by Melissa Goodnight
In fourth grade, I told my whole class I was a lesbian. This wasn’t too weird if you consider what I thought a lesbian was—a girl who had a lot of friends. I was a popular fourth grader, popular with the teachers on account of my grades and curiosity, and popular with my classmates because I was terribly misguided, but you know, in a funny sort of way. I’d get excited when I knew the answer to a math problem, shoot my hand up in the air, and knock my pencil box off my desk at the same time. The whole class would laugh, and my teacher would just shake her head and smile. Oh, Missy. I was like a living, breathing Judy Blume character. It wasn’t all that uncommon for me to say things that made no sense, to people who weren’t really there. I lived in my own world most days, surrounded by people I brought to life with my wondrous imagination. It also was not uncommon for me to occasionally slip those people into my real, waking life, like that day in fourth grade. That day when our teacher stepped out for a few moments, I got out of my seat, walked to the head of the class, cleared my throat and said, I’m a lesbian. I waited. Most of the kids just looked around at each other, sort of confused. One boy in the back raised his hand and asked what a lesbian was. I told him that a lesbian was a girl who liked girls. Then there was a bit of whispering, and one by one the girls in the class started raising their hands to say they were lesbians too. Turns out there were a ton of lesbians in my fourth-grade class. I was stoked.
When I went home that night I told my much older, much cooler sister what I’d done. She spat out her soda and asked me why on Earth I had said that. I dunno, I told her, as I handed her a paper towel. I guess because I AM a lesbian.
You’re not a lesbian, she said. You don’t even know what that means. I was a little surprised when she said that, because she is the one who told me what a lesbian was.
Let me back-up. Three months earlier, my sister and I were at a Melissa Etheridge concert. This may seem an odd place to take a 10-year-old for a fun Friday night, but this was a typical evening for me. See, for some time at the height of Melissa’s career (winning Grammys, playing on David Letterman, cutting platinum albums) my brother Scott dated Melissa’s sister Jenny. Melissa and Jenny had gone to high school with my older sister and brother, and they were all friends. When Melissa struck out to California to chase her dreams, Jenny stayed in Leavenworth, had a couple of kids, took over the family home, and eventually found her way back to my brother. They were perfect together. They both loved to smoke weed, go on all-night cocaine binges, and you couldn’t really trust either of them with a loaded weapon. But to be fair, this was the most normal my brother’s life had ever been. They went on family trips, they had us over for cookouts in their backyard, they hosted the annual holidays. My brother even had a driver’s license for the duration of their relationship, which was a big deal for someone who had it routinely taken away for driving under the influence. In fact, he had it so together that my mother would let me go to Melissa’s concerts with their family whenever she came to town, provided my sister came along too.
So, there we were, standing in the front row of a Melissa Etheridge concert in downtown Kansas City, at a venue called Memorial Hall. It was an old brick building, with one of those lighted marquees. Its dilapidated façade had seen the likes of Ray Charles, Elton John, and rumor had it, The Beatles. My brother and sister were standing on each side of me singing along to one of Melissa’s song when I started getting bored and decided to scope out the crowd. As I started to look around, I began to notice that there weren’t many men at the concert. Aside from my brother, the only other men around were the guys in the band and the security guards. I tugged on my sister’s shirt and asked her where the men were. She couldn’t hear a word I said—she just took the tug as a sign I had to go to the bathroom. She grabbed my hand, and we made our way to the right side of the stage, where a very large man looked at our backstage passes and waved us through. She stood at the end of the stage and gave me a little push. I knew where the bathroom was, I’d been there ten times before.
