This is Who I Am, but I Can Never Say it Out Loud

Illustration: Aude Nasr

Movie night, 1999. I was almost ten. My older brother, who was about sixteen at the time, had rented a movie called Election, and my mother and I had joined him to watch it. It was a high school movie full of teen angst and Americanisms. I was not enjoying it... Then the movie cut to a scene of two people kissing, and before my young mind could work out what was happening on-screen, I heard my brother mutter to himself, “are those… two girls?”

It wasn’t the first time I had thought about two girls being romantic with each other, but it was the first time I had ever seen it. I was a girl, and for as long as I could remember, I had known without a doubt that one day when I was older, I too wanted to kiss other girls. I had always felt like those urges meant there might be something wrong with me, and by that time, I had already come to terms with the fact that I would likely never be able to do it. Girls only wanted to kiss boys, right? And yet, here were two girls, in a movie for everyone to see, and they were kissing.

I wondered, in my naivety, if this could be the moment I finally found out that being a girl and loving other girls was okay. That it was an option.

"I'm not a lesbian or anything," said a voice-over by one of the two girls on the screen, as they continued their angsty makeout session, "I just like kissing girls".

Before I could even process the words (one, in particular, had piqued my interest), my mother broke the tense silence that had filled the room and said "Disgusting. They should be thrown in the trash"

Needless to say, I felt a pang in my chest. It was as though she knew what I was thinking, and had said the words specifically for me to hear. Words that had confirmed all of my fears. It must be true, there really was something very wrong with me. And if I was going to figure out exactly what it was, I had to find out what the girl from the movie meant when she said “lesbian”. Was that what I was? Could there really be a word for the feelings I had for as long as I could remember? “Lesbian”? It felt like a dirty word. 

Even though I had not yet learned the word for it, I was already aware of, and highly sensitive to, the stigma that came with being “different”. For almost ten years, adults, children, relatives, and strangers alike had been puzzled by my lack of what was traditionally considered to be “femininity”. Some had made their disapproval known; little girls should wear dresses and play with other little girls. Others, who were kinder, or perhaps less invested, would content themselves with a perplexed stare or awkward smile. Of course, I took note of every unfavourable glance, every whispered jibe and all the times I overheard my mother justifying my tomboyishness as a phase. I had always worried that my failure to uphold the feminine standards expected of me might give away my hidden romantic interest in other girls. And so, for fear of exposing my burning curiosity to my mother or brother, I waited an appropriate amount of time after the scene had ended to casually excuse myself. I rushed to my bedroom and headed straight to the small book cabinet at the bottom of the dresser, quickly extracting my treasured copy of the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, which I had commandeered from the living room library. The dictionary was old and worn, missing its jacket and cover entirely, but still held together at the spine by its binding. I had kept it close for just such an occasion; I needed to know the meaning of a word but was too ashamed to ask any of my family members. A part of me was convinced that I would not find it. How could a word that had just caused so much revulsion and discomfort be right there in a book I had openly claimed and kept in my room all this time. I braced myself and flipped to the L section. It was easy enough to guess the spelling, and there it was: “les·bian /'lezbiən/ n homosexual woman”. It took one final flip through the pages to find, on page 410, the definition of the word “homosexual”.

Among the many feelings I remember having at that moment (panic certainly deserving an honourable mention here), the two that stood out the most were quite contradictory; I felt as though learning the words to describe that part of myself had simultaneously freed and burdened me. I was free now to admit to myself that I was a lesbian. But I was burdened by the fact that I could not, and probably would never, admit it to anyone else. 

It was an odd thing for a child to have to wrap their head around. Even the girl in the movie said she wasn’t a lesbian. Of course, that proclamation may not have come from a place of internal homophobia, as I had believed. It was possible that she identified as bisexual, pansexual, queer, or a number of other combinations of gender identity and sexual orientation. But at the time, as a child who knew nothing about gender or sexual orientation, I felt as though she was ashamed for me. As though she was justifying her actions (and possibly my own future actions), only to be denied by my mother within seconds, crystallizing the shame that the girl and I felt. It was especially confusing because my mother had always been supportive of every aspect of my personality, even, to a certain extent, my unusual expressions of gender. So I could not understand why this would have been any different, why she had felt the need to disapprove of these two girls’ actions so vocally. Was it just as I had feared? Did she already know or suspect that I was a lesbian?

As I sat there on the floor with my dictionary, wondering if I should rip out pages 410 and 483 and hide them forever, I had no idea that some time after my discovery, in a field outside my Southern home, I would feel an overwhelming need to confide in my seven-year-old cousin: “Jawad, I’m a lesbian. It means I like other girls. But don’t tell anyone,” and that he would squint for a second, then say “Okay,” and guard my secret for a decade. It didn’t occur to me, as I stared at the pages, that there were others around me who shared my struggle. I didn’t know that the world was grappling with a global epidemic, and was rife with misconceptions, harsh judgements, and ignorance about sexuality. I didn’t know that there were people in the world fighting for their lives and their rights, fighting to be seen and heard and understood. It certainly didn’t occur to me that one day, because of those people, I would be able to accept and even celebrate myself. That I would meet other gay people, other women who looked like me, watch television shows all about queer women, connect with the growing LGBTQ+ community on the internet, and finally be able to come out to my friends and family. I had no way of knowing that my mother’s views would change drastically over the years and that she would eventually become an ally of the queer community. Or that I would, in fact, end up kissing girls.

There was no colloquial equivalent for the word “lesbian” in my mother tongue, and that may have contributed to my feelings of shame and solitude for a large part of my childhood. I had learned something so essential to my own identity through an American movie and subsequently, an English language dictionary, yet I could not find myself represented fairly anywhere in my own culture. In English, I would later learn and reclaim gay slurs, but for a long time, the only Lebanese Arabic words I knew for “homosexual” were slurs. I would come to realize that it was pride that had compelled me to come out to Jawad. Pride in myself and in who I am, and the urge to tell someone about it now that I had learned the right word. I would learn other words over the years, like “dyke”, “queer”, “gender identity”, and “transgender”, and although my first experience was tinted with guilt and confusion, these later experiences would prove much more positive. When I finally learned about gender nonconformity, for example, I found myself thinking “This is who I am, and I can finally say it out loud”.