In 1986, I bought a diary (they weren't called journals just yet.) It was purple with lines of small flowers running perpendicular down the front and back cover. The pages inside were cream colored with lines that were meant to keep the writing tidy. (I didn't do anything tidily at the age of fourteen.)
I wrote about boring details I thought I would care about later: went over to so-and-so's house and blahdity blah. Hello, Snoozefest '86.
Towards the end of the diary, things took an interesting turn. I started writing as if I were a boy.
Huh?
As a fourteen-year-old, I didn't have an Ellen, a Melissa, The L Word, or pop songs (Katy Perry might have kissed a girl, but she didn't like it enough to do anything besides write a song about it) letting me know it was okay for girls to kiss other girls. The only logical thing my mind could come up with at the time was to write like I was a boy. Boys could kiss girls.
Elaborate plan followed elaborate plan as my mind conjured different ways to get Andy (Kerri Green) from The Goonies into dark, private places with me. Even then, I knew writing had to be more intricate than just putting down your desires. Desires had to be delivered delicately, in a package that suggested there was a lot more to it than just kissing.
At the age of fifteen, I stopped writing from the perspective of a boy and wrote a horrible "novel" about two girls who were orphaned and refused to be separated if adoption presented itself. One of the girls ended up killing herself because the other girl was going to be adopted and, thus, they would be separated.
Huh?
Good grief. Wake up and build a float already. The pride parade is only days away.
When we can step away from it, the things we tell ourselves in order to make everything okay are often times hilarious.
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