I See Rad People
I grew up in the 1970s and 80s in Northampton, MA, a town the National Inquirer once called “Lesbianville USA.” You wouldn’t think there would be a downside to that but I managed to find one and it was this: I saw lesbians every day. Big, beautiful, brash women with radical haircuts and confrontational t-shirts were all over Main Street and I saw them everywhere, flashing studs and tattoos, holding hands, and ducking into the feminist bookstores and lesbian bars where I dared not tread.
And that was great. The problem was, I saw those lesbians…but no others. The list of out lesbian celebrities at the time I came out started at Lea DeLaria and ended and Martina Navratilova. There was no one in between. That was the whole list.
So I thought that’s what lesbians were: in your face, possessed of superhuman talents and well outside of the mainstream. Completely unlike the quiet preppie girl that I was, right?
In the spring of 1992, when I was 21, I found myself driving around aimlessly late one night, trying to avoid going back to my dorm because I knew I would find my boyfriend there, sitting outside my door with a backpack that had a toothbrush in it somewhere. He was a kind, sweet man—my mother still asks about him—and I just wasn’t that into him and I didn’t know why.
Then suddenly, a voice on the car radio was articulating exactly what I felt. A woman with a beautiful voice was singing a jaunty little acoustic ditty that showed she knew exactly what I was going through.
I don’t feel romantic about you.
I don’t sit around wondering why you don’t call.
I don’t feel romantic about you at all.
I had to know who my new ally was and when the D.J. said her name I almost ran off the road. It was by an artist known as Phranc. I’d read about her in Rolling Stone and knew she billed herself as “the all-American Jewish Lesbian folksinger.” A lesbian–who was going through something just like me. Hmmm.
It would be nice if I could say that everything fell into place in the car that night, that I stopped living in denial right then, that I unlearned a lifetime of internalized homophobia in an instant, or that my hard preppie shell cracked wide open and I completely accepted myself for who I was. It’s not quite that simple and coming out for me was a process, not a moment. But it started then, with the dawning of my realization that lesbians were not some kind of exotic other. They weren’t all Lea DeLaria. They weren’t all that woman I saw at the coffee shop all the time, the one who had a chain connecting her nose to her earlobe. They could be folk singers. They could be the girl next door. They could be me.
(Do I even have to say which one I am in the photo? I’m on the top right, in the green sweatshirt, yes, the one who looks like she wandered into a Lesbian Avengers meeting by mistake on her way to field hockey practice.)