NOVALEIGH FRENG

Nova has been in Second Life since 2010. In that time, Nova has worn many hats: model, fashion designer, roleplayer, photographer. She spends most of her time on grid nowadays creating poses and performing with TerpsiCorps ArtWerks and taking photos of pretty things she finds along the way.

I realized I was different when I was in high school, but we lived on a military base, and a girl I went on a date with was dating someone else when someone at school found out. Well, then someone told someone else, and her father’s command found out, and her father responded by sending her away. We lived on Okinawa at the time, and he literally sent her back to the United States. So naturally, I was terrified. That story circulated around school, of course, but I was also there with a group of friends the night the proverbial hammer came down, so it wasn’t just hearing some rumor going around. It was the scariest thing ever knowing that someone could look at their kid and go “you have to go live somewhere else because someone who isn’t even a member of this family says this isn’t okay.” We all knew what it meant if we got in trouble on base. Some of us still did - but our parents would hear about it, their command would get involved sometimes, and in this case, it was like nothing I’d ever seen.

She jokingly called it being “voted off the island.”

Growing up, I’d assumed my parents were open-minded enough they wouldn’t care, but this incident scared me enough that I kept my head down until college well into college, when I lived far away and met someone else I ended up crushing on. This person ended up inviting me out to Yellowstone with her and her mother and some friends for the summer, and we really hit it off. But... I didn’t want to be one of those people who had to hide things from my family, so I did what any self-respecting 21-year-old would do. I figured, “hey, we’re hundreds of miles away from my home in North Carolina. At least if this doesn’t go well, I’m here and they’re there.” And they held my hand while I called my mom.

And the conversation was... Well, it was kind of hilarious looking back on it now. Not so much then because I didn’t know how it was going to go. My mom asked me how the trip was going. I told her it was going great. The usual stuff, you know? It snowed in June. Baby bison were orange. Moose are jerks. Tourists were morons. And then, because I thought I was smooth, I slid something in there about how my new boss had been so ~curious about my friends. My mom said, “Well... I noticed a lot of your friends are... not straight.” And I responded. “That’s accurate.” And then there was silence. And then she asked, “Are you.... not straight?” At that point, I kind of just blurted it all out and told her that my friend and I were dating now and that I hoped it would be “okay.” It was then that she realized that I’d been hiding it a while.

I told her I wanted to tell my dad myself. Unfortunately, in her attempt to help, she had called to “warn” him to not be a jerk about it, and that sort of backfired.

He hasn’t spoken to me in about twelve or thirteen years at this point, but I don’t lose sleep about it anymore. My stepdad has been awesome and most of my family has been very accepting and although me and the person I was with when I came out are not together anymore, we are still best friends to this day.