Late to the Party

(A photo project that hasn’t yet taken off. It was a small party, but a good one. Reposted here for posterity and future revival.)

Picture this, bitches.

Late to the Party is a clear, queer call to celebrate … us! We are not going back into hiding, now or ever. We will show our faces. We will tell our stories.

We will be seen.

Charity (she/her)

10/13/24

In my 53 years, I’ve collected mental pictures of faces who will never even know they took up residence in my memories, or why. One stands out: The intimidatingly masculine, gender nonconforming redhead I kept seeing “over there” in college; the last time across that main street through campus, in front of the bookstore, on my last day at Western Washington University. “They/them” wasn’t a thing, back then; I thought of her as “her.” My heart sank even as I asked myself, rhetorically, why I cared. There were others.

Who I am has been mixed up with shame for as long as I’ve had memories; a source of both titillation and jealousy, in turns, by my significant men. Thinking about sharing specifics is bringing up unwelcome ghosts at the moment. I finally pushed that me down “for good” and went hard after evangelical right-wing self loathing in my 30s - only to see the man I thought was forever, the one I was trying to be “good enough” for, die prematurely (a kindness, as it turns out). I won’t digress here, but being the “good” girl got me nothing, on a grand scale. I mean, seriously: It’s impressive. 

Seeing I was dragging my two kids down into that nothing with me woke me up. 

“Enough of that,” I said. 

I threw out the misogynist male doctors, the patriarchal church, the toxic colonizer family of origin and all the patriarchal mainstays of our circle. And I stopped dating men. For the past five years, starting in 2019, we’ve navigated the hardest season of my life, just us three, on our own. 

Driving home from yet another Seattle doctor’s appointment for my daughter, I finally gave in to my gut, which had been screaming at me (with increasing volume) to come out to her. 

Shortly afterwards, she came out to me. 

I’m Charity. I’m 53. I’m bi, and even as my voice still shakes when I say it out loud, no boyfriend, husband, “friend,” family, societal institution or political “leader” gets to say anything about it.