Breadcrumb #651
ALLISON PUNCH
Every writer has the same story they keep telling, on repeat, in different disguises, until they get it out of them. My queerness began as a fiction.
It was the fall of my senior year of college. That season was one of the best of my life, crisp jean jacket days, an old home in Kerrytown I shared with five women who are still some of my closest friends, with a farmers market down the street and a neighboring home of boys I’ve not kept in touch with, Michigan football, and a slow, earnest coming out process.
I fell off my bike on the sidewalk off Huron Street, a busy road connecting my parents’ neighborhood to the hospital, campus, and all the way down to the Lurie Terrace retirement home where I waited tables for my first job. I was always running late in college and the day of my creative writing workshop critique, I tried to cut over onto the grass to avoid slow walkers. The sidewalk and grass parted, uneven, my front tire caught on the concrete, and I flew forward. What I remember most about this fall was the way my travel coffee mug and water bottle left my backpack, simultaneously hit the sidewalk, bounced with a loud crack, as the pedestrians I was cutting off rushed to retrieve them, asking if I was okay.
I scraped my hands and shins; my legs bleeding underneath my tights. I arrived to class five minutes late and sat in the small, U-shaped classroom with wounded hands palms down on my lap. My classmates critiqued my piece as I listened silently to advice, agreeing or justifying my decisions in my head as they spoke.
In the summer of 2016, I attended a panel in a warm, crowded room at DC’s LGBTQ literary festival where a panelist bemoaned, “we need queer stories told of life after coming out and before death.” The co-panelists nodded, audience members snapped in affirmation, I furiously tweeted the quote – all of us in agreement about the need for diversity of queer lit. There’s more to queer life than coming out, I rage!
Many queer people will tell you it’s easier to tell those who you don’t know, especially when you’re first coming out. My liberal, college town was also my hometown. I would cautiously create an OkCupid profile, only to delete it once I saw people from high school.
“Many queer people will tell you it’s easier to tell those who you don’t know, especially when you’re first coming out.”
I have so many memories of loneliness from college. I spent nights under the twinkle lights of my dorm room while my roommates were out with boys, thinking I had high standards or couldn’t find the right guy. I drunkenly kissed boys at parties and remained a virgin. Sophomore year, I developed a crush on a curly haired girl with an eyebrow ring who gave me butterflies. One night, I confessed my crush to my best friend in the gender neutral bathroom down the hall from her dorm room, only to never speak of it for years.
I can still feel myself holding back from sharing details in my writing. I’ve written and deleted the scene in the dorm bathroom over and over, not sure if its because it doesn’t fit in the essay or if I’m ashamed to share the way I closeted myself.
Senior year, the loneliness shifted. I couldn’t ignore the small but mighty crushes on long-haired femme girls in my women’s studies classes. I spent evenings quietly reading Jeanette Winterson and wondering if someone would notice. I knew now what I had been avoiding for years: my loneliness was distinctly queer. I didn’t know how to place my queerness within my understanding of myself, or how to move forward. I remained quietly closeted, consumed with the question of why I didn’t know sooner. This question still shows up in every single piece I write.
My final fall was when I took my first college creative writing class - where I fell back in love with storytelling, and also where I first wrote my queerness for the first time publicly, sharing the pages for the class to read. We went on a field trip to the art museum, and I found myself staring at photographs of rolling sand dunes, unable to write about anything other than women’s bodies. I know now what that experience meant - I was horny.
I’ve been trying to expel my coming out story since before it began. Queer literature is oversaturated with coming out narratives, yet for so long I sat with my queerness close to my chest, held in silence like accepting a workshop critique.
And yet. Here I am writing another coming out narrative. Here I am because the story has still not been written out of me.
I started with the sidewalk, with the way my tire couldn’t quite hit the concrete, the way I flew off my bike, scraped my hands, sent my coffee mug flying. I can’t get the image of that sidewalk out of my head and want desperately to write some metaphor about falling from the bike and fall the season. The way I wrote my story quietly in a class full of strangers before I shared it with those closest to me. But instead, just like that fall day, I get up and carry on, hands open this time.