Jodi Picoult - Sing You Home

When I was growing up in the southern suburbs of Boston, I used to ride my banana bike with glitter streamers up and down the streets of my neighborhood, silently marking the homes of the girls I thought were pretty. At age six, I fully believed that Katie Whittaker, with her sunshine hair and constellation of freckles, would one day marry me and we’d live happily ever after.

I can’t really remember when I realized that wasn’t what all the other girls were thinking, and so I started saying along with the rest of the female second graders that I had a crush on Jared Tischbaum, who was cool enough to play on the travel soccer team and who wore the same jean jacket to school every single day because, once, the actor Robin Williams had touched it in an airport baggage terminal.

I lost my virginity one night in the guest team’s baseball dugout on school grounds with my first boyfriend, Ike. He was sweet and tender and told me I was beautiful-in other words, he did everything right-and yet I remember going home afterward and wondering what all the fuss was about when it came to sex. It had been sweaty and mechanical, and, even though I really did love Ike, something had been missing.

My best friend, Molly, was the person I confided this to. I’d find myself on the phone with her after midnight, dissecting the sinew and skeleton of my relationship with Ike. I’d study with her for a history test and not want to leave. I would make plans to go shopping with her at the mall on Saturday and would breathlessly count down the school days until the weekend came. We’d criticize the shallow girls who started dating guys and no longer had time for their female friends. We vowed to be inseparable.

In October 1998, during my junior year of college, Matthew Shepard-a young, gay University of Wyoming student-was severely beaten and left for dead. I didn’t know Matthew Shepard. I wasn’t a political activist. But my boyfriend at the time and I got on a Greyhound bus and traveled to Laramie to participate in the candlelight vigil at the university. It was when I was surrounded by all those points of light that I could confess what I had been terrified to admit to myself: it could have been me. That I was, and always had been, gay.

And here’s the amazing thing: even after I said it out loud, the world did not stop turning.

I was still a college student majoring in education, with a 3.8 average. I still weighed 121 pounds and preferred chocolate to vanilla and sang with an a cappella group called Son of a Pitch. I swam at the school pool at least twice a week, and I was still much more likely to be found watching Cheers than getting wasted at a frat party. Admitting I was gay changed nothing about who I had been, or who I was going to be.

Part of me worried that I didn’t fit into either camp. I’d never been with a woman, and was afraid that it would be as uneventful for me as fooling around with a guy. What if I wasn’t really gay-just totally, functionally asexual? Plus, there was an added wrinkle to this new social world that I hadn’t considered: the default assumption, when you meet a woman, is that she’s heterosexual (unless you happen to be at an Indigo Girls concert… or a WNBA basketball game). It wasn’t like certain girls sported an L on the forehead, and my gaydar had not yet been finely tuned.

In the end, though, I shouldn’t have worried. The girl who was my lab partner in biochemistry invited me to her dorm room for a study session, and pretty soon we were spending all of our free time together. When I wasn’t with her, I wanted to be. When a professor said something ridiculous or sexist or hilarious, she was the first one I wanted to tell. One Saturday at a football game we shivered in the stands underneath a wool tartan blanket, passing a thermos of hot cocoa laced with Baileys back and forth. The score was close, and during one really important fourth down, she grabbed on to my hand, and even after the touchdown, she didn’t let go. The first time she kissed me, I truly thought I’d had an aneurysm-my pulse was thundering so loud and my senses were exploding. This, I remember thinking, the only word I could hold on to in a sea of feelings.

After that, I could look back with twenty-twenty vision and see that I never had boundaries with my female friends. I wanted to see their baby pictures and listen to their favorite songs and fix my hair the same way they fixed theirs. I would hang up the phone and think of one more thing I had to say. I wouldn’t have defined it as a physical attraction-it was more of an emotional attachment. I could never quite get enough, but I never let myself ask what “enough” really was.

Believe me, being gay is not a choice. No one would choose to make life harder than it has to be, and no matter how confident and comfortable a gay person is, he or she can’t control the thoughts of others. I’ve had people move out of my row in a movie theater if they see me holding hands with a woman-apparently disgusted by our public display of affection when, one row behind us, a teenage couple is practically undressing each other. I’ve had the word DYKE written on my car in spray paint. I’ve had parents request that their child be moved to a different school counselor’s jurisdiction, parents who, when asked for a reason why, say that my “educational philosophy” doesn’t match theirs.

You can argue that it’s a different world now than the one when Matthew Shepard was killed, but there is a subtle difference between tolerance and acceptance. It’s the distance between moving into the cul-de-sac and having your next-door neighbor trust you to keep an eye on her preschool daughter for a few minutes while she runs out to the post office. It’s the chasm between being invited to a colleague’s wedding with your same-sex partner and being able to slow-dance without the other guests whispering.

I remember my mother telling me that, when she was a little girl in Catholic school, the nuns used to hit her left hand every time she wrote with it. Nowadays, if a teacher did that, she’d probably be arrested for child abuse. The optimist in me wants to believe sexuality will eventually become like handwriting: there’s no right way and wrong way to do it. We’re all just wired differently.

It’s also worth noting that, when you meet someone, you never bother to ask if he’s right- or left-handed.

After all: Does it really matter to anyone other than the person holding the pen?

The longest relationship I’ve ever had with a woman is with Rajasi, my hairdresser. Every four weeks I go to her to get my roots dyed blond and my hair trimmed into its shaggy pixie cut. But today Rajasi is furious and punctuating her sentences with angry snips of the scissors. “Um,” I say, squinting at my bangs in the mirror. “Isn’t that a little short?”

“An arranged marriage!” Rajasi says. “Can you believe it? We came here from India twenty years ago. We’re as American as it comes. My parents eat at McDonald’s once a week, for God’s sake.”

“Maybe if you told them-”

A hunk of hair flies past my eyes. “They had my boyfriend over for dinner last Friday,” Rajasi huffs. “Did they honestly think I’d ditch the guy I’ve been dating for three years because some decrepit old Punjabi is willing to give them a bunch of chickens for a dowry?”

“Chickens?” I say. “Really?”

“I don’t know. That’s not the point.” She is still cutting, lost in her rant. “Is it or is it not 2011?” Rajasi says. “Shouldn’t I be allowed to marry whomever I want?”

“Honey,” I reply, “you are preaching to the choir.”

I live in Rhode Island, one of the only states in New England to not have recognized same-sex marriage. For this reason, couples who want to get hitched cross the border into Fall River, Massachusetts. It seems simple enough, but it actually creates a thicket of issues. I have friends, two gay men, who tied the knot in Massachusetts and then, five years later, split up. Their property and assets were all in Rhode Island, where they lived. But because their marriage was never legal in the state, they couldn’t actually get divorced.