I can pass

The Martin Luther King holiday brings up all sorts of ideas for me these days, especially now that I don't have to spend it writing report cards and filling out endless supporting documents anymore. Hail to the teachers ---- I know it's not YOUR holiday!

I've been considering white privilege, and other inherent, fish-in-water privileges that I accidentally had distributed to me at birth. (Only accidental if you don't believe that you choose which life you're coming into. For more on that, refer back to "Learning to Love", a few posts back.)

We had a very interesting testimonial-type sermon at UU last Sunday. Our minister, John, is my age and grew up in Alabama. Accident of birth, right? Ground zero --- right in the midst of the civil Rights Movement, but more or less oblivious. Isn't one aspect of white privilege to be able to be a self-absorbed teenager in Birmingham in 1965, and hardly notice what's going on around you?

White privilege can be described as believing that white skin is "normal" and everything else is other and bad. Hetero privilege can be described similarly. I know that the hue of my skin has given me access, entree, security that I didn't earn or deserve. Besides the fact that rural Iowa during the 1950s was the whitest place on the planet ----- how white was it? Even our bread was white! ----- it would never have occurred to me that there were people sharing the globe with me who did NOT have the kind of access and entree and expectations and dreams that I had, based on the color of their skin. White privilege made me clueless.

And hetero privilege? Ah, a horse of another color, so to speak. It's tricky, that. Whatever my internal inclinations, I was outwardly and thoroughly heterosexual for much of my life. Was I being "normal"? For a long time, I didn't know there was an alternative. I had no context, no way to conceive of another way --- and no way to label or enunciate my own stirrings or questions. I was so thoroughly straight, I took it ten steps further and carved my territory out of slut-land. If there were boys, I was there. I drank with the boys because the girls giggled and couldn't keep up with me. I most assuredly didn't like boy-things like sports, but I was smart and smart-alecky enough to hold my own with the smart boys, the ones who were more quick-witted than fast-footed. That was my domain; I would be taken seriously. And when you love a boy for his silver tongue and challenging repartee, (not to mention puns), can anything be more satisfying than the leap from intellectual to carnal pleasures? Leaping became my specialty.

I leaped into my version of wife and mother, unabashadly hetero-normal occupations. You could find me at the center of several female only societies ---- La Leche League, playgroups, nursery school, elementary education degree programs. My world was populated with women who were friends, colleagues, teachers, mentors, star-crossed lovers. But I maintained my unblemished position of heterosexual privilege. I was most assuredly normal. I had a husband. Or two.

It's been 15 years now since I jumped the fence for once and for all ---- no more dabbling and then ducking back under for cover, no more wishing and hoping and pining for my best friend. When I landed on the soft, far-greener grass of the other side and started to sort out the new norms, I quickly realized that cultural shifts are not all that easy. My hetero privilege was suddenly visible to me and abandoning it was a scary proposition. I didn't want to fit where I always had, and I didn't know how I would ever fit in my new place.

It's funny that I wound up with Jill. She's a "Gold Star Lesbian" (see your glossary) and nobody who lives in this century is going to look at her and think "Oh what a sweet girl, I wonder what her husband does." One look pretty much tells the story. She's all female (no doubt about that!) but she's a long way from being a girly-girl. She doesn't have the moves for it. She doesn't have that sort of energy.

Me, well I guess I can pass. Not like I used to back when I was young and curvy and cared and wore earrings. But I've still got the sensibility, when I want to. Plus I've got the resume --- I can talk about my kids, my pregnancies, marriages and divorces, all that stuff. If I want to, I've got a whole life worth of hetero stories at my fingertips and can speak that language as naturally as if it were my native tongue. Which it was.

On the other hand, I'm totally comfortable in my life now as a married dyke --- the dogs, the cats, the house, the Canadian wedding, the wife who does yard work and loves power tools.... I love my life now and feel more at home inside myself than I ever have, despite some hangover crapola about body size and aging. Bleh.

So the upshot is, I can pass and Jill can't. The thing is, I don't want to. White skin --- that's there for keeps. People make assumptions about who I am based on the color of my skin, and I can't do anything about that. But I can do something about the gay/straight thing, and this is what I do. I tell you who I am. Within the first few minutes of any conversation with someone who matters even a little bit to me, I slip in some identifying marker. I mention "My wife said this morning..." or something to that effect. I want you to KNOW who I am, who you're dealing with, and not make assumptions. I don't have any power over what you do with that knowledge, but you're going to know, whether you like it or not. I'm not willing to simply pass.

And that makes some people uncomfortable. "Why do gay people have to talk about it? I don't talk about being straight." ---- Really? You don't talk about what you and your boyfriend did over the weekend? You don't mention your husband's job or your children's school progress or make any of the many, casual references to family life that validate the "normalcy" of you and your relationships? That's all I'm doing, too, with a little added dollop of  "So there!" for good measure. I never said I'm not still a smart-aleck.


Glossary: Gold Star Lesbian=never been with a man  (Imagine that!)