Every once in awhile an old adage—a stitch in time saves nine; too many cooks spoil the broth, etc.—can suddenly seem fresh and
meaningful. That's what happened to my partner Kathy recently with the adage 'you can't judge a book by its cover.'
Kathy often exercises at lunchtime. For many years, she swam but has switched to running in recent years. During the years when
she was swimming, she used to share the locker room and pool with a group of women in their 70s, and they got used to seeing one
another there. Now that she has switched to running, the women often joke with Kathy, saying things like, 'It's too cold outside today
to run—you should go swimming!' She wasn't part of the group, exactly, but there was an easiness among them from seeing each
other so often.
She also got to know bits and pieces of the women's lives, either from being present when they talked with one another or,
occasionally, if she were there alone with one of them, from chatting with them herself. Kathy learned that one woman, for instance,
had walked with her family from Germany to Poland, during World War II, to escape Hitler. It was a hard journey—they couldn't drink
water as they walked, for example, because rumor had it that the Nazis had poisoned all the wells—but they made it, and eventually
she emigrated to the United States.
Last week, Kathy found herself alone with this woman in the locker room. As they were chatting, the woman asked Kathy, 'Does
your husband run with you?'
'I don't have a husband,' she replied, finding herself somewhere between uneasy and annoyed at the turn of the conversation.
'Hm,' the woman said. 'You look like someone who would have a husband; you look happy.'
'I don't have a husband, but I have a partner.'
'Does he run with you?'
'My partner's a she,' Kathy responded.
'We don't often run together because she likes to run early in the morning.'
Without further comment, the woman left the room to go brush her hair, and that, Kathy thought, was that: the woman was just
another homophobe who couldn't deal with Kathy's having come out to her.
But then the woman returned to the locker room.
'How do you say it in English, when you get baptized ... '
'Baptism?' Kathy wondered where this conversation might be going.
'No—the people who are there with you when you get baptized—what do you call them?'
'Godparents?'
'Yes, godparents. When I was baptized, my godparents were lesbians. My parents' best friends were a lesbian couple, and they
were my godparents. No one thought anything about it back then. Sexuality was no big deal. My parents were together for 45 years
and they were never married. I don't know why Americans get so upset about lesbians.'
To this scenario we could also add, from Kathy's experience alone, her student who comes from a poor, rural town in Kentucky
and adores her gay brother and his partner, and another of her students who is a conservative Christian and is best friends with her
lesbian roommate. Our own families—with members ranging from racist to redneck to conservative Republican—should have proved
this adage to us, since we have never felt anything but loved and welcomed by them.
But there is an even more important lesson—one that I'd missed even as I wrote my first draft of this essay—and that is: assuming
that someone is likely to be homophobic is itself a form of homophobia, reflecting as it does our own negative images of queerness. <
p>Because if we didn't harbor these images somewhere inside of us, how could we suppose we saw them in others? I don't doubt
that whatever homophobic feelings we have were foisted on us by a fearful society and that we have good reasons to be cautious.
But I would like to imagine a time when, if we were going to assume anything about another, it would be that they would accept us for
who we are.
And judging by Kathy's experience, maybe we're closer to that time than we think.
c 2003 by Yvonne Zipter.
yz@press.uchicago.edu .
