Wise Up!
Gays and Lesbians
By David Bruce
Athens NEWS Contributor
April 21, 2008
• The mother of comedian Liz Feldman knew that Liz was a lesbian even before Liz figured it out. At age 16, Liz went away from home to a summer drama program at which a girl seduced her. Liz knew then that she liked girls, but at the time she thought she also liked boys. The following summer she went to another drama program, and her mother walked into Liz’s room and saw two girls sleeping together in bed. Ironically, the girls weren’t gay; they were just tired.
One month later, Liz stayed the night at one of the girls’ houses, and when she returned home her mother told her, “There’s a letter on your bed…it’s from me.” Her mother also told her, “Don’t open it here — open it in the car!” In the car, which Liz was not allowed to drive, she opened the envelope, in which were two poems. The first poem was written from the perspective of a daughter who comes out to her mother and says that she’s gay. Not ready yet to talk, Liz simply told her mother, “You’re very perceptive.” The second poem was written from the perspective of a mother talking to her gay daughter, saying, “It’s OK, we’ll figure it out. I still love you.” Both poems rhymed.
Liz didn’t want her mother to tell her father, who believed that being gay was a mental disease, but her mother told her father anyway. Her father took her to get a psychiatric evaluation, and the therapist asked, “What’s the problem?” Liz replied, “That’s just it. I don’t think it’s a problem. Everybody else thinks it’s a problem, but I just wish we would stop using the word ‘problem.’” Liz is justly proud today of how she handled this situation at age 17.
Liz says that after the psychiatric evaluation, “The therapist said I was the most mentally stable teenager she’d ever had in her office, and that I didn’t need therapy, but that she recommended that my parents stay on” to get some help in adjusting to their daughter’s gayness. Her father was proud of Liz’s psychiatric evaluation. He told her, “Most mentally stable kid, look at you!” He also tossed her the keys to the family car, and that was the first time she was allowed to drive it.
As a 30-year-old adult, Liz made this coming-out story into a short movie. To protect his privacy, her father does not appear in the film, which is titled “My First Time Driving.” Liz says, “I made the film with my sister, which was also a dream come true. I always wanted to work with my sister; we’re very close and get along really beautifully.”
• Lesléa Newman is the lesbian author of “Heather Has Two Mommies” and several other books. She had attended Jericho High School, and in 1999 she went back there because she was being inducted into its Hall of Fame and had been asked to speak.
When she was attending Jericho High School, she was not yet out (she came out at age 27), although occasionally while she was growing up other students taunted her by yelling “Leslie the lezzie at her.” (She changed her name to “Lesléa” because the gender-free spelling “Leslie” once caused her to be enrolled in the boys’ gym class — something that horrified her.) While giving a speech to the students of Jericho High School, she came out to them as a lesbian and at one point she asked, “What is like today for gay and lesbian students at Jericho High School?”
One boy shouted, “We don’t have any gay students.” Of course, the school did have gay and lesbian students; they simply weren’t out. One year later, Ms. Newsman received an e-mail from a student who had graduated from Jericho High School and then gone on to college. Only then did she feel free to come out as a lesbian. While she was attending Jericho High School, she did not feel free to come out — even to an out lesbian such as Ms. Newman.
• Marion Dane Bauer once invited fellow young adult writers to submit short stories for a book about gay teenagers. Bruce Coville wrote “Am I Blue?” — which became the title story of the book, whose full title is “Am I Blue? Coming Out from the Silence.”
Mr. Coville is a happily married heterosexual, and his story is about a narrator who is beaten up by the school bully, Butch, because Butch thinks that the narrator is gay. An effeminate fairy godfather named Melvin, who gives him the power of seeing whether someone is gay, visits the narrator. A person who is totally gay will be dark blue, and a person who is wondering if he or she is gay will be light blue. The narrator’s skin is light blue, and as he looks around he sees that a man whom everyone “knows” is straight is dark blue and he sees that a woman whom everyone “knows” is a lesbian is not blue at all. When the narrator looks at Butch, he sees that Butch is dark blue.
• Terry and Bill are a gay couple who have been together for over 25 years. Because they got together in the days before gays and lesbians could be legally married, they made up a date for their anniversary, choosing the first Friday in January because that is when they had their first date. Of course, the date of their anniversary changes from year to year, but they are original, after all. Each time the first Friday of January rolls around, they celebrate by eating at a nice restaurant.
More and more, people are accepting homosexuality. Terry and Bill live in Lakewood, Wash., and they celebrated an anniversary in a nice restaurant in Steilacoom. Their male waiter overheard them toast each other, so he brought them a complimentary dessert and wished them, “Happy anniversary.” For both Terry and Bill, it was a special night.
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