Last week I visited my relatives in Pennsylvania, where I lived long enough to attend kindergarten before moving away forever.
I’ve always felt as if I didn’t quite “belong”, anywhere I’ve lived. Yet the idea of “belonging” rather frightens me, too. It frightens me that my cousin, for example, has spent her entire life near the town she attended kindergarten (while I’ve lived in other states, not to mention Japan and Germany).
But why do I really not feel “at home?”
I’ve been reading a biography of Christopher Isherwood -- He was born in England but wandered all over Europe before settling in Santa Monica. At that point, as someone said, “the wandering stopped.” Something about the Los Angeles area must have felt “right.” He had to leave England to escape the homophobic Imperial British Upper Middle Class.
And I left Virginia (where my immediate family settled after Pennsylvania) because I didn’t feel welcome as a pagan, bisexual (and liberal) poly.
Isherwood talks about the “Heterosexual Dictatorship.” The question is what do we want anyway? I want to feel welcome. I want to feel “at home.”
My wife asks what I want from the Unitarian church I’m a member of. I want to be able to be myself. I want to be able to mention my lovers, my significant people, without feeling I need to apologize.
Some of the problem is me, of course. I’m sure I’ve sometimes acted (as Mark Crowley put it in “The Boys in the Band”) like Polly Paranoia; but I just didn’t feel safe, in Richmond, Virginia, holding hands with my boyfriend as we walked down the street. Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson may never accept us, but I hope that many others can.
I don’t mind “sharing” American with Robertson and Falwell – as long as I get my own small piece of the pie.