“Not I nor anyone else can travel that road for you”: On Writing Old Wounds

Corita Kent, be (1967), of love (1967), (a little) more careful (1967), than of everything (1967)

I’m a proud Catholic high school graduate. I’m also a proud Jewish lesbian. Both of those statements are true, even though they might seem incompatible.

Why would I look back fondly at a Catholic institution? Well, it wasn’t the kind of place you’re probably imagining. My all-girls’ high school was run by an order of ex-nuns who very publicly left the Catholic Church in the late 1960s, an action that made headlines around the world at the time. Most of the teachers over sixty were former sisters, as were the principal and assistant principal.

As students, we were taught that it was more important to advocate for what was right than to quietly accept injustice. We were encouraged to be, as they put it, “women of great heart and right conscience.”

I took that very seriously. I still do.

In a lot of ways, my high school was shockingly progressive for an institution with Catholic ties. Many of our teachers were openly feminist and supportive of leftist issues, especially regarding inequities around class, race, immigration, housing, and disability. No one ever took issue with my being Jewish. When my classmates and I staged a protest on the quad to challenge our school’s uniform policy—we were required to wear skirts on Wednesdays, which we argued was sexist—the administration relented fairly quickly, acknowledging that we had a good point.

Of course, queerness was still off limits in those days.

Not explicitly. There was no written policy, as far as I’m aware. And I did know a couple of girls who were quietly out to people they trusted, including my best friend. Still, as was the case for most U.S. high school students at the very beginning of the 21st century, being openly queer was unthinkable. Even in liberal Los Angeles.

Looking back, this environment helped keep me from realizing my own queerness. I wouldn’t come to terms with the fact that I was a lesbian until my mid-twenties, thanks to the crushing weight of compulsory heterosexuality and some other complicating factors. In high school I believed, completely and totally, that I was straight. Just a really, really, really passionate ally who was obsessed with the musical Rent and older actresses and my gorgeous female English teacher, and who had an intensely co-dependent relationship with my bisexual best friend. You know. Super heterosexual shit.

There were signs all over the place during high school. Some of them make me smile, looking back. Others are more complicated.

As a first year, I had a Spanish teacher I’ll call Ms. García, who was probably in her early thirties at the time. She was perfectly nice, but not warm in the way most of our other teachers were. There was a reserve to her, a sense that she always held most of herself at a remove from everyone.

At one point, Ms. García asked us all to do a presentation on a Spanish-speaking luminary of our choice. I picked the writer Ana Castillo, and did my internet deep dive into her poetry, novels, and biography (this was a few years before Google, so it took a lot of hard work!). When it came time to give our presentations, I shared my research proudly with the class and with Ms. García.

“And,” I added, at the end of my biographical overview, “Ana Castillo is a lesbian.”

A few of the girls laughed, the kind of laughter that was common back then when any sexuality other than the assumed default came up in conversation. My heart was pounding, but I felt, in a way I couldn’t explain at the time, that it was extremely important to mention Castillo’s lesbianism. If you’d asked me then why I brought it up, I would’ve said something like, “Because there’s nothing wrong with being gay, and I shouldn’t have to pretend otherwise.”

Again: at fourteen, I thought I was a really, really, really passionate ally.

After my presentation ended, there was some dutiful applause, and then Ms. García said, “Carrie, I’d like to speak with you outside.”

My stomach sank. I knew what this was about.

I was embarrassed, but I remember, with much more clarity, how angry I felt. Angry at her, angry at the world. Angry, even, with myself, for reasons I didn’t understand then.

I followed Ms. García into the hallway, where she said, very quietly, that I couldn’t mention lesbianism in class.

Furious, I demanded she give me some justification. “Ana Castillo is a lesbian!” I told her. “It’s just a fact! Why can’t I share a fact about who she is?”

I was supposed to be a woman of great heart and right conscience! I’d been taught to fight for what I believed was right! And here I was, getting shut down for pursuing the very thing my school had asked me to be.

Ms. García didn’t get upset with me, even though my sharp tone was the kind of defiance that should’ve landed me in detention. She just said, again, “I can’t have you talking about lesbianism in my class. Okay?”

