I'm From Driftwood

by Frances

It is my dad’s 36th birthday and I am holding a cardboard box that is moving. He’s on the phone —he’s often on the phone—but the night’s plan has no room for interruptions. My present has begun to open itself.

This is the first living thing that I’ve ever been able to present to anyone, and my hands are shaking when my Dad says, into the phone, “Oh, they got me a kitten.”

Someone names the kitten Pete because that’s what he looks like, and I become absorbed in his habits. I am shocked by the functionality of the litterbox. I learn what “neuter” means.

Pete’s home and mine is on a jagged hill of subdivision houses, so heavy on lifted foundations and skylights that you’d imagine there was a beach nearby. There is no beach nearby. The cliff behind our house, carved out by construction workers only a few years before, overlooks the main stretch of road, named after a civil war battlefield. I spend afternoons watching traffic and rolling rotten vegetables from our garden into the street below. Pete prefers to plunge himself rear-first down the cliff’s edge, feigning panic by wagging his paws, crustacean-like, towards the nearest shrub. He is always very close to landing on his feet.

But we are at our best when we’re indoors, doing what I call “making a picture.” We’ll curl up together next to a pile of laundry we’ve just folded; on the edge of a carpet we’ve vacuumed; or on a couch with neat stacks of bills lined up on the edge. We’ll pretend to sleep and lie in wait for my parents to come home and see us, Pete and me.

We are friends, and we are afraid for each other. Every evening we find one another at the back door, and check to see that we are still Here. I begin reading stories about pioneer children taking their dogs to their one-room schoolhouses and I wonder how I can lobby for a bigger backpack.

And then Pete is gone.

Afternoons go by. My brother and I put up flyers on signposts and my parents start giving each other meaningful looks. On the seventh day, my dad wakes us up early to tell us that he and my mother have found Pete dead on the side of our subdivision’s main road. They’ve buried him. They show us the shovel. I feel hollow and excited. I want the phone to ring and for it to be a celebrity who will have sensed the profoundness of our loss and will offer the kind of weighty condolences that can only come from repeated rehearsals. Both of my parents cry.

After that we have cat years and non-cat years. There’s no cat the year I begin to get a murky sense of something that I can only then see as an irrevocable liability, a big gay cloud on the horizon. When that feeling comes, it makes me think of what Pete must have seen coming. My sense of tragedy is the slow inevitability of a four-door sedan going the residential speed limit into a body that can do nothing to save itself.

And when the thickness of that fear gives way, I’ll listen and hear the thin walls of our house adjust like the shaking of a cardboard box. And it’s then, with no sense of panic aside from a slight trembling in my hands, that I am desperate to allow myself to be given away.

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by Arni M.

Like many gays in the United States, I grew in up in a heterosexist and devoutly Protestant family. We went to church very frequently, where pastors would demagogue us and frighten us with elaborate descriptions of how we would burn in hell if we did not repent of our sins and seek forgiveness from Jesus Christ. By the time I was eighteen years old, I myself was a very devout Christian who had been praying and praying for God to take away my homosexual tendencies.

During my first year as a university student, I began confiding to a few close friends that I was gay, even though I was still in the process of trying to reverse my homosexuality through prayer. The university I was attending had a reputation for being a very socially liberal–if not left-wing–enclave, so I felt more sure that I would find more stable support there, even from fellow Christians.

One of my friends at the time was a very devout fundamentalist Protestant Christian from a socially conservative town in the United States. She nonetheless had been quite friendly to me during the first few months that I had known her, so I had little reason to believe that she would ever do anything manipulative or domineering against me.

One Saturday morning, I was casually having lunch in the dining hall when this friend came by, set her stuff down on the chair next to me, and said to me: “Hey, how are you? God woke me up a half-hour ago and told me to come to the dining hall and meet you here. I guess it was because he wanted me to talk to you, because you’ve been on my mind all of yesterday.”

I initially thought very little of what she said, since that was how people often talked in the town where I grew up. I continued eating as she got her food and sat next to me. Then we began on what I thought would simply be a casual conversation.

Then, suddenly, she said to me: “We’re going nowhere with this. I know God sent me here for a reason, and we’re not addressing it. God told me that there’s something that you need to tell me, so I’m ready to hear it. Whatever it is, I want to be there for you to comfort you and to help you. Talk to me.”

I was not expecting to hear that. I did not know what to say; I thought we were just having a casual conversation. So I talked to her about how I had been feeling homesick and how stressed out I was getting over exams. That was all I could think of. But she didn’t seem satisfied. She kept on telling me, “We’re going nowhere.”

So then I began to tell this “friend” about my struggles with my homosexuality. I had only said a few sentences when she grabbed my arm and said: “Hold it right there, that’s all I needed to hear.” At that second, a startling gut instinct told me that I never should have trusted her with that information.

