Quick Links*&%$@#^!!%&**&^%$#%^^%$#@@!@

Seasons of Love


http://www.angelfire.com/ego/cobbist/
vainandidlesongs@yahoo.fr

Sometimes I think normal people feel bad because they don't have abnormalities, while abnormal people feel bad because they're not normal, and both are jealous of each other. I always wanted to do everything once, the "normal" way before anything became tainted. I wanted a perfect family, a white cat, a golden retriever, a group of friends - and somewhere along the way, I became gay. I suppose it was really a discovery, but I cursed myself for not being able to be "normal."

I had always suspected there was something unusual before I even knew what a homosexual was. As early as 4, I remember watching "Doogie Howser, MD" and thinking about kissing his babysitter like how I saw Prince Charming kiss Cinderella. But I assumed you always had to love the opposite sex. Most girls go through a thousand crushes a year, so why was I an exception? One weekend when I was 14, I looked up at a girl I thought I knew, and when she looked into my eyes and smiled, I felt like I could be with her for the rest of my life. That's when I knew. My life was so far away from who I'd been trying to be at that moment, and I would've given that all up for her. Since the summer, we'd been great friends, and after only 4 months of knowing her, I was completely in love in that moment. Denial, I had found, was greater than the river in Egypt.

I tried to covered it all up. When I finally started to hang out more with girls, I adapted to their ways. It was as though I'd turned into a documenter on the Discovery channel and observed them as I would animals. I wore skirts, makeup, panty hose, and high-heeled shoes in a desperate attempt to attract male attention. After a time, it seemed that I got what I wanted, but it wasn't any better or worse. I had crushes galore, notes from guys, male friends always informing me that so-and-so liked me. By the end of the year, I was back in my jeans and tee-shirts, forgoing the cage of gender stereotyping.

There were also little things, too, that made me feel there was something else going on. I saw pictures of my friends, and didn't see them just as friends. Or, if a guy became overly flirtatious, I would get really uncomfortable, and soon nausea would set in. In my naïveté, I thought the way to cure myself of this feeling was to date. And I did. And it led to one disaster after another, and I wondered what was happening to make me feel so strangely. By the time I realized how serious this was, I was already exploring love as a lesbian and became very confused. I wasn't quite aware of the different kinds of love that were out there, and I had no idea it would get worse.

Not that I had a word for it. It was still very abstract to me. I knew of female friends from camp who dated each other, but that seemed to be worlds away from words like "queer" and "dyke." These girls were different, they were in love. I told myself that I could love girls, but I wasn't a "fag," I was normal. I wouldn't ever date those girls who had short hair and baggy pants, no matter how cute they looked to me. It worked for awhile; I was a writer, I could work out my aggressions on a keyboard. Then I met the girl with short hair and baggy pants who ruined everything.

Every summer since I was 8, I went to Camp Bothin, a Girl Scout camp, my favourite place in the world. There no one made fun of how strangely I spoke, or that I was chubbier than most girls. Wanting to have an excuse to keep coming back, I decided to do the program for older girls, the counsellor training programs. My friends and I were just starting with the "Lead On" program, the first of four summers. Our unit leader told us after a week we'd also get the four girls who were in the Advanced Counsellor-in-Training program in our unit. They were older, and they just needed a place to sleep as they were mostly with the campers.

The second session came, and me and all of my "Lead On" chums sat around unpacking. Someone had brought a stereo and was playing an Indigo Girls album softly. We were all a little hot, but it really didn't bother us any more. Then, with a great crash and yell, some small teenager burst into the room, yelling, "We're here to scare the Lead Ons!" I turned to the door from my seated position and I saw them fully. One was tall with blonde hair, another blonde with curls, another shorter with reddish blonde curls, and the one who effectively scared the snot out of us was the shortest with short red hair, and I couldn't take my eyes off of her. It wasn't that her yelling had attracted me, but the fact that she barely said a word after it. She stood back, constantly tucking and retucking her hair behind her ears, and when she laughed, her body would pull in and her head would push forward, her giant smile revealing her teeth.

