April 5, 2013

The Great Gay Abyss

When some gay people come out (think Ricky Martin, Clay Aiken or the former ‘N Sync boy band member Lance Bass), the news is not really news at all. I’ve always wished that my own coming out could’ve been this simple. It would have been nice to just call a reporter and put it out there that I was now officially gay.

Since I am not a celebrity, however, my process was nothing like this. It began shortly after I graduated from college in 1999 and it was long and arduous. 

It started with me navigating the ins and outs of the Baltimore gay scene, checking out bars, going on my first girl date and meeting a few lesbian friends with whom I began playing touch football with every Sunday. How cliché, I know. I was so busy getting acquainted with my new sexuality, while remaining closeted, that I started to lose touch with most of my straight friends from college. 

As I explored, the fissure in our friendships intensified. When they called to get together, I was “busy,” and on the rare occasions we did hang out, I felt like everything out of my mouth was a lie. How are you? What’s new? Are you seeing anyone? 

Given the emotional distance between us, I was surprised when I got an email inviting me to go in on a house for the summer in Dewey Beach. I didn’t know much about Dewey other than it was only about a mile away from the gay Mecca of Rehoboth, but that was enough for me. Without thinking about how I would handle this potentially awkward situation, I replied that hell, yes, I wanted a spot in the house.

This snap decision landed me in a mixed-gendered house full of straight, white, fairly conservative people who were primarily interested in going out, getting hammered, and hooking up with members of the opposite sex. To be fair, I wholly shared those interests, with only one exception, but, as it turned out, that difference was a big deal. Somewhere between college graduation and the following summer, the straight world had lost all its appeal.

When my housemates came down on Friday nights and invited me to “Taco Toss,” I politely declined, thinking I might toss my tacos if I had to stand around getting drunk at a bar full of straighties. To my housemates, it probably seemed that I’d gone from being a fun-loving person always up for a good time to an elusive, evasive, weirdo. One night early that summer, I left the house and waited for the free red bus, better known as the Jolly Trolley, that ran between the two small beach towns. 

When I got to Rehoboth, I steeled my nerves and walked into one of the lesbian bars. I took a stool a few seats down from a threesome of older women, ordered a Miller Light and sat huddled over the top of it, picking at the bottle’s label. The place was pretty empty. Later in the summer I’d learn the ebb and flow of the lesbian bar scene: Most evenings kicked off at the Frogg Pond, unless of course there was a Ladies’ Tea brewing at the Renegade, which took precedence over all other lesbian events.

“Are you new around here?” The voice came from one of the older women. I looked up to see that I had peeled the entire label off of my beer.

“Uh, yeah,” I said. I was simultaneously relieved to have someone to talk to and full of anxiety that this woman might be hitting on me. Her hair looked like a helmet, dark and unmoving, but she had a pretty face and a nice smile.

“I could tell. Where are you from?”

We chatted for a while and when she gathered that I was a freshly minted lesbian, her demeanor shifted more toward the motherly advice-giver.

“Have you been to Gordon’s Pond?”

“No? Is that a bar?” I asked naively.

She rolled her eyes, grabbed a free tourist map of Rehoboth from a nearby stack and asked the bartender for a pen.

“It’s a beach,” she said as her pen began moving across the page. “All women.” I looked at the sheet where she was drawing a map. “You go all the way down First Street, follow it over the little bridge, keep going.”

When the pen stopped moving there was a perfect sketch of the route I was to take.

“All women?” I asked incredulously.

“All women. You really should go. It’d be good for you.”

The next day, I ventured over to Gordon’s Pond where I paid the entrance fee and drove into the parking lot, grabbed my backpack and began walking over the large dune. What I saw when I got to the other side sent shivers down my spine.

There were women everywhere. Young women with red Solo cups dancing on the sand; black women, white women, old, fat women with mullets; beautiful women and women who wore sports bras in lieu of a bikini tops; women strolling down the beach hand in hand; women kissing in the ocean.

There were tattooed, pierced women and plain-Jane women, women with families, women playing paddleball and even a group of athletic-looking women in the middle of a serious game of tackle football. There were women with their shorts hiked too high, women with rainbow umbrellas, manly women, feminine women, women in cowboy hats and baseball caps, women with shaved heads and women with long, flowing hair.

Holy shit. I’ve found the promised land. I was stunned that these women were all gay. And on that half-mile stretch of sand, there was nothing to hide, nothing to feel ashamed about. Being gay was normal. Normal. I was still years away from feeling okay about being a lesbian—a word that I’d always had trouble saying out loud because it sounded more like a disease than a term that ought to be used to describe a person’s sexuality—but as I stood there, looking out at all of these women, I saw the promise of this possibility. When I walked out into the crowd that day and laid my towel down, part of me felt like I was home.

Once I’d discovered Gordon’s Pond, I stopped spending any real time in Dewey. I went to the house only to shower, change, and sleep. Looking back on it, I wish that I‘d simply sat down with my friends and told them the truth. They deserved a chance to make up their own minds about whether they wanted to stay friends with me. I don’t really think that they would have wrinkled their noses in disgust, but even if they had, I would have survived. Instead, we parted ways at the end of that summer and walked out of one another’s lives, they into their normal, straight world, I into the great gay abyss. It welcomed me with open arms and allowed me, in its all consuming embrace, to be proud of who I am.

Danielle is a frequent Rehoboth visitor and an author who has been published in The Huffington Post.