Our Stories, Our Voices

by Amy Reed (ed)

  Little by little, by first claiming my femaleness, I also began to reclaim my Indianness. It hadn’t been totally discarded, I happily found, just lying dormant, a seed waiting for sunshine and air. I stopped providing disclaimers about arranged marriage and my ability to speak Hindi. But more than that, I began to talk about my time in India, to really relish telling people how things were different where I had spent a significant part of my childhood. I began to understand that being Indian was just different from being American, no better and no worse. Moving to the States at fifteen certainly changed some parts of me. As an Indian-American, I prize financial independence and ambition more than most of the female elders in my family did when I was growing up. I’m also much more liberal about social issues. At the same time, though, I’ve retained the collectivistic attitude of the importance of family. Although I don’t see elders as infallible anymore, I do still believe in the wisdom of the ages.

  I don’t view myself as a chameleon now, but rather as a tree, constantly adding new branches and leaves, growing and turning purposefully to the sun. There’s so much more to life, I feel, than trying to shoehorn yourself into one identity, one way of being. What authority says, anyway, that you have to be one thing or the other, that you can’t successfully straddle more than one self? There may be people out there, especially in this tumultuous political climate, who are vocal about this: you can be either American or an immigrant, you can either speak with an accent or speak the “right” way, you can either be female on our terms or accept the label we give you, you can either assimilate completely or get out. To them I say respectfully, you’re missing the point of America. Perhaps one of the most important lessons I’ve learned in my nearly twenty years in this wonderful country is this: there is no one way to be American. There is no one language, no one color, no one accent, no one religion. We are a country of multitudes; we should be proud to remain that way.

  I am still learning. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t still sting when people shouted insults at me. I was recently at a protest where I felt that cold, heavy ache of otherness as people chanted and jeered at me and people like me, as they told me to go back to my country, as they refused to accept my right to live alongside them simply because of the color of my skin and where I was born. I still have days when the fight feels never ending, when I wonder if I will ever be able to exist without having to justify my existence. But on those days I look to the helpers and to others like me. On those days, most importantly, I look inside myself.

  I give myself permission to be exactly who I am, where I am. I give myself permission to participate fully in the American dream. I am still learning, but I am starting to accept that this is the only permission I need.

  HER HAIR WAS NOT OF GOLD

  Anna-Marie McLemore

  I have a theory:

  Every theater geek has their own theater dream. Maybe it’s restaging Cinderella in the 1920s. Or redesigning the costumes for the dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy. Or being the first genderqueer actor cast as the Emcee in a national production of Cabaret. (Just three of the ones I’ve heard.)

  In my teens, mine was probably either a role in the ensemble of Riverdance, or getting to design an elaborate lighting concept for a friend’s original script (in case you’re wondering: tendonitis, and we never quite found the budget for that production).

  But before that, in grade school, I had a dream role. And it wasn’t Juliet or Velma Kelly or even the Lilac Fairy in Sleeping Beauty.

  It was the Virgin Mary.

  Since the first Christmas pageant I ever saw, I wanted to kneel in front of that manger with my head bowed, playing the girl I admired most. A girl I’d read about in the Bible for as long as I could read. I wanted to wear the blue cloth that signaled her purity and loyalty of heart. (A few years later, when a history-obsessed friend told me how expensive blue cloth had been before modern dye processes, I would wonder how la Virgen had come by it. Had the angels brought it to her? The wise men?)

  When I was old enough, and when I heard there might be a Christmas pageant I could audition for, I got up the courage to tell a teacher I wanted to try for it.

  She laughed.

  Not cruelly.

  More like I’d made a charming joke, the kind of thing adults like to quote children saying and then laugh over.

  “Oh, honey,” the teacher said. “Do you really think you’re right for the part?”

  Was it because I was too short?

  Was it because I still had some of what my tías called my baby fat? There was a white girl who liked to poke my stomach and tell me how I’d never be pretty because I’d always look like a little girl. (This same girl would later get a school award for Christian kindness. I learned early that if you had blond hair and blue eyes and a sweet smile and just the right number of freckles, there was much the world would give you.)

  But then, as I looked around at the posters and Bible illustrations and nativity figurines, a dim idea of what the teacher meant buzzed around me like a mosquito. I noticed something I had faintly registered before but was really looking at for the first time.

  They were all blond.

  The Marys around me were all blond.

  Whether she was praying her song or journeying to Bethlehem beneath Christ’s star, Mary was always blond. In the prints where she bowed her head, her hair glowed as a seam of gold beneath her blue veil. And when her eyes were open, when they widened with the wonder of seeing the angels, they were two flecks of brilliant blue.

  The Jesuses, too. In paintings of Him praying. In drawings of Him being baptized by John, a dove on his shoulder. Even in nativities where there was enough of the baby’s hair grown in to suggest the color. He was always blond.

  Except, somehow, when He was on the cross.

