Brown White Black Read online

  So much is riding on our ability as a society to give up the notion that we are entitled to be comfortable all the time. For the minority, of course, comfort is not an option. You learn to identify the cues of strangers responding to your visible difference—refusal to make eye contact, edging away should they be forced to stand near you in line, tight-lipped grimaces when you smile at their baby. Over time, I’ve toggled back and forth between various survival mechanisms, assimilation versus anarchy, not dissimilar to the process of working through my feelings about ethnic identity, which I’ve been reckoning with for longer. Being first-generation Indian American has also meant moving between the two poles of assimilation and rejection of the dominant culture, but being brown is not something I can hide, nor is it something I have to declare. It simply is. Being queer has proved slightly more complicated.

  When I first came out, I was determined to hold on to my “good Memphis girl badge,” to prove that I could kiss girls and shave my head but still be considered acceptable. I hadn’t yet heard of the model minority, but I sure was trying to be one. I took pride in being able to pass, slipping back seamlessly into the straight world I’d been raised in, properly dressed and well spoken, the girl who would make grandmothers say, “She’s a what?” and maybe change their minds about the categories I occupied. But I soon learned the limitations of this approach—instead of changing the rules of belonging, they just make you the exception that proves the rule.

  Looking back, I know it was my dad’s death, coupled with the community that surrounded me in Tucson, that offered me some freedom when it came to exploring a more authentic expression of my sexuality and self, pushing past the norms I’d been raised with and developing something else. He, more so than my mother, objected to my being gay, and grieving for him meant wrestling with this issue that went unresolved with him when he died. At the same time, because grief is so all-consuming and exhausting, it often blocks out space for other things, things you maybe weren’t all that committed to all along, like caring what other people think. Grief and the public expression of it already make people uncomfortable—we are not good, culturally, at sadness—so I had less to risk by letting go of my self-censorship and attempts to play nice.

  My friend Marynelle has a long history of being a “fag hag,” a straight woman who keeps the almost exclusive company of gay men. (Like many in-group terms, its connotation is affectionate to one set of people and deeply offensive to another.) At her wedding, my date—my friend Phil, who is married to a woman—and I were seated at the table of forty- and fifty-something “choir gays” who have gone to the same Memphis church as Marynelle’s family for decades; they are doctors and lawyers and organists and have mastered the art of navigating a society that prefers to pretend they don’t exist, except as needed, for show. They have carefully cultivated acceptable personas—smart, funny, gracious.

  “Why are gay people always more interesting?” Phil asked, not sarcastically, as we drove away at the end of the night. “I never have that depth and breadth of conversation with straight guys.”

  Why are we more interesting? Because we have to be.

  * * *

  A few months after getting married myself, I saw Alison Bechdel, award-winning cartoonist and acclaimed graphic memoirist, give a keynote presentation at a teachers’ conference, wryly noting that we queers “made ourselves obsolete” via our attempts to be treated “just like everyone else.” Indeed, Bechdel’s own Dykes to Watch Out For cartoon strip grew out of her desire to see women like her reflected somewhere out in the world, but after twenty-five years of Bechdel celebrating and attempting to normalize it, that otherness had disappeared enough to make the reason behind the cartoon no longer seem relevant. So she stopped drawing it: victory or defeat?

  We have made it to the mainstream. I mean, Alison freaking Bechdel was a keynote speaker at the National Council of Teachers of English Annual Convention, which meant that the word “dyke” was floating around that auditorium in a way that felt downright radical by virtue of its lack of scandal. But something is lost in the transfer.

  Maggie Nelson says it best:

  Once something is no longer illicit, punishable, pathologized, or used as a lawful basis for raw discrimination or acts of violence, that phenomenon will no longer be able to represent or deliver on subversion, the subcultural, the underground, the fringe, in the same way.

  The day of the Obergefell decision was, without question, one of the happiest days of my life. I’d had a reading the night before, which had gone extremely well and given me the chance to spend time with several of my close friends, at a bar, after dark, on a weeknight—a true rarity in my life as a parent of a young child. One of those friends, Megan, an attorney and SCOTUS nerd and the person responsible for introducing me to Jill, is the one who broke the news of the decision to me in a text message that next morning as I drove Shiv to school. As a rule, I try not to look at my phone while I drive, so I didn’t even notice until I reached down to play “Baby Love,” at Shiv’s request, on his Spotify playlist. I saw Megan’s text and immediately started crying. Jill was in an all-day session for work, but I texted her anyway. She wrote back with more exclamation marks than she usually uses in an entire month and asked me to marry her.

  I wanted to get married—I wanted what “everybody else” had, or at the very least wanted it to be made available to me. Jill and I both wanted Shiv to have parents who were married, wanted the legal protections that marriage would afford us. We had done without them while Jill was diagnosed and treated for cancer and when we adopted Shiv, and we keenly felt the weight of uncertainty and the tang of bitterness that comes when you do not have paperwork backing you up.

