I'm here, I'm queer, get over it mom

When my daughter was sixteen, she had a couple torrid affairs with other sixteen year old girls. As soon as the first one got going, she was eager to come out to me. I think she hoped to upset me, shock me. Or something. She couldn't have thought it through very well. I had made accepting homosexuality a central value in our family, for my best brother and her best uncle is gay. Plus, for several years, my closest friend was a fat bull dyke that Rosie loved as much as I did.

When Rosie was about fourteen, and dancing quite a lot with the dance company where she was an intern, she started coming home telling me moonily about how much she loved doing contact improv with a certain female, twenty-something dance teacher and member of the company. When Rosie told me about that older female, I said "Rosie, you know it is fine with me if you turn out to be gay but you cannot date Shannon (I don't remember the actual name) because she is 28 and you are 14."

When I thought, for a few years, that I should expose Rosie to some kind of religious upbringing, but was unwilling to revisit my Catholic childhood faith, she and I church shopped for a long time, checking out churches all over Minneapolis.  My standard: we could only attend a church that accepted my gay baby brother Dave.

We found an über liberal Unity Church and attended for several years. After awhile, I would drop her off for Sunday school and skip the adult service, go out for breakfast and pick her up. In the fall of fifth grade, Rosie came out to the car after Sunday school and said "Mom, I am done with church" and I said "Okay" and that was it for us and church. I was not a hypocrite, a trait I loathe. I wasn't going to church so I was not about to force her to keep going. And she knew that about me.

She got me. She liked me. So what the fuck happened?

When she came out, at a restaurant, I said "I don't think you are gay, honey. I think you'll have this fling with Anna and then go back to boys." That's when she said "I'm here, I'm queer, get over it". And I said "I've thought a lot about whether you are gay because Joni (my former close bull dyke pal -- she called herself a bull dyke, btw) has told me she's sure you are gay. I never thought so and I still don't. Maybe bisexual." In my being, I knew she would end up with males. She's too much of a diva to be with a girl.  Rosie needs to be adored, put on a pedestal, cosseted with luxury and the finer things. Of course, there are lipstick lesbians. But I am brilliant and brilliantly intuitive. I knew my kid, which probably has something to do with her rejection of me. She can't hide anything from me when we interact. I feel her and she feels me.

In honor of Pride weekend, which is an über big day in San Francisco, I share my Rosie's little coming out day. She came out to me in October 1998 and by February, she was in an even more torrid affair with a boy named Rob. She stayed with Rob until they graduated from an associate's degree program. Rob transferred to Stanford, Rosie to Cornell. And then she was with Michael. Michael seems out of the picture. I sense that he had drug issues and died from them.  I sense Rosie has alcohol or drug abuse issues but is in recovery. Who knows?  This is just stale maternal intuition.

But gay?  Nope.  She's not a lesbian.

Not that there is anything wrong with that.