Grandma with the Clapback

Older people who freely speak their mind are not anomalies.  One generally exists in every family. As someone with only one (confirmed) living grandparent, though, the odds that that grandparent would happen to be the free-speaking type seemed a little bit tighter.

I should probably explain the “(confirmed)” comment, though.  My mother’s parents were...not the best. Her mom ran out on the kids pretty early, and her dad took that as a sign that he should put all of his children into a group home.  The state eventually had to intervene. He certainly wasn’t going to stop being a truck driver, so he married a Pentacostal woman who had pretty Draconian ideals when it came to child-rearing.  I remember my mom speaking frankly about being beaten with a garden hose. I learned most of this when my mother explained to my why/how she got married at 15 and left that house for good.

I say “(confirmed)” because, technically, we have no idea whether my maternal grandmother is still alive.  She was last seen in California somewhere. That’s literally all we know.

Now, in terms of my grandma who’s still around, well, life ain’t been no crystal stair. She has survived the death of a child and the suicide of a husband (from a second marriage).  So, she’s definitely earned the brutal honesty that she has developed, and apparently I came around AFTER she chilled a bit.

Apparently, when my mom and dad got married, my mom brought my brother (from her first marriage) to a family event at my grandma’s.  At some point, my brother (who must’ve been like eight years old) called my grandma “Grandma” to which she replied “I am NOT your grandma.”  TO A CHILD! I mean, he was literally my dad’s red-headed stepchild, but still!

That was before my grandma had really given my mom a chance.  She was not thrilled that my dad had chosen a woman who was already divorced and with a child older than his (because of course both of them already had a child).  After time, she saw how freaking awesome my mom is. They are still incredibly close (like, daily visits close) despite my mom and dad divorcing 26 years ago.

Still, this is not atypical behavior.  Once, she graciously accepted my partner and me into her home.  As we were visiting, she clocked my plaid slip-on’s and said, “Nice shoes!”  I was immediately flattered and effusively said, “THANK you, Grandma!” But she wasn’t done.  She finished her interrupted compliment by saying “...the uglier the better nowadays, huh?”

She said it with a smile on her face.  Like a villain from a Shonda Rhimes show!  My boyfriend was taken aback and I was doubled-over laughing.  She is likely the reason why half of my communication with loved ones involves dragging them and then waiting for them to clapback.  Being made fun of is absolutely hilarious to me now. I had to straight up switch schools because a kid wouldn’t stop calling me gay in 6th grade, and my grandma’s solution was to drag my ass on the regular.  And I’ll be damned if it didn’t work.

I’m not suggesting that this is the solution to harassment or bullying, but this skin is pretty think.  I have one or two things that, if pressed, can get me in my feelings. Outside of those, it’s basically an all you can bash buffet.  I’ll even help if you’re not getting there fast enough.

Now, at this point, I’ve painted with some pretty broad strokes, and it kind of appears like she only picks on her grandkids.  Honestly? We’re the safe ones. You should hear some of the stuff she has to say about her own kids.

My father likes to get his way.  If he doesn’t, he is super salty about it.  He will make passive-aggressive comments FOR YEARS to express his dissatisfaction.  This inevitably leads to his target snapping at some point, telling him what they think of him, and then him refusing to speak to the person(s) for...months? Years? He mixes it up.

This is the same man who, one year, just gave entirely up and wore swimming trunks to our Christmas dinner.  I am from Southern Illinois and I have never known a Christmas warm enough to warrant less than a sweatshirt, much less swimwear.  Why trunks!? I can kind of get shorts because white, country boys wear shorts during the winter all of the time around here for reasons unknown to the rest of us. But trunks?  They had no functionality. My mom claims he had just outgrown all other clothes, like when Tim Allen wore sweats to work in The Santa Clause.

Grandma Garland was not going to stand for it.  But she’s also a kind, smiley older lady, so she wasn’t going to make a stink at Christmas dinner.  Instead, she individually spoke to everyone at the dinner and roasted him. Rolling her eyes, shaking her head, and gesticulating wildly, my grandmother spent a solid 90 minutes making the rounds letting everyone know how beguiled she was by her own son’s clothing.  “I guess your dad’s gonna hop in the lake after this.”

Like most family meals, I spent most of the time trying to avoid my father because he had plenty of grievances he wanted to direct at me. “Glad to see you, son.  It feels like it’s been a year since I’ve seen you.” Imagine, however, a dry tone and throw in the fact that it probably had been at least a year. Greetings like this are the warmest reception the man has to offer.

Hence my pure joy to hear my grandma take him to task.  I yipped out a loud “Ha!” and high-fived my absolute favorite person in the room.  

Some people probably have really sweet memories of their grandma teaching them to bake or reading them stories.  I do not envy these people, though. I find the skills she imparted to me have way more value than something I could find on Pinterest.

