Archive

Notes & Queeries: Come Out, Again

Notes & Queeries is a monthly column that focuses on the personal side of pop culture for lesbians and bisexual women.

As everyone who is gay surely knows, there is no end to coming out. The first time might have been the hardest, but it was only the first time. After that, there’s a lifetime of coming out ahead of you. You’ll find yourself coming out to random strangers at parties, to people you want to date, to long-lost friends who looked you up on Facebook, and, of course, to members of your extended family.

In a recent South of Nowhere episode, “Spencer’s 18th Birthday,” Spencer Carlin faces the consequences of coming out again when her grandmother, the mother of the formerly homophobic Paula Carlin, comes to visit. Spencer’s grandmother doesn’t know that her perfect little granddaughter is gay, and finding out doesn’t exactly lead to grandmotherly pride. It turns out that Paula used to be homophobic for a reason: her mother taught her to be that way.

Although Spencer is ready to come out to her grandmother, her mother prevents her from doing so at first, telling Spencer that she doesn’t want her to get hurt. But when Grandma starts to judge Spencer’s gay friends for having made the wrong “choice,” Paula outs her own daughter, then defends her and declares that “a mother’s job is to love her child unconditionally, and to be proud of her.” But instead of agreeing with Paula, Grandma flees the Carlin house, unable to accept the fact that her granddaughter is gay.

During Spencer’s last conversation with her grandmother in the episode, her grandmother explains that she never loved Spencer’s grandfather but stayed married to him “because it was the right thing to do.”

Spencer asks, “But doesn’t your heart tell you what’s right?”

“If it were only that simple,” her grandmother replies.

Although Spencer says, “Maybe it is,” her all-we-need-is-love argument doesn’t seem to convince her grandmother, who came from a generation in which marriage was much more of an unbreakable contract than it is today.

The episode made me wonder how often gay people avoid coming out to their grandparents for fear of a similar reaction.

Not everyone’s grandparents are homophobic, obviously, but our grandparents grew up in a time when homosexuality was not nearly as accepted as it is now.

And I admit that’s one of the reasons I didn’t come out to my own grandparents.

When I first began working at AfterEllen.com, I had no idea how it would affect my life in countless unexpected ways. One of those was my ability to remain circumspect about my sexual orientation.

I didn’t want to be closeted, but working at AfterEllen.com often removed my ability to simply be a person – regardless of sexuality – at, for example, a dinner party or a networking event. Every time someone asked me about my job, I had to come out to them.

So I never told my grandmother about my work at AfterEllen.com, or that I am a lesbian.

I’m referring to my paternal grandmother, Ruth Earnshaw Lo, who was an American woman who married a Chinese man, my paternal grandfather, in 1936. He passed away before I was born. I was very close to my paternal grandmother, so the fact that I chose to not come out to her before she died in 2006 has sometimes weighed on me.

My grandmother was always a person I looked up to, for her intelligence, her sense of humor, and her courage. In the 1930s, she traveled to China from New York on her own – in a time when single women simply didn’t do that – to seek out my grandfather, whom she had met at the University of Chicago. She enjoyed telling me about how they married in Shanghai on the day that the Japanese invaded, and then spent their honeymoon fleeing down the Yangtze River.

She was one of the very few Westerners to live in China during the Cultural Revolution, and the fact that she was a Westerner in a Communist country didn’t do my family much good. It was a hard time, and I grew up hearing stories about it that made it clear how good things were in the U.S.

My family moved here in 1978, and my grandmother wrote a memoir of her experiences called In the Eye of the Typhoon, which was published in 1980. Reading it gave me a glimpse into how she saw things.

I believe that the woman she was when she was younger – the woman who went to the other side of the world alone, the woman who survived 40 years in China as an outsider – would probably have accepted me as a lesbian. But by the time I built up enough courage to come out to her, she had aged so much. In her last years of life, she lost some of herself. Sometimes she didn’t know who I was.

I always wanted her to see me as someone she would be proud of. I couldn’t overcome the fear that she would lose that pride in me because I’m gay.

So I didn’t come out to her.

If she were alive today, I would. I was unexpectedly moved by Spencer’s courage – albeit fictional – in coming out to her grandmother. I realized that I’ve never seen that on TV before. There are plenty of coming-out stories, but few coming-out-again stories, and we need more of them.

But also, by coming out to her grandmother, Spencer started to build a bridge across generations. And one thing I’ve learned in the past couple of weeks is that we as LGBT people need to build bridges to those who don’t support us.

Many statistics say that voters over 60 strongly supported Proposition 8. Not all of them, of course, but even in San Francisco, voters “older [than] 60 were overwhelmingly for” Prop. 8, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. I’ll bet that a lot of those senior citizens have grandchildren, and some of those grandchildren are gay. We all know that people who are friends with gay people – or who are close to gay family members – are more likely to be our allies in this struggle.

I’ve heard some people say that the hope for equality is in the future. We just have to wait for this generation of old folks to pass on; then the younger, more gay-friendly generations will make everything all right.

I agree that the young people of today seem to be open and accepting of so much difference, and that is heartening. But I don’t think the answer is writing off our grandparents. We need them, too, and all of their experience, to help us in the movement.

Good for Spencer for her fearlessness. May we all emulate that.

For more on Malinda Lo, visit her website.

Lesbian Apparel and Accessories Gay All Day sweatshirt -- AE exclusive

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Back to top button