best friend – aliciajoseph

I went out to dinner with a friend last night. We’ve been best friends for thirty years. We are both gay. We met in college at a Gay and Lesbian support group. It was 1996. I was twenty years old.

During dinner, the restaurant manager came to our table to ask how we liked our meal. Then she asked how long we’d been friends and, with a laugh, if we had planned our outfits. We had not. Though we were both wearing flannels like we were still living in the 90s.

She teased good-naturedly that she didn’t believe us, and then looked directly at my friend and said, “I can tell you’re Family.”

Her smile widened, and an easiness seemed to come over her, in the way your body naturally calms when it senses no danger. Then, as if we weren’t strangers, she told my friend and me personal stories about when she realized she was gay, how stringently she had protected the secret about herself that she was certain would destroy relationships with the people she loved the most. She included an intimate story about her mother, noting that she didn’t tell this story often, but continued with the comfort as though she were talking to trusted friends.

She also feared that her secret made her vulnerable to an incredible hate that could incite physical violence, even death, merely by existing, because, like my dinner mate, she would quickly buzz any homophobe’s gaydar.

I didn’t pass her gaydar. I’m always surprised when people can’t tell that I’m gay. When I came out in 1996, the only person who wasn’t surprised was an ex-boyfriend.

We were hanging at a friend’s house drinking beer. The exchange went like this:

“I’m a lesbian.”

“Yeah, I kinda figured.”

Continued drinking beer.

I always thought my gayness showed in my walk, despite my long hair and subtle makeup. But not everyone fit the stereotype. But when you did, you had to be aware of your surroundings. Like my friend and the restaurant manager.

Her name was Mercedes. She was a slender fifty-year-old lesbian from a Hispanic family. My friend and I were the same age as Mercedes, so we understood her insecurities. We were from the same generation.

She talked with us for so long that she eventually pulled out a chair and sat down. Neither of us minded. I listened as she told us her gay coming-of-age stories, and I felt like we were old friends catching up.

Mercedes knew she was gay in second grade when she couldn’t resist the temptation to trail her fingers down her teacher’s smooth exposed calf, which resulted in her parents being called. I had a crush on my kindergarten teacher but had enough sense to keep my hands to myself.

When Mercedes finally came out to her family, it turned out they had always known she was gay and loved her anyway. She has a wife that she has been with for over twenty years. Her journey in life has worked out for her, but that is not the case for many people in our community.

Being shunned and disowned was a brutal reality for many gay people back then. It was why there was such an emphasis on Family in the gay community. For some, being around gay people was the only time they truly felt seen and heard and loved and safe.

Our unexpected yet welcomed conversation with Mercedes, initiated because she recognized my friend as one of her own, made me wonder if today’s young LGBTQ+ generation holds the same high regard for Family within the community as generations past had done.

Or maybe because being gay is tremendously (though not perfectly) more accepted now, the need to look to the community as Family has ceased. Though I am glad that for the most part being gay is no longer something one has to whisper about, it would be a shame if that progress came at the cost of losing the emphasis on Family within the community.

I hope I am wrong.

Mercedes hasn’t let go of her obvious love for community. She gave my friend her number and told us to give her a call whenever we felt like going out. She knows a lot of gay people and enjoyed bringing people together.

I hope there are a lot more people like Mercedes out there.

My bestie and me.

Not all lesbians are fashionably challenged, but many are, and I’m no exception. We wear clothes as a necessary comfort, not to make a statement, except to say, “Yes, I threw on the first thing I saw in my closet without much consideration.” I wear clothes because it’s illegal to mosey around naked, and also because I don’t have the body that wears “naked” very well.

I can’t understand how anyone who knew me as a child (mom, siblings) were as surprised as they seemed to be when I came out. Since I was a little girl I hated wearing dresses. I have distinct memories of standing in the middle of my kitchen, begging my mother to let me wear my holey jeans.

“They have holes in them. And they’re dirty!” she’d scream.

Dirty, holey jeans were my preference of attire (and this was before they were trendy and stores didn’t sell pre-torn jeans). In the mid-eighties, ripped jeans were for burnouts with long hair, who smoked and listened to loud guitar-thrashing hard rock music.

I loved my holey jeans.

While I had no qualms with being messy, my brother (my twin) would change his outfit if one drop of anything – including innocuous water – touched a single thread of anything he wore. Pants, shirts, and shorts popped up all over the house. On the kitchen floor, across the stairwell, behind bathroom doors, or tucked between the couch cushions.

“Joey!” mom would scream. “Did you change your clothes again!”

Yep, mom. He sure did.

Though she never admitted it, I’m positive having a daughter eager to wear the same worn clothes over and over was a welcomed relief to the scavenger hunt of missing trousers my brother had tirelessly put her through each day, but one thing is clear. There was a mix-up somewhere in the womb because my other half (literally) got the girl genes and to me, befell the genes that to this day make me recoil at the sight of department store make-up counters, and to the perky saleswomen with their overly painted-on faces standing under those bright, shiny lights.

Thank Christ grunge was all the rage when I was a teenager. Flannel shirts, baggy jeans, sandals with socks – it was fashionable in 1993 to dress like a lesbian – and I loved every second of it.

I was twenty-years old when I crept into my first Gay and Lesbian support group where I met my friend Tony. My fashion disaster ways were still prevalent and every lesbian needs a fashionably sensitive gay man in her life to tell her it’s time to tweeze those eyebrows.

“Eyebrows are supposed to have an arch, Alicia,” he’d say. “And there’s supposed to be two of ’em.”

Goodbye uni-brow. Hello shapely new, separated eyebrows!

But it did’t stop there. He also gently persuaded me to dump my white leather fringe jacket and ditch the blue eyeliner and bright-red blush.

Farewell rosy cheeks, it was time for a more subdued look because the year was 1996, not ’86.

Eighteen years later, Tony is still my fashion confidant, but he’s also a dear friend – a friend who listens without judgement and has the uncanny way of knowing exactly what I need to hear during my most vulnerable moments. A friend who constantly reminded me I was a writer, even when I didn’t feel like one. His support helped me to never give up on my dream. When my first book was published, he was as happy for me as if his own dream had come true.

He helped me pass bookmarks out in a predominately lesbian neighborhood to promote my book. Over lunch he gushed about how talented a writer I am and then told me to burn the jeans I was wearing as soon as I get home.

Honest friends aren’t always good for your ego, but thank God for them because I shudder to think what I’d look like if Tony wasn’t in my life.