Contraband

In trembling hands I hold the electric hair clippers. My mother never allowed me short hair because said she didn’t want me to “look like a lesbian.” From the freedom of my own apartment two states away I watch the pieces of hair rain down into the sink. I cut some places too thin and other too long but the point isn’t the style. The point of this exercise is revolt or perhaps mild revolt.  I Googled hair growth to make sure I’ll have at least a feminine half-bob for graduation next spring before attempting this exercise in freedom. I do not want my four years of college to culminate in a battle over gender roles.

I am twelve.

My mom suffers from a religious mania, she constantly tries to chip away at me until I became perfect in the sight of her angry god. As she confiscates literature and music on the offensive topics of non-historical violence, sex, homosexuality and the occult, I rebel in slammed doors and possession of intellectual contraband.

On road trips my family stops at used bookstores in small towns across Michigan. The summers of my childhood remind me of cold lake breezes, sweatshirts over shorts, overcast lakefront and moldering smell of old paperbacks. It’s weirdly American, like diners and highways of Kerouac. Only instead of Walt Whitman, I take a battered twenty-five cent Stephen King novel with me.

My mother doesn’t have a problem with gore. Horror stories are no worse than The Lives of the Saints, a catalogue for children of the many violent ways to die for your god.  I read the paperbacks for the dirty parts, the sex, non-biblical violence, and everything forbidden to me in other media.

I begin to write gay characters into horror stories in middle school. My first foray into literature proved fruitful and my stories circulate the cafeteria. People called for more hand written pages on wide-ruled notebook paper. It is wise of me to release it in chapters and keep my audience’s interest peaked. I could call it a chapbook if I knew the term. My story contains just the right amount of sex, violence, and ridiculous plot about a cannibal to keep seventh graders interested.

I’m busted.

My mother starts reading old Instant Messenger chat logs. She discovers my contraband tucked into files with innocuous names like “Conversation with Ai”. She calls the school and demands my guidance counselor explain why I can’t write those things. They are against my mother’s religion. The moment she says “my religion” over the phone I know the argument is over. I attend school with Muslims, Jews, and Christians. The students are more reasonable than the adults--we are casualties in our parents’ holy wars. Oddly, no one takes offence to the cannibalism. It is a greater sin in our culture to kiss someone of the same sex than to eat them. The counselor meets with me, but only to reassure me I will one day be out of my mother’s house.

I am sixteen.

After we move to the Upper Peninsula I fall into a deep depression. As a high school junior I am disinterested in changing schools or going anywhere defined as rural. I wanted to finish high school in Detroit because I mapped out all the lesbians bars in Toronto. The drinking age in Canada is 19.

My parents continued to lug me around from town to town, but I knew their lives would be easier without my presence because they would no longer be obligated to talk. My existence seems like a mistake made by two stupid children who had to live with the consequences. I changed school districts five times and acquired four half-siblings. My mother refused to let me move in with relatives, viewing it as the ultimate failure of parenting. So, I remained miserable and continued to move. The final move breaks me.  

I began to see a social worker at the hospital once a week. My social worker doesn’t understand gay culture but she means well. Her brother came out and her mother didn’t handle it well. This probably made her as qualified as anyone to give me advice. She fumbled a bit suggesting after I left my mother’s house I could wear hidden symbols to identify myself to other gay people. She suggested lambda barrettes. I can safely say in my life I have never seen any woman gay or straight in lambda barrettes. Straight people, even professionals have wild misconceptions about gay culture.

My social worker grants me one huge favor. She slipped me a copy of The Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown. I hide this book in my room and read it in secret. I explore gay subculture from my bedroom. In her books I found characters like me, and while none of them wore lambda barrettes, they loved, lost and lived human lives. When I finish the book I enter the public library with a list of books and cautiously ask a librarian about, “for a friend” or “for a project.”  One day I show up to the desk with Annie on My Mind  by Nancy Garden and the circulation aid smiles and said “oh this is a really good book.” I breathe a little more after that. The librarians aren’t judging me, and they aren’t going to tell my mother what I’m checking out.

In these books I learn about drag and HIV, Stonewall, Fire Island, police raids, and love. Few of the stories ended happily.

I’m depressed.

In the bathroom next to my bedroom my mother silently change the inspirational quotes tapped to the mirror. She picked secular quotes from famous people, my favorite “If you’re going through hell, keep going” is attributed to Winston Churchill. These are messages of solidarity in the struggle against teenage depression.

When I come out, in a coffee shop painted ironically with whimsical fairies on the wall, my mother cries and says "I didn't want you to struggle with this. This is a very difficult cross to bear." Her heart is in the right place. I hoped for a different reaction. I want my mother, with all her religious zeal, to march a pride parade down to the capital, to fight for the rights of gay people.

I’m accepted.

I called my mother crying when I opened my acceptance letter to Cornell, "mom I got in  and they gave me a scholarship for half!" After a pause my mother said "oh, you're going to get your degree before me." This was the only indication that my mother sometimes wanted anything outside of her vocation as a wife and mother.

My mom and I don't have much of a relationship now. She sometimes sends me caption-less pictures of her new family, my half-sisters. The girls attend a Catholic school and she pulled them from girl scouts after the organization allowed to transgendered children to join. I send them care packages of intellectual contraband. I fought with my parents to allow my oldest sister to read the Harry Potter series and I recently mailed her my copy of The Giver. I want my sisters to see the world outside the cloister my mom tries so desperately to create in her home. I want them to know that out there is a world filled with subcultures, literature, and short hair.

I’m an adult.

Some afternoons I just want to curl up in a sad Steven Page song and an old sweatshirt. Loneliness is an island, isolation the unpassable sea between people. The tides are impassible this time of year. Subtle changes make it worse. My mother visited family in Chicago for Christmas, which is only 4 hours away from me and on the Megabus route. I didn’t know she was there until I saw the pictures of the cousins together online. I asked why she didn’t invite me and she said “I didn’t think you had transportation.” Every family gathering it’s always “I didn’t want to burden you with travel expenses” or “I didn’t think you could get here.” but she never invites. A neighbor took me in at Christmas and I wrote a poem about trying to form connections, a poem about loneliness and isolation and it won an award. I’d rather have gone to Christmas with my sisters. Acceptance is worth all the writing awards and scholarships in the world. 

Just love me as I am and all the accolades in the world become meaningless.

Another Christmas I saved up and flew to the UP only to find my mother was taking my sisters and my adult brother to Disneyland. She said “you can’t go; you have school.” but they spent the entire break talking about their trip. Their family trip. After that I sprang for a couple therapy sessions in the basement of a big brick building in downtown Kalamazoo. My therapist, a older man still wore tweed jackets with leather patches on the elbows. I liked his office because he also saw children and he had a beautiful natural doll house with little faeries dolls and wooden toadstools, I would look at it instead of making eye contact. He says my mother must have known she was being exclusionary.

That time my mother and stepfather sat me down in the living room and told me the “worst thing” I did as a Christian was support gay marriage. I “led others astray” with my pop social movements. Gay marriage, they said was a just a phase, a cause-of-the-week. After the supreme court decision this year my mother sent me a link about Canada day and the fourth of July but said nothing about the decision. A decision with a profound impact on my life.

It’s hard to be adrift in the world without family.