Hometown Pride

I went home to witness progress. Was I hindering my own?

The club reeked of old cardboard and Negro Modelo. I hadn’t planned on staying—I hated bars, didn’t drink, and after spending all day in the 99-degree heat, I felt cranky and old. It was 2021, and I’d flown into Laredo from New York City for one weekend to witness my hometown’s first-ever Pride festival. Closing out the festival was an LGBTQ+ comedy showcase—comedy being one of South Texas’s recent imports from modern civilization. Along with publicly acknowledging that gay people exist.  

I planted myself next to the DJ booth, intent on slipping out the back as soon as I’d finished my seltzer. Then I saw her: Standing offstage was a lanky blonde with Carolina blue eyes and a stark undercut. She wore a loose-fitted collared men’s shirt unbuttoned down to the sternum. No bra. Clearly not a local. She sipped on a plastic cup of ice water, peering about the room with relaxed confidence. I was struck dumb with want. 

I weaved through the bar and nabbed the last stool in front of the small stage. Then I pulled out the slender notebook where I kept my writing ideas and scrawled out some nonsense to justify my presence there, at the bar, alone. It had been a while since I’d tried to pick up a stranger—never mind another woman. Mostly, I was trying not to stare.   

Growing up in South Texas, I’d dated boys while simultaneously lusting after half the volleyball team—really any girl with a square jaw and stolid disposition. My crushes remained stubbornly closeted through graduation, and so did I. In part, it was a survival mechanism. Laredo was not kind to queer folks, especially back then. Effeminite boys—including my older brother—were viciously bullied while our teachers stood by. The girls who did give in only did so behind closed doors, sloppily kissing me while drunk on Strawberry Zemas, or under the auspices of entertaining their football player boyfriends. I left home at 17 having only had one girlfriend—a girl who lived on the opposite side of the country, whom I’d never met, on AIM.

Now here was this very obviously gay hot person, on my home turf, during Pride. While my mom was out of town. It was a gift from God, in all Her queer wisdom.  

Her name was Arielle and she was a comedian from Austin. At the top of her set, she joked about coming out to her Mormon mother and I grew hot with envy; equal parts jealous of and intrigued by her confidence. She asked how many women in the audience were lesbians and I scolded myself for my lifelong proximity to the penis. Then she asked who was bisexual, and I whooped two decibels louder than everybody else. Toward the close of her set, she announced that she was polyamorous and asked if anyone else in the crowd was non-monogamous. Among a spattering of applause, I clapped with the fervor of a cocaine-fueled sea lion.

It worked. After her set, Arielle approached me at the bar and asked if I wanted to grab a drink with her and another comedian. I tried to act casual, but mostly, everything felt electric. The bars were overcrowded, so instead I led them on a walking tour of Laredo’s downtown district. We strolled past the shuttered perfumerias and depressed Catholic churches and talked about being queer in the South. I tried and failed to make eye contact without blushing. Walking next to this gorgeous woman, the setting felt dizzying. I’d only ever felt suffocated in this place. Arielle asked if I was dating anyone and I did the thing I have done since I was a kid, wanting so badly to be accepted: I lied. I told her I was dating two men and one woman back in New York. The truth was—I hadn’t dated a woman in years. 

At the end of the tour, I recommended a taco joint off of the interstate and led them to where their cars were parked. We said goodnight to the other comedian, and to my surprise, Arielle turned to me. 

“Where are you parked?” she asked.

Twenty minutes later, Arielle and I were pressed against my SUV, my hands in her hair and pockets, feverishly making out. 

---

The word “gay” wasn’t a part of our lexicon. My father was an Egyptian immigrant and my mom was the high school President of the Future Homemakers of America. I definitely didn’t hear it in the Evangelical church where we spent every Sunday morning. I was the baby of the family, the darling who hid behind my mother’s silk skirts, always dolled up in frilly hats and dresses. I understood early what it meant to be a woman in our machismo border town: Passive, feminine, and most importantly—to date men. 

By the time I was a pre-teen, I felt myself pushing up against the gendered scripts that surrounded me. I wore pink, I bench-pressed with the football team. I was loud. My older brother was an actor, so I fell in with the community theater nerds alongside the rest of the town weirdos. It was there, backstage one night, when I saw the actress and a stage manager exchange a kiss, while the rest of the cast had retired into the audience and cracked open beers. Even before I understood what it meant to see two women together, I knew something inside of me electrified.