Since I didn’t really have to go, I just took this as an opportunity to explore. I walked past the bathroom doors and into the Green Room, which is what they called the large room with all the Pepsi, M&Ms, and mini-sandwiches you could ever want. It was a bit of a misnomer as the room wasn’t painted green, it didn’t have a bunch of exotic plants or anything like that. It was just a large room, painted a sort of peachy color, with couches and tables, and some weird paintings. It was dimly lit, smelled like it had just been cleaned, and there were televisions streaming the concert on the other side of the wall. I meandered around the room for a bit looking at the paintings, when I decided I’d grab another Pepsi and head back out. That’s when I saw the two women on the couch. At first, I wasn’t sure what I saw. I knew I saw people, I knew they were very close to each other, and I saw a lot of hair—very long, very beautiful hair. I wondered for a minute if it was the man who had been playing the drums on stage. He’d had long blond hair, but his was pulled back in a ponytail like mine. So, I decided to walk a little closer to the couch. That’s when I realized they were women, and that’s when I realized that the two women were kissing each other. They were kissing and touching each other, sliding
their hands over each other’s bodies like the men and women in movies did. They were unaware that I was standing there, absorbed in each other. I stood shocked for a minute, then my face grew hot and my ears turned red. I forgot all about the Pepsi and I ran back to my sister.
As we walked back to our seats I had this sort of rumbling in my stomach, a feeling of anxiety mixed with a little bit of excitement. I had this feeling from time to time as a child, like that one time I walked into my uncle’s barn while he was dressing a deer. But this time it was different. These women were different, something I sort of innately knew. They looked just like my sister and her friends. They were young and pretty. They had makeup on, and they had that long, beautiful hair, but they weren’t like my sister and her friends. They were different in a way that I couldn’t understand then. I knew they were doing something that no one else was supposed to see. I knew it was a secret that I had to keep. I just couldn’t understand why these two women were doing something that I equated with love. Back then I didn’t have the words to describe what I saw or how it made me feel, but years later, it became clearer to me. Love, passion, lust—it was all present in that room that night, with its history, its peach walls, and its fresh Pine Sol scent. In that moment, I had been so naïve and afraid, that I just closed my eyes to all of it. I closed my eyes to the world, afraid that this was now my secret, and someone might find it out.
Later that night I did get brave enough to ask my sister why a girl would kiss another girl. She finally realized the error of taking me along with her. She looked around, bent down toward me, and whispered: They’re lesbians, you know, they’re like girls who like other girls. I nodded in agreement, but that didn’t make much sense to me.
Of course, I never took what my sister said at face value. She often steered me wrong. She once convinced me I was adopted, that my real mother had left me by a rock and our mom came walking along, stumbled upon me and saved my poor, pathetic life, while messing up my sister’s life for all eternity. I knew she was lying about the adoption, but I still sometimes liked to imagine that I had another much nicer, much cooler mother out in the world, desperately trying to find me. Anyway, that’s how we ended up at the kitchen table that day in fourth grade. My sister told me that I wasn’t a lesbian. But I was pretty sure that I was. I mean, I liked to hang out with girls. I had a ton of friends. In fact, she had a ton of friends who were girls too. Beeb, I said, as I rested my arm on her shoulder in a comforting way. We’re all lesbians. Then she screamed for mom.
By 6th grade I couldn’t wait for my brother to call and say they had tickets to a concert. I had told my friends all about the lesbians and what they did. I had friends lined up to go to concerts with me. Most of their parents told them no. Absolutely not. It wasn’t safe for young, impressionable girls to go to a Melissa Etheridge concert. Melissa had just come out as a lesbian and our hometown of Leavenworth, Kansas—for the first time in my memory—was completely torn over something. You’re talking about a true small town. Smack-dab in the middle of the Bible Belt, cloaked in the anti-gay political rhetoric of the 1990s, and standing ground against Bill Clinton’s attempts at equality. Senator Jesse Helms’ words spoke to the hearts of the people in my town. They played on our Midwest values. The idea that there were weak, morally sick wretches filling up our schools and our churches, hiding in the dark shadows, was too much. These prevailing thoughts were just a small part of the wave of hysteria that catapulted us into fist fights and protests. The Westboro Baptist Church, led by the infamous Fred Phelps, was only thirty miles west on Interstate 70—a constant reminder that any sympathizing would be met with condemnation. It wasn’t just Leavenworth, a fact made clear the morning of October 7, 1998, when a cyclist named Aaron Kreifels was riding down a rural route in Laramie, Wyoming. He saw what he thought was a scarecrow tied to an old wooden fence. It wasn’t a scarecrow. It was Matthew Shepard. Hours later Matthew died in the hospital. His mother, standing vigil by his bedside, had just learned that he was HIV positive. The whole United States was casting their brows down on him. On them.
