My Life as a Goddess

by Guy Branum

  Guess which one I fell in love with.

  Her name was Annemarie. She was a bespectacled, sarcastic misanthrope from Bismarck. I’d known her before, but only as the girl who occasionally quipped at quiz bowl tournaments and always answered exactly one toss-up per game. In the back of this Minnesota Maroon van, we politely joked around, and I said something about The View, and she broke the chilling news to me that Debbie Matenopoulos, one of the original panelists, had been fired. I was rattled. We then fell down a six-hour-long hole discussing minutiae of television that no one else in the world remembered. ALF Tales, The Charmings, The Ellen Burstyn Show. After decades of loneliness, I had found a true kindred spirit. Eyes in which I saw a soul so like my own I nearly couldn’t distinguish between her and myself.

  Of course I didn’t respect her. Why would I respect some fat sloppy person who spent all their time thinking about TV trivia?

  On that first night, we set media on fire in our own minds. We pitched ideas for what we would do if we controlled TV. RuPaul’s Celebrity Mah-Jongg, a dramatic anthology series called Blythe Danner Presents, a workplace situation comedy where everyone was a sassy secretary called Talk to the Hand. I explained my long-standing theory that there was a right and wrong way to be on a talk show, and for the first time, I articulated the idea that would turn into Talk Show the Game Show, the TruTV show that currently pays my rent.13

  I’d had friends before Annemarie, but never so intimate. My best friend from college, Rebecca Cohen, was funny, smart, savvy, and insightful, but we were always separated by the fact that I was an asexual dork and she was an attractive, not-mentally-broken person. With Annemarie, there was no such separation. Never was someone so like me in fears and inclinations; I was not a mystery or an enigma to her. Annemarie could look at me, into me, and see the things I was not saying. In the way I had savored the feeling that comes from trivia, that heightened, electric readiness I’d practiced while watching Jeopardy! and living in quiz bowl, became an aspect of my social life. Instead of facts, it was creativity and ideas. Could I be as funny as she was? Could I match her thoughts? Could I best them?

  My love affair with Annemarie was, of course, going to end poorly.

  You may be confused. Here’s this book by this avowedly gay man, a man who interprets nearly all of his formative experiences through his homosexuality, and he’s never once referenced being in love with a man. And here, when he finally does use the word “love” to describe a relationship, when he documents falling head over heels for someone, it’s a woman.

  Yes, you have solved a mystery. I am not really gay. I was just pretending because I wanted my relationship with my parents to be horrible and to always have to keep track of whether boat shoes are in.

  Here’s the thing: In all those years of closeted isolation, you guys—the rest of humanity who creates our culture—you guys didn’t exactly make it easy for me to love someone. And I know love is hard for everyone, but you’re going to have to consent that it’s a more complex, problematic set of issues for a homosexual, particularly one who wasn’t raised in a speculative fiction novel where everyone is super-chill and there are no problems for gays ever.

  I have always been more likely to fall in deep, rapturous crushes with women than with men, probably mostly because there’s no danger of sexual rejection associated with them. It’s usually just me thinking someone’s the funniest, smartest, best person ever, and wanting to know what she thinks about everything always. On the rare occasion when I’ve allowed myself to feel such a way about a man, I’ve always been terrified of showing it to him in any way, because I knew with great certainty that if he learned such a thing, he would say to me, “Guy, you are very nice, but I never, ever in my life want to be naked in the same room as you.”

  And don’t think I’m a complete coward. I’ve created opportunities for many men to express the above sentiment to me. It just hurts a lot more when you actually think they’re the smartest, best thing ever.

  Back to Annemarie. She thought I was the smartest, best thing ever, and I thought the same of her. What I didn’t realize was that, as a closeted person, I appeared to be a viable romantic interest for a woman. I didn’t consider anyone would think of me romantically, ever, so it just never crossed my mind until my best law school friend, Rachel, met Annemarie and said, “That girl has a crush on you.” I said that was stupid and didn’t think about it after, either.

