Like Me (3 page)

I
have always felt lucky that my list of reasons for hiding my homosexuality most of my life didn’t include “God disapproves of gays.” Not one church or religion to which I was exposed had anything other than condemnation for homosexuality, but somehow I didn’t fully buy it. I did fear that God would disapprove of my feelings of homosexuality during my childhood, but fear of God never lingered in my heart for long. I felt that God’s love for me was powerful and unshakable. I know what I’ve heard religious people say about the Bible—that it specifically says homosexuality is wrong. I have read those parts of the Bible too, and by and large, the Bible is tricky to read, difficult to comprehend, and impossible to apply to modern times. I can tell you this much: even if the Bible were to read, “Chely Wright… if you’re reading this, be clear that it is a sin for you to love another female and for you to desire to partner with her for life,” I’d find it unsettling, but I would still know that this is who I am, exactly how God created me and that His love for me is infinite.

I did feel love in the years to come, from my family and from
the close knit small town that nurtured my success as a singer. But most of the time I felt fear. I was afraid that people would discover I was different, so I made it my mission to be good at everything else. I was scared that I was a failure already, because I was gay. But I did everything I could to make up for that fundamental flaw.

W
hen I was nine years old, on New Year’s Eve, the Old House burned to the ground. My whole family stood shivering in the twelve-degree weather in the dead of night, watching the volunteer fire department struggle to contain the blaze. They turned every hose they had on that white clapboard structure, but every time water hit wood, it bounced right off in little beads of ice. We never learned what caused the inferno that consumed the Old House, but all these years later I still dream of 710 South Main.

At the time, I had a good idea of what caused the fire; I thought it was because of me. The ninth year of my life was scary for me, and the last day of that year was a fitting punctuation mark. After the Old House was ashes, life got much harder.

W
hen people ask me when I knew I was attracted to women, I can only say that on some level I’ve always known. Before my first crush, I sensed I was different. But when I felt that attraction, I knew the difference was my homosexuality. Everything started to add up and it didn’t look good.

A couple of weeks before the beginning of my third-grade year, Jeny and I sprinted down to the school, as we did every day in the final days of summer vacation that led up to the first day of classes. There were usually three teachers for each grade, and our mission was to find out which teacher we’d be assigned to. When the school administration had made its decisions, a copy of names and teachers would be taped on the inside of a window just off of the elementary school office.

My name was underneath a teacher’s name that I didn’t recognize. Miss Smilie. I thought it was interesting that she was not a Mrs. or even a Ms., but a Miss. This whole Miss business confused me.

Miss Smilie was newly out of college and enthusiastic about being our teacher. She had the prettiest, whitest teeth I’d ever seen and her skin was golden brown. She didn’t wear makeup, and she didn’t need any. She wore bib overalls to school every
day and I sensed that it became a problem with Mr. Peterson, our grade school principal. After months and months of the overalls, she stopped wearing them and started coming to class in a skirt. I asked her as we were walking in from recess one day why she didn’t wear her overalls anymore, and she said she was told that teachers don’t wear bib overalls to school and she needed to find something different to wear.

Miss Smilie’s third-grade class. I’m front-row center. 1979
.

My brother, sister, and I loved school. Even if we were feeling sick, we would go to class. I’d arrive early when I could, just so I didn’t miss anything. That year, I began dreading Fridays. I didn’t like being away from school for the weekend. I realized that it wasn’t so much the other students, the recess, the tasty lunch served every day, or the gratification of the learning process that I was longing for on the weekends. I was missing my teacher.

I would wonder throughout the day on Saturday and Sunday what she might be doing. I wondered who her friends were. I didn’t think of her in terms of kissing and other kinds of physical contact, I just thought of her as someone that I wanted to be near. I believe that heterosexual third graders who might have a crush on someone of the opposite sex probably felt the same way I did. I doubt that a straight third-grade girl has fantasies about having sexual contact with a boy, but rather imagines simply being near him and getting his affection.

I paid close attention to the other little girls in my class, trying to determine if they felt like I did about Miss Smilie. I hoped that I would identify it in other girls. I prayed that it was perfectly normal to fall for my teacher, who was very much a woman. I saw no such signs in my female classmates. My stomach would feel uneasy and sick every time I thought about it. I knew that I was in a bad situation, and I was painfully aware that I had no one to talk to and nowhere to turn.

I don’t even think I’d heard the word “homosexual” before or understood what it meant, but I’d certainly heard jokes that adults and high school kids would tell that included the words “faggot,” “fairy,” “dyke,” and “queer” in them. When I heard people talking about faggots, dykes, fairies, and queers, I wondered what one looked like. We didn’t have them in Wellsville, as far as I knew. I’d also heard some things in church that led me to know that certain words and activities were negative. I had heard the words “whore,” “criminal,” “drunk,” “homosexual,” “pervert,” “liar,” and “non-believer” all strung together so many times that I understood that those were the building blocks of sin and evildoing.

Friday nights were a pretty big deal when I was young because my parents allowed us to stay up as late as we wanted. After the ten o’clock news there was a program called
Friday Fright Night
, and we could usually count on two very scary movies to be aired back to back. Most nights, we’d fall asleep shortly after the second
one began, but we loved our ceremony of popcorn, Pepsi, and scary movies.

One particular Friday night would cause me years of worry and unbelievable fear. My dad happened to decide to stay up with us to watch the double feature. Chris got tired during the first one and went to bed. Jeny fell asleep on the floor wrapped snugly in a quilt that my great-grandmother had sewn, probably years before any of us were born. That left my dad and me to watch the second movie alone. I’m sure I was tired, but I was bound and determined to show my dad how long I could stay awake.