I'm...Coming...Out

Honestly, though, if you don’t see a bellybutton singing the words to this post’s title, you’re probably lost.  Now scram!

Okay, now that it’s just us, this is definitely my coming out story.

I wish I could tell you that I woke up at 13, watched MTV’s Undressed, saw a gay storyline, had some feelings and came right on out.  That’s just not how things went down.

I definitely DID watch my fair share of Undressed, though.  For the uninitiated, the show had almost no substance and basically consisted of barely dressed actors constantly talking about sex and then supposedly having a lot of it every time the plot jumped to a different storyline.  Still, at 11 pm, after mom went to bed, I LIVED.

I think the intention for the show was to have an almost soft-core vibe but still be able to air on cable.  For me, though, the show was just the only access to gay people who were close to my age (as opposed to the handful of celebrities who took major hits in popularity after coming out at that time). They existed!  They were happy! People were relatively cool to them even if those people knew they were gay.  It was a novel concept.

Still, I definitely wasn’t ready to BE gay.  I even made deals with myself. Gave myself the occasional week where I wouldn’t yell at myself every time I had a gay thought.  Little did I know, I was taking the first steps toward accepting myself.

I knew I was different before that point.  Or rather, I was told I was different on a regular basis from many of my peers.  One of the reasons I switched to the “city” schools after sixth grade was that I was being pretty viciously bullied by the first kid to call me gay.  I had to ask what it meant, the first time he said it. Granted, the first time he said it, I was all of seven years old.

Comically, he was older than me and half my size.  He is also the only person I’ve ever physically fought to this day.  And that was a joke. He got as close to my face as he could possibly achieve and I knocked him to the ground.  That was it. My glorious battle.

Even after that, though, he was pretty relentless.  I basically lost all guy friends due to fear of being thought gay.   I wasn’t even twelve years old, but apparently, I took to recruiting early.

After switching schools, I got to start over, but I was wounded. I basically clammed up. I didn’t want to give anyone any hints about my abnormality.  That meant I basically couldn’t do or say anything since I wasn’t really sure what Blake (and yeah, that’s his name) saw in me to ridicule in the first place.  But clearly there was something and that needed to not happen again, so silent I was.

Still, I was never really great at not talking, so I found my way to choir and met some extroverts who helped me navigate my way through a place 10x the size of my former school.  I found my voice, as much as I hate that the context invites a pun.

All the same, that voice couldn’t speak truth.  I wasn't entirely sure what I was, yet, but I definitely wasn't the standard. I also got SUPER religious at this point.  I made church friends and that was actually really fun for a while.  Everyone was positive and supportive.

I lived like that, happily, for a while.  I tried dating girls, knowing that I wasn’t really interested.  It’s so embarrassing to know that I used girls as a social shield rather than just having good friends, but I suppose I can honestly say it seemed like a good solution at the time.

Then came Andrew.  Beautiful, tall, in-the-running-for-the-Olympics-in-swimming Andrew.  He came out as gay his junior year and most of the school abandoned him.  I was a sophomore who admired the shit out of him for doing it and I made that clear early on.  Suddenly, I had a new friend.

But really, I got several new friends.  It turns out, he had set up an entire support system of allies before he came out.  And they were older which felt like I had somehow managed to trick upper-echelon peers into thinking I mattered. Turns out, they were just cool (but how I would use that word today, not how gaybie Stephen would've used it). It was in this group that I was finally able to come out. It doesn’t really count when you let someone test the waters for you first, but still, I came out and was met with immediate acceptance (albeit from a handful of people who were sworn to secrecy).  That was the summer of my sophomore year, and I only really had one problem to deal with: I was still dating the sheriff's daughter.

I quickly had a long, tearful conversation with her.  She was very confused and certainly not as accepting and loving as my trial run.  Then again, why would she be? Just because I saw us as amazing friends doesn’t mean she hadn’t been banking on a bit more.

Still, I didn’t expect her to tell the entire school.  And she didn’t really. She just told three people who, well, you can figure it out.  Regardless, I spent the first day of my junior year seeking out all of my male friends to reassure them that I in no way wanted to have sex with them.  That was more a remnant of my elementary school days than anything else.

This is every gay kid's biggest fear, but it's also a normal part of the coming out process. Growing up in the age of social media, my generation tends to want to curate the narrative. We get lots of practice by making our Facebook page lie about how much we're enjoying every moment of life. Still, with something so personal, it felt like this was information that only I should get to decide when and to whom to disseminate it. The moment someone took that away from me, it felt like things were spiraling. I was desperate to get ahead of the story. At the same time, I was horrified that my sexuality was now a rumor rather than a fact. People who didn't hear it from me wanted confirmation, forcing me to answer that dreaded question, ("I heard you were gay. Is that true?" asked the CIA waterboarder). Having the courage to say yes felt kind of good, but it meant that I'd have to keep doing that. All year.