“Oh yes, the Lord is speaking to me right now.” she said with her hand still squeezing my arm tightly. Then out of nowhere, she pointed her finger right in my face and shouted: “You know what that is? That’s the devil trying to tempt you to follow him instead of the Lord. The devil wants to defeat you so that he can drag you into hell with him. Well BEAT IT! You know God despises homosexuality and that homosexuals will never be worthy of going to heaven. Resist those temptations. Resist them! There are temptations everywhere in this sinful world, and if you surrender to them, you have surrendered yourself into an eternity into hell. God has his hands extended towards you, but only you have the choice to sacrifice those worldly desires and take God’s hand. Are you going to follow Satan, or are you going to follow God? ARE YOU GOING TO FOLLOW SATAN, OR ARE YOU GOING TO FOLLOW GOD?”

I was shocked and scared, and I thought that I was going to faint right there. Her voice had become louder, more stern, and more forceful. As she screamed at me in the middle of the dining hall, students were walking by staring at us, wondering just what we were doing and why we were making–or rather, why she was making–such an embarrassing and conspicuous scene.

After that, she took out her Bible, and she spent an hour spitting out Bible verses and using them to justify her antagonism against my homosexuality. I tried to tell her that I had an exam coming up in a couple hours and that I had to study, but she told me that “God was more important than an exam.” I sat there passively and helplessly as she kept on screaming out Bible verses at the top of her lungs. More and more students walked past us, glaring at us with disgust.

Eventually, she asked me, “Are you at peace?” I lied and said yes.

But I was not at peace at all. Still, I tried to hide my feelings of shock, disbelief, denial, confusion, and frustration as she bade me goodbye. Before she left, she said to me, “And I hope that God will give you the perfect WOMAN whom you can spend the rest of your life with.”

For a long time after that, I hated myself and often wished that I could die. Later on, however, I would be fortunate enough to come across close friends who would teach me how to accept my homosexuality, and more importantly that I should just be myself, no matter what any one person tells me. Today, I am proud to be openly gay, and I am much more at peace now than I ever was while I was closeted.

by K.W.

I’m 21 now but when I was 9, my mom enrolled me in the YMCA Summer Program. I found that my best friend ‘R’ from school was going to be there too and I was so excited. Our moms were really close friends as well. R and I noticed that all the girls had boyfriends so we decided we would be girlfriends. We kissed and held hands and lived happily ever after…that is until 3 days later when all the kids started throwing things at us and calling us lesbians. We were 9. We didn’t even know what that word was! The counselors ended up calling our parents and I got into a lot of trouble. Living in the bible belt and my mom being Southern Baptist, she did not like that at all. She told me it’s gross and it’s wrong to feel that way and I had better forget about it. So I did for 8 years. I tucked that memory deep down inside and forgot all about R. I kept my feelings secret, even from myself.

Then at 16, it all came together and it hit me like a brick.  Other women look at each other all the time. But not the same way I do. The things my girl friends feel when they look at guys are the things I feel when I look at girls. I thought “Oh sh** I’m gay!” My mom’s speech found me again. “Gross…wrong…” I forced myself to look at men. That didn’t work. I even tried to “Jesus the gay out.” I revoked my Wiccan ways. Maybe if I prayed the right way to the right god I could be straight. That definitely didn’t work. I’ve always been tomboyish preferring jeans and Chucks to dresses and heels. But I went out and bought heels and started wearing makeup every day. But those feelings just wouldn’t go away. So I just decided to go with bisexual although I only dated and slept with men. I was too afraid to do anything like that with a girl. What if I never wanted to be with a man again and be “normal”?

In my later teen years and early adulthood, I got into some really bad relationships with men but I finally found one that was perfect. Gentle, caring, sweet, but something was missing. I realized I was living a lie and I just couldn’t do it anymore. I called him in tears, wailing “I’m gay! I’m a lesbian! I’m so sorry!” He said that was just fine and he loved me anyways. I was flabbergasted! He was the first person I came out to AND he still loves me? I’m not disgusting? Cool! We’re still best friends. I told all my friends and they were so supportive and awesome. I wanted to tell my mom but I didn’t know how. So I didn’t. I told her my boyfriend and I broke up and I didn’t really give her a reason why. Life went on and she kept trying to set me up with guys. I politely turned her down every time but then one night at dinner I just replied “I don’t like men.” She asked if I was a lesbian. I worked up the nerve and said “Yes. I am. I’m a lesbian.” And it felt so good to say it. As I got up to leave, I told her I loved her. She said she couldn’t say it back. Needless to say I was heartbroken. Over the next week, we argued furiously. It was so terrible I left home. I moved out and in with a close friend. It was painful and it sucked but I would do it all again.

We’re still very close and she’s sort of came around but not as much as I’d like. She doesn’t want to hear about any girls I’m seeing or anything of the sort. But I tell her anyways because I love her and I want her to know about these amazing things going on in my life. I want her to know who I am. Even if she pretends she’s not listening, she still is.

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