Gay By Association
Identity in the in-between
Article by Leyla Kramarsky, art by Isabella Hageman
My moms get called “sir” in the fish line at Whole Foods. And at other places too, but it’s in the mess of shoppers and carts and sea smell that it sticks with me. Sometimes, Jeanne gets called “Sir Paul McCartney.” The resemblance is uncanny, honestly. It’s happened a few times. Anna, my mom who doesn’t look like Sir Paul Mccartney, says it’s because of the way they both occupy the world. She says femininity and masculinity aren’t really about the presence of, or lack thereof, boobs or butt or hair, but about stance, stature. She takes up space. That’s masculine.
My brother gets called ma’am every once in a while. Kind of. Usually, it’s more of a general, group-directed “girls,” and he happens to be a member of the group. He’s tall, but he’s loose-limbed and earnest. So I guess that’s feminine.
I get called lucky. All of the kids that I’ve ever babysat for, my middle school classmates, and the younger siblings of my high school friends have been jealous that I get to have two moms. Even when they don’t understand the mechanics of it all, the idea of having not just one, but two, of the nurturing, maternal presences they call their mothers is elating. I am lucky, but, to me, it’s luck related to the love and comfort that my family possesses, not to their queerness. That element has always felt strikingly normal.
My whole family is queer. My grandpa was too, but he didn’t come out until he was old and divorced and only after he had ousted his own daughter for being a lesbian, but that’s not really what I mean when I say family. When I say family, I mean the network of my mothers’ friends and ex-lovers, collected at college and in activism groups and beneath fluorescent club lights. My Uncle Betty taught me to laugh. He’s John when he’s a lawyer for the city, but he’s Betty Pearl, the blonde-bobbed drag queen, when he’s with us. Uncle Betty has the best stories. At six years old, I sit with him on his porch, eyes wide at his stories, while his husband puts their daughter to bed. One of his hands holds a glass of wine, the other gesticulates wildly.
On the train ride home from my first day of first grade, my mom asks if there are any “cute boys or girls in my class.” No. Ew.
Nothing is ever assumed in my house. Gender and sexuality are hypotheticals to toy with and try on and eventually sort of figure out. If you throw enough darts, you’re bound to hit a bullseye. My brother hit it early. A letter home from summer camp contained two papers. One addressed to “Mama and Mommy and Leyla” and one addressed to “JUST LEYLA.” In it, I read, “I’m bi. I miss you!” in a twelve-year-old’s shaky handwriting. My parents didn’t read it. They’re generous with secrets. It didn’t matter, though. He came out to them a month later. I, on the other hand, pretended that the lack of haste in exploration meant a free pass from doing it at all.
My family was the second gay family ever to enroll at my New York school. My parents were pioneers and, by extension, so was I. In Debbie’s kindergarten reading class, I teach my friends what a sperm donor is.
“How can two women make a baby?”
“Well, my biological father donated his sperm and they put it in my mom at the doctor’s office.”
“What’s sperm?”
That one was above my pay grade. In middle school, I am recruited to assist with the Gay Straight Alliance called Spectrum, or coloquially, “Gay Club.” At Gay Club, I teach my friends about ball culture and suggest we have a screening of “Paris is Burning.” It’s a classic in my household. When my friends start coming out, I am relieved that other people can finally share the weight. Being gay-by-association was getting exhausting.
I never stopped to think about my own sexuality. I told myself it was because I knew that it didn’t matter. I told myself that I was enlightened, born into a monarchy of queer people with no need for binaries or labels. I hated labels. I hated them because I couldn’t even begin to reckon with what mine might be. I didn’t feel straight. I was injected with too much queerness for that. I had been to one too many pride marches, one too many shabbat sedars filled with lesbians, seen one too many shirtless pictures of my mother campaigning for equal rights outside the White House. I was too open-minded to be straight. In the hallway outside my apartment, I told my mom I didn’t think anyone was 100% straight. She asked me if I didn’t think that people could be 100% gay. I was stumped. I asked her what she was on the kinsey scale. She rolled her eyes as she put the key in the lock.
“That’s a stupid scale.”
Then she pushed the door open and said, “a six.”
I also wasn’t gay. I knew that much. I could tell which girls were hot, but in a distant, sterile way. Every once in a while, I thought I might like to kiss one, but not enough to follow through. I couldn’t pinpoint a place where awe turned to attraction. There was the camp counselor that I was a little too infatuated with, the upperclassmen whose shoes I needed to buy, but it was never enough to decide anything definitively about myself. What confused me the most, though, is that I wasn’t really that into boys either. I hooked up with a few, followed through with none. I never really cared. I convinced myself into crushes that vanished the moment they were reciprocated. I can only remember feeling true attraction to two boys during high school, one of whom I never even kissed, and one of whom I ran from after he expressed interest in a relationship. I was freaked out by the idea of myself as a sexual being, and more freaked out by my own passivity in it. My upbringing, warm and forgiving, was absent of the sense of urgency and confusion that allowed my friends to realize themselves. With no binary to rebel against, I was left floating in a strange in-between. I watched as my peers tried on labels, discarded them, and began again. I watched as they found power in the words that they used to define themselves. I had no words. My best friend, Theo, said, “Leyla’s sexuality is the great mystery of our time.” I laughed and offered no explanation.
