The sun comes out, but it is cold
in this small town in Indiana named Portland.
Not as cold as Minnesota, and it is odd to hear complaints of the cold
from the people here. To complain about
the ice and dreariness would be a more realistic gripe.
It is cold here in terms of the
weather, but it is cold in a different sort of way also. The Hoosier hospitality would seem to
underscore a niceness that one should find pleasant. But even with that Hoosier hospitality, one
such as myself would still know that I am not welcomed here-not my female
strength and not my lesbian identity.
It is not a cold like in a big city–like
Chicago, which I have passed through a few times in the past month or so, or
Minneapolis, where I live. In fact,
often I feel a warmth in those cities because I know I can be different, for
the most part. No, the cold here makes
me avert my eyes. Never out of fear of
danger from the outside, but danger from the inside. I feel my body and its history of having
grown up in religion and farmland. That is
when I know my body has rebelled from those traditions and rebelled so angrily
that the stares coming my way from the people here let me know I don’t belong
here.
It is cold because I am angry. I am angry I grew up in a similar environment
where my femaleness was dirtied and my gay identity went to a deep place of
hiding. I am angry that a movie theater
full of people can in unison express disgust for a brief showing of two men
holding hands, conveying very clearly that they can’t imagine something so
foreign as gays or lesbians sitting in the same audience as themselves.
I am angry that I feel the female
inferiority and the male superiority that I knew on my own father’s farm–a farm
that was never considered to be mine. Farms
go to boys, never girls. I even knew
that at an early age.
I feel cold… a cold that the warmer
weather can’t decrease. A cold that
reminds me that the unfreezing of homophobia is as far away as the 800 miles
that I am from home.
Reprinted from:
(1997, Feb. 5 – 18). Indiana Cold. [Personal essay]. The Minnesota Women’s Press, 12, (23),
4.
Copyright
1997 by Susan Miranda. All rights
reserved. No part of this writing may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the copyright holder. For reprint permission, email miranda_susan@yahoo.com.
