my closet had a revolving door.

On Pride and Permission

A few years before I met Susan, back in the days when I wore suits and heels and pearls, I was having dinner at Nobu in New York with a large group of women writers and editors.

It was the late nineties. The publisher of a well-known woman’s magazine leaned over and described herself to me as being post-gay. I wasn’t sure what she meant, and I asked her to explain.

You know, she said, sipping her sake, it means that you don’t really think about it too much anymore. That maybe you don’t do the things that you used to do before you were coupled, like going to the clubs, or marching, or openly identifying as gay.

I was mystified.

How could I not think about it too much anymore, or not openly identify as gay?

At the time, I was newly out; some family members didn’t “believe” me, and others refused to talk about it at all because, in their words, I’d always been such a good girl. My father and stepmother were wonderfully supportive and relieved, believing that my coming to terms with my sexuality would result in my meeting someone and maybe even settling down. But my closet had a revolving door, and I was in, and out, and in, and out, and in again until 1996, when two of my dearest friends, a couple, died of AIDS within months of each other. I had lost thirty colleagues (from one job) less than a decade earlier, when I was also very much in love with someone who did not love me back. I was working in the food business in Soho, and, by 1991 nearly every man I’d worked with was gone, vaporized into the mists that swallowed up an entire generation of (mostly) young men, entire industries, and entire chosen families.

Which is not to say that this was entirely the reason behind my coming out in the later 90s, although I told the people at Oprah back in 2020 when I was among a group of queer authors asked to talk about the one book that changed everything for them (mine was and is Mark Doty’s Heaven’s Coast); I said that there was a certain point at which I could no longer bear witness to the tragedy unfolding in front of me from the security and comfort of my closet.

I don’t talk about it much. Even for a memoirist, there are parts of one’s life that are not for public consumption. But, it should be said that, like most queer people, I knew that I was different from the time I was very young. I felt, from my earliest days, that I was on the outside looking in; that I was not privy to an inside joke that everyone else seemed to know; that all of those creatures called boys were interesting and sometimes even nice, in the way that a bowl of pasta could be nice. I also come from a long history of complex trauma which I have written about candidly, and it has often been implied that my orientation was somehow connected to this trauma. Maybe it was, but I really don’t think so: my maternal grandmother was a lesbian, and I am one of three gay cousins of the same generation whose grandparents were siblings. The only things resulting from schlepping through this life with a satchel of trouble on my back were trust issues, the refusal to believe that I would ever find love in my life, and the refusal to believe that love was my human right, as it is for anyone and everyone.

Early on, people got weirdly granular, sometimes shockingly so. Had you ever had a boyfriend, they wanted to know, and so I told them: yes, several, and all but one were loving, kind, gentle, and hilarious. But: not for me in that way. My father’s sister was more reductionist about it: sitting at the bedside of her beloved husband who was dying of congestive heart failure, she looked at him as he slept and turned to me sitting in the other chair in his hospital room, and said you’ll be alone if you don’t meet a man. Don’t you want to be with someone like we are — me and your uncle — at the end of your life?

I could not explain to her then that love is love. I could not explain to her that deep into our old age, my wife and I might run into the possibility that we’d be separated from each other despite marriage, powers of attorney, and healthcare proxies because, as our country hurtles to the far right, it has become legal for assisted living facilities to refuse to recognize married same-sex couples, even if they’ve been married for half a century. I could not explain to her about that afternoon when I came home from high school and found my usually taciturn grandmother sitting in one of our entry way chairs, her head in her hands, sobbing: her girlfriend of almost sixty years had had a stroke, and didn’t recognize her during their weekly visit. And just like that, their relationship was gone; I was the only person who knew about it because I was the only person who had figured it out, just as my grandmother had me sized up by the time I was fourteen. But we never spoke of it.

