My Captor, My Confidante, My Closet
I never purposely retreat into my closet, or go in there to hide. Instead, it assembles itself at light speed around me all at once, silently and stealthily and more solidly than I ever could have imagined. It’s the summer before seventh grade and it’s almost like I got drugged — it’s that sudden, jolting, and disorienting. I claw at the door but can’t make myself try to turn the handle.
And so I sit, my legs pulled up to my chest and my heart beating one million miles an hour. I’m trying to work out what it means for my distant future that I like girls and not boys, and also contorting my brain with the exertion of trying to convince myself it’s not true.
I can’t.
At first I don’t test out the confines of my closet. I don’t know whether the walls are made of impenetrable cinderblock or a flimsy papier-mâché. Whether the door is deadbolted shut or just leaning listlessly against its outside frame, waiting for me to kick it down.
What I do know is that the inside of my closet is the blandest, starkest white and it’s closing in on me. That’s because I start off by insulating my closet. No gay content allowed. Nothing that will truly turn me on if I can help it. It might confirm something about myself that I do not want to know.
Nobody comes to visit me in my closet. (It doesn’t matter; I wouldn’t let them in if they knocked and knocked and knocked.) They don’t know its address. They don’t even know that I live here, that I’m anywhere other than where I am physically: laughing all night at sleepovers; flying through Meg Cabot and Sarah Dessen books about straight teenagers in straight love; watching Criminal Minds with my dad and my brother, telling myself how hot Derek Morgan is and trying to feel it.
I don’t even know where my closet is, either. It could be in a giant warehouse full of other closets that belong to kids my own age. Maybe we’re all so close to one another but have no idea because we’re too scared to reach out.
But it feels like it’s alone on a desert island or on Mars.
There’s an educational book about sex. It says: “Dreaming about or having a crush on a person of the same sex does not necessarily mean that a girl or a boy is or will be homosexual.”
It doesn’t say anything about the other way around.
I interpret: “You’re WRONG.”
I interpret: “There’s hope for YOU.”
I tear the page out and slap it up on my closet wall. For a long time, it’s the only decoration there.
Never, never do I let myself out of my closet to breathe some fresh air or to stretch my legs, even when no one else is home. If I did — if I allowed myself to really feel those feelings about that girl on my high school swim team, for example — I’d have to admit to myself that I have a closet to take a break from.
I’m not ready for that. I convince myself that I never will be. That I don’t need to be.
I’m wearing my closet like a bodysuit, like armor, like a thousand-pound straightjacket that digs into my skin more and more every time I try to move.
Violence doesn’t lurk outside my closet. Neither does rejection, or abandonment, or even particularly hard conversations. “It gets better,” is out there, along with loving me anyhow and loving me no matter what. At least that’s what I think, and I know I don’t want to hear that bullshit.
Outside of my closet, I think, I am a consolation prize.
Sometimes a lot of me exists outside my closet. I have close friends and a kickass family, I smile all the time, and I can write. Other times I huddle in an exhausted heap in my closet’s familiar back corner, my body pulsing and roiling with my difference. When conversations turns to questions about whether I have a boyfriend or how far I’ve gone sexually, my closet is the most comfortable place for me to be.
All the new friends I could have had are just outside my closet door. Their chatter about their hookups and their boyfriends and analyses of texts from a new guy seep into my space and I want so badly to be a part of it. I fantasize about seamlessly participating in these conversations, about relating, about belonging.
But I’m so worried they’ll sense my closet and my embarrassing inexperience and know that I’m not like them that I’m guarded and quiet, quiet, quiet. Maybe they think I’m standoffish, or uninterested, or judge-y. Really, my voice is just so muffled from trying to figure out how to communicate from inside my closet.
Eventually, I retreat farther into my sad, dark closet. My could-be friends all head out into an open plaza together, giggling, to stretch out to get a tan.
