Girls Can Kiss Now by Jill Gutowitz

Author:Jill Gutowitz [Gutowitz, Jill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria
Published: 2022-03-08T00:00:00+00:00

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College and high school, though different in many ways for me, were also very similar, in that I felt walled in, confined to one space, one people, one groupthink. After graduation, I was finally freed from the physical walls of school to explore new places, and to explore myself: who I was, who I wanted to be, what I believed in. Los Angeles was that bitch: a luscious, sprawling, wide-open meadow, rich with opportunity and boundless horizons. In L.A., it was easy for me to embrace my love of pop culture rather than reject it, as I was living in the very nucleus of celebrity, an environment and an industry that validated caring about who was being papped outside of Katsuya. I stopped seeing being interested in such things as “vapid” or “feminine” and saw it for what it really was (fun, exciting, political). I peeled back my layers, skin sheet by skin sheet, did the work of unlearning beliefs I’d grown comfortable participating in, and eventually came to find that, oh shit, I was gay as oat milk (oat milk is lesbian, and I’m not obligated to explain this to you).

Coming out as gay opened me up to a whole new realm of possibility, of people and art and movements to admire; I fell in love with femininity. Sure, I fell in love with actual women, like, the people. But coming out frees you in ways that I’m not sure any straight person ever fully experiences. Queer shame spans a spectrum. On the more dangerous and depraved side, you might place having a violently homophobic father, being beaten for queerness, being thrown out of your home, and being killed. On the other side of the spectrum, though one may not be actively in fear for their life on a daily basis, there’s still this undercurrent of shame, this feeling of “I shouldn’t be doing this,” where holding hands with your partner on the street might draw stares, judgment, a vocal outburst. Being able to overcome all of this, this anxiety that ranges from learning to protect yourself to justified paranoia, no matter where you fall on the spectrum, is nothing short of a miracle. And by “overcome,” I don’t mean holistically overcoming it—no, internalized homophobia will haunt you like Ari Gold eternally haunts Lloyd—but “overcome” as in saying it out loud, lifting that weight, that burden off yourself, of your own volition. Coming to a place of peace with yourself enough to say, “The world has historically said I should not be this, yet here I am, this, and I’m great,” is simply a mammoth feat of human strength. So when I came to reconcile myself with queerness, and found peace with it, I felt lighter in many other ways, ways that opened me up to new experiences, new interests, newfound appreciations. I decided I didn’t just love women, the people, in a romantic and sexual sense, but I loved women, the concept, everything we represent in

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