I’m Moving Back to My Homophobic Hometown… with My Wife

When I was old enough to start caring about my family history, the first question I remember asking my parents was obvious: “Where did you grow up?” When the answer was a simple, “Right here,” I thought nothing of it. To little me, that made perfect sense. Every single person I knew was from Right Here—where else in the world did I think they would have come from? Why in the world would anyone want to come from anywhere else?

As I grew older my circle of influence didn’t change much. My classmates in middle school were the same kids I went to preschool with in the church basement, and would be the same kids I graduated high school with. Two of them shared the same babysitter I did, and I still have the faint marks where one of them bit me as an infant. Everyone in my little town seemed so content, so happy to know everybody and everything.

For a while, I was content too. It was kind of nice, to be out for a walk and have someone pull over and ask what was going on, if you were okay, if you needed a ride home. I never did since home was only a mile away, but it was a pleasant sentiment. You’d see the same smiling faces at every school recital, the moms and dads in the audience as intimate to you as your own, the grandmothers scattered around sure as summer to have made something you ate at least once.

But as I started to learn more about myself—as I changed, and the world around me did not—I started to notice cracks in the idyllic small town life I grew up in. I never thought that one day, when I walked down the street with my out-of-state girlfriend, that one of those grandmothers would one march into the post office and demand that my aunt (who was post master at the time) explain to her how in the world I thought I had a right to “act like that” in this “God-fearing” town. That I, and by extension, my family, should be ashamed of the fact that I dared to have a girlfriend.

When we went a few days later to the local ice cream shop and were holding hands over the table as we ate, sixteen year old Alicia had no idea how to respond—or what to feel—when someone came up to her and snarled through clenched teeth that “This is a family establishment!” All I remember feeling that night was deeply embarrassed, though I couldn’t figure out if it was for her or because of me. Home had always been so welcoming. Sure, there were cliques and sometimes I went stir-crazy because there was never anything to do, but it was home.

There’s nothing like the sudden realization you have at sixteen, seventeen years old, that home only loves you if you’re exactly what home expects you to be. In northern New York State, home expects you to be straight, white, and—if you’re a woman—quiet. I had the white part down, but that was it. I remember telling my aunt that it was my home too, and I didn’t fear God all that much, that I had as much of a right to do what I wanted to, with whoever I wanted to. That grandma wouldn’t have had a second thought, I’d said, if it had been a boy I was walking with. I got angry and belligerent with my home, pissed off that the place that prided itself on everybody knowing everybody and always looking out for each other had turned on me. I was born here. It was as much mine as theirs.

I got to the end of my rope, yearning to be gone from it all. Set home on fire for all I cared, because home didn’t care about me. I began to hate knowing everyone and everyone knowing everything. Privacy seemed like a pipe dream, everyone for three towns knew about the “lesbian Sullivan girl” and felt it was completely okay to talk about me like I was some fictional character on TV. As soon as I could, when college was finished and my degree was obtained, I ran. I ran as hard and as fast as I could to that out-of-state girlfriend who is now, not coincidentally, my wife, and I got around to settling my country butt down in big city Detroit.

Here I am and here I’ve laughed and loved and enjoyed the hell out of not knowing anybody and nobody knowing me. The privacy to be and do what I want, with who I want, is a breath of fresh air so heady I’m still drunk from it three years in. But there are the small things I didn’t tell you about: how I cried the first night I was here, big, ugly tears because I was so far away from my mom and my dad. How I’d find myself thinking that I didn’t want my future kids going to the massive three building high school my wife went to. That I thought they would be better served in classrooms like mine back home in the high school hallway of my central school, made up of twenty-seven kids you’ve known your whole life, where the teachers, administrators, and coaches all know your name. The coaches especially all had to know your name; you only have enough girls in the school to field soccer, basketball, and softball team if every girl plays every sport.

So here I am, three years into this grand and anonymous adventure in Detroit and before the winter is out, well… I’ll be back home, maybe living a couple towns over, but close enough that people will talk about how the Sullivan kid that moved to Detroit is around again. But in my three years away I’ve learned a lot of things. One, when someone tries to tell me that this is a “family establishment” my polite and courteous response will be to look them in the eye and say, “Well, isn’t it a good thing we’re a family, then?” Two, if Grandma wants to run her mouth about behaving certain ways in God fearing towns, I will remind her that according to her own religion, God made everyone in his image. So we’re probably pretty chill with the whole thing, anyway.

I’ve learned in my three years away from home that nobody back home has a right to take that place—where I grew, as my family did before me, where my parents loved me, where I fell in love, where I learned to drive and catch fish and grease a truck and drive a snowmobile—well, nobody has a right to take that away from me. To some people, anonymity is scary. It’s feeling small and insignificant in the whirlwind of sights, sounds, and people whirling around you who don’t know and don’t care if you exist.

To me, anonymity was freeing. It was being able to walk down the sidewalk, head held high and fingers laced tightly through my wife’s knowing that nobody around was keeping watch for deviant behavior to report back to my family. Anonymity was the power to laugh loudly in the middle of Target as my new friends made funny faces with pool noodles. There’s no worry in being who you are when the world around you doesn’t care. Anonymity was being an insignificant person to the majority of people I encountered but that insignificance to the masses meant that to the few, the friends in Detroit and the family back in Northern New York, that I was finally comfortable being, well, me. Truly me. You know what else anonymity taught me? It taught me that no matter where I am and no matter what I do that I have a right to be me.

So here’s to going home. Even when home’s been a giant pain in the ass. Even when, for a while, you and home didn’t love each other all that much. Because when you move away, and you find strength and courage in anonymity, you’re suddenly not afraid to go back and say, “This is my home. I belong here. Make room.”