My Story (The Gay Years), Part 4

I knew. Wasn't it time someone else did?

But it was a pretty precarious time. All my long-term friends - Rachel, Michael, other people I haven't pseudonymed yet - had left for college. I was left with a single friend, Jennie, a mediocre job, and a half-time school schedule. I was close to being fully depressed; I wore the same shirt every day, and only about two different pairs of pants; I would bring a pizza home from work and eat the entire thing myself. It was ... well, it was bad. Yet there were a couple of good things, things that made it redeemable.

The classes I signed up for were, for the most part, nothing too spectacular - Introductory Anthropology, Introductory Sociology - but I also enrolled in a class I knew I had to take: Dream Interpretation. Long story short, it got me through that first term. We had normal class activities - I learned more about Freud and Jung in that class than I did in a year of university psychology - but it was honestly more like a group therapy session every week, and that's just what I needed. The class was about what you'd expect from the community college crowd: there were a couple of folks my age; a couple of new moms who were just going back to school; a mother-daughter duo who were likewise heading back; a couple of older folks who thought the class looked interesting. It was a safe place, and that's what I needed then. My town is conservative in the way of retired WASPs, so to find such a safe space was almost miraculous.

It's important to establish that I had such a place, because work definitely wasn't. I'd thought, when I started, that a "wine café" was necessarily cosmopolitan and liberal. I was wrong. It was owned by an old couple from California. Well, ostensibly owned - he cooked, and she did all the owning, and let me just say that the term "battle-ax" was invented to describe this woman. She was not just aggressive, she wouldn't rest until you agreed with her, so there was really no choice but to nod and smile. She would not only defeat you when you disagreed, she would deny that you could disagree. Following any disagreement, she would steal your firstborn children, burn your buildings, and sow ash over your empty fields. Most importantly, she wouldn't even refer to gay people as "gay"; she called us "weirdos." Not that she knew I was gay, at least not until later.

Jennie and I were the only hosts who worked at the restaurant, and as it was open 11-10, we were there pretty much all the time. As far as coming out goes, I'd decided by October or so that Jennie was the logical first choice. I remember the night, too; I invited her over to watch a movie, and after my family had gone to bed, I told her that I was gay. Her reaction was a loud "Really?" It was a good thing, though, because she ... well, she hadn't been waiting for it, exactly, but her secondary reaction was "Oh, well, that makes sense," which I heard a lot of during subsequent comings-out. Of course, then came all the questions about what I had done (nothing), who I crushed on (specifically, our co-workers), and so forth. Even though my experience was nonexistent, I was happy. Someone knew.

But, now, who else? I needed more. I needed a net. I mentioned my gaiety in passing in my Dream Interpretation class, but no one really made a big thing of it. Why should they? People routinely had much stranger dreams; at least one person started crying every week. I was gay, that was a part of me, and while I can appreciate that now, it made me impatient back then. I needed people to ask me and make a big deal of it, not treat it was just a normal thing. So, I poked around at work.

The other restaurant workers were a notably more liberal bunch than the owner. There was short little Rose, the physicist (well, physics student), who was also from Colorado and knew my old town. I grew close to her slowly, and ended up going to see The Devil Wears Prada with her that spring, which I think is as close as I ever got to talking with her about it. There was Julian, called Jule at the restaurant but who I knew as Jules because he'd dated Rachel. I approved of him, mainly because he was a nice, good-looking guy. Gay, I'd've thought, if I didn't know his history with Rachel. Then there was Aaron, a rather built guy who had a soft voice and a definite swish to his step, who I was determined to find out was gay even if he was in the Air Force. It didn't happen.

Finally, there was Nicole. She was the epitome of who I wanted to trust: She was a traveling actress, she'd lived in both London and New York, she had appeared in off-Broadway plays, she had an agent who sent her lists of roles every week. It was after lunch one day in the spring when I told her. We were sitting in the back, and she was paging through that week's list of roles. One of them was for a guest spot on Smallville, and we started talking about that. I never watched it, but I knew (who didn't?) of Tom Welling. I said something about finding him attractive, and that was it. She didn't make a big deal about it. Like with my class, it just was. And I'd been open about it with myself for long enough to realize that maybe that's all it needed to be. I didn't need to make being gay a big deal. Here was a friend who'd lived all over the world, who certainly had met gay people before, and she wasn't jumping up like I was a "weirdo" or like I'd just won some big prize. I was gay, and that was all; it was no different than if I'd taken out my contacts and shown her that I really had brown eyes.

I needed that, then. I needed normalcy, not an extreme reaction. I received it, and as much as I thought I wanted extravagance, I realized that I needed understatement more.