My perspective on that was probably a little off, too. Really, the people who were disgusted by the revelation (including a person who later tried to become my financial adviser by tricking me into a lunch because he sounding lonely/suicidal) never asked. They also never spoke to me unless it was absolutely necessary from that point on. SO many guys (some of whom used to say really shitty things to me) started treating me like I was invisible. I should've been thrilled by the people who asked. They wanted to know me. The silent majority were the ones deserving of my ire.

Also, coming out completely disarmed the homophobes. Literally, the worst thing the could call me was a fag. And that word had totally lost it's punch when 2,000 of my peers knew that I would willingly (sometimes, enthusiastically) have sex with a guy. That's not to say that they didn't still say mean things behind my back. I remember the finance guy, when we used to be best friends, tell me that Andrew coming out was one of the most disappointing things he had ever heard. That he used to be proud of Andrew, but now he's just disgusted. Cool. Still, the first and last time I was called a fag to my face at Centralia High School, I looked Travis straight in the eyes and said, "What are you, the news?" Done. Finished. Accepting myself was the cure to the small town bigot. They were no longer parroting the ugly thoughts I had about myself because those thoughts were gone.

Word also got around at church.  I hadn’t heard anything, specific, but then the pastor gave anti-homosexuality sermons three weeks in a row.  That marked my break from organized religion (followed by my break from all religions several years down the road).

Anyway, I was the second gay kid in my school during my tenure. By the end of junior year, I was the guru to the closeted kids that somehow started existing out of nowhere. I also got involved in theater that year, so I basically put out an APB?  And that’s how I came out to my mom.

It was the summer and everything was perfect.  I could still drool over Andrew before he left for college and I somehow didn’t lose all of my friends after revealing my true self (or rather, being exposed for who I truly am?).  I had a support system of my own. I was going to spend the summer getting tan and getting a man.

Cue a 3 a.m. call from a questioning boy we’ll call Jimmy.

I was Jimmy’s Andrew, and I knew it even at the time.  Just like Andrew had no romantic interest in me, Jimmy didn’t really do it for me.  We had already shared multiple awkward moments in cars where he would try to say something, then think better of it, or grab my hand out of nowhere and lay his head on my shoulder.  Jimmy was struggling because he came from a religious family and even had intentions of joining the ministry.

So he calls, right?  And it’s hella late! I knew I’d wake my mom from talking on the phone (I’d been busted too many times), so I took the phone into the back yard and talked to Jimmy.  He asked how I knew I was gay. What were the signs? How could I be sure? And I told him the best way I knew how at the time. I knew because saying it and being loved all the same was the best feeling I had ever known.  I knew because if Andrew ever changed his mind and laid a kiss on my lips, I would’ve phased into a liquid. It seemed truer than any other aspect of my identity.

And then my mom walked outside and said that we needed to talk.  She had heard the phone ring and stayed on the line the entire time.  In thirty minutes, I went from being closeted to my family all the way to my mom knowing how much I wanted to kiss the upperclassman who took me under his wing.  She was convinced he had somehow bamboozled me into homosexuality and certainly didn’t want me spreading the good word. Her biggest fear was that I would affix a label to myself that I wouldn’t be able to remove.

It took her YEARS to get past this.  Multiple boyfriends. Tons of awkward visits.  She loved me in all aspects except for my romantic life.  That was a topic that I brought up at my own risk. Still, in time, she realized that, rather than giving myself a permanent label, I was actually trying to remove the one everyone had affixed to me at birth.  That the only thing I diverged from was her expectations.

Even so, during the rocky times, she made it clear that I should not tell my father.  He had always been openly homophobic. He loved a good gay joke and accused most women around of being lesbians to ridicule them.  And his own goddamn sister is a lesbian.

I followed my orders, especially once I was in college.  There were still some financial responsibilities they helped out with despite my full-ride.  Mom made it clear I would not be able to stay if Dad pulled his end of the funds.

So I bided my time, and sure enough, I got outed again.  This time, by my stepmother. She knew and was super cool about it.  She hated how my dad made shitty jokes and one day, to shut him up, she told him that his own son was gay.  And that was not ideal, but his reaction was. At least according to her account, he looked up and said, “I just want him to be happy.”  Even if that’s a lie, I accepted it in exchange for forgiving her.

Yeah, so it turns out, I really only came out the first couple of times because coming out in a small town is like taking out a full-page ad in the newspaper.  That said, anyone in the LGBTQ+ community knows that once you come out, you have to do it for the rest of your life. And it’s way easier now. I mean, not easier than having someone else do it for you, but certainly easier than emotionally abusing myself and waiting for God to “fix” me.  As far as that strategy goes, Monique Heart said it best: “NOTHING HAPPENS, AMERICA!”