Small towns like Leavenworth, which weren’t directly affected by the pain like those in Laramie, they didn’t budge. Those people, the ones who had grown up alongside Melissa, the people who loved her and saw the great things she was doing for the community, those people said they chose to look past her sexuality. That’s what they’d say in whispers at the Country Club, or the check-out line at Walmart. They wouldn’t hold her choices against her. They would look at the bright side. The good side of her, of Matthew. Then there were the others. The people who took a stand against homosexuality, and the corruption they said it caused. They were the ones who were picketing her concerts, running to city council meetings to protest the sign that was being erected in her honor. But they were also our neighbors. They were my friends’ parents. They were the self-proclaimed examples in our community. The rest of us were just degenerates.
My mother was caught somewhere in the middle. She didn’t particularly like that I went to the concerts, but she was assured by my brother and sister that I was well looked after, and that I had a great time. And I did. I told my mother that I loved Melissa’s music, which was true, and I enjoyed hanging out in the tour bus. She took delight in my happiness and always said yes, even when she wanted to say no. I was glad for that. Mainly because my brother and sister were damn, dirty liars. As soon as we would get to a concert they’d tell me to stay close, then they’d start pounding beers and God-knows-what-else. My sister would meet up with friends who got free tickets off my brother, and Jenny and my brother would hit the tour bus, where I can only assume the good drugs were. I was left to my own devices, which usually meant slamming Pixie Sticks and watching Melissa get ready for the show.
Melissa was short. By 6th grade I was taller than her at a whopping 5’4”. She was petite and thin, she had that long, blond, rocker hair, always down and in her face. It smelled like hair products and a little bit like flowers. When she would stand next to someone to take a picture or sign an autograph, she would always grip their hand and squeeze it a little. I always considered this a sign of her genuine nature. She had the ability to make you feel like you were the only one in the room when she was talking to you, a trait I’ve often tried to emulate in my own life. Though I didn’t have much interaction with her at her concerts, since I was only a child, I did get the chance to just hang back and observe. Before the show she would walk back and forth in front of the mirrors and sing things that made no sense, in notes that she wouldn’t normally use. She’s warming her voice, my brother would whisper to me, then he’d yell at Jenny’s kids to stop running around and making damn fools of themselves. I would move to a quiet corner somewhere, away from the hustle of the people backstage, and just watch and listen. The rhythmic sounds of her cowboy boots knocking against the concrete floor was a welcome distraction from the people and the chaos. She seemed to never know others were around. At some point a woman would come over with an apron on the front of her jeans, like a waitress carries, and she would start pulling makeup out of it and brushing it on Melissa’s face. Somewhere between meeting her on the tour bus, listening to the click of her boots, and walking out onto the stage, I would watch Melissa transform from that little girl from Leavenworth into a rock-star. I fantasized about what that would feel like—what it would be like to be someone who had their named chanted by thousands of people. Someone who wrote and played music that moved souls. Someone who appeared to be unapologetically the person they were meant to be.
When the lights would dim in the dressing room, the crowd standing on the other side of the wall would know it was time. They’d start to roar. Their collective voice rising up in their chests. Feet stomping, hands clapping, cheering her name, Melissa! Melissa! She’d stroll past me, her guitar strapped to her back, and give me a smile or a wink. I never followed with the group of people behind her, and I never watched her as she entered the stage for the first time. I preferred to sit with my back against the wall and listen to the crowd catch the first glimpse of her. The noise was tremendous—the rise of the screams confounded my gut. Sometimes, I’d close my eyes and pretend to be out there on the stage. Melissa, not Missy. A daughter of the music. A possessor of raw talent. A keeper of this new-found passion. But mostly, I’d just close my eyes and listen to thousands of people watch a tiny woman pluck at guitar strings until the wee hours of the morning.
