Don't Call Me Princess: Essays on Girls, Women, Sex, and Life by Orenstein Peggy

Author:Orenstein, Peggy [Orenstein, Peggy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: feminism, Sociology
ISBN: 9780062799487
Goodreads: 35180998
Publisher: HarperAudio
Published: 2018-02-27T08:00:00+00:00

Coming Out in the Twenty-First Century

On another winter evening, a few months after we first met, Amber introduced me to Hannah. They were nearly three thousand miles and an international border away from my California home, but thanks to Skype, we were all in the same room. Hannah jumped up every few minutes to check on a chocolate chip banana bread she was baking for Amber. (“It’s her favorite,” she explained.) They talked about the party they went to on New Year’s Eve; about how, for Christmas, Amber took Hannah ice skating and gave her a necklace; about the last time they were together with their families. They sat close, draping their arms around each other, touching constantly in the way of young lovers. Amber wore a hoodie from Hannah’s university; Hannah wore a T-shirt from Amber’s college, her long dark hair covering the school’s insignia.

Five minutes after Amber sent that first, fateful message, she got a reply from Hannah suggesting they Skype. They did, and ended up talking until four in the morning. “I told her everything,” Amber said now, gazing at Hannah affectionately. “About the fake MySpace profile, about getting caught by my parents, everything. It was crazy. I knew in, like, a split second that I didn’t want to talk to anybody else ever for the rest of my life. She was the first person to tell me my feelings were okay. And I realized: this is what a relationship is supposed to feel like. You’re supposed to feel appreciated and accepted and comfortable and able to say anything.” Hannah’s eyes welled up, and Amber pulled her close. “Why are you crying?” she asked.

“Because you were so sad,” Hannah replied. “You needed someone to listen to you. I remember thinking, ‘This girl really needs someone to tell her it’s okay.’”

Within a few weeks, Amber’s relationship with Jake fizzled, and they agreed to split up. While she was now free, she was only sixteen, and the new object of her affection lived in Canada. There was no way Amber could see Hannah in person—not, at least, without coming clean to her parents.

YouTube is full of “coming out videos”—that phrase returns about twenty-one million results. There are poignant and funny videos, and some that are heartrending, as parents accept or reject their children live on-screen. There are videos of twins coming out together. There is a subgenre of “how to come out” videos, and another of songs people have written about coming out. Amber watched dozens of them, trying to get up her nerve to talk to her mother. She resolved to do it over winter break, but as Christmas turned to New Year’s, she continued to put off the conversation. Finally, just before school restarted, she invited her mother out to lunch, not something she typically did. It was a strategic choice: her mom wouldn’t make a scene, Amber figured, in a public place. They agreed to meet at a deli. Amber was so nervous that morning she was shaking: she still wonders how she drove there without crashing the car.

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