This is for the girls that I used to love but I never told
an essay on realizing i was queer in the midst of trauma that was rejected by 3 different publications so I'm just self publishing it here
I don’t remember my first crush. That little right of passage was one of the many that fell victim to the coping skill I still depend on: disassociation. I do remember having a crush on my t-ball teammate’s older brother, Ethan*. It was kindergarten and I preferred to play in the outfield so I could tap dance and pick flowers. And in the 3rd grade, I had a crush on Nathan. He was a 5th grader who got the singing part in ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’ in the America-themed spring performance. Yeah, that’s right. It was an entire two hour production all about how great the U S of A is that the school threw threw together. The post-9/11 patriotism was a weird time and I’m sure I’m not the only millennial who thinks back on these random memories and thinks “what the actual fuck”.
Let’s start at the beginning…
Being a girl that grew up in a conservative Christian household in the middle-of-nowhere Oklahoma meant that even at a young age having feelings for a boy wasn’t anything to be ashamed about. My mom and I often talked about boys and which celebrities I found cute and she even had this weird obsession with this kid named Brent. “He’s my future son-in-law,” she would tell me. The irony is that Brent grew up to be sorta creepy and at some point slid into my sister’s DMs in a way that was borderline harassment.
High School Musical was a real sexual awakening for me. That Troy Bolton! There was something about that hair and the softness in his eyes as he sang. And armpit hair?? Are the boys in my middle school going to grow THAT much armpit hair by the time they are singing on the basketball court and falling in love with the new girl in town? WILL I GROW THAT MUCH ARMPIT HAIR? The answer is yes, I now grow an insane amount of armpit hair. And while Troy Bolton is technically a boy, he gives off the vibes of a lesbian.
Like many from similar backgrounds, my upbringing didn’t really have any sort of nuance around sexuality. Men that like men are usually girly and skinny and well dressed. Women that like women have their haircut a certain way and wear cargo shorts and hiking sandals. I thought that was it. That’s how you knew if someone was gay. And if you were into that stuff, that’s how you knew you were gay. “But Sarah’s mom has her hair cut short like a man’s…” I remember saying to my mom to which she responded “She’s married, darling!” (my mom is originally from Mississippi and had a specific drawl to go with her origins.) “And she’s a Christian!” There are many more micro-aggressions that haunt my childhood like little ghosts.
high school sucks
At my high school, freshman got the last pick for electives which meant that first year I got stuck in choir and child development. At the time I was just happy I didn’t get stuck in ROTC because even then my young brain knew there was something off about the military. On the first day of child development, I met her. She was a sophomore, a natural beauty, someone that didn’t even have to try to be a perfect angel. Her name was Kristina and I instantly…..thought I would stop at nothing to be just like her. Each morning I would wake up, look in my closet, and think “what would Kristina wear?”
The best part: she was kind to me. Kristina didn’t treat me like I was the geeky freshman cross country runner who was below her like so many that were older than me did. She would wave at me in the hallway, ask me to skip class to walk around with her, and introduce me to her sophomore friends. I thought about her all the time and hoped that she would just continue to like me, as a friend of course!!
here comes some trauma…
My sophomore year was filled with a very specific type of trauma. One morning, I was woken up by a blonde lady that I had never seen before. My parents were crying in my doorway as Blondie told me I was going to a boarding school. “Like Zoey 101?” I asked. No one I knew had ever gone to a boarding school so it was my only frame of reference. I didn’t want to go to a new school. I had a track meet that day and running was the only thing I cared about at this tender age of 15. “They don’t do cross country or track but this school does have a rugby team.” This didn’t comfort me as team sports have never brought me the satisfaction that running did.
Blondie ended up being someone my parents hired to legally kidnap me and take me to this place called Teen Challenge. Yeah, I guess you can call it a boarding school but that would be like calling someone’s time in prison a vacation. This place was a torture chamber, complete with locked doors, alarms on windows, and staff members who had no formal training in taking care of children yet controlled what we ate, when we showered, and even if we were allowed to speak.
We were required to drink powdered milk with breakfast and lunch, memorize Bible verses as punishment, and everything we did was monitored, including our weekly 15 minute phone calls to our immediate family which was the only source of the outside world allowed. I can go on and on about the weird shit that happened in this girl’s home in Lakeland, Florida but honestly, a majority of my 22 months spent there are a blur. It all feels like a movie I saw once. This is where that coping skill of disassociation comes in handy.
