And Another Thing: To the Woods

By Carole Taylor

Last week's episode found our heroine out in the woods with the nymphs and faeries and even with other things of vacant stare. And yes, probably with people who have a preference for dating pigs and sheep. But I don't personally know any of those "Deliverance" types. Or maybe I do and just don't realize it. Everybody has a closet of some sort, but straight folks often don't think they do. The contents of other people's closets usually seem much more interesting and worthy of microscopic inspection. Witness Dan Burton and Henry Hyde versus Bill Clinton. (And no, I won't give that one a rest.)

But to bring you up to date on my coming out in the woods, last week when I had lunch with two old friends from high school, I decided the best way to approach this closet business is to pretend that my house has no locked doors. I decided to act as if everybody already knew about who I live with and why, in the same way that they all knew I designed our high school ring. Old history. Next? How, if anyone is paying the slightest bit of attention, might anyone think anything else about me? But you just never know how much energy some people might want to put into their own insulation and denial.

So I'm having lunch with two women that I probably don't have much in common with anymore, other than having been friends all those years ago when each of our lives were more homogeneous (a homo of some sort, at least). I said something about my partner, and without skipping a beat, Charlotte (bless her heart) said, “And what does she do?”

Once again, children, it turns out that fear of the unknown has proved itself to have more fangs and hairy palms than reality. Fear, as they say, stands for False Events Appearing Real. Spending a lot of time preparing for the worst lets the worst live rent free in your head, and often has little relationship to how gently things might actually play out. Not to say that preparation isn't a good thing, but at least when you expect people to act like friends, giving them this bit of additional information will only adversely affect folks who aren't your friends anyway. Their loss, bye. I am, after all, often entertaining, sometimes even polite; I can spiff up when required so even rich people can take me out to dinner without too much undue embarrassment; I can sing, dance and cook, and I often speak in complete sentences. Unless a fragment has some stylistic purpose. (Unlike certain elected officials who shall remain, for the duration of this particular column, nameless.)

The fact is that if we don't treat this whole issue of being gay as a bone of contention, then eventually what ought to be a non-issue becomes a non-issue. Which is the point of all of us coming out anyway. Secrets by their very nature are big and dark and mysterious because things look bigger in the dark than they actually are, and therefore secrets are scary to everybody, even to the person who owns them. Or rather, to the person owned by the secret.

I actually revel in our differences, mine and not mine. I want to be able to celebrate what actually is that infamous 'gay lifestyle' with its even more infamous agenda, and all of our inside jokes and camping and double entendres that straight people just can't seem to catch. We lose a lot of our connections with each other when we are swept away down the mainstream. Maybe we can figure out a way to have being gay become a big So What, yet still maintain the differences that make us worth having a whole set of sitcoms designed around us. (And another thing, how come "Will & Grace" isn't too much about being gay, when "Ellen" was too much about being lesbian? But that's another column.)

Think about this for a second: In a very real sense, it is our community that can be and often is the essence of world peace. Now wait-- don't roll those eyes at me like that. It was not too lofty a statement. After all, we are all races, all genders (yes, Virginia, there are more than two), all differences. All classes, all nations, all professions, all beliefs, all religions, all politics. We can go almost anywhere in the world and find family, an expedition on which straight people often seem not very adept. There are no boarders for us. Love is, after all, the international language. Ok, well, then maybe sex is. Whatever. Let me be philosophical for once.

Ok, then, since you suffered through all that with me, I'll share a favorite joke, appropriately enough, from high school. At the time I first heard it, I didn’t realize that what the joke was about was compulsory heterosexuality:

"To the woods, to the woods!" he threatened her.

"No! Not the woods!! Anything but the woods!!!!" she lamented.

"Anything?????" he enthused.

Beat, two, three... "To the woods, to the woods…" she sighed, resigned.

Booga booga . . .


Carole Taylor holds a masters degree and most of a doctorate, which she used as a university administrator for much too long by all accounts. She has been a commercial artist, a journalist, a grants writer, a house cleaner and a Renaissance woman. She also wrote a fantastic must-read novel, called
"A Third Story". You can email her here.