Chapter Thirty-Eight: Is Gay (~jinghan)

Note from the author: Quotations are paraphrased as per my memory. That or they’re completely skimmed down for privacy reasons…

It’s a Saturday morning and I’m lying in bed reading. It reminds me of being back in year eight. It feels like I haven’t had the luxury of secretly reading while snuggled up in my bed on  Saturday morning since year eight. Somehow, recently, the awareness of work to do, deadlines to meet, people to meet has coaxed me grudgingly out of bed before lunch on a Saturday morning. Like, for example, last Saturday I got up at 6:20am (yes, 6:20am!) to dress up in newspaper and surprise attack someone on their birthday… it was totally worth it, but I do miss these lazy couldn’t-care-less mornings with an engrossing book.

It’s a Saturday morning and I’m lying in bed reading. It reminds me of being back in year eight. It could be because I haven’t had the luxury of reading by the secret light of the morning since year eight, but it could also just be because I’m reading a book about “eighth-graders” (as the american’s call it).

The book is So Hard To Say, by Alex Sanchez. Somehow she manages to capture the antics of teenaged crushes and the struggle between enjoying your own identity and the need to feel included in a high school environment in just the right way. She doesn’t over play these teenage struggles nor does she cheapen or idealise them. It’s so perfect that it takes me back to a time when I was that young and unsure of myself.

And in case I’m not already awed by the author’s ability for good teenage-literature, she manages to capture of dilemma of homosexuality in a way that is not political, not whingey, not rebellious… just… real.

“Were you always openly gay?” I ask one of my friends, because the topic is on my mind.

“Oh, no. Noooooooo, definitely not,” he says.

For some reason I didn’t expect this answer. To me he’s always made gay jokes (not as in lame jokes, but as in jokes about homosexuality) and I had always had the impression that he was a really self-confident sort of person. But then again, in the past I had thought that about people, and often its turned out that some of the confidence they put on is born from insecurities that they feel. Actually, thinking about it, this must apply to me too…

“I totally assumed you might be one of those people who would think they’re too cool for me when I first met you in first year,” I’m saying to my friend.

“Oh, no, you’re totally cooler in the social heirachy than me. People like me need to suck up to people like you.”

“No way! I was totally sucking up to you. I haven’t always made great friends after changing schools, so I was pretty anxious about being friendly to people in the first few weeks of semester. Possibly a little too friendly.”

He tells me about how he only told a few friends at the end of year twelve that he was gay, and before then he was always worried that the people whom he considered friends would not be friends with him if they knew he was gay. This part I would relate to. I’m not sure about you, but I certainly had things I didn’t tell my friends because I didn’t want to know that they would judge me for them. Ignorance is bliss?

It’s Saturday morning and I’m gobbling up the last few pages of the book. The characters are still teenagers with their identity struggles, but I know that they’ll get through it and they’ll be okay in the end. I smile to myself and hug the book under my doona, savouring the feeling I’m left with.

“Was it hard?” I ask my friend.

“Yes.” He tells me about how at one point he had considered jumping in front of a train as a last resort. How it seemed like there would be no end.

I catch my breath and take a moment to digest this. “Are things better now though?”

“Oh yeah, definitely! Uni is awesome.”

I smile that this. In a way we’ve all come through and becomes more comfortable with ourselves here at uni, where the suffocating and inflexible social world of the high-school classroom is left behind. Here, you make friends with people who like you and are like you. Here you find people you fit in with without having to be someone that you’re not.

So maybe its not that our false confidences are hiding our inner insecurities. Maybe it’s that with the right friends around us we’re shedding the insecurities of the past to come out as the confident people we were always capable of.