by Jacob Tobia
In My Own Two Shoes, On My Own Two Feet
The summer of 2008, just before my seventeenth birthday, my grandmother passed away. Her death itself wasn’t a tragedy: four days away from her eighty-eighth birthday, she’d lived a long, robust life. She’d built a family, traveled internationally a few times, and even gone back to school at the age of fifty-eight to complete her college education. She’d done a lot and been places. Once she brought me back a soapstone owl from Greece.
Her death was sudden, but in the right way. One month, she was living alone at her apartment in the small town of Danville, Virginia. Mostly independent, happy, in fairly good health, taking walks up and down the hill outside her apartment complex each day, going to the beauty school every two weeks to get her hair done. The next month, she was in the hospital. Nothing was particularly wrong, she was just feeling weak and in a bit of pain. No cancer, no debilitating injury, some dementia but no Alzheimer’s. Then quietly, suddenly, a week later, she died.
I was on a church retreat, in the middle of a small prayer group, when I heard the news. I left the room to take the phone call from my mom. She told me that my grandmother had died. I walked back in and fell to the floor—my prayer group huddled around me as I let the feelings wash over me. I shed a lot of tears that day. It wasn’t because my grandmother’s death was untimely or unjust; it wasn’t that her death felt unfair. As far as deaths in the family went, her death was peaceful and sweet; which, paradoxically enough, made it easier to connect to my sense of loss.
When someone is taken before their time, when someone is taken in political violence or brutality, when someone dies in pain, the feelings of rage can stand in the way of properly grieving. In those instances, we must split our heart between feeling anger and feeling loss. Like when another trans woman of color is murdered in hate violence. Or a person we love dies in prison. Or cancer takes a twelve-year-old. In those instances, our grief and anger are grueling.
In the case of my grandma, I was given the grace that comes with a painless, peaceful death. I didn’t cry because I was mad at the world for taking her. I cried simply because I loved her. I cried because I adored spending time with her, playing cards and Rummikub. I cried because I am a nostalgic person who feels and feels and then feels some more.
After the funeral, we began the long process of going through my grandparents’ possessions. The decisions about what to keep and what to give away were exhaustive and relentless, and my mom was mainly the one who had to make them. My father and brother and I were just there for moral support. I spent most of my time digging through an old crate of letters my grandmother and grandfather had written to each other during World War II, when my grandfather was deployed to the Pacific only a few months after they’d been married. They were engrossing and romantic, filled with “I love you, my darling” and “You are the most cherished part of my heart.” Scrawled in a deeply slanted cursive, half of them written at sea, they took forever to read. I sat in the guest bedroom of my grandmother’s apartment, wading through each word, reading about the time my grandfather had spent in Hawaii before deployment and then the time his ship almost sank, finding photos of him on a rock in Central Park before he shipped out, feeling awed by my grandmother’s courage in the face of economic hardship at home. I marinated in their deep, abiding longing for each other in the face of war.
Before I knew it, hours had passed. My parents, who’d been slowly working their way through the living room, had arrived at my grandmother’s bedroom. I recognized the sound of her wooden dresser sliding open and closed. I recognized the clanking of costume earrings, the snaking clink of necklaces, the pop of her jewelry box lids. I could recognize those sounds anywhere. It was the same jewelry I’d spent hours and hours of my childhood trying on.
As far as I was concerned, that was my jewelry collection, but my mom—who’d never particularly cared for my grandmother’s classically Southern, feminine taste—was deciding its fate. I had to save it, but how could I without giving away the fact that I wanted it? And what did I want it for?
The beauty of a crisis is that it compels us to act out of instinct. When the stakes are high and the decisions imminent, we don’t have the chance to question our motivations or doubt our intentions. We must simply do something. So I didn’t have time to think about what it meant that I wanted my grandmother’s jewelry. I didn’t have time to question whether it would be risky for me to seem too interested. I didn’t have time to agonize over whether I had the courage to say I wanted to inherit my grandmother’s clip-on earrings. And I certainly didn’t have time to debate whether wearing my grandmother’s chunky clip-ons from the 1980s would be a solid fashion choice when I finally got the courage to take them out in public. I just knew that if I didn’t save her costume pearls and Christmas-themed brooches, I would spend the rest of my life—and every subsequent holiday party—regretting it.
Without a plan, I put down the letter I was reading and attempted to casually float into the room to see what my mom was doing, immediately giving away that something was up. I am not the type of person who casually enters a room. Like a true Leo, I only know one way to enter rooms—loudly and with fanfare. Which is why, within three seconds, my mom knew something was going on. And if she didn’t know it then, she definitely knew it when I casually sat on the bed and said,
“So . . . um . . . whatcha doin’, Mom? What are you . . . erm . . . looking at?”
She sighed and wiped her nose. I like to think her nose was running because she was emotional, but it also could’ve been the fact that we’d stirred up literally all the dust in the entire apartment over the course of ten hours.
“I’m going through your grandmother’s jewelry. Remember how much you used to love these earrings? You’d spend hours in here playing with them.”