It wasn’t okay, obviously. I fumed about it for weeks. And even though the sharp fury lessened, I never let go of it. Not really. I went out of my way to avoid Ms. García in the hallways. I never took another class with her. I put away the memory, if not the feeling.

Years passed. I grew up. I came out.

Then, one day, about ten years after I’d graduated, my dad—who never forgets a face—casually mentioned to me that he’d run into Ms. García at the neighborhood Trader Joe’s. They’d had a short conversation, apparently, and she’d asked after me. Remembered me, after all that time.

Curious despite myself, I looked her up on Facebook, and found a profile photo of Ms. García with her arm around another woman, looking at her with the kind of love that couldn’t be misinterpreted.

It was the key I’d desperately needed at fourteen and didn’t know was there.

Oh, I remember thinking. Oh.

In a time when teachers had to stay professionally closeted or risk losing their jobs, Ms. García must have been terrified that my use of the word “lesbian” would get back to the school’s administration. That they would believe she’d encouraged it. Or, even worse, that they might think think she was actively indoctrinating her all-female classes into an “alternative lifestyle.”

Ms. García hadn’t been trying to protect me or the other students from hearing about lesbianism. She’d been trying to protect herself.

I don’t have a clear ending to this old story, not really, except the ending that I can find in myself. I’m happy to say that my alma mater is much more welcoming towards its LGBTQIA+ students these days, and is now one of the very few Catholic schools in this country to be openly trans-affirming. As gratified as I am that there have been major changes in recent years, though, the memory of Ms. García still holds some pain for me.

What happened in that hallway was very mild in some respects, compared to other wounds I’ve experienced, but her reprimand, her command to stay silent about something so raw, still spread under my skin and stayed there. The burn of it fed on a larger shame.

“Write it,” Elizabeth Bishop commands in my favorite poem. It’s an order to face what you haven’t yet: to put it in letters and words and sentences as a way of confronting what haunts you. So, a year ago, I finally listened to Bishop. I wrote.

Curiously, as I wrote, that old pain didn’t disappear. Instead, it expanded. It made space for Ms. García, and what she must have felt when she silenced me in that hallway.

Loser of the Year, my forthcoming sapphic romance novel, centers around two teachers at St. Rita’s, an all-girls’ Catholic high school in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Given the school’s adherence to “traditional values,” faculty, staff, and students are required to conform to an ethics clause prohibiting same-sex relationships, a policy that is still perfectly legal for U.S. religious schools to have.

One of the main characters, Mattie—a newly-divorced Jewish lesbian who’s brand new to St. Rita’s—reluctantly decides to keep her sexuality under wraps at work, just for one school year, out of her desperation for a job. But over the course of the novel, she’s able to find ways to connect with her queer and questioning students, encouraging them to stand up for what they believe is right. Mattie can’t be out at work, but she can create a space for her kids to be who they are.

She’s trying to be a woman of great heart and right conscience. So are many of her students.

I wanted to write a character who did the best she could with a bad and unfair situation. Mattie’s luckier, in a lot of ways, than Ms. García was. She’s in her position as interim faculty, so long-term job security isn’t a concern. And as a millennial, she’s grown up in a slightly more accepting world than Ms. García did. Like Ms. García, though, Mattie has to choose between honesty and a paycheck. It’s a painful line to walk.

I wanted to write a character who finds a way to give her students what I never got.

Ms. García’s name won’t show up on my book’s acknowledgments page. But she’s there in Mattie, and in Mattie’s love interest Jillian, a Catholic who approaches her sexuality in a very different way than Mattie does. In writing both of these characters, I’ve come to forgive Ms. García. I think I understand her a little better.

She did the best she could at the time. It wasn’t what either of us deserved. Both of those statements are true.

The title of this blog post is a quote from Walt Whitman, as rendered in a serigraph by artist Corita Kent. Kent, formerly Sister Mary Corita, was a member of the order that founded my high school and left the Catholic Church. She was one of the foremost figures of the pop art movement and an important voice in 1960s and ‘70s U.S. social justice movements.