It took me a couple tries to admit that I was gay. It’s a story I’ll explain more fully one day, but for now all that’s relevant is that I came out to myself at 14 and to a lesbian aunt within a year of that, on our way to see Life is Beautiful at an arthouse theater. “I knew it!” she shouted triumphantly in response, crowing that she’d called it when I was a toddler.
At 15, I think it was, I told my best friend, which didn’t go quite as expected. From there the news trickled out at school. No one else in my grade was ‘out,’ though I was hardly the only gay student. It was the late 1990s and cursory TV-MA ratings were slapped on each new episode of Ellen, which was nearing the end of its run, as if it contained all the sex, violence and nudity of The Sopranos, which would premiere the next year. In reality, Ellen DeGeneres’s character rarely did anything more sexually explicit than wear sensible shoes.
My parents were Republicans and I saw no reason to unburden myself to them prematurely; unless and until I had a girlfriend or almost-girlfriend, my sexuality was irrelevant. The almost-girlfriend arrived the summer I was 17. We met on a gay website and lived around 45 miles apart, a seemingly insurmountable distance, so we stayed up all night talking on AOL Instant Messenger. Or at least we tried, but the realities of dial-up Internet meant getting punted offline so others in our households could go online themselves.
The first or second night we spoke, we jokingly envisioned a gay wedding officiated by Debbie Harry in a top hat. We had no real concept of love or marriage, but we shared lingering crushes on Debra Winger and a mutual adoration of John Waters films. Relationships had been built on less. We weren’t in danger of actually falling in love with each other; we were too fundamentally immature and incompatible. But we were alike in exhilarating ways. We’d watched the same gay movies, listened to the same gay music, followed the same gay rumors about Clea DuVall. That was difficult to find in the Midwest in the ’90s.
Almost-Girlfriend had big plans for adulthood — she wanted to adopt four dogs and name them Ferris, Seattle, Roxy and Bain. I was more interested in adopting non-furry children. Her dream was to be an actress or musician; mine was to be a writer. It wasn’t lost on me, then or now, that her creative pursuits erred on the orgiastic side, while mine were onanistic. On some level we probably both sensed I’d never be edgy or sociable enough for her, and I was more drawn to femme-ier types, but we watched MonsterVision together that summer and discussed Daria and Darlene Conner, the patron saints of caustic teenage lesbians, at length.
We never got together in-person then, but we graduated to phone calls that were also disrupted by our families. My parents and siblings were going to notice that I was suddenly holed up in my bedroom for hours at a time having animated discussions with a girl none of them knew who lived an hour away; by that stage of my adolescence, I wasn’t especially talkative and was rarely animated about anything besides Sleater-Kinney, Absolutely Fabulous, Motown and Howard Hawks films. One night in August, after my siblings were in bed, I sat with my parents in the living room and came out during an episode of The Late Show with David Letterman.
The room spun as I flung open the closet door. Time slowed to a crawl. My hands had never felt clammier, or my face hotter, in my life. My parents looked as queasy as I felt, and my mom summarily cried. They worried my life would be harder now and were taken aback to learn I’d already been ‘out’ for several years. When our conversation was over — I could tell my siblings whenever I wanted, but they advised waiting to tell my grandparents — I ran to my computer to rehash it for Almost-Girlfriend, the impetus for it all, until her dad ordered her offline.
In a few short weeks, the school year began and we inevitably drifted apart. It wasn’t long before she acquired an older girlfriend, moved to my city for college and formed a band that occasionally toured. Our worlds did not intersect, but we had a hard time staying away from each other for long. It was always needlessly dramatic and exceedingly stupid when the shit hit the fan, and then the countdown clock restarted, ticking away until we began circling each other again. We never so much as kissed or held hands, though we eventually met in person several times. I was still too socially stunted for a conventional relationship.
Eventually and improbably, I fell head over heels in love in my mid-twenties. She was younger but more experienced (at that point in my life, a turnip was more experienced), and though she didn’t always seem to realize it, she called the shots in our relationship. I went along with a list of unreasonable demands, including changing my email address and phone number so Almost-Girlfriend couldn’t contact me. The only demand I ignored, because it was financially imprudent, was to throw out a blanket Almost-Girlfriend once sat on during a visit.
After we moved in together, my partner went through my old notebooks and my desktop’s hard drive when I was at work during the day, taking offense at things I’d written years before we knew each other. When she found the words “I Love [Almost-Girlfriend]” scrawled in a notebook from my late teens, pyrotechnics ensued, but I was too lovestruck to heed those warning signs — I thought her insecurity would resolve itself in time.
While I missed my old friend and wondered what she was up to, I knew better than to ever try to contact her behind my partner’s back. And then one day my partner stormed out, never to return, and within a couple weeks of that, a sibling called me to report I was the subject of a Craigslist Missed Connection. That’s how I was reunited with Almost-Girlfriend, who said she’d tried to find me several times over the years without success. We’ve been in some degree of contact ever since, our juvenile past firmly behind us. Each year, Crankenstein and I receive a Christmas card from her featuring a portrait of her pets, none of whom are named Ferris, Seattle, Roxy or Bain.
If I tell her about this post, she might let me link to a project of hers some of you would enjoy. I have no idea whether she remembers the Debbie-Harry-in-a-top-hat wedding ceremony we once planned; we’re in our forties now and high school memories get a bit hazier each year. But I know she remembers our parents yelling at us to hang up, so let’s close this with a reenactment of that and a link to the requisite Blondie song.