There are other girls outside my closet, too. Some of them I know and some are fictional characters, but what they all have in common is that they’re doing what they’re supposed to. They’re going to prom with dates who match their ties to the girls’ dresses, they’re relieved when their periods come each month, they can talk to their admiring younger cousins about relationships with real authority.
Those girls understand something I don’t. They’re going places I won’t.
That’s what it feels like, at least. Which is why I persist in trying to be like the girls who like boys.
For a second soon after my college graduation, I succeed.
I meet a guy who seems to really like me a lot. He kisses me when his friends leave the room; I wish they would come back. At my place later we’re alone, so we go further. He makes a plan to come back the next time we get together with a condom. I tell myself that if I can make this work my closet will dissolve and I’ll be free. It does not work. My closet’s walls constrict around me.
I’m drinking gin and tonics with my brother. The topic of having kids comes up. He has a girlfriend so I say if either of us is going to do that anytime soon, it’s going to be him even though he’s younger and still in college. He immediately asks me, “Are you gay?” in a way that lets me know this isn’t a thought that just popped into his head for the first time.
I’m too tired from my charade to lie but not strong enough to tell the truth and buzzed enough that I’m mostly unbothered, so I deflect. “Why would you ask me that?” I answer, and the the conversation chugs on, the opportunity to escape my shrinking closet bungled.
My closet comes alive sometimes. It’s not a safe space or a sanctuary, but it knows me better than anyone else. It rolls its eyes when I barricade the door from the inside like this. It shakes its head with exasperation when I mentally work overtime to ignore who I really am.
Ignoring gets easier and easier, though, somehow, but I start to want to do it less and less.
One night I go out with a friend and her boyfriend and some of his friends, people I don’t know. Later I won’t remember one thing about any of the new people, but I’ll never forget this girl-couple who are dancing together and all over each other among the crowd of straight-seeming people the entire night. They’re grinding and kissing and they do not give a fuck and I cannot stop watching them. Afterwards I lie awake on my friend’s couch and just let myself feel the jealousy, the longing that I absolutely can place, the searing annoyance with myself and my closet.
The closet that, I now know, is more than willing to let me go: Dancing like those girls at the bar would be a violation of our lease agreement. There’s no room for that inside my closet.
My closet wants to evict me.
Still, a haze of shame never permeates my closet until a friend tells me that she thinks her younger sister may like girls, and that their mom had recently told her sister that same-sex relationships are against their religion. Now, my closet is an absolute sauna of the sticky, inescapable stuff. That little girl was born right around the time my closet hurtled down on me. How could I be such a weak coward that I can’t even get myself together to be the positive example she may need — that I needed — if she really is questioning her sexuality?
Who the heck do I think I am?
After years and years and years of working to make my closet a place I can live in for the rest of my life, it turns out that now I’m a person who wants out. A person who’s finally, finally willing to acknowledge her closet in order to lose it.
I start by coming out to myself. Once barren, my closet’s walls are now porous and plastered: I read Rubyfruit Jungle and Ask a Queer Chick and and Fun Home and The Miseducation of Cameron Post and Chloe Caldwell’s Women and relate like crazy to this one perspective-altering paragraph in Never Have I Ever by Katie Heaney. I obsessively listen to the gayer of Sam Smith’s albums, The Thrill of It All, for months. I devoutly devour every episode of the Nancy podcast. Way later than I should have, I discover porn and I’m like, Oh.
The first friend (and person) I tell about my closet has the most miraculous response. “Let’s go celebrate,” she says. I had known she’d be supportive, but actually ecstatic? It’s one of the best gifts of my entire life — and I gave it to myself by being honest. I want to get “Let’s go celebrate” tattooed across my freaking forehead.
“Let’s go celebrate” gives me the confidence to tell another friend, then another. I drop a major hint chatting on the phone with my brother.
The progress can be intimidating, but it’s mostly intoxicating.
My closet still has three walls and a ceiling that’s way too low, but the door is wide open.
I want to celebrate.
I’m ready to dance.