Around high school, my older brother left for college in Boston and came out of the closet. I imagined my parents must have been horrified, but his courage made me admire him more. He called me from Boston weekly, coaxing me to imagine a world beyond my life as a South Texas church youth leader, introducing me to Ani DiFranco and The New Republic. He took me to Bookwoman, a feminist bookstore in Austin, and without even thinking about it, I picked up a few LGBT bumper stickers at checkout and plastered them all over his hand-me-down Jetta. I quietly and unceremoniously exited the Evangelical church at 16, after I overheard some youth pastors tell a kid he couldn’t come to the church around acting all gay. I spent my junior year of high school cruising the main road in town blasting “Untouchable Face” at full volume, a Texas-shaped rainbow on the bumper and a Diversity is Our Strength sticker on the dash—equal parts bat signal and cry for help.

One night, I came home from an out-of-town volleyball trip to find my brother’s Jetta had been moved from the driveway into my parent’s garage. The bumper stickers were gone. When I asked my mother about them, she chided me.

“In this family, we don’t trumpet our beliefs,” she said. 

Only after I left for college did I find the courage to ask her what she thought about my brother being gay.

“I believe that God will intervene,” she said, looking doleful.

Her face broke my 19-year-old heart. “It isn’t a choice, you know,” I told her. 

But quietly, I understood that for me it could be. I could simply date men and spare her and the rest of my family the grief. If this was how she responded to my brother, what would she make of me?  

---

The day before the Pride Festival, I stood at the American Eagle departures gate in Dallas, scanning the room for familiar faces—I almost always bumped into an old classmate or teacher on the rickety flight home. But at 34, I’d been away from the bordertown for as long as I’d lived there. I recognized no one and boarded the plane, relieved to be another anonymous out-of-towner. 

In New York, I had designed a life that bucked convention: I had two partners, one of whom was married, and the other, my ex-fiance, whom I’d transitioned from living with to co-parenting our pets in the same building. My friends were artists and writers. I wrote about sobriety, BDSM and trauma. I had a day job that I loved, training people to have impossible conversations. But every time I boarded that plane to Laredo, I felt that big, bold self shrink into something agreeable and malleable. And though I had dated women, I hadn’t had a serious relationship with one since my twenties. I’d begun to wonder if my double life had something to do with it.

I cozied into my window seat, and a woman sat beside me.

“I love your dress!” she said. I took a calculated gamble and asked if Laredo was home.

”Not anymore, I live in Virginia,” she said.

I exhaled. 

”How about you?” she asked.

”Moved away years ago,” I said, reaching into my backpack for my copy of Detransition, Baby. 

”Who’s your mom?” she asked. 

I froze. Anyone who cared enough to ask who my mother was would know exactly who my mother was. My mother was a socialite, the matriarch of a big Irish family that’d been in Laredo for six generations. I gave her my mom’s maiden name. 

“Of course I know your mother!” the woman squealed. And, as it turned out, me, my siblings, and every person I’d known in the church. I left the book in my bag. 

The woman spent the remainder of the 93-minute flight talking at me about our Lord Jesus Christ, the country’s eroding moral fabric and inexplicably, the usefulness of enema-assisted juice fasts. I mentioned that I trained rape crisis counselors for a living and she insisted that without Jesus, therapy was a Band-Aid.

I sunk into my chair, sucking my teeth, paralyzed by the same dread that wore me down my entire adolescence. When she asked, I told her about my fiance, my studies, and my family back in Texas, but I didn’t dare mention I was traveling home for Pride. I told myself this was a temporary survival tactic, a way of getting through the cramped flight in peace. But looking out over the miles of desert brush, it occurred to me that we hadn’t yet landed in Laredo, and here I was, already hiding behind a sheen of half-truths. 

---

That first night of Pride, I went to an LGBTQIA+ poetry slam, hoping the creative community would offer a gentle re-entry into Southern gay life. 

The club was strewn with “Love is Love” streamers and rainbow Bud Light posters. A dozen people milled about the bar, a mandolin cover of Radiohead’s “Creep” crooning over the PA. The slam hostess greeted me at the bar, a stack of dry-erase boards in her hands.

