Coffee Shop Rabbi

A sense of humor is essential for good activists.

This is an updated version of a post I originally published on Open Salon in September of 2010.  In thinking about the things I’m grateful for this LGBTQ Pride Month, it occurred to me it was still very timely.

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I came out in 1988, just after a rancorous divorce became final.  A very nice woman asked if I’d ever tried kissing another woman, and a few minutes later it was clear to me that I’d been barking up the wrong tree all my life.  It was a moment of great joy, followed by sheer panic.

I had two little boys, ages 4 and 6, and nothing, absolutely nothing, was more important to me than the two of them.

Was I going to mess them up for life?   Was I going to lose them?  Should I just declare celibacy and give it up?  I wrote to  an acquaintence who had been “out” many years, with two daughters from a previous marriage, and poured out my fears.  She wrote me back with the phone number for the National Center for Lesbian Rights saying, “Call them.  Do whatever they tell you.”  Then she said my kids were going to be fine.

I did, and they are.  But there’s much, much more to it than that.

The attorney to whom NCLR referred me informed me that for the umpteenth time in my life, I was the Queen of Dumb Luck.  My divorce had become final in one of the very few counties in the United States where my orientation alone was not grounds for taking my kids from me in 1988.  My best bet was to come out of the closet completely, so I did.  On March 17, 1988, I phoned my ex and told him.  To his credit, it has never been an issue.

I told the boys that I had fallen in love with a girl.  They liked her.  Unlike their boring mom, she was good at catch and knew everything about baseball.  Sure, fine, and what’s for dinner?

The kids were in kindergarten and first grade, and there I wavered.  Surely this was my private business.   Surely it wasn’t appropriate to phone up the principal and say, “Hi, I’m a lesbian.”  So I waffled along for a while, hoping for the best.  And that’s where I went wrong.

Aaron began getting into fights at school.  The teacher called.  I went in to chat, and it turned out that he was out there defending my honor.  The words “gay” and “fag” were favorite schoolyard epithets (in first grade!) and whenever someone used them, he took it personally on my behalf.  He told them to take it back, and then two little boys would roll on the ground, fighting.

I outed myself immediately to the teacher, explained that this was a young man defending his mother — and please, could we just ban those words on the playground?

“You are what?” she gasped,  and when I repeated it, she said she’d have to take it up with the principal.  Over the next few weeks it became clear that the words “fag” and “gay” were a lot more acceptable than a lesbian mom and her spawn, and we needed to find a new school if my kids were going to feel remotely safe in class.

Finding a new school where we could be out as a queer family turned out to be quite the project in 1988, even in the liberal East Bay of the liberal San Francisco Bay Area.  I went from school to school, asking directly if “diversity” included “lesbian parented children.”  I was privileged to have the means to check out every private school in town, and I was hustled out of most of their admissions offices like an unwanted peddler.  [All those places now trumpet the fact that they love queer families, and all I can say is, hallelujah.  I am not naming names, because the guilty parties have mended their ways.]

God bless St. Paul’s Episcopal School.  When I asked the admissions director, Laroilyn Davis, if a lesbian family would be welcome at St. Paul’s, she said, “It’s time we included a family like yours.”    In the years to come, the administration there always had our backs:  individuals might find our presence distasteful, but there was never any question that we belonged.

But the damage was done.  My children spent far too long in a situation where they knew we were a second-class family, where we were the objects of open disgust.  I am well aware that my younger son is a social worker partly because he has a special affinity for children who don’t feel safe.   His big brother will still offer to punch you out if you use the word “fag.”

And as for me, I am torn between gratitude for being the Queen of Dumb Luck, who came out in the most liberal area in the country, who had the means to seek out a safe place for her children, who had legal support and moral support and two courageous sons — and fury that any of that was necessary.

Yes, things are better now than they were in 1988.  They need to be better still.  Our opponents don’t seem to understand that anti-gay policies hurt the whole society:  the collateral damage is horrendous.  The lack of same sex marriage rights means that the children of queer families  grow up knowing that they, the children, are less in the eyes of the law. The courts are just now figuring out that the federal Defense of Marriage Act [DOMA] means that lesbian and gay couples can lose their home to the IRS when one of them dies, unlike straight couples, who are defended against death taxes.

When we discriminate against any group of people, we are all the less for it.  When are we going to figure that simple fact out?