Gay Pride

My mother is not a lesbian. Her fraternal twin, Marty, was a lesbian. Marty died of lung cancer when I was seven; she and my mother were thirty-four. My mother’s twin is a martyr in my family, the perfect child, the perfect person. She loved people; she was smart, athletic, active in the fight for women's rights. She taught me how to jump rope on Sanibel Island in Florida. It was windy, but that's all I remember.

We went to Philadelphia for the memorial service. Suede, one of Marty's former lovers, played "From a Distance" on her synthesizer. Marty's body was cremated, but we never saw the ashes scattered because a huge snowstorm covered Pennsylvania the day after the service. We ate dinner in Marty's old house, which she shared with Bonnie, her lover at the time. My mother says my father cooked chicken, and Suede played the piano and guitar for us. She played "House at Pooh Corner" and "Peanut Butter and Jelly" for me and my little sister.

The August after Marty died, I taught myself how to play "Happy Birthday" on the piano, for my mother. Mom's birthday always created of a huge amount of stress for every member of my family. My father, my younger sister, Cricket, and I, we labored. To make it perfect. On our birthdays, my mother pined and agonized to ensure that every detail went correctly, so the birthday person would be happy. The reservations at the restaurant, the number of party favors, the order of giving presents and playing games, all must be in line. And when something did not go as planned, she would be devastated; we would spend the whole day assuring her that the birthday had gone well, that it had not been ruined by a burnt cake. So when August eleventh rolled around, it was imperative that not a single thing upset her, that we not ruin her birthday.

Cricket led Mom by the hand into the living room as I began to play. I only got to the part where it goes high with "happy birthday dear Jody" before I messed up. Pressed the wrong key; the interval was off. I burst into tears. Sobbing on the piano bench, bent over the tainted keys, I realized my mother had also begun to cry, with Cricket in her lap. The only other time I'd ever seen my mother shed a single tear was months before, at Marty's memorial service. My sister was so shocked that she began to cry as well. And there we sat, all three women in my family, seated across the living room from each other, sobbing our hearts out. My father froze momentarily, stunned on the couch, before he tried to comfort all of us at once. I don't know how he did it.

I believed wholeheartedly for many years that my poor piano skills had ruined my mother's birthday, causing her to break down. She finally told me why she had cried: it had been her first birthday without Marty. It was the first time in her life that she could not turn to her twin and say, "happy birthday Marty."

And wait for the response…"happy birthday Jody."

I am thirteen. I am frozen at the top of a cement ramp, looking out upon the cold, cement terrace of Boston City Hall. I don't want to be here. If my friends ever found out that I had been to this kind of event… I know for a fact that no one in the Chenery Middle School would ever be caught dead in this situation.

This is everything I fear. A few clumps of bizarre women standing around with all the awkwardness of the beginning of a party, some eyeing each other for dates. My mother's friends have been raving about this event for weeks, somehow bringing it up every time I see them, with their funky headbands and Guatemalan print pants, tapered at the bottom. My friends always manage to be nearby when one of my mother's artist types pulls into our driveway in a rickety old Subaru. She inevitably leaps out of the car, kisses me on the cheek, and makes some joke about men's inadequacy. My friends turn to me suspiciously, offering confused and skeptical glances. Seems like no one else's mother is aware of Gay Pride Week.

The lesbians have noticed our presence. They pause in their small-talk conversations, groups of two and three. They each look up in their own turn to notice the only family group here. The only man here. The only children here.

Card tables, lined up to form an L, are the only furniture in the entire open area. Some people are still setting out dishes of cold noodles and casseroles. There are only about thirty people here; they all look like dykes.

We are awkward, but we cover it in different ways. I try to play it cool, aloof, bored. My sister is confused; she sticks to me. My dad is absolutely silent. He's here to support my mother's interests and because, like my mother, he believes that there should be equal rights for everyone. He reminds Mom of when they went to Vietnam war protests together, and he staunchly sat in front of the locked gates of the Westover Air Force Base because he should, because he believed it was right. It seemed sort of foolish to her, Mom says. My mother is smiling now, but timid. She is here to support the gay community in honor of her twin, and to see the featured performer: Suede.