”You sleeping with any of the performers?” she asked. 

“Uh—no,” I said. 

“Related to any of them?” She asked.

“I…don’t think so?” I replied. 

”Congratulations!” she said, and shoved a whiteboard into my chest. “You’re tonight’s judge.”

I took my whiteboard and Coca-Cola and searched the room. In the corner sat a woman wearing a flat cap and a mask with a discreet heart-shaped rainbow. She was sitting alone, looked to be college-aged. She had a notebook.

”Been to one of these before?” I asked, sliding onto the barstool next to her.

She nodded. “But it’s my first Pride. I’m Tara.” 

”Who would’ve thought—Laredo.” I said, and gestured to the rainbow streamers on the wall. “How’re you feeling about performing?”

”Nervous,” she replied. “My boyfriend’s friends are here, I don’t know what they’ll think. He doesn’t know that I’m—”

”Queer?” I asked.

“That I’m here. But…” She glanced around the room, then nodded. “Yeah, that too.”  

”Are you out?” I asked, suddenly surprised by my brazen questioning.

”To a few friends,” she said. “I work at a church, and I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t fly.”

In our town, your church was like a calling card. “Which one?” I asked.

She answered, and I froze. It was my church. 

Minutes later, when she took stage, Tara’s shaky voice boomed with fervor.

“All my life I’ve been told to love my neighbor,” she said. “That this voice was to only be sweet. ‘No louder than lovely,’ my mother reminded me.” 

She ranted about straight-passing for survival, the anguish of being a bisexual Christian woman in a church “where hate speech and hallelujahs were spoken in the same breath.”

Of the seven poets who’d read that night, she was the only one who outed herself. I watched, clutching my dry-erase marker, equal parts enamored, proud, and protective of this person I had just met. When she finished, the room was still, and I held up the whiteboard with a big “10” scrawled across it.

Tara walked off the stage, breathless, and plopped down at the table beside me. I looked her in the eye, and put my hand over hers. 

“We have to talk,” I said. 

---

The morning after the comedy show, I woke at dawn with Arielle, the comedian from the club, tucked into the small of my chest, all elbows and hips, the bedsheet wrapped around us like a balm. Will you be able to sleep like this? she’d whispered a few hours earlier. I’d nodded greedily into her back, yes, even though I never slept this way with my male partners. Always too hot, too itchy. But this? I only wanted more of this.  

Arielle had to get back to Austin to watch her girlfriend’s early morning soccer match. We clawed our way out of bed at 7 am and I sent her off with a shot of espresso and a kiss at the gate. I drifted through the rest of the day stoned off the scent of her sweat on my skin, giddy with the thrill of it, reluctant to shower. I had no idea if I’d ever see her again, but I understood that something inside of me had shifted.  

That afternoon, I met with Tara from the poetry slam in an abandoned food truck park, the one place in town where she could speak openly without worry of being heard or recognized. We sat at a dusty picnic table and she picked at her cuticles, her eyes roving between the chain-link fence and Huisache trees behind me. Everywhere but directly at me. 

“I think my brother knows,” Tara said. “The morning after the Slam, we were getting ready for church. He walked by the bathroom and congratulated me for performing.”

Her older brother was more open-minded, he was into film and organized comedy showcases around town. “I think he might be queer, but who knows” she added, and smirked. “I think it’ll be okay.”

She suspected that others in the church wouldn’t respond so generously. “There’s a way they talk about it during prayer, like it’s a disease,” she said. She’d overheard a church leader ranting about the trans woman who won the Miss USA Beauty Pageant, and how offensive it must’ve been to “real” women. “I’ve nearly walked out so many times, almost exploded at them.”

Tara struggled with anxiety and depression, so her parents sent her to a Christian therapist who told her that she was attracted to women because she watched porn.

“I felt like I couldn’t talk to anyone, so I found other ways to deal,” she said. Eventually, she was admitted to an inpatient clinic a few hours outside of town for an eating disorder. It was there, on the clinic phone one hopeful afternoon, that Tara finally came out to her mother. “But we haven’t talked about it since,” she said and sighed.        

With each new detail, my chest sank. So much of her story mirrored my own: The hiding, the pacifying, self-harm, and most of all—the avoidance. For years after I left this place, I’d cut, thrown up, drank, snorted, anything to soften the sting of my inherent sense of shame and sinfulness. And while that wasn’t all about my sexuality, it was connected to a pattern of withholding. I’d been in recovery for almost a decade and still, I wasn’t out to my mom or anyone from my hometown.

