With Patience and Fortitude: A Memoir (8 page)

I wound up majoring in urban studies and education, mostly because I knew that after graduating I wanted to work in politics and government, and these majors made the most sense for me. I’d considered majoring in political science, but everybody in the whole world was a political science major. Besides, when you were a political science major, you had to study national and international issues, and by then my focus was clear: cities fascinated me most—and they still do. I added the education major, not with an eye toward becoming a teacher but to study education from a political perspective.

O
nce I’d experienced how exciting and satisfying it was to be involved in the political process, I had an even clearer idea of what I wanted to do with my life. As graduation neared, I knew my challenge after Trinity would be to channel my passion for progressive causes, political organizing, and getting things done into some kind of job and profession. I was pretty clueless about how to make that happen in a self-sustaining way, but I was determined to find a way.

A more complicated challenge waited in the background.

While I had a very busy social life at Trinity and enjoyed spending time with my friends, my romantic life was just as nonexistent as it had been in high school. Not that there was a lot of pressure to date at Trinity—there wasn’t. Every college has a different social dynamic. I didn’t know anyone at Trinity who went out on dates, and compared with other schools, there weren’t even that many couples. One of my high school classmates went to a college in the South, where if you didn’t have a date you didn’t go to football games. Trinity was nothing like that. So I never really felt left out.

Then again, I just assumed I was
always
going to be left out, which is different from feeling left out. I had no expectation that I’d ever get asked out on a date and had no interest either, so it’s not like I was disappointed. It was what it was. Then, during my senior year and much to my dismay, I discovered that I wasn’t immune to romantic feelings.

T
o this day, I vividly remember my first crush, although the funny thing is, I can’t remember her name. I just remember her big halo of curly hair. We were both seniors, but she was probably in her midtwenties because she’d taken time off to travel. I’d see her in some of my classes, and on occasion we talked. We were friendly but not supergood friends, and I certainly never told her about my feelings for her.

Normally a crush is kind of a fluttery feeling. You feel excited and anxious, but not in a bad way. And when you’re in that state of mind, your friends will tell you it’s a crush. It’s a universal experience that’s celebrated in music and poetry. But to me, all those fluttery feelings were overshadowed by a troubling sensation, because I was having them for a girl. And so those feelings were wrong.

Looking back, it’s hard to say exactly how I knew my feelings were wrong. I don’t remember hearing any sermons in church about it. It didn’t come up once in religion or theology classes. I don’t remember being taught about it in school at all. And my parents never indicated one way or the other how they felt about LGBT people. But I saw and heard things that probably had a subconscious impact on what I thought about being gay. When I was a child, other kids did use the word
gay
in a negative way. I don’t think those young kids were aware of being homophobic—I’m not even sure they knew what
gay
meant.

In sixth or seventh grade, I got called
dyke
by kids at school. Again, I don’t know how I knew what that word meant, because I have no memory of ever having heard it before, but I must have because I knew it was bad and knew enough to say, “No, no, I have a crush on” a certain boy. Of course I didn’t have a crush on any boy and never really have, but I said it to prove that I wasn’t what they said I was. I didn’t say a word to my parents or to my sister about the episode because I was afraid. I must have wanted to tell them, because I must have been frightened and upset—at least enough that the experience remains vivid to this day.

I grew up in a homophobic era. You didn’t have to hear a sermon about it or know what your parents thought about it. It was in the air. At least it was in Glen Cove in the 1970s.What I saw at college was better, but far from perfect. Trinity wasn’t exactly on the cutting edge of college LGBT rights activism. By the mid-1960s and early 1970s, Columbia and Vassar had out students and gay student organizations. But in 1984, when I was a freshman, a senior came out in a letter to the editor in the school newspaper. (I’m not sure if he was the first out gay student at Trinity, but he was the first to come out in such a public way.)

I happened to know him because I volunteered for a community outreach program that he’d founded. Trinity is situated in a very poor neighborhood, at the top of an enormous hill. When you’re on campus, you literally overlook the poor neighborhood below. There was quite a lot of tension between the students, who were largely affluent, and the people who lived in the surrounding neighborhood. So this guy was already known on campus for his great community work, and his coming out was something people talked about, which I imagine was what he’d hoped people would do.

Trinity already had an LGBT student organization by the time I got there, and while they didn’t publicize their meetings (because they’d had problems with other students throwing things at members as they came and went), a group of them would routinely visit classes. They’d ask professors to give them a block of class time so they could talk about homophobia and LGBT issues, and then they’d answer questions. During the years I was there, they came to a few of my classes, and I thought they were so very brave, articulate, and well put together. Sometimes people would ask stupid questions, but given how little people knew back then, I’m guessing they were just trying to understand something that made them uncomfortable—or they were just knuckleheaded. After four years at Trinity, I had a full, positive political awareness about LGBT people and the LGBT civil rights movement. I thought discrimination was wrong, and I was fully supportive of efforts to pass antidiscrimination legislation. But I was not gay.

I had that crush on the senior with curly hair, but when I tried to picture myself leading a gay life, I couldn’t. It was all uncharted territory. Actually, a lot of my life had
already
felt like uncharted territory. To paraphrase something my father often says, I needed uncharted territory like a moose needs a hat rack. So I decided to push my feelings aside. I went back to my tiny dorm room, closed the door, sat on my bed, and talked to myself and to God. I said out loud, “This is not going to happen to you.” It wasn’t so much that I pretended I didn’t have the feelings I was having. I just pushed them down so deep that they no longer existed, because being interested in women—being a lesbian—was not the plan, at least not the plan for me.

