Sissy

by Jacob Tobia

  I’d had it.

  She was done.

  I had to end this.

  Sometimes queer people come out of our snail shells because we feel safe, because we know that the garden outside is friendly. Other times we come out of our shells because we haven’t nibbled any leaves in weeks, and if we don’t come out to forage for food, we’ll eat ourselves alive. I’d felt the pangs of hunger for so many years: the hunger to live openly, the hunger to be honest, the hunger to smooch some cute boys, the hunger to get on with my life. If I didn’t make a move soon, I knew I’d starve.

  Two weeks later, on December 15, 2007, I was sitting alone upstairs in our bonus room watching reruns of R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps. It’s a silly children’s horror show that originally ran from the time I was four to the time I was seven. I’d always watched the newest episodes with my brother. Watching the reruns now, with their crappy, late-nineties special effects and cheesy music, I experienced something powerful for the first time: I experienced nostalgia.

  I started to have a sense of just how long I’d been alive already, which, in turn, made me think about just how long I’d been hiding this whole gay thing from my parents. I’d been hiding it from them for five years. Five years out of sixteen and a half. Essentially, a third of my life.

  A third of my life.

  One-third.

  That fraction tumbled around in my mind for a while. And suddenly, out of thin air, I was resolved.

  Tonight is the night.

  I am going to do this.

  This secret ends now.

  This snail is coming the fuck out of her shell.

  I picked up the phone and called Paige.

  “Paige, I’m going to do it. I’m going to come out to my parents tonight.”

  “Oh, wow! Are you scared? You got this, okay? Just call me after and let me know how it goes.”

  I called my brother, told him the same thing.

  And like a robot who’d been reactivated, I got to work.

  The first task was finding a way to organically get my parents in the same room. It had to be organic, we all just had to sort of end up there. Otherwise, I’d have to do the whole “Mom, Dad, can you come downstairs? I need to talk to you about something” line, and they’d be like “Oh God, is Jacob on drugs or did he get some girl pregnant or crash his car or get chlamydia or something?” If I could, I wanted to avoid starting the conversation on those terms.

  Turns out, I couldn’t. My parents would not get in the same damn room. My dad was upstairs watching TV. My mom was downstairs reading. My dad went downstairs to get a snack, but then my mom was in the bathroom. My mom went upstairs to brush her teeth, but then my dad was back downstairs putting up his plate. They played musical chairs for over an hour as I attempted to ghost around the house, seeing where they were without attracting too much attention.

  At a certain point, I’d had it. We were going to have to do this the old-fashioned way.

  “Hey, Dad, when you get to a stopping point in your show, can you come downstairs? I want to talk to you and Mom about something.”

  “Okay. Be right down.”

  “Mom, are you at a stopping point in your book? I want to talk to you and Dad about something.”

  Three minutes later, I had them around the kitchen island. This was it. Give ’em the performance of your life, kid.

  “Well, there’s not really a way to preface this, but . . .”

  The rest goes by double-time in my mind, less “Disney Channel Original Movie” and more “contender at Sundance.” In my memory it is understated, matter-of-fact, almost clerical.

  My mother asks sweet, kind, empathetic questions, trying to make sure she understands. I answer. My father stays silent. My mother asks more questions. I answer. My father stays silent. My mother asks her last question. I answer. My father stays silent.

  A pause.

  My mom turns the questions on my dad.

  “So, Abe, what are you thinking?”

  His silence smolders a moment longer, burning with heat and pressure and intensity.

  He finally speaks. Processors whirring, I listen.

  “You’ll always be my son, but if you choose this lifestyle, I want no part of it.”

  Processing. Processing . . .

  “If you choose to be with a man, he will never be my son-in-law.”

  Processing . . .

  “If you choose to adopt children, they will never be my grandchildren.”

  Processing . . .

  “This is not a choice I agree with. This is not a choice I will ever approve.”

  Overwhelmed, my processor shut down. Rainbow wheel of death. Spinning, spinning, spinning. Survival mode enabled.

  “Okay, Dad. It’s good to know that’s how you feel. We can keep checking in about it.”

  Panic mode operational.

  “I’m gonna—”

  Engage force field, Captain.

  “I’m gonna go.”

  I head for the garage, get in my car, and turn the engine on. My father comes to the garage door.

  “You can’t leave,” he proclaims.

  Watch me, I think.

  When I turn around, I realize his car is parked behind mine in the driveway. I can’t go anywhere. At least, not in my car.

  I black out.

  It wasn’t my father’s rejection that started it. It was the overwhelming totality of emotion. It was the rejection, the revelation, the honesty, the five years of boiling up and over unleashed all at once. I wasn’t running away from home. I just needed some space and, in panic mode, didn’t know how else to get it but to put one foot in front of the other as fast as I could.

  Suddenly, I’m running running running through the December rain. I’m sobbing sobbing sobbing through the December rain. Why did I have to pick a rainy December night to do this? Why didn’t I grab an umbrella out of my car? Why am I even running? This is so dramatic. This is so stupid.