  Then, in the summer between my first and second years of law school, I came out of the closet. (I’m sorry that so many of my stories use this as a breaking point. I know it’s hack, but sometimes clichés really do come true.) I came out to my parents, and as part of my ritualized notification of friends, I called Annemarie and told her. She gave a desultory “Uh, yeah, we all knew” and segued to another topic of conversation. Probably the NBC soap opera Passions, which involved a witch and a doll that was brought to life. Passions was our passion back in those days.

  I thought a lot about how the news would alter me. The world was full of new questions, new issues. I didn’t know who I was without closet doors surrounding me. A key issue for me was that my desires were now in evidence. People knew I liked guys, so I no longer had to hide my appreciation of them. In sum, I got to flirt, and flirtation was a new, exciting search for the right answer. This time, if you got the right answer, you didn’t just get ten points, you got to ejaculate with, on, or in (the prepositions seemed endless!) a boy you found attractive.14

  The story that ends this chapter returns us to one of those University of Minnesota vans. Again, we have overnight bags and a collection of brilliant, opinionated, barely socialized delights. People who’ve forgotten more about conceptual artist Jenny Holzer than you will ever know. I got in, the same but transformed. I was talking a lot about how gay I was. I was talking about boys I liked. I was talking about how simply everyone was wearing powder blue this season. It was true, but I was insufferable.

  So Annemarie did not suffer me. Everyone else did. None of them really noticed. They were too busy discussing what kind of pie they were going to get when we stopped off in Osseo, Wisconsin, the midpoint between Minneapolis and Chicago and the place where we got pie.15

  There was one other significant change in the van. In the intervening year, a new guy had joined our ranks, a medical student named Dave. “Dr. Dave,” we called him. He was bad at quiz bowl but still came. Also, he was handsome. Not just handsome for quiz bowl, which was as low a bar as you imagine, but regular-human hot.

  I wanted his attention. I wanted it so bad. He was straight, and I knew nothing could happen, but that’s exactly why I wanted to flirt with him, to get to play the game without fear of real injury. Like a shorts-and-shells practice in football. I wasn’t transparent about my interest, certainly, I was just very aware of him. Waiting for any little moment when Dr. Dave might say something that would be a segue for me to show off just how delightful, funny, and smart I was.

  Less than an hour into our drive, I was possibly on my second or third delightfully charming comment to Dr. Dave when a cry came up from the back of the van.

  “NOT FUNNY.”

  We went back to our conversation until the next time I, in some way, tried to amuse and delight my aspiring-physician crush.

  “Not funny!”

  Annemarie then explained to the van just how and why I was pathetically trying to seek Dave’s approval. She didn’t lay all of the cards on the table. She didn’t say, “Guy is trying to seem funny to make Dr. Dave like him,” but only because there was an entire weekend ahead of us, and if you’re going to peel someone’s skin off, you really have to take your time.

  I tried to lash back at her, but she would use the force of my attack to throw me with a deft “Not funny” and the occasional insult to the premise or substance of my line. In my every word or action, she knew exactly the response to make it hurt the most, and make me fear whatever would happen next.

  Because Annemarie knew all the answers to
me. She’d read me cover to cover and knew the strengths, weaknesses, and sensitive spots. She was pissed, maybe because she wished she could be flirting with Dr. Dave. Maybe because she wished I was flirting with her. Maybe she was just mad because I’d left her alone in the chilly waters of repressed asexuality. Now I was her Rebecca Cohen, prancing off into the sun-dappled fields of adult sexuality and leaving her behind. It didn’t matter—all that mattered was that she, still steeped in plausible asexuality, could purport to need nothing. I, however, had stepped out into the world of liking boys, and that meant I could be humiliated in front of boys, so she was there to do it. Those sun-dappled fields don’t leave you much cover. Annemarie and I could tell you the highest point in Oceania, the third rule of thermodynamics, and the names of first and second Becky from Roseanne, but how to flirt with boys, a thing everyone knows, we had no idea where to begin. So we sucked it up and focused on the parts we were good at, trivia and verbal blood sport.