Believe it or not, this program was not pro-exploring your sexuality. In fact, they only supported a specific type of heterosexuality that is popular in religious circles:
A man and a woman date but never see each other naked the entirety of the courtship
Only once you are married may sexual relations take place
Jesus is the third person in your relationship because something about his relationship with the church is supposed to be the example for marriage
I was living in a house full of teenage girls aged 12-17 and this was what we were supposed to believe. The more you bought into the indoctrination, the more likely you were to be recommended to leave on the correct exit date which was 15 months from your intake.
Some of the girls that I lived with were specifically sent away because they were caught kissing girls or watching lesbian porn or some version of innocent exploration that was not heterosexual. And I found out later that there were girls making out ALL. THE. TIME. Me—an incredibly hard sleeper who will probably sleep through the rapture if that does happen—missed out on ANY of the fun.
The program directors, a Puerto Rican couple that scared the living shit out of me, often would remind us that since we are away from boys, Satan would tempt us with the sisters we live with. That made sense in my adolescent mind. “Ohhhhhhhh so because we aren’t around boys, our hormones become the perfect tool for the devil to use to tempt us into lesbianism!” At least this was what I told myself when I started getting fanny flutters around Kate.
my first girl crush
Kate was so cool. She was from Tampa. She was into karate or some sort of martial arts. She had a twin brother. And she was funny. It all started when Kate told me that her brother’s best friend, Michael, was the perfect guy for me. She told me he was the sweetest and he was super into musical theater, which was music to my ears as the biggest Broadway nerd I knew.
Soon enough, the conversations about Michael between me and Kate became this unspoken way to flirt. And while usually the staff members didn’t approve of us talking about our friends on the outside (and trust me, they monitored all conversations), somehow we got away with this all the time. I remember I would catch Kate looking at me and feel those cliche butterfly feelings that are so tenderly associated with having a crush. But I was in an environment where I couldn’t talk about this new experience, much less act on these feelings.
I got out of the program when I was 18 because legally no one could stop me from leaving. I lived in a halfway house for a bit because I had no job experience, no driver’s license, and emotionally I was still a child after being locked away for so long. Making friends was difficult but thankfully I was able to connect with Josiah.
He had been in the same grade as Kristina in high school and was stationed in Alaska with the Air Force. Since we both didn’t have IRL friends, we started to Skype all the time and chat about life. He was the first person I talked about Teen Challenge with and if I remember correctly (which I probably don’t), he was the first person I told I didn’t think I was straight. “Well, duh,” he replied. I was taken aback. I know now that being queer doesn’t look one way but at the time I had no idea that so many of the building blocks that make up myself pointed to something that was not defined with the labels I knew.
Was it obvious? I asked him to explain. “You followed around Kristina like a little puppy dog when you were a freshman, remember?” Because of my experience of a real crush on a girl in Teen Challenge, I was able to understand that my constant thinking about this other high schooler was not just me trying to be like her. I think I was in love.
More recently…
From time to time, survivors of the adolescent Teen Challenge programs will start group chats. Some people don’t want to do anything to address that period of their life which is valid. Others want to get the word out about the systematic abuse we went through. And there are a select few that just want to continue our trauma bonds, which is understandable. Being locked away in a religious cult-like environment and having no autonomy as a child is a specific experience and it feels nice to have others that you don’t have to explain all the nuances to.
In 2019, I was added to a big group chat with 50 or so survivors. We were talking about our secrets, the things we got away with, the shitty stuff staff members did, and so on. The girl on girl conversation started and I was honest about my feelings for Kate because I didn’t think about the fact that she WOULD BE IN THE SAME GROUP CHAT!! Then, she messaged me privately:
“Didn’t wanna keep blowing up the chat but so dead at those comments 😂 I was OBSESSED with your eyes and god kept testing my ass in there.”
Those silly cliche butterflies began to multiply in my tummy. We sent a few more messages back and forth about this shared experience that we had never vocalized. That type of validation is so delicate, so rare, especially when you’ve been told your whole life that being gay or queer or whatever looks and sounds a specific way.
*All names have been changed to protect the innocent.
Happy Pride!