So you’re gay.
Now, when did you know for sure?
According to “When I Knew” (ReganBooks), a collection of first-person memories edited by celebrity photographer Robert Trachtenberg, finding out for yourself isn’t a total shocker, but sometimes there’s one clear moment that settles the question.
“It’s the eureka moment, the moment of confirmation; it’s almost as if in retrospect, they realize they knew all along,” says Trachtenberg, who collected around 400 stories and winnowed them down to about 85 for the book. The book’s release coincides with Gay Pride month and Chicago’s Gay Pride Weekend, June 24-26.
Contributors include “Will and Grace” creator Max Mutchnick, who knew “when I outgrew my mother’s high heels.”
Writer Kate Nielsen knew at age 5 when she dragged her mother to see “The Sound of Music” several times, “which she was happy to do as she just assumed it was because I wanted to be a nun–not that I wanted to be with a nun.”
Trachtenberg says most lesbians he contacted were more serious about the “when they knew” moment than men were. “It was much more developmental with women . . . it’s a different sensibility, much more sober.”
While he intended the stories to be entertaining, he thinks it would be “great” if the book “could help people understand, who didn’t before, that you don’t choose to be gay. It’s not a choice.”
Because the book includes only about a dozen stories from women, WN decided to ask Chicago-area lesbians about their own eureka moment.
Tre Hill
Being herself feels `more comfortable’
Sophomore year, biology class, Des Moines, Iowa. Tre Hill listened to her high school teacher drone on about the sexuality of organisms when suddenly, she says, it dawned on her: “Oh, my God, maybe I’m a lesbian!”
Hill, now 32, always had been attracted to her best friends and “given them gifts that I shouldn’t have,” she says, such as an expensive necklace.
During high school, Hill–who now runs a party-promoting business–secretly headed out to gay clubs in Kansas City, Kan., where she met her first girlfriend.
“I was very depressed before that because I had feelings I thought were wrong. I thought, `I’m going to hell.’ I tried to pray it away,” says Hill, a regular churchgoer as a child.
“When I started sneaking around and being myself, I felt more comfortable. I couldn’t lie. I thought, `This feels great.'”
Hill and her girlfriend moved to Chicago, where they kept dating for about three years. She just ended another long-term relationship, so for her recent birthday, friends took her out to a strip club.
“It was like being in a candy shop,” she says, and grins.
Robbin Burr
Once clueless, now contented
Growing up in a small Oklahoma town, Robbin Burr couldn’t find many clues to help her figure out her awkward feelings.
“There were no `Will and Graces’, or `Ellens,'” says the executive director of the Center on Halsted, a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community center. “When my friends had crushes on Hollywood male idols, I didn’t get it. I really liked `The Bionic Woman.’ I couldn’t care less about Lee Majors; it was Lindsay Wagner who caught my eye.
“If people were gay, it wasn’t talked about. I wasn’t around anyone who was gay, so I went through the motions of life.”
Burr, 50, was married for 15 years and spent most of her adult life as a heterosexual, until a co-worker helped her open up 10 years ago.
“I was working with this gay guy, and I guess his `gaydar’ went off. I really had an admiration for a woman I worked with, and he saw it as a crush.”
One day the co-worker left a card on Burr’s desk, and inside he had written: “It’s OK. I know.”
The most difficult part of her transformation was ending her marriage. “Once I started coming to terms with the fact that I was a lesbian … it took almost three years to figure out how to leave.”
But life is so much better now, she says.
“It’s incredible. I have this amazing job, and I’m obviously aware of who I am. My 20-year-old daughter is a completely accepting, open woman, and I found the love of my life. … It’s that dream come true.”
Karla Thomas
Denial no longer a part of her life
Paging back through her diary when she was 18, Karla Thomas started to wonder. A poem she had written at 15 ended with the line, “Maybe I’m gay. They’re such sweet people.”
Another poem she had cut out and pasted in the book was about an unsatisfied, misunderstood lesbian. Underneath she had scribbled, “Don’t worry, diary. I’m not a lesbian.”
Thomas, now 25, grew up in Trinidad with a heavily Catholic upbringing. “I knew [being a lesbian] was sinful against the church,” she says. “At the time I thought `that choice is wrong.'”
She was inseparable with one of her girlfriends at high school, where other students dubbed them “husband and wife.”
“I was a little clueless,” says the Chicago resident, an engineer and soccer player who is set to compete in next summer’s Gay Games in the city.
Thomas moved to Mississippi at 17 to attend college and met a woman in her dorm who became her first lesbian girlfriend, although she didn’t recognize the dynamic until it was pointed out to her.
“The woman went home for the weekend and wrote me an e-mail telling me she was in love with me,” Thomas says. “I went to church and cried for four hours. The next morning I cleaned up the apartment, bought flowers and waited for her to come home.
“It was [a] release. It was like, `This is what I’ve been waiting for.’ Until the point she said it, I had a big black curtain up. If you had asked me the day before if I was a lesbian, I would have denied it.
“Today I don’t consider it a big part of my life. My life is gay and my world is gay.”
Jessica Halem
Private choice leads to public career
Jessica Halem would like to remind you that being gay is about sex.
As executive director of the Lesbian Community Cancer Project, Halem, 33, works with elected officials and other leaders on health-policy issues for gay women, but really, she says, the issue of being gay comes down to what curls your toes.
“Being a professional lesbian, it’s easy to forget with all the suits and politicians and black-tie fundraisers that this is a very personal, intimate way of seeing the world.”
Halem says she was a “really good straight girlfriend” during high school in suburban Ohio, but it was really just a way to be popular. “It wasn’t that I denied my sexuality. It was just that I was involved with heterosexuals for all the wrong reasons.”
In college, Halem figured herself out.
“I got to campus and it was the first I’d seen masculine women: hot, butch dykes with boots and jeans and baseball caps and snarls–women who did not look or act like any women I’d ever seen,” she says.
“For the first time, my knees started shaking and I couldn’t remember any of my flirty tricks.”
Halem, a self-described radical feminist from an early age, wasn’t new to the lesbian community–she had met plenty of gay women during her teen activism days. She just never identified with them.
“I had never worn Birkenstocks. I had never loved hummus enough to make a life of it,” she says, only half-joking. “I didn’t hate men … I love men, but it’s so much better being with women.
“Part of it is sexuality and part is are you ready to dedicate your life to living differently,” she said. “I’ve made an informed choice to live as a lesbian.”
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asneumer@tribune.com
WomanNews invites you to send us your stories on when you knew you were gay. E-mail us at ctc-woman@tribune.com; or write us at WomanNews, When I Knew, Chicago Tribune, 435 N. Michigan Ave., 5th floor, Chicago, IL 60611.
— Interviews by Alison Neumer.