  A few minutes and half a mile later, I’m on the swing set by the neighborhood pool, sitting in the rain, shivering. I call my brother.

  “Dude, you have to stop crying, I can’t understand what you’re saying. You have to calm down.”

  I hang up on him.

  I call Paige. I tell her that things were okay, but I am overwhelmed and need to get away for a while. Like a best friend does, she doesn’t ask any questions or hesitate for a second. She marches immediately downstairs, fearlessly telling her parents, “Look, Jacob is gay and he just came out to his parents and he’s upset and crying in the rain, can we go pick him up?”

  Without missing a beat, Paige and her dad hop in the car. They pick me up at the pool. Paige holds me in the rain for a moment, then beckons me inside the vehicle. The car ride back to her house is silent. Not because it is awkward, but because it is human: because she wants me to focus on breathing, on slowing down.

  When we get to Paige’s house, her mom digs out some old sweatshirts, gets me out of my wet clothes, makes us hot chocolate, and leaves us alone to talk. Out of all possible nerdy things to do next, Paige and I make a list of pros and cons. At the top of the list is:

  You can date boys now!

  As if.

  Half an hour later, I call my mom. She pleads with me to come home. I tell her I never planned to run away, that I wasn’t running away forever or anything, that I was sorry for being dramatic, that I wasn’t mad at her. Paige and I turn on some Food Network while we wait for my mom to come pick me up. Barefoot Contessa, I think.

  Back at my house, my dad has shut himself in my parents’ room. Now he’s the one who won’t come out. My mom and I are both grateful for the space, grateful that he’s left us the rest of the house. We sit on the couch and begin unpacking years of baggage, unfurling scarves and socks and underwear and pants. T-shirts and beanies, hood
ies and metaphorical belts. It feels good to have it out in the open. Now my mom is the one who’s crying.

  “When you were born sixteen and something years ago, you know what I said to the doctor?”

  She cradles me against her chest, running her fingers through my hair.

  “I told him it was like an angel had fallen down from heaven and landed in my arms. You were so beautiful and perfect.”

  I breathe in and out. She breathes in and out. The universe breathes in and out. Our Christmas tree twinkles on the hearth.

  “I’m just worried that life is going to be harder for you. I don’t want life to be hard for you. The world can be so mean. I want you to have everything you want without having to deal with people being cruel to you. I love you.”

  We sit on the couch for hours, until two a.m. I can’t remember the last time my mother stayed up until two a.m. At the end, before I head up for bed, she makes me pinky-promise her that I won’t get AIDS. I tell her I will always use a condom. She says okay. I say good chat.

  My father and I don’t speak a word to each other for a week. The next weekend, I tell him I want to talk.

  Like the little shit that I am, I start our conversation by turning the tables. I tell my father that I have chosen to accept him as he is.

  “Look, you are my dad and I love you and accept who you are no matter what. If you choose not to affirm my sexuality, I will still love and accept you. There’s nothing you can do to shake me, to make me stop loving you.”

  He is taken aback, unsure of what to say. This was not the conversation he was expecting.

  Scrambling, he tells me that homosexuality is a sin. I tell him I don’t care what the pope says, that I’m not even Catholic—I’m Methodist—and that I choose to interpret the Bible differently. He reiterates that he believes gay people go to hell. I tell him he should go to church more than two times a year if he plans on condemning anyone to hell. Checkmate. He drops the religious argument forever. He never really meant it in the first place, he was just panicking and saying whatever popped into his head.

  We agree to disagree. We agree to passive aggression. We agree to not really talk about it. We agree to a fraught truce, an imperfect armistice, a Cold War. Neither of us is truly okay—it’ll be a long time before we’ll be okay, and to this day, we still work hard at it—but for the next few years, we’ll do our best to pretend.

  * * *

  —

  So there you have it. There’s your drama. There’s your classic teenage angst. There’s your glorious, Jacob-erupts-from-the-closet-in-a-burning-fire-of-self-actualization showdown. There’s your delicious courage-in-the-face-of-adversity sandwich.

  But that’s the last one you’re going to get in this book. That’s the last great coming out story I have. From this point onward, coming out becomes more complicated, becomes messier and more nuanced alongside my burgeoning identity.

  For years after I came out as gay, when people would ask, “So what was coming out to your parents like?” I would recount this entire story to them word for word, even adding a few embellishments to make it more grandiose. I relished every dramatic detail. The fact that it was December. The fact that it was raining. The fact that I ran. People like you better when you give them a show.

  When I was younger, this story held real weight. This was my war story, the proof that I was a veteran of this struggle. I held it close, hopeful to tell it to anyone who’d listen.