As the evenings would wind down, I’d usually end up walking alone backstage. The halls were always dark with lights down low by my ankles. I would duck into doorways to escape men pushing drum sets on large carts, or security yelling into walkie-talkies. At some point in the evening, I would find myself in a room with a couple of women who were on a leather couch, or a futon, or an overstuffed chair. I never knew who these women were, but there were always plenty of them. My sister would usually come frantically looking for me, and gasp at whatever or whomever she saw me watching. She’d grab my hand and lead me to the car, reminding me to not tell mom and to forget what I had seen. Except, it was a little too late for that. I would go on to spend many nights wondering, fantasizing, about what it would feel like to have a woman’s long hair in my face, loud music pulsating in the background, lying in that heat, two soft bodies pressed against each other.
By 11th grade I was in a full-on crisis regarding my own sexuality, brought on by everyone around me. I was taking heat from my mom who was worried that I knew all Melissa Etheridge’s songs, and my sister, who would routinely hold me down on the ground and try to put lipstick on me or pluck a stray black hair from my upper lip. Listen, puberty was not nice to me. My confusion was intensified by my desire to please my family, and to figure out this nagging feeling I had inside. Why was I different from the other girls? Why didn’t I want to date anyone? Why didn’t I feel like I belonged? Just try, my mom would say, as she would slip a stray hair from my eyes. You have to put yourself out there. You’re such a pretty girl, any boy would be lucky to have you. Sex, that was my sister’s advice, stay away from the weird-looking dicks though. I didn’t know what a weird-looking dick was, but I was certainly scared of them. The idea of seeing or touching any genitals frightened me, but I knew my mom was right. I needed to put myself out there. That’s when I decided to take matters into my own hands and ask a boy to prom.
My first prom date was Cole, my gay best friend. Yeah, I knew he was gay. I knew Cole was gay before Cole knew Cole was gay. That’s why I asked him to prom. I didn’t want to find myself slow dancing with some dude who smelled like his dad’s Stetson cologne, trying to hide an erection he got from the lace of my dress rubbing his ironed Dockers. I wanted to be there with a guy I knew wouldn’t expect me to go down on him in his car up at Haven’s Hill after prom. But I also wanted a date who would open the door, pay for my meal, and tell me that I looked pretty. ‘Cause damn it, I was a lady.
Cole was a bit surprised when I asked him, but he said yes. I suspect it was because his crush was going stag, and he just knew that the two of them would end up slow-dancing to Madonna under pink crepe paper by the end of the night. But as prom night drew near, Cole and I both chickened out. Who were we fooling? I mean, Cole had a list of guys stapled to his bedroom wall, in a descending order of hotness, and I was a varsity thrower for the track team, racking up points in shot put and discus throwing, not to mention a heck of a third baseman. Some things just seemed destined. Instead of going to prom, Cole and I orchestrated a kick-ass hotel party for the after-prom crew. We used his sister’s ID to book the room, my sister’s ID to buy the tequila, and his mom’s Food-4-Less discount to stock up on limes. How many limes do we buy? Cole asked, frantically. I dunno, fifty? We were naïve but ambitious.
That night, in the hallway of the Super 8 on Fourth Street, I kissed a girl. It wasn’t my first kiss, but it was the first one that I wanted. The first one I had been pining for. It was the first time I didn’t feel like I had to kiss the person standing in front of me. It wasn’t a boy holding my shoulders to the ground at recess and sticking his slobbering, swollen lips on mine. It wasn’t a boy pushing me hard up against a locker, darting his tongue inside my mouth like a snake. This kiss, this person, was different. She was soft, and she was sweet. Her hair was the color of strawberries, and her skin smelled like dandelions. We’d spent long nights laughing on the telephone together, sharing stories and secrets. I wanted to kiss this girl. I wanted her to like me. I had thought about her non-stop for months. I had fantasized about our first kiss and our first touch. The way her hair might fall into my face while she lay on top of me, our bodies fused together, under blue moonlight streaming through curtains. Hearts aching, arms touching, hands grasping under the veil of thin sheets.