My first year of college, I found some clarity. Yes, I am definitely actually attracted to men. But, also maybe to women, but also it doesn’t matter because I’m preoccupied anyway, and I go to a liberal arts school where everyone seems to assume that women are queer because they wear Carhartts. Fine. I floated. I worried a little bit that I would float forever, and I let it go.
Then, the summer after my freshman year, I met Lucinda. We were counselors at a summer camp spending hours in the sun teaching kids to weave and craft canoe paddles and brush the dirt off of carrots before taking gritty bites.
We call it a love affair, but it started as a friendship. Days into meeting Lucinda, I decided she was the funniest person in the world. I looked for her in every room, took uncomfortably long strides to catch up to her on our walks between staff orientation meetings. She felt out of my league, like she knew something I didn’t and I was desperate to learn from her. Sitting in the backseat of her camry during drives to the gas station for beer or into town for ice cream, I felt giddy like an awkward high school freshman adopted by the seniors.
When she found out that I had two moms, our dynamic shifted. In the heterosexual world of outdoor-focused summer camps, she felt out of place as a lesbian. I was gay-by-association again, but this time it was my superpower. My queer upbringing allowed me to view the world through a similar lens as her. She said “I got it” and no one else did. I was proud to be her confidante.
There was romance woven into our relationship from the start. I was aware of it in a way that nagged at me, something I could almost grasp, but couldn’t define. We joked when the campers tried to identify the counselor couples that they would never realize that we were secret lovers. We spent days off searching for the perfect diner brunch. It became a source of immense tension when we disagreed about the quality of the breakfast sausage at two rival establishments. She thought they were dry at my favorite place. They were not. I had never had a friendship like it. It was infused with a new level of intimacy, a frenzied desire to cram as much closeness as possible into our breaks from work. We bantered and argued with passion, staying up unhealthily late to debrief the inconsequential parts of our days as if they were scenes in a gratuitously dramatic movie. I felt lucky to be in her presence. I didn’t understand why her camp cabin, infested with beetles and leaky with rainwater, felt so safe.
She told me during the last week that she was in love with me. I already knew. I had felt it well up somewhere behind glances and shared PBRs and the time that she learned my favorite song on guitar. Sitting on her porch steps in front of an uncomfortably beautiful sunset, I cried. I cried because the part of me that I had evaded for so long had manifested in one of the most incredible people I had ever met, and I still couldn’t tell what I wanted. I couldn’t allow myself to let go, to embrace the depth of the things that I was feeling, because I had ascribed so much pressure to what that might mean. I was suddenly trapped in the labels that I had thought that I rejected. Would that make me bisexual? Would I be ceremoniously inducted into the world of my parents? I felt like an imposter. I felt like a child. I felt the way that my friends in middle school must have felt when they began to figure out who they were. The weight of my years of avoidance was crushing. The open mindedness I thought that I possessed was gone. I couldn’t give her an answer. I didn’t have one. I went to bed with an unfamiliar devastation. I spent the next day on the verge of tears, hyper aware of her ease at vulnerability and of my weakness. That night, drunk off of sprite and vodka, she asked me if I had ever, or could ever feel the way she felt. I told her yes. She asked me if I was attracted to her. I told her yes.
“Well, then this is ridiculous.” She kissed me. And I knew immediately that I had told her the truth.
It didn’t matter that she was a girl. Well it did, but only because our relationship, in its closeness and love, was one untouched by expectation and rooted in a confidentiality that I believe is often unique in female friendships. It didn’t matter that she was a girl because what was really special about it wasn't that I had finally unlocked a profound truth about my identity, it wasn’t about feeling vindicated in some new label. It was that I had found this extraordinary, new sense of love. A delicate, gentle, understanding one built on a foundation of friendship and forgiveness and intimacy. It was that I had allowed myself to let my feelings– the visceral, wordless ones–propel me into a happiness that I didn’t feel any need to explain. And when I left behind the logic and the worrying I got something raw and real. And it was me and it was her. And that was it.
When I told my mom, it didn’t matter to her that Lucinda was a girl either.
“Any summer loves?” She asked from the living room couch the morning after I arrived home from camp. I paused.
“Well... Lucinda.”
“Mm. I thought so.” She returned to her crossword.
I don’t know what I expected. Maybe some long-awaited celebration of this newfound similarity, or at least an acknowledgment of an unspoken question between us. My mother, true to her word, didn’t care.
I don’t know what it means to me to be queer. I don’t know where I fit in on the kinsey scale or what words I might choose or not choose, but I know what it means to love Lucinda, so I’m not really worried about it. Maybe there will be more hers (not that anyone else could be her) or maybe there won’t. Either way, the summer I spent with her will remain cemented as one of the most important of my life. I don’t feel scared anymore, and I don’t feel any need to justify myself. I feel comfortable being in motion, stitching memories and people and pieces together to create a me that feels true. I’ll probably never be finished, and that’s totally ok.