from the KNOWN LESBIANS category

Yep, I’m gay. Understated, like the star who said it, but still radical to me at seventeen, standing in line at Safeway with my mother. And wasn’t that just like me to be standing in line at a place called Safeway? (Not crossing a line or stepping outside the lines at Dangerroute or Wildroad.) Just six weeks till graduation, till my shiny gold medal & my virgin white rose, the tassel with ’97 clipped on like a gaudy barrette, & those big curls tamped down under my bobby-pinned mortar board. Yep, that was me then, biding my time, while she was changing the face of Time forever. Yep, I’m gay. Words I wouldn’t say for another five years, & when I did, I would whisper them, hoping no one would hear. Like my favorite, Mary Tyler Moore, she played a character who shared her own name. I always wondered, How do you separate the two—the one you pretend to be & the one you actually are—especially when you answer on screen to the same sobriquet they shouted down hallways, on the playground, even in the womb. Yep, some of us were already cast & called as embryos, the way some ships stand pert, their sails full, inside a bottle. The launch was never the point, you see. The launch was never even possible. Yep, I’m gay, she said, & I noted that women could use the word, too—deposited this fact like a check I would need to withdraw someday. But the woman she played explained that she was a “chapstick lesbian,” to studio-wide guffaws. It was a joke I wouldn’t have gotten back then, so unfamiliar was I with even the parodied poles of butch & femme. When I stood at that podium, it felt like a pulpit—& not a bully pulpit either—the keenly churchy kind. When I gave my speech, it felt like I should have been reading Scripture—almost like I was. How my feet wobbled in those patent leather heels. How the sweat dripped from my hairline, smudging the eye shadow my mother chose, the mascara she prescribed. I wore lipstick that night, as I had since fifth grade, but that didn’t make me a “lipstick lesbian.” I was a chapstick lesbian under cover, a gay girl in deep, heteronormative drag. Imagine if it had been a bully pulpit. Imagine if I could have seen it that way. This was before I fell in love with a woman. This was before I fell in love with the subjunctive, too, before I even knew what it was—that radical notion that grammar, like people, had moods! Yep, I’m gay. Imagine if I had spoken my truth into conscious existence that night, to the eight hundred over-warm bodies in the eight hundred creaking, auditorium chairs. I could hear them, yes—their sniffles & shifts—but looking out, all I could see was darkness, the uncluttered view from a void. Remember glow-in-the-dark ink? Remember dimming the lights to tell secrets at a slumber party? Then imagine, if you will, my subjunctive soliloquy: “Good afternoon, Over-Achievers. Is it just me, or did we waste a whole lotta time together, trying to be perfect, trying to outshine each other? When they take boys out of the equation, girls are supposed to thrive. Instead, some girls just become more aggressive, others more submissive, & the whole, hierarchical way we do things in this world plays out again in one sex—which, by the way, isn’t even one sex, let alone a single gender. I’m not planning to keep in touch, so fair warning if you wrote K-I-T in my yearbook. It’s not you—it’s me—except it’s also kinda you. I learned a lot these last four years, but not enough about what really matters to me, & frankly, not enough about me. That’s what the next four years are for, I suppose. Hey, wanna hear a joke? [dramatic pause with ambient noise] We’re the joke. And everything we took so seriously has either passed altogether or is mostly irrelevant now. But I’m tired of passing. For a little while, I thought I might want to act, but then I remembered that’s all I’ve been doing. So I think I’m going to try a different tack. I’m going to try saying more of what I mean—fewer euphemisms, also known as less lying. So, nope, it hasn’t been real. Most of this has been a mirage—with some extra credit & some genuflection & some appalling Sadie Hawkins dances. But whatever else you remember about me & this valediction, I want you to be the first to know that Yep, I’m gay.” [some gasps, some laughs, applause suspended, microphone spiraling to the floor]

“Who is Ellen DeGeneres?” $800