My parents have brought their children to a Gay Pride event in hopes that they might mold our minds in the right direction. Although they have never tried to impress a religion on us, there are some values my parents want us to have. They have brought their children here for the same reason that my father repeatedly hints to us that Republicans are racist pigs, and my mother reminds us that if there is a God, She might be a woman.

We scurry over to the fringes of the socializing zone. Cricket and I climb up on thick cement benches that weave around the edges of the terrace. We are quiet, playing with different leg positions, trying to become as fetal as possible. We have about ten feet of breathing space between us and the crowd, which grows larger as more women emerge from the ramp. The rising chit-chat and bursts of laughter bounce off the walls, up to the ceiling. The roof is so far above me that it feels like there is no roof at all. The terrace is cavernous, hollow.

We get food off the spindly card tables. Lasagna, spinach, cold carrots and celery sticks, typical for early June. Mom mumbles that she likes the noodle salad while we stay huddled over our paper plates. A woman, Audrey, joins us silently. She runs the lights at our Unitarian Church. Mom has mentioned before that Audrey is gay, in a tone of pride, as if this is a righteous, noble thing to be. Audrey, like us, knows no one here. She asks me about school and music a little bit, between bites. My father has not said a word.

Finally, the tension is too much for me. I force out the words methodically, "Mom, why are there only women here?" When my mother is truly upset, too upset to scream, she is quiet. She peers at you from behind raised eyebrows; her words are tight and held back. Right now, I sound like her.

But she does not. She is loose, and somewhat irritated at the tone of my voice. "I don't know honey." I feel manipulated. Five years later, my sister would finally put into words that detail-obsessed side of my mother, so evident at birthday parties. "This restaurant has no Non-Smoking section?!" or "It's too bad the sky is partly cloudy," or even "Goddamn it, I can't believe they didn't have your rollerskate size." Now, she has not pointed out the absence of men. Perhaps it is no surprise to her.

My mother tentatively moves off to find Suede. Along the way, she attempts to socialize with the women. I don't think she has any friends here, but she pretends to be confident and proud. They are kind to her, smiling from within their circles, even sharing a word or two in passing. They somehow seem to know that she should be free to enter their select club, as an honorary member.

Cricket and I spend a good half hour alternating between sitting on the cement benches and getting up to peer over the wall, to the plaza below. A pop radio station is hosting their summer concert, which has attracted far more people than this lame event. I can see throngs of families, with children in small baby carriages, buying fried dough and noisemakers. Some kids are screaming for cotton candy. Between the balloon-arches and speaker towers, far below, is a stage where an alternative rock group performs the cool music on KISS 108. People clap and cheer. At one point, I turn to my sister, and grumpily say "I wish our family was like that." She stares back at me, not understanding.

Finally, we meet up with Suede. It is only the third time in my life I have met her. She is huge. Her crimped, colorless hair falls around her wide face, wide body. She is a happy bear of a woman.

My mother pulls my sister and me towards Suede with her eyes. We remember our manners and how to shake someone's hand like an adult. Suede's palm swallows my petite fingers. There is the obligatory astonishment at how much we've grown. Surprise and joy that I have begun to play the trumpet. By this time, there are many women, swimming in groups around us, each turning her head to hear Suede's booming voice. She is a powerful woman. My mother's crowd has always told me, without words, that someday I will be powerful too.

Suede has to leave because the entertainment is about to start. We are near the front of the crowd as it funnels slowly into an enclosed ampitheater. We settle down on huge cement benches which fan out across the room. They are, in fact, not benches, but giant's stairs, leading up, away from the small stage below. My family sits in the center; I am in front of my parents.

Women take seats all around us; some are holding hands, running their fingers up each other's shoulders, down to their hips. They sit and joke about life, mostly about gay life. Some have come in groups of four, double dates. There are three men that I can see, sitting at the top of the audience, to the right of us. They have red hair, red beards; they look like they're about to break into an Irish sea shanty, but their bearing and clothes are a little too soft.

