Out
The telephone rang one June morning during Gay Pride Week some years ago.
“We need new blood in CommUnity,” Nora announced. “Would you be willing to write a column about gardening?”
Nora was the executive director of the Pride Center for the Capital Region, the oldest continuously operating LGBTQ center in the country as the home page of the Center’s website proudly proclaimed; CommUnity was its monthly paper. I had served on the board of the Pride Center, and at the time was working with Nora on plans to redesign the building’s backyard into an attractive and useable space.
Why not, I thought. After all, how difficult could it be to write a 1000-word column once a month? She was looking for a title that would interest and intrigue.
“How about we call the column ‘Out in the Garden,’” I offered. “That should at least make readers laugh.”
“Done,” said Nora and we hung up.
But where had I heard that expression before? I knew it went deeper than the joy of punning, an art I had learned from my dad and was perhaps overly committed to. Out in the garden, later in the day, I remembered. When I was a child and coming home from school, my mother would tell me about herself as a child coming home from school and asking her mother where her father was. “He’s out in the garden, dear,” was invariably her mother’s response.
Why was my memory of my mother’s memory so vivid that, decades later, it served as the title for my column and now this newsletter? What did it mean for me to be out in the garden? What possible connection could there be between being outside in a garden and being out as a lesbian? Plenty of gardeners are not gay, plenty of gays are not gardeners. And yet, somehow, the need to be literally outside and the need to be out as a lover of women were/are connected for me.
When I was in junior high, I joined my local Girl Scout troop. Marching in the Memorial Day parade, our troop was placed behind the horse brigade. We learned to side-step shit. At Christmas time we caroled outside the homes of those who were “shut in.” Sometimes we were invited in. Then I would see a person who could not get out of the house and the fear of being bed-ridden, confined to a room, would haunt me for days. I much preferred the parade.
Even now, so many years later, I panic if I cannot get out. Spring, summer, fall I cannot sit at my computer or in my reading chair in the morning if the sun is shining or even if it is just cloudy. I have to be outside. In winter, on those days following a big storm, before the roads are cleared, before you can take a walk or drive anywhere, before I can get out, I panic.
I panic at the thought of moving, as I age, to an apartment that has no outside. Sara and I visited a senior retirement center recently and I thought, I could die here. When I shared this response with my guide from the center, she took it as a compliment. I did not mean it as a compliment.
I would have died long ago had I not found my way to come out as a lesbian.
For some two or three years, I dutifully wrote my monthly column, in the late afternoon or early evening, in my study, surrounded by posters from past marches on Washington for gay and lesbian rights, each one exhorting me to “come out.” But whether writing or gardening, I was churning and spinning and thinking about “out,” becoming what Vivian Gornick refers to as a “mind puzzling its way out of its own shadows,” not necessarily finding answers but obsessed by inquiry.
As a child outside was coded “boy.” Outside I got to be a boy, which meant I was free to be a body in motion, discovering my physical self, my capacity to ride a bike or throw a ball or win a race. As a teenager, outside became the place where I could be sensual without censure. Even now, to Sara’s utter dismay, I relish a hot and humid evening, one without the air conditioning on, one that reminds me of evenings long ago when, after working our 3 to 11 shift at the hospital, I would drive the girl I loved to the Dairy Queen. There we would sit outside and together consume a gooey confection of vanilla ice-cream slathered with a mixture of chocolate and marshmallow sauce called a “Jack and Jill.” This reminder of enforced heterosexuality did not take away my passion; it just drove it underground.
I was lucky enough to encounter feminism in time to literally save my life. Feminism enabled me to understand that enforced heterosexuality is key to patriarchy’s control of women and that the panic over homosexuality is all about control. It is no accident now that the far right is frantic over the explosion of choice in the realm of sexual self-expression and is determined to ensure that boys will be and stay boys and girls will be and stay girls and that there will be no other options than boys and girls and that in this way boys will rule. If patriarchy wins out in this country, as it might well do, I will be happy to die for refusing to go back in.
I keep puzzling over “Out in the Garden” and what it means for me to connect my love of plants with my love of women. In the end I have come to think of “out” as a code word for “desire” and of desire as the force that has allowed me to survive and to flourish. I recall Dylan Thomas and consider that my passion for plants and my passion for lovers past and present is indeed the same as “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.”
Sometimes I think I will change the name of my newsletter just so I won’t have to think about this issue of connection anymore. But I can’t. D.H. Lawrence famously commanded his readers, “Never trust the teller. Trust the tale.” But for me, trusting the teller seems paramount. I want my reader to know who is telling the tale and to trust that this teller is willing to confront complexity and ambiguity and to rest in contradictions.
Nothing is simple and perhaps the best we can do is to leave things hanging, like my mother’s last garden, two geraniums in a single pot hanging out on the porch of her apartment at Laurel Oaks, the senior retirement center she moved to in her eighties.
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