Keeping Her a Secret

Twelve years ago, hip-hop duo Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, along with singer and poet Mary Lambert, released a summer pop hit about same-sex rights titled Same Love. The song came out in July of 2012, which was the summer that my friend and one of her female classmates started seeing each other secretly, with my help. To this day, a swirl of convoluted emotions comes up when I think about the number of times she asked me to help hide her sexuality from her parents. 

“Just come over!” my friend would plead, and I knew I would get stuck with keeping an ear out for her mother’s footsteps from the bedroom door as she and her girlfriend hooked up at night. To this day, I can recall my thirteen-year-old self trying to block out the giggles and whispers from under my friend's bed sheets while I sat guard by the door. I felt sorry for her but also for myself. This is one of the many painful memories that helped me understand why the celebratory word for the LGBTQ community is pride. 

In my experience, it is heartbreakingly common for individuals who identify as queer to struggle to come to terms with and eventually embrace their sexuality. I am one of them. My name is River, and I am a twenty-four-year-old transgender person of color. 

I was seventeen when a joke that hinted at my sexual orientation leaped out of my mouth and shattered on the living room floorboards at a family gathering. "Should I slap you?" my mother hissed in our native tongue — a threat that has held weight since I was a child. I had tears of grief and rage in my eyes when I begged her for an apology as we walked back to the car after the party.

I've never been able to convince my parents to accept who I am. While growing up in Dallas, Texas, my sexuality came into question around the time I started having crushes. A different friend of mine at that time overheard my mother asking hers if she thought I was lesbian. My friend’s mother comforted mine by saying, "No, of course not. If anything, my daughter is much more masculine than yours."

My early teenage years consisted of suppressing a sea of such incidents. After experiencing my first psychological breakdown during my sophomore year of high school, my parents sent me to a homophobic therapist. The following months entailed talk therapy sessions that gaslit me deeper into the closet. I was a competitive swimmer for most of my life, and due to the constant implicit and explicit homophobic messages I received while living in the South, I began viewing heterosexuality as a sport. If I just tried hard enough, I could excel.

But despite the social programming and pressure, when I was twenty-one, I found myself falling in love with a transgender woman. I used to be terrified of my parents catching my lover's scent on my clothes or her lipstick smear on my cheek. These fears eventually became too overwhelming, and I ended the relationship. It's been years, but I still miss her smile, her hands in my hair, and how our fingers stayed intertwined as I fell asleep in her arms.

I am exhausted from trying to swim out of the ocean of my feelings because no matter how hard I try, I keep returning to the water. A few months ago, I posted a poem on my Tumblr page that reads, “It's true. I can not love a woman louder than the shame that rings in my ears.”

Pride is the opposite of shame; every time I think about that, I remember my friend from seventh grade — her turmoil mirroring my own. We lost touch shortly after the start of high school. My last vivid memory of her brings me back to our freshman winter dance when she and her girlfriend swayed on opposite sides of the basketball gym with boys they didn't love. While sitting on the bleachers, I cringed, yet couldn’t turn away as my friend’s date slid his hands further down her waist. She winced, and they both pretended not to notice. After the dance, she came over and cried on my bed till dawn, promising to change. It was then that I remembered a lyric from Same Love. It quietly sang in my head, “And I can't change. Even if I tried, even if I wanted to.”

One of my deepest regrets is spending most of my pubescent years watching this girl haunt herself with her mother's shadow the way I do with mine. Today, she remains a series of flashbacks that remind me of the voice that echoes in my head each time I try to listen to my own.