Wait, she knew? I was taken aback. Like with all parts of my childhood faggotry, I held fast to the delusion that I’d been subtle. That I’d sneakily loved my grandmother’s jewelry, or that I’d played with my neighbors’ Barbies unnoticed. Memory is fickle like that. You give yourself the delusion that you need at the time, and back then, I needed to believe I was actually hiding, when I was always sort of just hiding in plain sight. I wanted to believe my identity was in a closet or a chest or a bank vault. At best, it was a china cabinet with glass doors. The contents were fragile—precious, delicate, beautiful porcelain swirled with gold and blue, wisps of floral detail, shimmers of crystal—but they were on display for pretty much all the world to see, including my mom.
I was uncomfortable that she’d clocked me and only mustered this response:
“Yeah, haha, I remember that. I would spend a lot of, um, yeah, a lot of time playing with that when I was a kid.”
My discomfort grew. I crawled in my skin.
Dammit, Jacob, this is a crisis, so you have to keep making the words with your mouth, okay? Just ask. Just ask the question.
“So . . . uh . . . what are you thinking about . . . I dunno . . . doing with her jewelry?”
“I’m not sure. I mean, most of it’s costume, and I certainly wouldn’t wear it, so I’m thinking that it might be best to give the lion’s share to Goodwill.”
Oh no oh no oh no oh no oh no. Oh god OH GOD NO. You gotta do something, kiddo, because this shit is about to be gone forever.
Then, a flash of brilliance.
You have cousins who are girls and they aren’t here! You can say that we should keep it for them! Aha! A scapegoat!
I was suddenly flooded with confidence. “I mean, we could give it to Goodwill, but don’t you think that we should hold on to it so that Kaitlin and Lindsay and Courtney can look through it when they’re next in town and see if there’s anything that they want? I’d hate to get rid of it if there’s anything that they’d like to keep.”
My mom mulled this over, then smiled, pleased with the empathetic child she’d raised. Little did she know tha
t I never intended on giving any of that jewelry to my cousins. I was just using them as an excuse to get it back to our house, where I could squirrel it away.
“Look at you, being so considerate of them. I suppose we can hang on to it until they have the chance to look through it.”
Oh my God, that plan worked. Jacob, don’t act too excited. You can smile, but, like, not too big, okay?
“Why don’t you hold on to it until then? Can you put it in the pile of stuff that we’re keeping?”
Keep it chill, Jacob.
“Sure. Sounds good, Mom.”
Okay, stop talking now and leave the room. Definitely don’t turn around and say something else.
I reached the door, then turned back to my mom. “Okay. Great. I think it’s wonderful that we’re keeping this for the cousins.”
Why are you still talking? Just go put it in the pile.
“Because, y’know, so much of grandma’s jewelry is just really beautiful and I’m certain that they’d like some of it.”
Jacob. You have to shut up. You’re giving yourself away.
I backed out of the room awkwardly. “And I love a lot of it, too. Especially the brooches, because they’re so sparkly . . . so . . . yeah . . . anyway, I’ll go put it in the pile now. I might look through some of it before I put it away.”
Jesus, kid, way to be subtle.
I took the four boxes, placed them in a brown paper grocery bag for safekeeping, and, with great aplomb, placed the bag in the pile of items we were taking home with us. On the car ride home, I was smug. My cousins were never going to get any of it. I didn’t completely understand why yet, but that jewelry was for me.
A few months later, when my cousins did end up coming to visit, I knew just what to do. As a freshly out homosexual, I combined my newfound gay fashion powers with my catty teenage powers of manipulation to dissuade them from taking anything whatsoever. Putting on my best Tim Gunn, I passive-aggressively introduced the jewelry to my cousins:
“Here’s some of Grandma’s tacky costume jewelry if you want to dress up like her or something, lol.”
My strategy was a great success. I managed to persuade my cousins that our grandmother’s jewelry was undesirable. Other than a locket or two, they didn’t take a thing.
Grandma’s jewelry was mine. Now I just had to figure out what the fact that I wanted it meant.
* * *
—
News of my budding identity as a queer weirdo (queerdo?) spread slowly, in hushed tones, through my home church. During this period of time, the adult leaders in the church knew what was going on, but were ambivalent about how to respond. For the most part, the approach was always one of “live and let live.” Jacob can be gay and be a leader in youth group, as long as they don’t like, talk about it all the time. As long as everyone was nice to me and I was nice to everyone, they could let it stand. Some of the adult leaders even went so far as to let me know that they supported me. Overall, it was an atmosphere of love, but the limitations of that love were tested sooner than I’d anticipated.
The major test came a year after I came out, when I was asked to give my first testimony. I was ecstatic. For church kids, this was the closest you’d ever feel to a rock star.
Testimony was when shit got real. During your testimony, you took the stage in front of the entire youth group and told your deepest, darkest secrets. You confessed that you were struggling with an eating disorder or with self-harming; you shared that you’d been abused by a relative or lost a family member to addiction; you recounted the story about the terrible illness you fought or the horrific car accident you were in and told everyone how God’s love was the only thing that got you through it. You cried. You confessed. You found catharsis. You found absolution in front of the collective. For a queen like me, testimony was the best part of church, the closest I could get to a bona fide diva moment, sans sequins. It was dramatic, it was performative, it was emotional, it was indulgent, and I loved it.
