Then Comes Marriage Read Free

college, and then I would move on to law school in New York. Twelve-year-old kids—especially those who talk as much as I did—come up with a lot of silly ideas. But what is more than a little frightening is that this is exactly what I ended up doing. (The fact that Sandra Day O’Connor was appointed by President Reagan to be the first woman Supreme Court justice three years later when I was in high school only strengthened my resolve.)
    I am sure my parents did not expect me to follow through on my grand pronouncement, but they did encourage my brother, Peter, and me to think independently. My mother especially was very curious about the social issues of the day. Mom was involved in the women’s movement of the 1970s and belonged to a consciousness-raising group. She also wanted to expose us to as much art, music, and culture as she could. One day in 1981, she exposed me to something I’m sure neither of us expected.
    I was fourteen that spring, and Mom brought me along to a former synagogue in Cleveland Heights, where a group of women were installing the feminist artist Judy Chicago’s famous piece The Dinner Party . The installation is huge—a triangular banquet table measuring forty-eight feet long on each side, with dozens of place settings and hundreds of engraved floor tiles all representing different women throughout history. Whenever it was exhibited in a new venue, Chicago enlisted numerous local feminist volunteers to help set it up. My mom is not exactly a do-it-yourself type, but she was eager for us to participate in what was a great artistic happening.
    The only thing I remember from that day is all the butch women wearing tool belts (literally). Everywhere I looked, there were women carrying hammers, pulling wrenches out of leather pouches, whipping out tape measures. I had never seen anything like these women. I was definitely exposed to something new that day, and it made me self-conscious, uncomfortably so.
    From that point on, I was aware that there was something different about me, something that needed to be hidden. By the time I was in high school, a lurking fear had taken root: What if I turn out to be gay? I could not bear that thought, so I just kept pushing it down as deep as it would go. Even though my parents never made negative comments about gay people, I knew that they would not be happy if I turned out to be a lesbian. So I tried to change and I tried to hide. I dated guys throughout high school. Ironically enough, my high school prom date, a guy named Aaron Belkin, would also turn out to be gay. Later, he became an activist for LGBT rights, one of the key players behind the 2010 repeal of the U.S. military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. There must have been something in that prom punch. Or maybe it is not surprising that two of the few gay kids in a graduating class of ninety students would be drawn to each other. Unconsciously, perhaps, we sensed each other’s secrets.
    Despite my fear of exposure, or maybe because of it, I was even more driven to succeed academically, to be part of the exciting world I had dreamed of since I was young. And just as I had planned so carefully at the age of twelve, I set off for Harvard in the fall of 1984. Upon arriving in Cambridge from the hinterlands of Cleveland, however, I initially found myself intimidated by the hordes of East Coast private-school girls—one of whom, a young woman from New York City, asked me in all innocence whether Woody Allen films ever made it to Cleveland movie theaters. My new classmates all seemed able to read Kant in the original German, planned someday to be president or secretary of state, and seemed not to have an iota of self-doubt. Navigating my new social life was difficult enough, even without the additional layers of confusion and anxiety about the possibility that I was gay.
    Every time that I had a crush on a girl, my fear about my mother’s reaction to my