The comedian is first. She makes lots of queer sexual jokes. I can understand that they are queer and sexual but I don't see how any of them are funny. I laugh anyway, quietly, smugly, as if this kind of humor is mildly amusing and familiar to me. One joke is about Midwesterners who hear that they are going to have a flood, so they build themselves some dykes. God looks down upon these poor dykes stuck in the middle of the country and yells, "Get to the sides! Get to the sides!" The audience roars, and my mother leans forward to explain that a "dyke" is another name for a gay person, but not a very nice name. And gay people are generally more welcome on the coasts…I interrupt her with an impatient, "I know, Mom."

In the middle of her act, the comedian asks the audience, "how many of you here are homosexually challenged?" And then, amid laughter, "I mean, how many of you... are straight?"

I hastily move to assert my straightness. My mother, my father, and my sister also dutifully raise their hands, and looking around, I notice that we are the only ones. The comedian and the audience turn their heads to us, laughing openly. The laughter translates into applause, for what I don't know: for our courage to admit it, to come to their queer event, to willingly be the freaks of a crowd. My dad's smile is forced; his silence is overpowering. I smile confidently, trying to act like I don't care, like I am strong and proud to be straight.

In the months before this, I began to think about the possibility of being gay. I rolled the idea around in my head, decided to let it sit peacefully, keeping myself open. But there's no way that I want my mom and all these other women thinking I'm a mini-lesbian-in-training. For now, I am straight. Straight as an arrow, not deviant, like the many short-haired women around me.

Suede is voluptuous. She is just as huge on stage as she is up close. She waves at my family. Thankfully, feeling privileged, we wave back. She tells jokes between each song. They are the same jokes that she will tell at every performance I will come to see her at in the future. Her favorites are the ones about an orgasm climbing the rope in gym class and about masturbating with your own two fingers. The women love her. Her music and her voice resound off the walls. We have an old record of hers, and I recognize some of the songs. Like the jokes, Suede always plays her sweet blues the same. But she is jazzy and sexy and strong.

When Suede is done, it is time to go home. We buy a signed CD, gather ourselves together, and scurry out of the cement, into the summer night. Apparently, the party has only begun; a Gay Pride dance is about to start. But we are thankful to leave the scene, to be done with the whole ordeal. I can only imagine women's bodies rubbing up against each other in disco lights. Women kissing, their Guatemalan pants pulling up to reveal unshaven legs.

Four years later, I went to visit my mom's mother in her new apartment. My parents were divorced by this time; it was just me, my mother, and Cricket in our blue Volvo stationwagon. We socialized in my grandmother's small parlor for a while, but I soon grew bored and wandered off to look in the other rooms. On one of the shelves in my grandmother's bedroom, I found five photo albums, each devoted to one of her children. I immediately leafed through my mother's but soon moved on to Marty's. I passed by the naked baby pictures, the toddler wearing the same dress as my mother, and the awkward teenager. When I reached the adult pictures, my fingers froze; I stared at the same few photos, for what felt like a very long time. With the exception of hair color, Marty looked exactly like me.

I was so happy, tears squeezed out of the corners of my eyes. Beaming, I ceremoniously carried the album out into the parlor and presented it before my grandmother, my mother, my sister.

"I look exactly like Marty." I said it like I expected no response, no contradiction, no tomorrow.

"No you don't," my mother quickly answered, dismissing my fervor. "Marty had a very different face and body from you." She glanced at the pictures aloofly.

My grandmother said, "Well, you do look a bit like her. Not like the rest of us anyway." Most of the women in my mother's family are thin and wiry with no chest. Marty and I both have very wide faces and more breasts than the rest of them combined. Although my mother frequently calls me "beautiful," she has also described me as being "full." And my grandmother, who is a little less kind, has even called me "big." According to both, Marty was "chunky at times."

"No," my mother said, shaking her head with determination. "You don't really look like her. Although, you know, there are times when I look at your hands, and they look just like Marty's."