(no subject)

I'm trying to read this article on Ellen Page and Ellen Degeneres that several people on my dash have linked, but I keep having to stop because I keep starting to cry. 1997 was the first year I had conscious feelings for a girl my own age that were, by my then internal standards, fairly decidedly unchaste. She was really quite amazing, but I can't say it was a fun early crush. It was pretty awful. Our parents arranged a sleepover one night when my folks had to be out of town and I was terrified, because I liked the idea of sleeping next to her far, far, far too much. I was scared of my feelings and consumed by the fear that I'd do something wrong and bad. I was sure I was taking advantage somehow. Somehow I was lying.

I was so relieved when I wound up sleeping on her floor.

(But I still felt guilty and horrible, because I liked that too.)

This despite the fact that I really couldn't classify or describe what I was feeling, I just knew that I was feeling something, and it was fairly overwhelming. And if she ever found out, she'd tell her best friend, and then her best friend would be ten times as horrid to me, and she was pretty horrid to me already, so that was not a pleasant prospect.

I was an isolated and not very media savvy kid. I watched public television on occasion, but never commercial television, except for scattered episodes of cartoons, Star Trek, and nature documentaries, so I really had no idea who Ellen DeGeneres was, until suddenly there was all this media coverage. I'd encountered homophobia before, of course. I read voraciously, and I had read jokes and stories that hinged on it. But I tended to misread them - a moment in one of my favorite books that I can now see as relying on a character's rejection of the possibility that he could have romantic feelings for another man, seemed to me as a child to work because that character was rejecting the idea that his leige lord was coercing him into the romantic side of their friendship. Obviously horrible. Of course you'd think that, I thought to the jibing antagonist as a nine year old, when I first read the story, you sleep with people who can't tell you no.

But, while I was uh. Naive. I wasn't actually stupid, and I couldn't miss the nature of the reaction to DeGeneres entirely, even though I also couldn't fully parse it. I used to tense when people said her name. I'd stop listening to them. I'd think about questions of theology instead, or sing silently in the safety of my own brain.

I had no idea I was bisexual (I didn't know bisexuality was possible), or even that I was attracted to other women, but I still felt threatened by how much people despised Ellen DeGeneres for telling them she was gay.

Of course DeGeneres was on the periphery of my concerns that year. I was isolated from pop culture partly by choice and partly by circumstance and I was more concerned by the fact that for some reason I couldn't seem to make friends. The girl I liked so much would be friendly to me when her bestie wasn't around, and she never actively joined in when said best friend bullied me, but she didn't say anything to stop it, either. I liked her, but I was fairly sure she wasn't really my friend. Friends don't let friends tell you you're stuck up and cold and too fat and ugly and lie constantly and so no one will ever like you.

I didn't come out to myself for another three years. It was four before I told anyone else.