This was where our stories diverged: Despite never having had a girlfriend or even a first kiss, Tara had found the courage to tell her mother. Yet here I was, living on my own in New York, still coasting on the protection that straight-passing afforded me. Even that morning, I’d been cagey with my mom, lying when she’d asked who I was going to meet. I had come to Laredo to witness progress long overdue, yet I hadn’t yet considered all the ways I’d been hampering my own. I knew where I needed to begin.

---

“Did you have a nice time with your friend?” my mom asked.

“Mmhmm,” I mumbled from the doorway, still vibrating. I considered saying something agreeable, but the throbbing in my chest wouldn’t let up. “Actually, it wasn’t an old friend,” I said. I slipped my sneakers onto the carpet and sat down on the leather couch next to her. “It was a girl I met at a Pride festival this weekend.”

“Oh,” she said and froze.

“She goes to the church,” I said. I pulled a throw pillow into my lap and tucked my feet under me, watching her reaction closely. “And she’s bisexual.” In 34 years, I’d never said that word in front of her. I looked to the stack of prayer books on the glass coffee table. “So much about her reminded me of myself.”

The air tensed, and my mom’s eyes shifted to the TV. Fox News was on mute, something about AOC and impending civil war. “So what do you think about a manicure appointment on Friday?” she asked. 

I took a sharp breath. “I just shared something difficult, and you changed the subject.”

“No, no,” she said, her voice rising. “I didn’t mean to. I thought you were done.” 

My muscles seized, but I pushed myself to push through. “There’s so much about me you don’t know, that I don’t share—”

“…you don’t have to share everything with me,” she said. 

“Chris had it so much harder, but the ways we were different made it hard to grow up here.” I felt  unsteady, as if I’d strapped myself onto a rollercoaster I wasn’t sure I wanted to ride. “I’m so scared that you’ll think I’m broken in some way.”

Please, I thought. Please just hear what I’m saying so I can skip the after school special.

She said nothing. 

“Or—” Oh god, was I crying? “Or love me less.” 

Cortisol pumped through my skull. I felt myself lurch forward, leaning into some heavy ascent.

“Oh bebita,” she said, softening. “I could never stop loving you.”

I choked on a gulp of tears. “Mom, I’m queer.” 

I could’ve thrown up.

“Oh,” she said, looking like a doe caught in the path of an 18-wheeler.

She stared at her lap for an impossible minute, then back at me. “Does that mean Ben isn’t your boyfriend?”

“It doesn’t change anything,” I said and sniffed. “I’ve dated both men and women. This just—”

“Broadens your horizons?” she asked. 

“Sure,” I said and laughed. I was surprised I didn’t feel relieved. I felt awful.

“I didn’t think that’s what you were going to say,” she said. “You know I prefer not to talk about sex stuff,” she said.

“This isn’t about sex,” I said.

“It’s about love?” she said. 

“Yes,” I replied. Which, fine—I wasn’t about die on that hill.  

“This isn’t what I would’ve chosen for your life, but you can’t live for me,” my mom said. “My parents didn’t approve of all my choices. They would’ve preferred I had a career, not become a housewife.”

Her comment wounded me, and yet, it was a give. Something. An acknowledgment that we were separate people, but similar in such foundational, stubborn ways.

For years, I had traveled home and chiseled off the jagged edges of my strangeness, reshaping myself into something more palatable. I feared that if I didn’t, I’d end up unloved and alone. The irony was that by withholding—from her, from Arielle, all the people in my life—I was doing precisely that: Sitting in my aloneness. Depriving myself the chance to be fully known or seen. Maybe my mother wasn’t prepared to see all those parts of my life, and that was her right. But I could no longer behave as if they were shameful.

I sighed a Grand Canyon sigh and wiped my tears. “A Friday manicure sounds great,” I said.

Later that night, Tara emailed me a copy of the poem she’d read at the Poetry Slam. This time around, her words hit heavier:

”All my life I’ve been told to love my neighbor,” she’d said.

”And now I see that I have forgotten the end of that: as I love myself.”

Me and Arielle at Pride in New York, one year later.