I was not, of course I was a proud heterosexual. They'd hired me, I later found out, because they assumed I was one of them. What a dyke."Īt the end of the year, I dropped out of college for the first of many occasions and started working at a cafe where everyone else-everyone but me-was gay. I wasn't interested in anything my teacher had to say, and when she gave me feedback on my writing-especially the feedback that essays required transitions between paragraphs and I needed to start using them-I'd say, "I don't believe in transitions," and leave in a huff.īack in my dorm, I'd say to my roommate, "Is this what happens when you don't get any dick?" while turning up the volume on my Melissa Etheridge CD. I strolled in late and plopped down in the front row, and I slept in class more often than not. I was appalled by the whole thing, but especially by my teacher, who I was sure spent all of her nights home alone petting her 45 cats. Our reading list was entirely women who slept with women or looked like they did, from Virginia Woolf to Dorothy Allison, from Leslie Feinberg to Judith Butler. Besides, her sexuality was written into our course syllabus. Stereotypes are dangerous, but sometimes they are also true, and Sandy had "dyke" written all over her face. "Hey, you a lesbian?" I'd hear boys sneer in gym class before I looked around and realized that I was the one they were asking. Until college, the only time I heard the term "lesbian" was when it was in the form of a question. Most of the women in my holler would never admit to an attraction to anyone outside their husbands, except maybe for Jesus and Dale Earnhardt. It may seem unbelievable that I could reach legal adulthood never having met a lesbian, but I'd grown up in a town with a population of less than 3,000 just over the hill from where Deliverance was filmed. She was the first openly gay woman I'd ever met. Worse, she usually had a Jeanette Winterson paperback tucked under one arm. She looked, most mornings, like she'd picked out her outfit from a pile on her floor. My teacher, who I'll call Sandy, wore too-big sweaters, dowdy leather clogs, and no makeup.
She made being a Walmart bagger seem like a fine option. At least until I met the woman who would be my creative-writing professor.
I wasn't particularly interested in school, but I was even less interested in making a career for myself as a bagger down at the local Walmart. It was my first semester of college at a small state university for people who didn't get into their top choice.
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