  Three days after the Obergefell decision was issued, Jill and I nervously walked into the county courthouse in downtown Houston. We weren’t sure what to expect: Lines? Protesters? Resistance? Refusal? Instead, we got a clerk named Maria, who, after filling in our personal information and making us raise our right hands to swear it was all true, nonchalantly mentioned that her daughter had gotten married a few years prior, when same-sex marriage had been made legal in a nearby state. She smiled at us, took our money, stamped our license, and sent us on our way. The whole thing took maybe twenty minutes.

  Having steeled ourselves for the worst, we giggled incredulously on our way out of the building, halfway expecting someone to come running after us and insist that there had been a mistake. “That’s it?” we marveled. “Man, no wonder straight people keep screwing this up. It’s way too easy to get married.”

  The relief of not having to fight, not being excluded, not having to push or challenge or ask to see a supervisor—it was sweeter than we thought, that relief. Even when you’ve long made peace, or some semblance thereof, with the inevitability of living well outside the mainstream, you can’t help feeling good at being welcomed back in.

  * * *

  As a blue-eyed, blond-haired, obedient little girl, Jill was regularly conscripted to be the flower girl for weddings, often for people she didn’t even know. She was soon turned off to the whole idea of weddings; it all felt false, artificial. Plus, there is absolutely nothing about the “Princess for a Day” fantasy that appeals to her. Though she couldn’t quite put her finger on why, when she was young she never imagined herself standing in front of a church in a white dress, getting married to a man. That wife of mine, not a fan of weddings.

  The irony is that I love weddings. I love attending them, crying during them, dancing after them, helping other people plan them. I am kind of a fool for ritual and enjoy stereotypically pretty “girl” things. I love Indian weddings best of all, because they are in their own Technicolor stratosphere of the celebration universe. Indian weddings are bright and vibrant and joyful and last for days and are such tremendous spectacles that there’s no pretending they’re not completely ridiculous, in the best way. But I never wanted one of my own. Not even when I thought I was straight.

  For years, I’d bee
n told how “mature” I was, how unlike other people my age—an occurrence I both resented and cherished. Because of this, I believed that I would be single for a very long time. (I routinely told my parents to be prepared for me to become a single parent if I made it to thirty unmarried.) I believed that if I ended up finding someone, he would probably be some smart older man, the Professor Bhaer to my Jo March. I always imagined that he would be white, seeing as how I was not anything close to the “ideal” Indian girl that Indian guys seemed to be attracted to. White people were everywhere, and a white guy had been deemed acceptable, though not of course preferable, by my parents. (It’s also important to acknowledge that I was the product of an American culture that did nothing to bolster the potential appeal of Indian—or any Asian—men. I did manage to have crushes on a few Indian boys … they just never seemed to be interested in me.)

  I didn’t bargain on the fact that I would end up in a relationship that landed even further outside the expected parameters than “older white guy.” With Jill in the picture, a wedding seemed so far off the table that I put it out of my mind as a possibility. I didn’t even talk to my parents about my relationship with Jill for years; if only my younger self had known that I would have happily taken the family fights over how many people to invite and what to put on the dinner menu, if it meant my parents celebrating my relationship. When my straight friends complained about their mothers or mothers-in-law driving them nuts with wedding planning, it was all I could do not to gripe at them that at least they could get married. And while I admit to being jealous of more than one Williams-Sonoma registry, what I really wanted was not a wedding itself, but everything that it stood for and represented—the celebration of the relationship, the acknowledgment of the commitment, the solemnity and sanctity. When you say you’re getting married, people show up. They make plans; they buy plane tickets. They bring you presents. They make a big deal.

  * * *

  The word “wife” has always creeped me out—it just felt so contractual, so old-fashioned, so … straight. I never, ever wanted to have anything to do with it, and it would grate on my nerves when straight people used it in reference to themselves or other straight people: Let me check with my wife or So excited to become his wifey!

  I could never really explain why it bothered me so much (the word “wifey” and hashtag #wifemeup bother me still, but that I can articulate), but the clue was contained in the fact that before we were actually married, I found it kind of sweet when straight people would use the word “wife” to refer to either me or Jill. A colleague: “I was hoping to meet your wife at the holiday party.” The host at a dinner party: “Oh, is this your wife?”