  Only in the moment of His deepest suffering did artists consider He might have walked this earth as a dark-haired, brown-skinned man. (In depictions of His resurrection and His reappearing, on the other hand, He is shown, as though by magic, blond again.)

  I was not right to play la Virgen not because I was too young, or too short, or even because of my baby fat.

  I could not be Mary because I did not have the right colors.

  I thought this, even as I was surrounded by the godly women of color in my family and my community. I was not good like them, I thought. I did not have their sacred hearts.

  They were good, but I had to be made good. And I wished and prayed with everything in me for God to make me a girl blue-eyed and blond enough that I could not only play Mary in a Christmas pageant but could grow to have a heart like hers.

  If I wanted to be good, I would have to work against my own colors, the ones that teacher had laughed at. If I did this, I thought, I could grow up to be the kind of Christian woman and Christian wife I dreamed of being one day.

  Christian wife.

  Those two words seemed like two things I could aspire to, no matter what color I was. They seemed clean, uncomplicated.

  At least they did until I realized that my heart was different from those girls’ at school in more ways than I ever knew.

  As a teen I fell in love with a boy who had been assigned female at birth, a boy who would later transition to living the gender expression that was true to him, not the one the world told him to live.

  I loved him. I saw this transgender boy as a child of God.

  But I couldn’t give myself the same grace. My queerness only added to the distance I felt from God, distance born that day I first prayed to be a girl painted in golds and blues.

  I didn’t speak of those paintings and figurines I’d seen growing up, with their luminous yellow hair and their eyes that looked like drops of the ocean. I didn’t speak of the moment when I had realized that the light off their halos was not enough, that the gold had to grow from their heads too.

  So I don’t know how that boy knew.

  But one day, no warning, he asked, “You know Jesus wasn’t really a white guy, right?�
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  I looked at him. We’d been drinking beer we were too young to have on a roof we weren’t supposed to be on, watching the kind of Los Angeles sunset that comes in violet and gold and gray. It had been a rare moment of quiet with us, watching that sky. I liked him so much that when he didn’t talk, I almost always would, too nervous to let the space between us grow silent.

  For him to break that quiet was as rare as a rainstorm over the city.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I know it’s the way all those Renaissance painters show Him, but He wasn’t,” the boy said.

  He had the grace to pretend he was just discussing a fact of history or science, something I might be interested in but not a thing that had plagued me for years.

  “Weird, isn’t it?” he asked, still watching the sunset, taking a swallow from the bottle and then handing it to me. “We see all those paintings and we take it as some kind of fact that he was white even though it makes no sense.”

  I nodded, like I’d already known all that and we were just making conversation. I would not admit my ignorance to a boy I liked this much. I had kissed this boy on lighting scaffolds. He had snuck me after hours into the dark theaters where he worked. Still, I had never told him about the role I’d wanted most growing up.

  But then I did some research. I looked up articles. I took out books from the library. And I came to understand the distance between the story those paintings and nativity figurines told and the historical Jesus who lived on this earth.

  Jesus had dark hair and brown skin.

  He was a dark-haired, brown-skinned boy at His birth and during His youth. He was a dark-haired, brown-skinned man during His time as a teacher, during His baptism, at His death, and in His resurrection.

  He was a dark-haired, brown-skinned man, not just in His death and suffering, but in His life and His glory.

  He was no more like those pictures than the boy I loved was like the cis male husband I once thought I was supposed to have.

  It would take a long time to accept myself as the queer Latina girl I was. It would take a long time for me to forget the sound of that teacher’s laugh, or to let go of my instinct to believe that saints were spun out of blue and gold. But recognizing two men as they were—embracing my love for a transgender boy, and my reverence for a brown-skinned Jesus—left a seed in me that would grow roots in the years after.

  It let me see la Virgen de Guadalupe as she appeared to Juan Diego, her arms full of roses. Juan Diego was a brown-skinned man, and la Virgen told him, as many times as he needed to hear it, that he was a child of God. She showed him in so many flowers, blooming impossibly out of season, that his tilma could barely hold them.

  It let me understand myself as a child of God, including, not in spite of, who I was. And it made me sure that no one else—not teachers, not painters, not the world—gets to draw the boundaries of where God’s light reaches.

  My mother and father worried that facing the world as I am would destroy the faith in me. It almost did. I heard, over and over, You are too different; we do not want you. I heard it from those who tried to tell me God would not love me as I was, and I heard it from those who tried to tell me there was no God. But the faith I learned from my mother and father, and from my whole family, stayed with me when the world yelled the things those nativity figurines had whispered.

  My husband and I now attend a church that welcomes anyone who draws near the light its stained-glass windows cast on the sidewalks. I love my church home. I love their accepting spirits and their open hearts.

  But the pull toward the kind of churches I once knew has never quite left me. Even knowing they wouldn’t accept me or my husband, I still feel it.

  Sometimes I find myself at the steps of those churches, knowing a little of my heart is just inside the doors. Because even if the church I’m waiting outside may never welcome me, there are others like me.

