're lucky that special feeling lasts a lifetime.

It's OK, Sally. RIP

Sally Ride and her choice to live a closeted gay life reminds me of so many lesbians I've known of her generation. If you wanted a career and were very ambitious as a woman in the 1960s to the 2000s, most professional middle-class lesbians did not come out publicly. They channeled their energies into their work because that was enough of an uphill fight. Their personal life (if they had one) they kept on the low-down. Only those of us who chose to be political and cultural activists came out publicly. In the last decade everyone is coming out, and the sheer numbers of out people supports those who are now out. There wasn't such strength in numbers in the 1970s to the 1990s. So staying in the closet wasn't a matter of cowardice but of sheer survival.

I hope we can be kind to Sally Ride for staying in the closet. Her mission was to reach for the stars. It's a shame that her time and society couldn't also accept her love for a woman.

Get Me Out of the Box!!!

Several years ago I kept hearing about getting out of the box or just thinking outside the box. Well, I started to think about boxes, how many are in my life and in the world where I live. I mean almost everything is a box: your house, your stores, your car or even your fridge.  And if you're really into diagrams I bet you could create a box for your job, your partner and your cat. The box is a paradign that is just about everywhere.
 
But as I often think about lesbians and our culture, I realized that we have quite masterfully created our own boxes for our own unqiue culture. There's the ordinary boxes of butch and femme, but for our sexuality and our relationships, we even have more labels and their corresponding boxes than the mainstream culture has for straight people. Perhaps it's because we have so much in common with each other and yet so little in common with each other too. Or to put it another way:  just because we are everywhere doesn't mean we are all alike.
 
Many of us look for our lesbian sub-group and often find common interests and identities. We find our box. A few of us create our own boxes. And dare I say, the enlightened ones skip the boxes and just wing it through life.