  It was thoughtful, and I got what they were trying to do, the respect they were trying to connote, but it still felt like play-pretend. Jill and I were adamant about not using the word “wife” because, according to the U.S. government, that word didn’t apply to us. Until it did. Now I love referring to Jill as my wife. It’s so convenient. For thirteen years, I stumbled over what language to use when talking about her, or introducing her, or just casually discussing my life. “Partner” seems logical, except that it confuses lots of people who think you mean “business partner” (especially straight people who read you as straight and live in Texas and/or Tennessee and don’t have any LGBTQ people in their life, or at least think they don’t). I refused to say “domestic partner,” which sounds so clinical, like a condition you can treat with a prescription drug. “Girlfriend” was too trivializing—it took Facebook a while to figure out that I did not want to characterize my relationship using the same language my eighteen-year-old students gave to theirs—and “beloved,” which someone once suggested to me, felt way too intimate for daily use. “Spouse” seemed like the best possible option but still felt like a compromise. When you say “wife,” everyone knows what you’re talking about, even if they’re going to raise eyebrows about it. And, you know, it is nice to be part of the club. It is nice when my friend Christian texts and says the Old 97’s are coming to town and his wife is on board for the show and what about me and my wife? It is cute when my students grumble that the head of school referred to Jill as my “partner,” because we’re married now and he should have said “wife.”

  We even used the word “wife” in our marriage ceremony: I joyfully take you as my wife. What has happened here? Are we complete and total sellouts? Was my hatred of the word “wife” motivated by jealousy all along? We have newly married straight friends who feel the inverse; they hesitate to use the terms “husband” and “wife” because they carry too much weight, too much history of what those relationships look like. But we don’t have a history of gay marriage to avoid or imitate. We’re making it up as we go.

  I grin every time I look at the band I wear on my left hand or look over and see the same ring on Jill’s hand. Is this what it feels like to drink the heteronormative Kool-Aid? I learned not to want something because I thought I could never have it, and now I do—my version of it, anyway. But there are still so many things that we, as a community, do not yet have: employment protection, transgender rights, safe schools. Even before it happened, I knew my marriage was no Band-Aid, but I worried that it would be seen by many as one. I worry that our long focus on marriage equality means, now that we’ve obtained it, we’ll be told to “be grateful” for what we have and fall in line. I don’t want to be placated. I want access to the mainstream, but I also want the right to live outside of it if I choose.

  Queering has always been about challenging, troubling, questioning. Perhaps it seems hypocritical to challenge, trouble, and question the territory that you are also demanding access to, but without the continual movement that queering brings, we risk ossification, the stiff bones of stasis. All any of us can do, argues philosopher Judith Butler, is “work the trap that one is inevitably in.”

  Voluntarily Bald

  My father asked me to grow out my hair about a year and a half before he died. He didn’t know he was about to die—this was not a deathbed request—but it wound up having the power and intensity of one. When you lose someone, their words take on weight, become sticky, viscous, more difficult to disregard.

  He asked me to grow out my hair because we were going to India, traveling there as a family—him, my mom, and me—for the first time in twenty years, and he wanted my hair to be “not so short” when we arrived. He had always preferred my hair long and never tried to hide this preference. He was good-natured about it, like he was about almost everything, and our banter about my hair became a running family joke:

  “Nito, why don’t you grow your hair long?”

  “Daaaaad, if you want long hair, grow it yourself!”

  My dad went bald at an early age, so this made for a reliable laugh. There was a sharper edge underneath it, though; he really did want me to have long hair, and I really was annoyed by his persistence. Disagreements between parents and kids regarding appearance, whether it’s hair or clothing or piercings or tattoos, are universal and often not about the adornments themselves but rather about what they signify. Inside my father’s frame of reference, for an Indian girl to have long, flowing hair was a sign not only of beauty but of compliance and social acceptability. Short hair was “American,” a sign of my assimilation and, by extension, his failure to raise a more “traditional” daughter.

  When he was alive, I never thought consciously about the fact that a beautiful daughter can serve as a kind of cultural capital for fathers, but I did chafe against the notion that my value was necessarily tied to my appearance and also, by some not-explicitly-stated-but-not-difficult-to-extrapolate correlation, my marriageability. Even inside our liberal group of immigrant families, marriage was always an expectation, a necessary component of how success and the good life were defined. Within the families of our immigrant community, my generation was almost all female. We grew up with the understanding that while our parents were happy for us to find our own partners—the American way—and they mig
ht even be able to make room in their imaginations for a partner who was white, the idea that we would get married, preferably around the age of twenty-five, and subsequently produce grandchildren, was decidedly not optional. This was such a default expectation that I’m not sure any of us ever thought through what would happen if we didn’t get married or didn’t want to.

  In what might seem like a contradictory stance, our parents also expected us to take up professional careers, pushing and challenging us as students and supporting us in graduate school, just as they saved to pay for our future weddings. (Savings bonds purchased upon the birth of a baby girl are not uncommon in the Indian community.) And though the preference for sons within Indian culture is well-known, my father never displayed that preference. Even at the height of our estrangement, I never felt that he wished he’d had a son instead of a daughter. He grew up with two older sisters and held a deep reverence for them and his mother, who died when he was in high school. Having witnessed firsthand the gender-related obstacles that Indian society put in front of the women in his family, he had consciously chosen a strong woman (my mother) to be his wife and defied others’ expectations when he “let” her work as a teacher even after they were married.