That seems like a lifetime ago, and in many ways it was. I’m now very comfortable living as openly as I do—my wedding photo was on the front page of the
New York Times
! But when I’m really honest with myself, I have to admit that, like so many LGBT people, in the back of my mind I still have a faint sense of unease, wondering what people will think of me when I walk into unfamiliar situations, fearing they will judge me because of who I am. I suppose that given the times I grew up in, it’s understandable that even an out and proud lesbian like me still looks over her shoulder when no one is watching.

The world has changed, and I hope I’ve contributed just a little bit to that change. As I left the embracing arms of the Trinity campus with the lessons I had learned, about my identity and about social change, I embarked on a new chapter and entered into real life.

P
ART
II

Learning My City, Finding Myself

C
HAPTER
6

Winning and Losing

I
wasn’t sure how I was going to get there, but my life’s work already had a direction. It came from two sources, I think. The influence of my parents is in my bones. My father’s union activism showed me that when people stick together, great things can happen and people’s lives are improved. My mother was often sick and very tired, but her illness and her pain gave her momentum. She was going to make things better for people and me whenever or however she could. And she knew she didn’t have forever to do it, so she didn’t waste a minute. Years later Ellen told me that all those afternoons in the car, when my mother drove me from lesson to lesson, had one overriding purpose in her mind: to raise me well and see me through grammar school. That was her stated goal. She lived a few years longer, but her imprint has lasted all my life.

The other big factors are my personality and my internal makeup. I really like being with people and doing things with them, and it has always made me feel good to get things done. Perhaps it started when I was a kid. It was often lonely in the house, and so whenever I could, I would run outside to be with my gang of friends. I needed them, and the best way to do things with them was to organize them. It wasn’t for nothing that they called me the Mayor of Libby Drive. I have carried this passion with me ever since: whenever I see a problem, I want to fix it. Maybe the fact that I couldn’t fix my mother, that I couldn’t stop her inevitable decline from the cancer, drives me. I don’t want to go overboard here, but I’m happiest in a group, and I like the fun of making things happen. Another well-known aspect of my personality is that I can be loud. Can it have come from living with two almost-deaf relatives, my mother and Aunt Julia? And my laugh is the loudest! I love a good story or a great joke.

This is a decent set of character traits for someone who wants to make social change her life’s goal. After Trinity, I struggled to find the right job. I was offered a six-month stint in Boston as a field organizer for an antinuclear referendum, which sought to close down the two nuclear power plants in Massachusetts. It was a PIRG-affiliated effort.

I was responsible for organizing house parties to get people to support our effort and vote in favor of the referendum. We did a lot of door-to-door canvassing. Before we went out, we’d practice by doing role-playing. You would pretend to knock on a door. Someone pretending to be a resident would come to the door, and you’d recite your script to them. That person would respond to what you said, and you’d pivot into whatever the right response was. The PIRG really drilled into our heads the significance of practicing, and anyone on my staff now can tell you—I believe in practicing.

We held some public events. Once again I learned that you don’t want to organize an event in a room that’s too big for the number of people you’re expecting; otherwise it will look empty, and that’s demoralizing to the people who do show up. If they’ve left their homes to go out to an event they think is important, and nobody else is there, it makes them think that what they care about doesn’t matter. That’s depressing, and you run the risk of having those people never come out again, or they wind up having a negative feeling about public citizenship, which is just the opposite of what you’re trying to instill.

I also learned that you never hold a meeting unless you have an “ask” for the people in the room. Once you get people there, you’d better be prepared to ask them to do something: sign a petition, donate their time or money, or agree to do volunteer work. If you don’t ask for something, they won’t feel like they’re involved. After all, if people have bothered to come to the meeting in the first place, it’s because they care about the issue you’re promoting. So you waste a huge opportunity if you don’t ask them to do something that will contribute to whatever you’re campaigning for.

The other big lesson I learned from that referendum campaign was about the importance of follow-up. I became the queen of follow-up. You have to get back to people with what they’ve asked for, whether it’s basic information, or a way for them to get involved, or whatever. The key is responding. You can’t leave people hanging, because then they get discouraged and won’t come back the next time you ask for help with a referendum or an election or any kind of community effort.

We were trying to get the citizens of Massachusetts to vote to close down two nuclear power plants, but public opinion was not in our favor. And neither were the most important Massachusetts political leaders. We worked hard, and we did our best, but we lost miserably. That was a lesson for me. Can you imagine? Our debrief on the campaign was about how much
damage
we’d done to the antinuclear movement! I was too young and inexperienced to have seen it coming, but however disappointing it was to lose, it was still a good organizing experience. Winning probably hadn’t been in the cards, but winning is only one way things can go.

S
adly, when I got back home, Aunt Julia was in the last stages of colon cancer. She was a difficult patient. Her deafness made it hard for her to grasp what we were telling her and what was happening to her. Also, she was in a powerful state of denial, convinced that if she prayed enough, God would intervene and save her. I had already buried my mother from cancer, and the idea that God would intervene—or had ever intervened—in her life to make everything right made me nuts. This wasn’t about faith. It was about cancer. In the best of times, Julia had always had trouble adapting, and these were far from the best of times. As her health declined, she became more and more withdrawn, frightened, and therefore uncooperative.

We had to be tough with her, and that was not fun. One time the home health aide asked for my help because Aunt Julia couldn’t get out of the bathtub and had become somewhat hysterical. It was hard to get through to her that she had to let one of us help her out of the tub, so I said very firmly, “Look, you let me pick you up, or I’m calling the police department to come and do it.” That caught her attention—she knew me well enough to know that I’d call the police if I had to. She didn’t want the police coming in and seeing her naked, so she let me pick her up. Julia died on March 4, 1989, and we had the funeral at the same funeral home and church where we’d had my mother’s funeral. Four years later, almost to the day, we would hold my grandmother Nellie’s funeral there, too.