Reflections from Kodak
Not only am I aging gracelessly, but I just watched myself do it.
I’ve just completed digitizing my photographs from 1965-1980. I did this by removing them from deteriorating, disintegrating scrapbooks and albums and scanning the fading photos into my computer. Then, I preserved them, improved them, and curated out the people I no longer wished to remember. My ex-husband the accordion player (vintage ’73-’78) now makes only a brief guest appearance.
It’s astonishing how the once bright, colorful 4x6s of Disney World, Chesapeake Bay, or even Paris had turned to a brownish-sepia. Luckily my memories of good experiences, fun theatre productions, and dear friends are still bright in my mind.
But the pictures did tell me a very clear, visible, wistful story. Before I came out to myself and others in early 1980, my life was indeed sepia-toned. Not bright. Not authentic. Not happy.
Yes, I loved my college and theatre friends. And escaping into theatre saved me, as it has done for many gay youngsters, who are afraid, closeted, or in denial. But truly, in those early photographs, from high school on, I saw my unhappiness and my longing for a more authentic life. I saw it on my face, in my posture, in my clothing. It’s uncanny. I tried so hard to be straight I even straightened my curly hair.
So I stopped scanning the pictures at the day before I stepped from the closet. Those hundreds of pictures, now digitally preserved, will be printed in a pre-coming-out album I just ordered from an online photo company. This album will take up a tiny fraction of the bookshelf space where those big, fat, fading, falling-apart scrapbooks used to stand. And I’ll have saved my old sepia life.
Next week, I’ll start scanning photos from the day my uncloseted, big, bright, gay life began. It was a steamy Cape Cod afternoon, spent visiting with my college roommate. Quite perceptively, she drove me to Provincetown, Massachusetts for the day.
Gay couples strolled everywhere. We stopped at the Womencraft bookshop, bulging with lesbian literature, feminist gifts, and crafts. Too afraid to investigate the books, I looked at a display of buttons proclaiming “The Moral Majority is Neither” and “A Woman without a Man is like a Fish Without a Bicycle;” posters, t-shirts, mugs celebrating feminism, pro-choice, and other familiar topics.
I stared at the short-haired, make-up free women behind the cash register. Were they, you know? I picked up a mug with a photo of Robert Indiana’s LOVE sculpture on it and took it to the register.
“That will be $4.99 after the 10 percent lesbian discount,” said the clerk. Holy shit. My face flushed and I bobbled my wallet trying to get to my money to pay for my lesbian- discounted mug. Like an undercover cop in trouble, I’d been made.
And it hit me. I was a lesbian. It all made sense. Yes. Lesbian. Right there on Commercial Street I had an epiphany. I also had a lobster roll. And I kept looking around. The future awaited me.
So next up I’ll scan the happier photos of myself. I’m still marveling over the distinctly visible change in my smile, my appearance, and my whole persona before and after coming out. I was hiding in plain sight.
And this revelation makes me think of Florida and other states where Don’t Say Gay is taking hold and LGBTQ people are being harassed, hated, targeted simply for who they are.
I worry about youngsters having a much harder time coming out in this new era of hate.
I worry about the ugly choices parents might have to make in order to get their trans youngsters health care.
I worry about my transgender friends in states which might outlaw their access to hormone therapy.
I worry about young people, out since their teens, who have never faced much discrimination. How will they handle it?
I worry about my friends in Florida and other states being turned away from health care because they are gay. The Supreme Court just allowed that kind of discrimination. I already know of two friends whose primary care doctors felt a need to assure them it would not happen at that particular medical practice. But it surely will happen at others.
You know what I don’t worry about? I do not worry that LGBTQ people will stop coming out; that they will stay in sepia-toned lives rather than living in full-spectrum color. We are nothing if not colorful. We are the rainbow. And we’re here, we’re queer, and we vote. ▼
Fay Jacobs is the author of five published books and is touring with her one-woman sit-down comedy show, Aging Gracelessly.