The story of how I came to Massachusetts is not a unique one. I came for college, went home for a year, and then came back when home (that city) turned unbearable. Ultimately, where I chose to live had everything to do with whom I loved, or, in the beginning, whom I wanted to love. It is impossible to ignore that Massachusetts was the first state in the country to legalize gay marriage, it’s impossible to ignore that in all parts of the state, when my wife and I go somewhere, no one bats an eye when we say that we’re married. It houses the first place that felt like home to me besides the place where I grew up: Mount Holyoke College in the Western corner. Then there is Boston, at the other end of the state, where at first it felt as though everything I did was wrong, or did not fit, until I met Jen. Regardless, it has been my home for twelve out of the last thirteen years.
In high school, for my senior quote, I first picked something very inspiring, very “me,” or what people expected to be me. It was probably something that Audrey Hepburn said, although I have no idea what that original quote was anymore. At the last minute, I changed the quote to this: “If I had a brother in jail and one in Georgia, I’d bust the one out of Georgia first.” Charles Frazier wrote that in Cold Mountain. People were surprised by my quote. And I think that’s what I wanted – for people to know that I was leaving and breaking out of the hot, conservative world that was the place where I grew up. I don’t believe that people change, I learned that lesson early, we just become more of ourselves. And if we’re lucky, through that process, we become ourselves unapologetically.
When I went back home to Augusta after I graduated from Mount Holyoke, I felt suffocated. I knew it was temporary; I was applying to MFA programs to start the following fall. I had a job, I lived with my mother, I had a boyfriend; I wanted to be back in Massachusetts. When I decided to go to graduate school in Boston, I was close to renting an apartment from someone, when my mother made an observation: if I moved into that apartment, I was just going to be in the same situation that I was in at Mount Holyoke. What she meant, I believe, was that if I lived there, I was going to be gay. Be gay because I would be living with other gay people. And suddenly, what I had been unable to articulate became clear. I needed to leave Georgia because if I was ever going to find myself, become myself, if I was ever going to have the kind of relationship that I craved, I had to leave. What a difference it makes to go home after finding what I wanted all along. I had to go away, I had to be in a place where finding and acknowledging what I wanted was not an uphill battle.
What makes us feel safe? Acceptance, not just mere tolerance. “Teaching tolerance” is a key phrase in the world of education. To tolerate means that we are putting up with something, that we are enduring it (from Latin tolerare, to bear, endure). Tolerance carries with it the connotation that we don’t really want to put up with someone or something, that we have to. Is it really our job to teach young human beings to simply tolerate another human being, to just put up with another human being? And yet on the other hand, I acknowledge that no change ever came about overnight. Is tolerance supposed to be the step that eventually takes us all to acceptance? If so, then teaching tolerance is important, but it’s not the end goal.
Recently, in Massachusetts, I felt like the place where I lived and the ideal of the state I had moved to, were two different places. The yards on the South Shore of Massachusetts were speared with Trump-Pence signs. Balconies and yards in Brockton, where I lived for the last three years, were lined with “No Sanctuary City” signs. The problem was this: Massachusetts had started to look and feel like GA to me. But I must confess something. I am an emotional person. Massachusetts, I know, has more established, legal protections for me as a member of the LGBTQ community. Georgia has less protections, and it has some downright hostility towards my community in places. And still I feel as though a part of me was throwing my hands up in the air and saying fuck it, it’s all the same: South Shore of MA, Atlanta, GA, whatever. But I know that’s not how logic works.
Like any woman, like any queer person, I am worried; the place where I lived looked a lot like Georgia, the place I tried to get away from. Georgia has introduced a bill that bans abortions for women after the six-week mark, essentially banning abortions, period. It has a governor who held a gun in his campaign ads. It has pockets of liberality, where it’s ok to be me, and everywhere else is somewhere you don’t want to stop for gas, don’t want to go to the bathroom, don’t exist. While I have lived in Georgia before, being queer in the south is something that I am going to have to learn again, because while I was queer when I lived there, I wasn’t out, and therefore was invisible.
And then there’s visibility. I yearned for a specific kind of relationship: one that was committed, monogamous, but didn’t necessarily have to be marriage. These were qualities that I attributed to heterosexual relationships. There were no queer relationships that I knew that had these qualities, none that I had read about, had seen in movies or TV shows, for these are the places where we see examples of ourselves. Even in college, when I first discovered the L Word, where was one supposed to find a model for a committed lesbian relationship? On the one hand, I wondered if it even existed, while on the other I learned about the verb “u-haul.” As in: “Liz and Sue u-hauled after only dating for a month!”
If you had told me thirteen years ago that I would someday go back to Georgia, I would have politely told you that you were mistaken, I would never go back. Once gone, I would stay away forever, the way that I avoid drinking vodka because it tastes like my first hangover. I have grown into myself, I have become comfortable in who I am and in the life that I live. The story of a life is a silver thread that knits pieces together, different times, different places, different experiences. As a young person, I had convictions. I wanted to make change. I still want that. Only now, I get to do these things with my wife, the person with whom I share life and all adventures. What a difference it makes to be with someone, instead of alone, to have a partner, instead of trying simply to keep my head above water.
(I wrote this piece back in June, right around the time that I was moving to Atlanta, thinking that I would post it on the day that I was moving, while the movers were loading our house into the moving van. Instead, I sat on it for the summer. That internal editor wasn’t about letting me reread it or post it. I didn’t want the story to be just about my sexuality, but to encompass more of an idea of my life in the two states. Now that I’ve looked back at it after a couple months, the two things can’t really be separated.)
Alexandra Sladky 