  Maybe I can’t change what would happen if we crossed the threshold into those churches. But sometimes, finding those who are like you, exchanging those looks of You too? is enough. It helps us understand that we are not alone. That together we can find church communities that will welcome us as God welcomes us. That yes, maybe a little of our hearts will always be just inside those doors, but God is the one who gave us those hearts.

  They are ours to take with us.

  FINDING MY FEMINISM

  Amy Reed

  Here are the things I want you to know about my teen years:

  I was a misfit by choice. I wore weird clothes and didn’t shave my armpits. I was way too cool for high school.

  I yelled at boys in the hall for saying “faggot.”

  I got straight As effortlessly.

  I went to eight Ani DiFranco concerts by the time I was eighteen.

  I was an activist. I went to protests. I planned protests. I wrote press releases for the protests I planned. I marched in the Seattle Pride Parade and Take Back the Night marches. I was interviewed on a public access talk show as an expert on youth rights activism. I was in the newspaper. I traveled to youth activism conferences in San Francisco and Massachusetts. I was invited to speak at an ACLU convention and got a standing ovation for my speech.

  I was hot shit.

  Here’s what I don’t want you to know:

  My strength was an illusion.

  My empowerment was an illusion.

  My thorns were an illusion.

  I built a wall of armor around myself because I was so soft inside.

  I yelled and screamed about the rights of others because I could not speak up for myself.

  I was not a good feminist.

  Don’t get me wrong. I cared deeply about all the things I protested: the involuntary commitment of kids to institutions, gay conversion therapy, the corrupt pharmaceutical industry and the overmedication of children, the suspension of a local middle school boy for wearing a skirt to school (though we later discovered it was not an expression of his gender identity but a prank by the class clown). I cared about all the issues I fought for. But there was something else, something hiding beneath all that fighting:

  Shame.

  * * *

  As a teen, these were (I thought) the rules of white, middle-class, midnineties feminism in Seattle:

  Don’t wear makeup. Don’t shave. Don’t be a girly-girl.

  If you sleep with a lot of guys, you’re a slut.

  If you sleep with a lot of girls, you’re cool.

  The more outspoken and confrontational you are, the better. Your strength is in your thorns.

  Don’t show weakness. The worst thing you can ever do is be vulnerable.

  Your greatest strength is in how loud you can say “NO!”

  Here’s my dirty little secret: I did not know how to say no.

  Hiding behind all my posturing and empowerment, all my bristly fake confidence, all the Take Back the Night marches and loud feminism, I felt the secret shame that I was an imposter. Despite all my talk about strength and consent, I held the secret that I felt weak, that so much of who I thought I was had been defined by experiences I did not consent to, how I felt deep down that it was my fault. I shouted “No! No! No!” with my fist pumped in the air, surrounded by an army of strong women, but the truth was I had never been able to say no in my own life when it mattered most. I thought if all those women knew how weak I really was, they would kick me out of feminism.

  As I marched through the streets of Seattle chanting about women uniting and taking back the night, I did not think I was marching for girls like me. My definition of rape and sexual assault was limited to violent attacks by strangers in dark alleys; it was premeditated drugging by crazed, malicious predators. No one I knew was talking about the murky gray area of consent and coercion. No one was talking about me.

  I remember secretly wishing we were marching for me. I remember wishing I had earned the right to these women’s outrage.

  This is my truth: In the shadows of my trauma, shame, and sil
ence, I mistook the misogyny of self-hatred for feminism. I found a way to twist messages of empowerment into oppression. If feminism was about questioning traditional gender roles, then I had to hate everything about myself that was traditionally feminine. If it was about rejecting the idea that a girl’s worth is defined by a boy’s desire, then I had to hate everything about myself that boys liked—my shyness, my sweetness, my beauty, my body. Feminism was about being a strong woman, so I hated myself for not being strong. It was about being assertive, so I hated myself for not being more assertive. It was about taking self-defense classes and fighting back, so I hated myself for not fighting back.

  This is my dirtiest little secret: deep down, I have always believed I was not raped enough to call myself a survivor.

  It is a horrible thing to say, something I would never, ever say to someone else. But somehow I came to believe that I do not deserve the same compassion as everyone else. Somehow I am at fault in a way no one else could ever be.

  This is one of so many shames that are too common for trauma survivors: my experience wasn’t bad enough. I did not earn the right to this suffering. I made it up. In some twisted way, I must have chosen it. It must be my fault.

  * * *

  If you’ve read my novel Beautiful, you know a little about the year I turned thirteen. It is the story of a girl not being in control of her own life, of being taken advantage of by everyone around her. It is the story of a girl falling, with no one to catch her, with no parents paying attention, no one protecting her, no one guarding her from so many experiences she was not ready for. It is a story of powerlessness. It is a story of desperation, of a kid who just needs someone to see her, someone to care, who needs an adult to step in and protect her. It is a story about grown-ups not doing their job.