A QUEER CHRONOLOGY

NONFICTION

Elena Lee Anderson

Seven

Idress up as a Home Depot Worker for Halloween. Baggy jeans with a hammer slung through the loop on my thigh, a backwards cap, a bright orange apron. In the photographs, I’m grinning a gap-toothed full moon smile, looking like every stereotypical lesbian you’ve ever heard of. Maybe everyone should have figured it out then. Maybe they did.

Nine

They think I’m contemplating astronomy—what this expansive universe looks like through the keyhole of my father’s telescope— but on the tip top of Honeywell Hill, I have something else on my mind. My Girl Scout troop is working toward another badge, but I’ve checked out, only able to eavesdrop on my dad’s conversation with another parent.

“That used bookshop on University, Biermeier Books, you know it? My uncle and his partner own it.”

My mind is speckled with light, small openings to hope like the stars poking through the solid black night, but I can’t explain why yet. My great uncles, David and Bill, are like my second parents. I know they live together, travel together, and love each other, like my parents do. But (per what I’ll later learn was their request), my parents always called them “roommates,” until now.

Ten

Sinjun Bergen Betty Strom.

Practicing my cursive. Pretending I know how to draw, even though her body has come out angular like two-dimensional stacked building blocks.

Sinjun is all bones and close-cropped hair, sharp black eyes and White Stripes t-shirts. I draw her in my Lemony Snicket journal, lying on my bottom bunk bed. I swirl her name over the drawing and all throughout the lined book, so many times that I’ll remember it, every syllable, my whole life.

Eleven

Everyone has left the house, so I pull out the VHS of Home for the Holidays and fast forward to the scene where Tommy and Jack are holding each other tight on the beach. When it’s done, I rewind and watch it again. And again.

This year, my sister starts watching Will and Grace. I watch with her, too young to get the jokes, starving for narratives the rest of the world hardly shows me.

Everything that resembles a reflection looks like gay men. I’ll take it. I’ll take anything.

Tweleve

I steal the copy of Julie Ann Peters’s Keeping You a Secret from the St. Anthony library.

“She sauntered away, but not before I caught a glimpse of her T-shirt. It said:

IMRU? Am I what? She glanced back over her shoulder, the way you do when you know someone’s watching. That’s when it registered—the rainbow traingle below the message.”

No one at my middle school wears t-shirts like that, so I’m desperate for a friend, someone who knows what I won’t tell. I walk to the library by myself one afternoon, pay the fine, lie and say I lost it.

It comes out of hiding from my desk drawer after Kayla dumps me at the end of 6th grade. Older, she’s going on to high school. I’m still

a baby, so she lets me go “even though she still cares about me,” her Adrienne. That’s my pen name in the notes we’ve written all year— made up names that we address and sign the two-page daily love letters with, not willing to risk anyone finding out. My mom always told me: “Be careful what you put in writing.”

Joscelyn, my only friend who knows, tells me to burn the letters when Kayla leaves me. I don’t. I tuck them into the same desk drawer with Keeping You a Secret and try to re-read, for the fourth time, the book about coming out as a lesbian and the terror that follows. Abandonment, isolation, harassment, the heat death of the universe. I’ve slept in Kayla’s bed every weekend for the last year and I can’t finish the book this time. I put it back in its drawer.

Thirteen

I participate in the National Day of Silence.

I write letters of explanation to my teachers, telling them I’m an “ally,” and spend the day so quiet that I don’t even exist.

Fourteen

“I’m thinking about cutting my hair,” I tell my mom, cruising over Industrial Road on the way home from the dance studio.

“Oh yeah, how short?”

“Short.”

She doesn’t answer. The next night I tell my ballet teacher.

“You’ll have to get extensions every time we perform. That’s expensive,” he says. “It’s not worth it.”

He goes home to kiss his partner every night. I expect him to understand that I don’t honestly care how long or short my hair is, I just want people to know who I am. The haircut is a code I need him to crack, for him to see me like I see myself: like him.

Sixteen

Nathan’s poems are like a smooth mixture of Pablo Neruda and Frank O’Hara, and the first time I read them, I love him.

We love each other like shy children and pry into each other’s bodies, tweaking the wires to carry currents of life. We give each other weekly writing prompts. We listen to Dessa and Eyedea and Tupac on the floor of his sunny bedroom and smoke weed out of apples down at King Park and have sex at 3 am on the grassy hill at Brigid’s cabin.

I tell my safe but scattered first love that I’m bisexual when we’re sitting on the hood of his mom’s car in a parking lot downtown, eating gummy sweets bought at Candyland from a white paper bag. He laughs at me. Says he probably is too. Says he thinks everyone is, at least a little bit. He gives me a kiss and later takes a picture of me, smiling there on the grey Toyota Highlander, my eyes shooting light like meteors.

Eighteen

“I don’t like the way he looks at you,” Pat spits. He’s been cheated on by every girl he’s ever dated.

I’ve gone back into hiding. With him, my silence doesn’t grow because of bigotry, but jealousy. When I hang out with guys, he gets mean. I don’t need him to know the threat is more than just men. Until him, I clung to my identity, starting college out and proud. But he sucks me over his black hole horizon, and I’m lost in the trapped quiet.

Slowly, his nerves sprout into anger that dulls my starlight to a flicker. I give him everything I have, shut parts of myself away to be what he needs, try to stay bright when he borrows money; squats in my apartment; keeps me up with his keyboard and bong smoke; comes home on a different drug every night, if he even comes home at all. He rapes me in his parent’s basement and afterwards, I apologize. He absorbs me, undetected — no one knows what happens in the depths.

When I’m with him, I almost forget I’m queer, because I forget I’m anything at all.

Nineteen

My friend Taty shifts side to side in the San Francisco spring night as they light another cigarette. “You and KT seem close.

Taty’s a constellation of all things gay, sparkling lip ring and buzz cut and cargo shorts. Just their one comment calls me back out of the closet. We’re on a spring break trip with our university. I take the cigarette from their hand and steal a tiny drag.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Taty shrugs, smiles a little. We both know what it means.

Twenty-One

“Go left,” I tell KT. Just off the highway, we travel aimlessly over pitch black rural roads. Five minutes later, “Go right. Keep going straight.”

“I don’t know how,” they laugh, and my eyes roll.

Once we end up on the curve of a road where there’s no streetlamps and no house lights and no cars anywhere to be seen, we get out. I have no idea where I am. The frogs and crickets sync up their songs, and KT and I don’t have to say anything. We lie on the paved road, silently counting the stars that we can never see at home through the city light of the St. Paul Midway.

Eventually, when we stand up, they pull me close to them and we dance like it’s our wedding reception. Gravity loses its grip.