We snuck into the bathroom of the motel room, just as the rest of the kids had started taking shots of whatever they’d lifted from their parents’ liquor cabinets. We laughed as her hand slid to the lock on the door, turning the knob to make sure it took. I flipped the light switch off, then she flipped it back on with a smile. We stood, motionless, for what felt like hours. Her hair was disheveled from the chaos of the party, the top button of her shirt was unfastened, revealing a small amount of lace flat against the top of her breasts. I nervously laughed, and moved my attention to the peeling, yellowed wallpaper. She took my hand in hers and I looked up. Her straight, white teeth bit at her bottom lip, but her eyes remained fixed on our hands. I watched her teeth pierce the pink skin, a summer berry about to explode. My breath quickened. I felt a yearning in my stomach like never before. I knew this was our moment. I leaned forward into her welcoming body. Our lips met, my hands instinctively grabbed her hips, and I pulled her toward me, frantically. The smell of her skin took me by surprise. As she reached up and took my face in the palm of her hands to pull me closer, a sigh escaped her lips. I wanted the moment to freeze. I wanted to stay there, wrapped up inside of her forever. I wanted my heart to explode with joy. But it didn’t. Instead, my heart began to fill my head with worries. How does this end? How will she hurt me? Is it possible that I could hurt her? I thought about my mother finding out. I thought about her mother finding out. I thought about the world finding out. I thought about Matthew. Fear took hold of me in that moment and it never fully released.
Cole and I cried together that night in a creaky, hotel bed, between stained sheets, under the sweet, prickly smell of marijuana floating above us. I told him that I thought I was broken, that I didn’t know how to love the right way. He told me that he was gay. I tried to act surprised, but mostly I just tried to assure him that he was okay. That I was okay. That it would all get better. But I wasn’t sure. This was only months before Matthew Shepard’s murderers would be tried for leaving him, alone on the fencepost, to die. Only months after the whole world began to take notice of the very real threat facing people like Cole and me. Months after mainstream America finally had the rampant abuse of the LGBT community thrust into the spotlight. Kids like Cole and me, kids who just didn’t know what the hell was happening, we started to get scared.
Over the next couple of years, I had a lot of confusing nights with a lot of different people. There was Molly. I’d lie next to her and run my fingers through her straight, blow-dried hair. Her breath smelled like Sweet-Tarts. Her lips were plush and full. She’d whisper for me not to tell anyone. There was that guy I met at that party. The really cute one, with the blond hair and six-pack stomach. He rubbed his hands up and down on my jeans so fast that I thought I’d catch fire from the heat. There was Hannah. She’d played Three Days Grace, hoping I’d like her taste in music. One day she told me how her dad sometimes came into her room in the middle of the night and ran his hand slowly over her breasts while she pretended to be asleep. We would make giant leaf piles in our neighborhood and climb inside to hide. She told me that she loved me with a red leaf stuck to her wavy brown hair. There was Adam. We’d play pinball together in his basement after practice. He’d stand behind me, his basketball shorts pressed up against mine, our reflection in the glass in front of us. He’d move his hips toward me with every release of the silver ball. I’d push back against him, as it rolled down the machine, into the small crevices and secret corners. The machine would light up, and shapes would whirl around us. We played pinball three times before he told me that he liked another girl.