  As I’ve grown older and my identity has become more complex, this story has hollowed out. Not all at once, but bit by bit. Each time I made a new discovery about my gender, each time I reconnected with my femininity in a more powerful or significant way, each time I brushed polish across my nails, another piece of this story would fall away. It’s not that the story was bad or incorrect or too traumatic, it’s just that with each passing day, as I got further and further from feeling simply like a gay man, the story of coming out to my parents as gay mattered to me less.

  These days, my answer has changed pretty substantially. When people ask me when I “came out to my parents,” I just sorta scratch my head, because which coming out story do you want? Which identity interests you most? Some days, when I’m feeling generous, I may tell you the partial answer, which is that I came out to my parents as gay and then never really came out to them again. If you’re really lucky, I may still recount the sordid emotional details of that rainy December night.

  But most of the time, I brush the question off. I give some half-assed answer like, “Well, my mom was great with it, and my dad took his time. But he’s mostly come around,” and then I move on.

  No one ever gets the full answer. The full answer, the one I wish I could give my sixteen-year-old self, is that I will never be done coming out to my parents, because I will never be done coming out to anyone. The reality about gender is that we are all morphing all the time. We are all growing and evolving, excavating and renovating. I will be discovering new facets of my gender until my last breath. And so my coming out is never complete. My parents (along with everyone else in my life) will be learning new things about my gender and my sexuality well into their retirement, well after they’ve sold my childhood home, well after they’ve moved into an assisted living community (though hopefully they’ll never have to), because I am still discovering new things.

  For me, coming out is less like a closet and more like a software update. I go off, further developing and tweaking my code, changing my algorithm to be better, stronger, faster; and every few months, the people in my life get an update to their operating system. Sometimes, the upgrades are so substantial that you can hardly recognize the computer in front of you anymore. You have to learn how to use the system all over again. Start from scratch. Sometimes, the upgrades are cosmetic but profound, like when emojis were first added to the default iPhone keyboard. Sometimes, the upgrade is so minuscule or behind the scenes that you don’t notice it. But no matter how old you get, there will always be another upgrade. I will always be tweaking my OS.

  Looking back at my sixteen-year-old self, what I hate most for myself is the fact that on that night in December, I thought I was done. I thought that with that one software upgrade, I’d fixed the bug and could move on. After all, I’d come out of the closet and I was in the room now—so we were good, right?

  Right?

  I also lament the weight I put on honesty. I was told I owed it to my parents to be honest with them about who I was. But did I really owe them that? Do queer people really owe honesty to people who have spent their entire lives precluding the possibility that we are anything but straight, anything but the gender we were assigned at birth?

  I feel this most acutely in regards to my relationship with Chris. I did not have to wait until after I’d come out to my parents to start dating him. I could’ve started dating him without disclosing my sexuality to my parents. I could’ve sucked a dick or two before having the big talk with my folks. My straight friends never had to have a conversation with their parents about their heterosexual desire before slurping on a D or munchin’ on a muff, so why was I held to that standard? It strikes me as ridiculous that I should have to declare my sexual consciousness to the world around me before I could even explore it, before I really even knew what it was. No one should have to come out before they get the chance to (consensually!) put their mouth on genitals of some sort, just to be sure.

  After I came out as gay, I never officially came out as genderqueer or as nonbinary or as trans or as feminine. I never, not once, sat anyone, much less my parents, down and said, “My gender is different than what you think it is.” “Coming out” stopped being a useful or productive way to think about my journey.

  I couldn’t have properly “come out as trans” if I’d wanted to, because I never closeted my gender identity in the first place; instead, I buried it. As a teenager and young adult, the fullness of my gender was unknown,
even to myself. It was buried underneath layers upon layers of shame, two decades of gender policing and self-alienation. As I began to excavate, I did so in the light of day, an open-air dig for everyone to see.

  My queerness and transness were a gradual unfurling, a slow blossom. I expressed my gender in real time as I discovered it. I didn’t say, “Mom, Dad, I’m questioning my gender,” I just showed up at the dinner table in lipstick one day. I didn’t say, “I’m genderqueer,” I just started shopping for different kinds of clothes. I never said, “I, Jacob Tobia, am now a member of the trans community,” I just started hanging out with more and more trans folks until it became an afterthought.

  What I’m saying is this: From now on, you’re going to have to work a little harder. There is still drama. There is still angst (trust me). There are still funny stories about how clumsy and awkward I am. And there are still lots of bad dick jokes. But from this point onward, my identity stopped being something I withheld and withheld and withheld and then finally released. It became something I chipped away at bit by bit, that I unearthed in real time.

  After coming out to my parents as gay, I was done building reservoirs in my heart. I was done storing up water behind a dam, praying that it wouldn’t burst as the pressure mounted. I was done hiding. From here on out, I vowed to myself that I’d be a free-flowing river. That I’d do my best to try.

  The Christmas following my little announcement was awkward. If you want to seriously ruin a family holiday, all you really have to do is tell your parents that you’re into pounding—and, more important, getting pounded by—other men.

  Chapter 5