The movie began to play. We watched the entire thing from start to finish, and I was petrified. Even though I needed to go to the bathroom halfway through the movie, I stayed snuggled on the couch next to my dad. The scenes of that movie, the story, and the sounds that came out of our console television on that night would stay with me and haunt me for days, weeks, months, and years to come.

I was convinced, after seeing it, that I was in danger of being possessed by the devil. The main character of the movie was an all-American little girl around my age whose body was inexplicably overtaken by Satan himself. I questioned my mom about it in the following days, and once she got over the complete shock that my father had allowed her youngest child at nine years old to watch
The Exorcist
, she explained her position on the devil and how unlikely it was that I’d be possessed by an evil spirit. She tried to convince me that I was a good kid, even if I sometimes got in trouble. She told me I was a normal kid like everyone else and that the devil didn’t go after normal kids to do his dirty work. Well, that’s all she needed to say for me to know that I was in deep spiritual trouble. I was not normal. I was the opposite of normal. Everything around me, whether it was overt language, subtle suggestion, or non-spoken actions, told me that there was something unacceptable about me.

I continued to love Miss Smilie, even though I didn’t want to. I put myself through little emotional and behavioral obstacle courses, willing myself to resist the urge to like her. I’d try to go the whole day in class without looking at her. My feelings for her were sinful, I believed, so I did my best to avoid my feelings. My stomach continued to hurt, and I was so hopeful after third grade passed that being away from Miss Smilie would fix me.

The next year I developed a new crush. My mom’s cousin Sam Finnell and his family lived in Leavenworth, Kansas, just a couple of hours by car from Wellsville. Sam and MaryAnn Finnell had three daughters. Marcia was two years older than my brother, Tracey was my sister’s age, and Sammie Sue just a few months younger than me. Mom’s cousin Sam was an amazing piano player and I idolized him for that. Sam and his family were good, kind, and funny people. We played music, played cards, battled at board games, went camping with them and their beloved dachshund, and shared a million laughs. They were the fun relatives that we didn’t get to see that often, but when we did, we had a ball.

Since Sammie Sue and I were close in age, I usually spent my time with her when our families got together. She was obsessed with Rod Stewart and was convinced that she was his long-lost love child. She had her hair cut like his and dressed like him.

I loved playing with Sammie Sue, but I found myself inventing reasons to go upstairs where Marcia’s room was to have the chance to walk past her door and try to peek in. She was nice to me, and the Finnell sisters actually got along well with one another. So when I’d suggest to Sammie Sue or Tracey and Jeny that we go up to Marcia’s room and ask her if she wanted to play Monopoly, they were always agreeable. Most of the time Marcia would stop what she was doing, which was usually talking on the phone to her boyfriend, and play with us. All of Sam and Mary-Ann’s daughters were beautiful, and Marcia was no exception.

A short time after one of our weekend visits up to the Finnells’
home, my mom received a piece of mail from MaryAnn. I brought it in from the mailbox that sat atop a post poked in the ground at the end of our gravel driveway and announced excitedly to my mom that we got something from the Finnells. She opened it, read the little handwritten note, and pulled three wallet-sized school pictures of the Finnell girls from the white envelope. My mom got up from the kitchen table, walked over to the refrigerator, and secured each little photo to the freezer door with three separate magnets, each slightly resembling a different type of colorful fruit. I walked over and studied the pictures. Sammie Sue had her blond hair spiked way up high just like her fantasy father, Rod Stewart. Tracey looked pretty, and it occurred to me then how much I thought she and my sister looked alike. Then I took a long look at Marcia’s picture. She was the prettiest of them all, I thought. I felt blood rushing to my cheeks and to my arms and legs. My tummy did a flip with a double twist. That was the first time that my body felt any kind of sexual excitement that I could remember.

For a few days, that fridge was like a drug. I couldn’t resist the force that made me want to go near it. I’d find a reason to go into the kitchen and I’d casually walk by her picture, most of the time not daring to stop and stare, but just slowing my steps ever so slightly. I’d pause just enough to focus on her, tipping my chin to the floor to throw off anyone who might see me but cutting my eyes upward to look at beautiful Marcia Finnell. After a few days of doing this, I was so scared of getting caught that I decided it was time to move to Plan B: I stole the picture.

In a purposeful and planned tactical maneuver, I walked right by our almond-colored Kenmore and swiped the two-by-three-inch photo. I went directly to the bathroom in the hallway. It was the only safe place to be, because I could lock the door once I got in there. I locked the door, slid down the paneled wall onto the floor, and looked at that picture for what seemed to be an eternity. It was time for me to hide Marcia’s picture in that bathroom.
Underneath the sink was a cabinet where my mom would put Comet, Pine-Sol, a box of hair curlers, and stacks of toilet paper. Inside that cabinet, on the underneath side of the countertop, there were a couple of support boards that held the sink up flush with the counter. That’s where I hid the picture. No one would ever reach up there for any reason. I gave the picture one more look, kissed it, and put it in its safe hiding place. Marcia Finnell was my crush in fourth grade and as much as I loved her, I was learning to hate myself.

I continued to pay close attention to others around me in hopes that I might be able to find someone else like me, but I saw no signs that would lead me to believe that I wasn’t alone. Being a homosexual was not a phase, as I’d hoped it would be.

If there were other girls in Wellsville like me, I didn’t know how to find them. I knew of no books in my school library or our little city library that addressed homosexuality. If they existed, I never would have dared check them out anyway, for fear of someone noticing.