  However horrible and excruciating it was, I loved it. I loved trying to best her and losing. I loved watching someone know something so well, and I loved that the something she knew so well was me.

  And yes, to answer your question, Annemarie is now in a committed and loving relationship with a woman who is, I hope, as masterfully cruel to her as she once was to me.

  * * *

  1. By the way:

  Constantine

  Julian the Apostate

  Theodosius the Great

  Like seven guys named Michael or Basil

  Irene

  There. The only ones I know anything about beyond their names are Constantine, because he made everyone be Christian, and Irene, because she kept having her sons blinded so she could stay in charge. The rest of them were relatively boring.

  2. Unless you’re Bulgarian, but I think even they’re probably over it by now.

  3. In the SAME way. I wasn’t taught that in the SAME way. Let us not too easily indulge in the game of “gay white men are STILL white men,” because your little game of erasing the innumerable games of fuckery that were played on my sense of self over the course of the past forty years is no longer cute to me.

  4. Buy his novel No One Can Pronounce My Name, now in paperback!

  5. Apostasies like the Iconoclasts Empress Irene crushed during her merciless reign over the Eastern Roman Empire. I bet Irene would have cut the noses off anyone who tried to run one of these pseudo-Starbucks.

  6. It was Alan Schneider.

  7. They were the only people in my family who identified as Jews. This is why I like Jews.

  8. This, of course, refers to The $100,000 Pyramid.

  9. Yes, this packet is from 1996, right after Kenneth Branagh’s overclocked Hamlet that no one saw.

  10. Bad quiz bowl habits. They filled me with bad human habits: mostly pomposity, game-based rage, and a willingness to roll my eyes when someone didn’t know Madame Chiang Kai-shek was Time’s co-person of the year in 1937.

  11. The mind-set of quiz bowlers is best essentialized in a story about one of the great players of all time, Rob Hentzel. At least I think this story is about Hentzel—I just remember that it’s about an iconic player. So Hentzel went to a quiz bowl tournament and played it solo. In every round, he alone faced off against four capable players and beat them all. Finally, he was in the game for the tournament championship, and he answered nineteen of the twenty toss-up questions correctly. On the last question, however, he had nothing. The moderator read the full question, and he did not ring in. At the conclusion of the question, a girl from the opposing team rang in and answered correctly. Hentzel got up, confused about this thing he did not know, in a world of things he knew. He walked over to a friend on another team and asked, “What is Easy-Bake Oven?” That’s quiz bowlers—they know everything except the stuff everyone knows.

  12. I do not know anything about either of these topics, but in quiz bowl, if you don’t know about a subject, you have to teach yourself one common fact so if a question comes up, instead of just saying, “Oops, I can’t help,” you can at least be checking against that one thing. So here are the things I know about hockey and astrophysics:

  Hockey: The award for sportsmanship in the NHL is called the Lady Byng Trophy.

  Astrophysics: The space at which a mass is so concentrated that its gravitational escape velocity is equal to the speed of light is called the Schwarzschild radius.

  I could be wrong about either of these things, but if I ever hear a hockey question and no one else answers, I will ring in and say, “The Lady Byng Trophy!”

  13. Talk Show the Game Show is a talk show where guests score points by doing the sorts of things you’re supposed to do on a talk show: name-drop, plug projects, and tell anecdotes. At the end, guests are evaluated by two magnificent judges, Karen Kilgariff and Casey Schreiner. Complete rules are available at TruTV’s website.

  14. I would not ejaculate in, on, or near another man for nearly a year after this.

  15. The Norske Nook in Osseo, WI. It had very good pie. There was a place next to it called We Aim to Cheese that we never went to, but has a really good name.