I spent years thinking about what my testimony would be. I fantasized about the soaring rhetoric I would use, about the way I would make people cry, about the adoration I would receive when I reached my triumphant conclusion and claimed it for God. But for years, I had to wait, because it was an unspoken rule that testimonies were only done by juniors or seniors in high school.
Finally, my time had come.
I was asked to give my testimony for a retreat called Discovery, which the high schoolers planned for the middle schoolers. For the middle schoolers, it was a chance to grow spiritually. For the high schoolers, it was an opportunity to hang out and flirt and get free food while also learning leadership skills. That year, I was asked to give the “God Created You” talk.
I mean, what did they think I was going to talk about? The struggles of wearing glasses in middle school? Having a lot of body hair? Not being good at sports? Of course I was going to talk about being a big ol’ queen.
By this time, most of the high schoolers at church knew I was gay, but no one really told the middle schoolers what was going on. I was allowed to be gay at church, but they probably weren’t ready for me to say, “Jesus made me gay and maybe he made you gay, too” in front of a bunch of sixth graders. I knew it was risky to write a testimony about being queer, but I couldn’t let my church’s reticence to publicly embrace my identity stop me from trying. So I sat down at my computer, and I started writing.
The week before the retreat, each person who’d been selected had to first give their talk to a committee of adult leaders. This mechanism wasn’t usually used to censor talks; it was mostly in place so that young people didn’t procrastinate and put off writing their talk until the night before. One Sunday after church, I went downstairs to the prayer room, sat in front of the committee, and gave the following talk:
As is the custom, I’d like to start out by reading a Bible verse for you guys, a Psalm that I picked out.
Psalm 139:13–18 (NIV)
“For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place.
When I was woven together in the depths of the earth,
Your eyes saw my unformed body;
all the days ordained for me
were written in your book
before one of them came to be.
How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!
Were I to count them,
they would outnumber the grains of sand.”
When I read that verse, all I can say is wow . . . It honestly and completely blows my mind that God created me, created all of us, with such love and such thought. My favorite part of that verse, and the words that resonate with me so deeply, is the part right in verse 14 where it says, “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”
I guess I never realized it until I was writing this talk, but that verse speaks so strongly to who I am, and what my experience in life has been. You see, I’m not sure if you guys know this, I don’t know if someone has told you, if you’ve heard it from a friend, from Facebook, or if you just had a sneaking suspicion, but I’m gay. It’s funny, no matter how many times I say it, or how many times I come out to people, it’s always hard for me just to say those words, “I’m gay.” Being gay has made life pretty interesting for me. Sometimes it’s been okay, sometimes it’s been kind of fun, sometimes it’s been pretty lonely, sometimes it’s been downright traumatic, and more often than not, it’s been a challenge.
When I finally came around to that realization, it was terrifying, straight-up terrifying. It was like this
wall had been drawn between me and everyone else in the world. I sort of began to panic, I didn’t know where to turn, I didn’t know who to talk to. So I talked to no one. I didn’t tell a soul. I clammed up, and didn’t really let anyone in. I pretended that this whole sexuality thing simply didn’t exist. I became an actor.
I pretended to like girls. I pretended to have crushes, I pretended to be this person that I clearly wasn’t, and retained this fear that if I ever slipped up, if anyone ever understood who I truly was, if anyone ever saw through my disguise, my whole life would be ruined. I became pretty depressed, because when you hide who you are like that, you lose a lot of your ability to connect with people. You live in this constant all-pervasive fear that someone will find out how much of a freak you are. You can’t connect with people because you can’t connect with yourself. You lose a fundamental part of your humanity. In that capacity, I was an incomplete, destitute person. That’s right about when the questioning started. I began to ask, “Why me? Why do I have to be the gay kid, why do I have to bear this burden?”
As I got older, the question of why became more and more important. The only conclusion that I came to was that God had made me gay, and I wasn’t okay with that. Why would God want me to be miserable? Why would he put me through all of this, why would he put this burden on me for seemingly no reason? I couldn’t even begin to understand. I just got angry.
Honestly, I began to hate God. I hated him for making me this way, I hated him for making me flawed, I hated him for not making me normal, I hated him for forcing me to be this person, I hated him for putting this thing in my life, I hated him for SO many reasons and I didn’t know how to change that. So I began to withdraw from Him. I began to hate God and consequently, I began to hate myself. I was reduced to a closeted, scared, dishonest, miserable person. And it was that way for the span of around 4 or 5 years.
I began coming out to my closest friends the summer before sophomore year. The first time I came out to anyone, it was a nerve-racking, scary thing. I had become so used to putting up this facade, that breaking it down was hard. I felt so vulnerable, and vulnerability can be horrifying. Yet by making myself vulnerable to others, I began to make myself vulnerable to God, and he slowly began to make his way back into my heart. I began to open up my heart to the love that God has to transform us all.