It’s eye-rollingly predictable that during Pride Month, Susan and I would have happened upon Gentleman Jack, the HBO series starring Suranne Jones and Sophie Rundle as Anne Lister and Ann Walker, who lived together openly in a religious union in 1834, having taken the sacrament together at Holy Trinty Church in York. With a brilliant script written by Sally Wainwright and largely taken from Lister’s millions of words (and some code) written in her journals, Gentleman Jack shows what every LGBTQ person knows: that families will snark and growl and conspire to end relationships by separating us from our beloveds; that colleagues will attempt to discredit us; that clergy will pronounce us freaks; that some of us will overcompensate with perfectionism everywhere from the boardroom to the bedroom. But most of us could not be post-gay any more than these two remarkable women were when they walked to the altar together and went home to begin their lives as a publicly recognized couple 190 years ago. Because: love is love.

(And yes: we’re a few years late, but we are obsessed with this series because of its beauty, its remarkable characters, its mind-boggling script. And okay: it sizzles. So sue me.)

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Those early days when my door stopped revolving were a little bit like being shot out of a canon: anyone who has come out (at any age) would likely agree. There were clubs (which I hated), and blind dates (also hated), and fix-ups (mostly hated), and blinding crushes that rendered me paralyzed, unable to form words, and on one occasion resulted in ventricular palpitations that landed me in the hospital. My beloved father once helpfully fixed me up with the gay daughter of some distant friends; she had the personality of a garden brick and no discernible sense of humor, and I had to explain to my dad that just because two people bat for the same team does not mean that they’re going to fall in love and run away together. Instantly, or ever.

My mother — she of the cabaret singing and the record contract, the fashion business and the modeling — was the last person I told, and who, to this day, refuses to refer to Susan as anything but my friend, or, if she’s feeling generous, my partner. As far as she was concerned, I was not a lesbian, nor was I necessarily straight: I was just me, bound to her by all sorts of requirements and obligations and demands, none of which assumed that there might ever be anyone else in my life. I was her primary relationship after her second husband died (and pretty much while he was alive), so the idea that I might fall hook, line, and sinker in love with someone else — whomever they were — wasn’t even a consideration. Coming out to my mother was not about me; it was about her, and the fact that I was actively choosing someone else as the object of my attention. And like most NPDs she didn’t like that. She first wanted to know the most important detail: had I told my father before I’d told her? (I had.) And who did I think I was to believe I had permission to not only tell people I was gay but to come out in any public way that might somehow implicate her as the mother of a not-perfect homosexual adult daughter?

So, back in the days of Matthew Shepard, and my friends dying left and right, and my own struggles to understand who I was and would become as I got older, what did my colleague mean when she described herself as being post-gay? I’ve long-wondered (in the same way that I used to wonder what queer food was, although now I know, thanks to the very wonderful

John Birdsall

). One definition: [post-gay] means to define oneself by more than sexuality, to disentangle gayness with militancy and struggle, and to enjoy sexually mixed company. Another: in which sexual orientation will cease to be relevant to a person's social position, life experiences, and conception of self….the post-gay position ultimately buttresses homonormative strategies of social and political activism that actively exclude marginalized queer and trans people. (For sure, the latter feels accurate to me; it was also written in 2018, twenty years after my colleague said what she said to me. Also, she was very much a white, extraordinarily wealthy Californian, corporate mogul-type.)

I came out twenty-eight years ago, when I was thirty-three years old. I met Susan three years later, and left New York to be with her in 2000. I am sixty now, and will be sixty-one at the end of the month. I am very much a queer woman; I identify as a lesbian. I define myself by more than my sexuality; I like good people who are kind and intelligent, be they straight or queer or anywhere on the continuum. My closet has not been opened in nearly thirty years; its revolving door is locked for good.

I still see young people around me who struggle as I struggled, and far worse. To them, I say: look around. There are scores of us who will offer you support. You will not be alone. Watching Gentleman Jack over the last few nights, I am marveling at this truth: everything has changed for us, and in many ways nothing has changed at all.

Wherever you are: look in the mirror at the person who is staring back at you, and always Have Pride.