I spent the whole summer getting to know her. Her name was Trisha, she was obsessed with "The X-Files," she was 16, and she drove a 1972 Volkswagen Beetle. I would say little white lies to try and impress her, to have an excuse to talk to her. Everything she said to me was absolutely fascinating, and watching her even more so. I tried to memorize every aspect of her, the way she walked like a little boy, how every time she made a joke, she'd lean in and then turn around when it was done as though she didn't want to know if people were laughing. I took what seemed like hundreds of pictures of her, to always keep her face just inside my retina so when I closed my eyes, all I could see was Trish. None of this ever seemed odd to me either. I never admitted to myself that I had deeper feelings for her; I said she was just a friend.

At the end of the summer, we all said our tearful good-byes, exchanged phone numbers, addresses, and e-mail addresses, promising that we'd write. The strange thing was that we did. We all kept in touch, sharing everything that happened to us. We even saw each other a couple of times before the next Girl Scout event, called "Leap Into Leadership." Of course we'd all go because it was another excuse to see each other, and it was also located at Camp Bothin. It was a grand reunion when we all got there, with soft tears and kind words. We felt like we'd been gone for years and we'd just now come home. It was a feeling of nostalgia that only belongs to teenagers.

We even all slept in the same large room, on the same poorly springed cots with the cheap council-issue plastic mats they tried to pass off as mattresses. The last night, it was as though we had become closer than ever, as though no time had passed since the summer. I was picking at my nylon sleeping bag, glancing once in awhile at Trish, who was talking to someone else. It was hard to see anyway because the lights were off for "lights out." We were all talking as girls do late at night, and someone asked, "Is anyone gay?" I never thought about it. I had spent the passed five months like I was in the first chapters of a cheap romance novel, but it still never crossed my mind that I could be feeling this way because I was gay. Yet in that same instant, I realized the truth, and I put everything together. In one moment, I discovered that I was gay, and I was in love with Trisha.

Then I got my first lesson in hiding. Most homosexuals don't admit readily that they are, in fact, gay. Most hide it, or at least don't volunteer the information. It's not shame, nor is it trying to "fit in," but it's the overwhelming sense of fear. I told all of them within my own time, but I don't think I am fit to accurately assess why I lied then and I still lie now. I wasn't really bothered by it until I was in my French 3 class when day, and I was asked about it head-on. One of the girls in the class said she had heard I was a lesbian and wanted to know if it was true or not. Now, I had seven pairs of eyes on me, and I wasn't about to tell the truth. So I lied. She said it was nothing to be ashamed of, that she'd dated girls before. I told her that I wasn't ashamed of anything- I wasn't one. That's when I finally felt really bad about lying, which put me in an awful fix. Lie and save myself, or tell the truth and run?

Unfortunately, the truth doesn't always set you free. In this case, the truth, I believed, would trap me in some sort of cage and I'd become like an oddity to our conservative Republican town. Hell, if the right people found out, I'd be on the fucking front page of the newspaper, advocating gay rights and all that. A real human-interest story. After that, who knows - People Magazine, Reader's Digest, Time. No thank you. I wouldn't want to be famous for something that I had no control over.

But could it have been that she was right? That I was and am ashamed of my sexuality? I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm madly in love, or that I was even dating someone, or that I don't need a man to make me happy. But I was afraid of everyone, what they might say, or worse, what they wouldn't say. I hate how all of these people "out" themselves and they're so proud. What do they want, a medal? I'd never experienced gay pride. It's like saying you're proud of being a brunette, or tall. And like hair colour, no matter how much you try to cover it up, your roots always show.

My roots were firmly planted at 3125 Sir Francis Drake Blvd, Fairfax, California, otherwise known as Camp Bothin. The summers I spent there not only gave me lifelong friends and valuable experience, but expanded my horizons and human understanding. I haven't been back there in almost three years, and every time I think of going back, tears rush to my eyes. So much of my history is wrapped up in those buildings, late night talks, silly camp plays, camp songs, and meeting the woman I still love.

None of us realized how reckless we were being in our self discovery. The whole time we were surrounded by campers, small children who couldn't understand why their counsellors would cry sometimes when they were having so much fun. How could we tell them their counsellors were dating each other? We couldn't, of course. We only had each other. Sneaking small things when we thought no one was looking, these were little treasures. My own story parallels so many others, who came to camp only looking for friendship, but came away with answers to questions that they weren't asking.