Throughout the end of high school and into college, I went back and forth between where I thought I belonged, and where other people thought I belonged, butting up against my fears of intimacy and finding that forever kind of love. I thought I had to decide. I thought I had to label myself one way or the other. One side or the other, as if there were sides. As if it was that easy. I had a growing desire to be loved, but I also had a growing fear of what love could do to a person. My mother had spent her life largely alone, in part because she had grown unable to trust men, and by the time I was a teenage girl, she had unknowingly transferred that distrust to me. I went into each new relationship feeling like I had that night in the motel, wondering how this person would hurt me. I’d fantasize about the break-up, rehearse the way I would tell them that it wasn’t going to work, repeat into the bathroom mirror, you don’t get me, this isn’t working, I can’t trust you anymore. Allowing myself to love and to be loved took time. Many years of failing, many years of doubt and shame. Many years of learning to go easy on myself. And I didn’t learn how to do this by myself.
Cole’s life became complicated. Time and again I came to his rescue. Once to get him from an abandoned parking lot that a group of guys had driven him to when they found out he was a faggot. He was lucky that night, only a few broken bones. I bailed him out of jail for a bar fight. I helped him pack his things after another boyfriend had assaulted him, called the cops, thrown him out of the apartment. Each time I told him it would get better, and over the next couple of years Cole’s life did get better. He came out to his family. His mother cried. She knew the hardships he’d face. She knew the sleepless nights she’d endure, wondering if her only son had made it home safe. His father told him that he couldn’t spend time with him anymore. Then he told him he wasn’t the son he had hoped for. But as the years rolled on, he let all that go. On Cole and Russ’s wedding day, his father told him he was proud of him. Told him that he’d kill for his son. Told him not to take shit from anyone.
As for me, I fell in and out of what I thought was love a couple of times, with people who were never right for me. Then I met Jerimiah, and my life changed. He was patient with me. He restored my faith in more than just men, he restored my faith in love. He showed me what it could look like, how it really felt, and how it could really save those that need saving. I spent many nights crying, wondering why I was falling in love with a man who knew me, but still chose to love me. He knew about my distrust in men, he knew about my worries over hurting and being hurt, he knew about my bathroom kiss. He knew about my mother’s history, and my irrational fears. But there he was, and there he’s stayed, all these years later.
It would be years before I let Jerimiah’s love teach me about the most important kind of love. He taught me how to love and accept myself. Through letting down my walls of fear and expectations, I was able to see that I had nothing to be ashamed of. That I was loveable, still after all these years, those moments I held secret for so long were making me who I am now. The clumsy, messy, kind, and awkward person that I am today was formed by those years. Formed by the unabashed eagerness with which I lived my life, by the chances I took, and those years of constant mistakes. I was formed by those awkward kisses and anxious thoughts. Formed by the ideas of a naïve little girl, swaying to the collective song on the other side of the wall.
Today while I was driving down the road a Melissa Etheridge song popped up in my playlist. It was a fast one, with a great beat, and an amazing guitar solo. I remembered it. I remembered standing behind the curtain, looking out into the faces of thousands of people, swaying back and forth. I remembered the feelings. I remember feeling small but empowered.
My third-grade son was in the backseat. He asked me who was singing. Melissa Etheridge, I said. Melissa? He asked. Like you? I smiled. Yeah, like mommy. I realized that gone are the days of confusion and chaos, of fear and sadness, and secrets—for me, but not for everyone. There is a whole new generation growing up now who may never hear the name Matthew Shepard, but who will no doubt feel the sting of a familiar shame, a familiar fear, for their friends, for their classmates, for themselves. I’m reminded of this everyday as I watch my son play and learn. Watch him laugh and run. Watch him grow into friendships with kids not like him, but also very much like him. I have a feeling, deep down inside, that the next generation will not let us down.
Meanwhile, my memories serve as a constant reminder. A star-lit evening on a creaky deck with a brown-eyed girl and the desire to learn something about each other. About ourselves. Watching Melissa warm her rusty, deep voice before walking through the curtain. These are the memories I move forward with. These are the memories that little fourth-grader never imagined she’d recollect on a starry, summer evening watching her son grasp at fireflies just out of reach.
Melissa Goodnight is an emerging creative writer, with a focus on creative non-fiction, and a recent graduate of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, with an MA in English.