One tight closet

I was 10 years old when I learned what a dyke was. It was just after lunch and I was sitting in science class. I wasn’t exactly paying attention to the teacher. Instead, I was watching my seatmate doodle little cartoon animals in her notebook. She wasn’t paying attention either.

“My brother’s girlfriend’s sister is a dyke.” I’m trying to rack my brain for some context but I honestly can’t figure out what we were whispering about beforehand. All I remember is that word. Dyke. And how she let it roll off her tongue and onto the floor. How the acid wafted in the air as it traveled the three cubic feet from her mouth to my ears.

“What’s that,” I asked. She looked at me as if I were kidding. “You know. A girl who likes other girls instead of boys.” Oh, the acid.

Wait. I’m a girl who likes other girls instead of boys. Boys are gross and coarse and sweaty. Girls are soft and they smell good. All my crushes were girls but I never told anyone. Not because I knew it was bad but because it was just fourth grade common sense to keep your crushes a secret. And when your crush was your best friend, then you really had no one to tell. But this word. Dyke. It sounded really bad. Was I doing something really bad?

Fast forward to a few days later. There’s something about the cramped space of a confessional box that seems to literally squeeze everything out of you and there I was. The last few days were spent in distress and I was counting on the wise words of a priest to speak the truth.

“Father,” I said, barely a whisper. “I have a crush on my best friend.” Silence. “She’s a girl.” My fear compounds itself. “Hmm…” says the voice on the other side of the screen. “That’s not normal.”

I spent the next five years trying to be “normal” again. I tried to like all the male celebrities that my classmates had a crush on but it wasn’t easy because of the women who shared the screen with them. Tom Felton? Emma Watson. Robert Pattinson? Kristen Stewart.

So I just stuck to music. I wrote a lot of my lyrics on scrap pieces of paper because I knew they wouldn’t be allowed past the four walls of my bedroom anyway. But I still changed the pronouns just to be safe.

People don’t really know what that does to a small, gay pre-teen. Changing the pronouns of a song to be “normal.” It’s like, you just spent all your energy writing something that’s so raw and true and then you completely invalidate it by changing a “her” to a “him.” But for five years, I let society invalidate me.

There’s something about emerging from the cramped space of the proverbial closet that seems to leave you in a fighting mood.

My song, “One Tight Closet,” tries to illustrate that. So if you’ve ever felt like fighting back against the people who shoved you into a closet, give the song a listen!