A National Coming Out Day Story

[hrj]

(I posted this on facebook and then figured I might as well put it here too.)

So evidently today is National Coming Out Day or something. I'll assume that everyone on my f-list is aware that I'm a lesbian. (Although I was rather startled to be told recently that someone who met me well after I came out, and who has known me for a couple of decades or more, didn't realize this until relatively recently--never doubt the power of oblivious social defaults.) So I'll tell you my favorite random coming-out story instead. (Some of you have heard this one already.)

It was a road trip…must have been back in the '80s because I was driving my old pick-up truck -- I honestly don't remember where I'd been, but I was driving west on I-84 alongside the Columbia River in Oregon in one of those long stretches where the exits are about 20 miles apart and services are similarly scarce. This is important because--as a woman traveling alone--I do have a certain level of healthy paranoia about stopping to provide roadside assistance. But traffic was light, and the folks by the stopped vehicle were an older man and a young (possibly pre-school age) boy, and the man was holding up a gas can indicating the relative simplicity of the assistance required. So I stopped.

I recalled having passed a service station maybe 10-15 miles back, but first we had to go maybe another five miles west to get to an interchange where we could reverse directions. So the round trip to fill the can and deliver them back to the car was in the vicinity of 40 miles total. (Not quite as out-of-my-way as it might seem, given that I was probably coming back at the very least from Chicago and still had the drop down to the Bay Area to go, but still a non-trivial diversion.) At any rate, one gets to talking about all sorts of things on a trip like that. I had a chance to size up my passengers: Hispanic (by visual appearances), rural (based on the nature and contents of their vehicle), socially conservative (based on initial conversation), and the sort of person who is unsurprised to have a complete stranger do a good deed because it was exactly the sort of thing he would have done in my place.

At some point, the topic turned to where I was traveling from and where home was for me. In my usual short-hand when traveling out of state and in general company, I said I lived in San Francisco. He got this very concerned look on his face and said quite seriously, "You know, there are a lot of homosexuals in San Francisco." Without skipping a beat, I replied, "Yes, I know. I'm one of them."

Now, this wasn't a particularly risky thing to do in the context. Conversely one might think that there wasn't any particular benefit to it. But I like to think that for the rest of his life, when he's thought about "the homosexuals in San Francisco" the very first thing that came to mind was the nice woman who stopped in the middle of nowhere and went an hour out of her way when he ran out of gas. And if I'd kept my mouth shut, that wouldn't have happened.

Comments

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Lovely! So what did he say, and how did the rest of the drive go?

[kareina.livejournal.com]

I am curious on these points too.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

I confess the immediately following exchange was not quite as edifying. He felt compelled to ask "So what do you DO together" and I had to firmly but politely inform him that that was an invasively personal question and I had no intention of answering it.

[kareina.livejournal.com]

It occurs to me that another way to answer THAT question would be something along the lines of "oh, you know, picnics in the park, long walks in the forest, a bit of gardening, pretty much the same as everyone else, really".

[madbaker.livejournal.com]

I like this story.