The Exvangelical Queer Victorianist’s Notes on Death, Love and Poetry

A Literary Coming of Age in the ’90s

I spent New Year’s Eve of 2015 with my three boys in a hotel room several states distant from our home. We’d traveled to spend the holidays with relatives who didn’t have space to house us or energy for midnight celebrations. To keep up our strength for seeing in the new year, we bought Pringles and Smartfood from the hotel snack shop, plus Sprite to take the place of champagne when the ball dropped. Then we sprawled on the sofa to channel-surf until the big event. 

During our tour of the cable network specials, I glimpsed a rerun of Ellen Degeneres’s coming-out episode. “Go back to that one!” I told the kids. “You need to see it. It’s historic.” 

The show provoked a reaction I hadn’t foreseen. It didn’t amuse or bore my children—it irritated them. All this evasiveness and angst, just over being gay? It was incomprehensible. My middle child, who was nine, complained, “Why is she acting so weird?”

To my kids, the world I grew up in was baffling, the greatest dread of my childhood a complete non-issue. They had other witch hunts to worry about from their peers: at any moment, they could be accused of racism or sexism or transphobia, without regard for fairness or even logic. But worrying about being queer, in their minds, made zero sense.

Such unquestioning acceptance of LGBTQ+ identities is far from universal in our nation, but the fact that it can exist at all speaks to a revolution during my lifetime. In the 1990s, when I was a college student, a Democratic president instituted “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and signed the Defense of Marriage Act. By the time my children were in elementary school, Americans of all orientations were serving openly in the military and marrying in every configuration of genders. Even within the Christian culture where I was raised, churches that had been vocally condemning homosexuality a few decades ago were celebrating gay marriages and ordaining queer and affirming clergy. 

This sea change raises stark questions for members of my generation who believed our own sexual desires to be unacceptable at the point when we were setting the course of our lives. We chose jobs and partners and decided whether or not to raise children in the context of social conditions that have radically shifted. What would we have done if our world had been different? How should we evaluate our past, and how direct our future? 

For me, the hardest part of facing the future can be forgiving myself for the past. I find myself haunted by the ways I sabotaged my own happiness before I learned to value my desires. My real life feels inadequate next to an imagined alternate existence in which I embraced my sexuality earlier and took an entirely different path. 

But that self-judgment is an oversimplification. My youthful challenge wasn’t just to accept that I was attracted to women—it was to open myself to the full complexity of the attractions I felt and their connections to the rest of me. The categories I had available, gay or straight, weren’t enough for that. I was attracted to some women sexually, some romantically, some intellectually, as maternal figures, as role models, as embodiments of fabulous dreams I could never experience for myself. Some men too, and the attractions overlapped, collided, shifted midstream, and flipped to their opposites. Meanwhile, I had beliefs, ideals, and aspirations that meshed or conflicted with these longings—often both at once.

My children, who earlier introduced me to a world without homophobia, are as teenagers giving me a glimpse of gender and sexual identities endlessly adapted to each person’s self-expression. Although they and their peers still perceive the categories of feminine and masculine, queer and straight, trans and cis, those categories aren’t limits for them, but sources to draw from in constructing and perpetually reconstructing themselves. The rigidity of my generation’s views of sexuality and gender stagger their belief. One YouTuber they follow struggles to persuade his Gen Z audience that some people feel visceral disgust at what he calls “girl cock and guy cunt.”

This laying aside of expectations, this recognition of infinite alternatives, can be a source of healing. We all make unique calculations in deciding how to live, and no one else has access to all the factors at play—not even we ourselves at a different point in time. Revisiting our journeys can remind us, at least in part, of what we went through and what resources we had to draw on, bringing us fuller knowledge of who we were, are now, and possibly may be.