  THIS MONSTROSITY

  THERE’S A STORY WE all know is coming. Since you began this catalog of my homosexual whining, we’ve all assumed a certain bit of reportage was on its way. My college friend Alice always used to say (not in college, after I came out), “You guys have only the one story.”

  So why am I belaboring? Why am I not simply telling this story from the beginning? Because the belaboring is the beginning. The self-consciousness about “just telling” is what makes it a story. And I am incanting against hackness. I’m making perfectly clear to you that I know you’ll think me telling my coming-out story is trite, and maybe I fear it’s trite, and our sharing that construction is a gentle kind of mental colonialism. A quiet shame around the relative importance of me saying a thing that the world was very sure was important before I had the sense of self to say it.

  I was in law school. I went to law school because my mom told me to. It was also to avoid having to go out into the real world. I was pretty certain I wouldn’t be able to survive there. My parents had been telling me for years how frivolous and irresponsible I was, and a big part of me believed them.

  My senior year of college, I said, “Maybe I could just go get a job for a couple of years and figure out what I’m doing.”

  “But what will you do? Be a history teacher?”

  My parents, as people who had not gone to college, did not understand how majors worked. They thought people who majored in things that were high school subjects would become high school teachers, and they thought majoring in anything else was ridiculous. My mom didn’t exactly understand what my poli-sci degree would be preparing me for until she found out a coworker’s daughter had gotten a poli-sci degree from Chico State and gotten a job for the county. “Political science, you can be a parole officer with one of those.”

  When they asked me what I’d do, I didn’t really have an answer. “My friends are becoming consultants,” I said. They didn’t know what that was. I didn’t, either. My mother told me I would go to law school, because if I didn’t go now, I’d never go. She was right. If I hadn’t gone then, I’d never have gone, because I had no business going to law school.

  Another reason I went to law school was that my grades were mediocre. Not bad, not great, but thoroughly fine. I had a severe habit of lovingly crafting papers I turned in four days late and got docked a grade and a third on.1 I knew that law schools cared about the LSAT, and I knew I could do well on the LSAT, so I went to law school. You might not think this is explaining why and how and where and when I had a very long talk that dare not speak its name with my parents, but it’s really necessary.2

  See, I applied to lots of law schools you’d expect me to apply to: Berkeley and Stanford, the latter of which I was never going to get in to;3 Michigan and UCLA, where I had a chance; and Davis and UC Hastings, where my
admission was virtually guaranteed. Also, I applied to the University of Minnesota Law School for a very stupid reason.

  Once, while taking BART into San Francisco, I started talking to a guy who was dorky but affable. Maybe so dorky and affable that he started the conversation with me. I have no idea who he was or why we started talking, but he told me he was in grad school for some sort of engineering, and that he’d previously gone to law school at the University of Minnesota. He was exactly the kind of guy who’d go to law school and then decide he’d rather be an engineer instead. Smart but willful and kind of dickish. I’m sure he “sees both sides” of Gamergate, you know? I knew a lot of those guys at Berkeley. Well, he said Minnesota was ranked seventeenth in the country. I checked, and he was right.

  So, at the suggestion of a random stranger on public transportation, I applied to the University of Minnesota and got accepted, and when it came time for me to figure out which school I was going to, UCLA and Hastings told me I needed to get private loans and Michigan refused to take me off their waitlist, while the good people at Minnesota let me know they’d given me a full academic scholarship. It was very kind of them, but it did destroy my life for several years.

  I didn’t really think much about moving to somewhere else in the country. I figured we all watched the same TV shows, so culture had to be pretty uniform. The upper Midwest was hardly the sexiest location to go, but moving at least seemed dynamic. Dramatic. And at the end of it, I would have a profession, a life. And once I had that nice stable income and status . . . my life would happen, I guess? It was vague, but it felt fancy.