#me: why am i thinking about conversion therapy pamphlets c. 2000 again

[anghraine]

On a less cheerful note, I was thinking with some frustration that I've reached 2024 and somehow I'm still not okay, even though there are so many good things about my life and so many people in it to help me, why am I like this-

And then I was remembering a conversation I had earlier with another early modernist about how her conservative Southern Baptist upbringing led her to feminism and academia, and how I didn't say "I get it" because I didn't want to make it about my Mormon-raised-with-some-Catholic-influence personal issues when I've had basically nothing to do with Southern Baptist anything.

And then I was thinking about discovering lesbians were a real thing via visiting a church bookstore at around... age 12 and seeing pamphlets for conversion therapy. I don't remember clearly what they said, just that they were from Evergreen whatsit and I was scared for years after.

And gradually, I figured out the weird way that people talked about my bio dad's sister was because she's also a lesbian, but her conservative Catholic family found it easier to pretend not to know. This led to a weird conversation a few years ago with my grandmother (bio dad's mother) where she was asking why I never have any men in my life. I mumbled something about just not really being interested, and she was like ... oh, you're like your aunt :)

me: Um—well—yes.

my grandmother: Just so devoted to your career :) There was this wonderful man I thought she really loved, but she just didn't have space in her life for marriage.

me: *blink*

And I was also thinking about, basically, a million other things from growing up in rural US towns when I did. At the time, much of it felt too individually small to justifiably get worked up about, but much of it still rattles around my mind. Some things were bigger than I even realized, in fairness—say, the Evergreen pamphlets represented something much bigger and worse than I really comprehended at that age. I was pretty much on my way out by the time I fully got it (and Evergreen is more or less gone now, I think—while I'm still here and still queer, hah). Some of the gender shit + homophobia of that time seems almost comically trivial in this era of senators ranting about the corrupting filth of LGBT+ people, or alternately it's so dated that even said senators wouldn't bother.

Anyway, it's kind of wild how I just ... don't think about a lot of this a lot of the time, and actively wonder how certain things got so fucked up in my head even though my life has been easy in many ways. And then I'll have this early modern British lit/feminism conversation and not think about it much at the time (we ended up having a perfectly nice conversation about the Pacific Northwest and the deficiencies of Shakespeare scholarship) and have a mostly good day and then somehow end up staring blankly at the wall at quarter to midnight thinking about how scared I was as a teenager.

I do not like being angry tbh. I'm irritable, sure, but rarely actually angry because I find it so unpleasant, even in the fairly slow and cold way that I generally get angry.

But I've been trying to organize my thoughts and I think I might be angry about this. I was more familiar with "gay" as a slur than as a descriptor into my 20s because, see, the church preferred to talk about people struggling with same-sex or same-gender attraction as part of these earthly trials, not gay people. Describing people as gay might be too validating or something, at least then.

And part of the reason this stuff can be so difficult to navigate in the present is that very "at least then." Because things could get far better than has ever actually happened, and it wouldn't make anything better for who I was at 15. I'm the one carrying that around. Not uniquely, since tons of us came out of that environment and others of similar kinds, but—

Okay, ethically, I believe that people always have the choice to simply do better than they did in the past and this should be encouraged. But that doesn't un-do anything for me.

It's fine and good to say, look, certain things are much better than they were in 2000 (or whenever). And that's true, some things are, and I'm not at all sorry about that. But sometimes it seems like those of us who are still around are supposed to just forget the things that shaped us when we were reaching adulthood, like it doesn't matter any more because that was another time and we're in our 30s or older. Like we shouldn't still be affected by our own pasts, even when the main actors are still around and completely unrepentant, or were hateful until the day they died.

I am angry about it, in my way, I suppose.

#me: i really shouldn't be this screwed up. nothing that bad has ever happened to me #[five hours later] #me: why am i thinking about conversion therapy pamphlets c. 2000 again #anghraine babbles #cw religion #cw homophobia #rare breed of attack unicorn #anghraine rants #long post