The Beautiful Dream of Nobody Cares

After college, just starting out, I lived in San Francisco. My apartment was a tiny studio in the Mission District across the street from a Mexican bakery.

The heat didn’t always come on in cold weather, the hallway carpet was bald, but my place was sunny, I could afford it, and I loved it. The bathroom had an old clawfoot tub and a window that opened onto a fire escape. When I took a bath, the same cat would always come through the window and sit on the tub ledge. I never learned whose cat it was. (I’m allergic to cats, so she had to leave when I toweled off.)

I slowly got to know many of the people in the building. Single moms, a jazz pianist, an elderly lady, an assortment of students, a twentysomething gay couple from South Carolina. (This was still the babyhood of tech, before Silicon Valley salaries smothered the city in renovation. You’d be hard pressed to find a single mom or an elderly person in that building now because they couldn’t afford it.)

Not free?

One spring day, Mike and Ronnie—the gay couple—loaded up their car; they were moving back to South Carolina. We chatted on the street. I was so curious why they were leaving. San Francisco is where, as a gay person, you can live as your full self and be accepted—a place to be free. Had they not felt that? I assumed they had fled the south. I was surprised they were returning there, where they would not be accepted as two men living together in a loving relationship. (This was before the opening of marriage to same sex couples.)

How lucky I was to have walked by just as they were packing the car. The conversation we had—what these men shared—made my world so much bigger.

Mike and Ronnie did not in fact feel free in San Francisco. They felt pressure to be gay a certain way. They didn’t feel full of joy seeing rainbow flags; they felt like the gay community judged and spurned them. So, after a few years, they decided San Francisco wasn’t for them and were going home. They had bought a house near their families, who accepted them. They could live together in South Carolina. Being gay was no big deal in their town. Everyone knew them. No one cared.

That’s when it hit me how many ways, and places, there are to live as your self. Living in the south did not mean Mike and Ronnie were going back in the closet. It's true that a country or a region can be restrictive, biased, even dangerous, but those circumstances don’t play out in every family, neighborhood, city, or time.

Mike and Ronnie did not in fact feel free in San Francisco. They felt pressure to be gay a certain way. They didn’t feel full of joy seeing rainbow flags; they felt like the gay community judged and spurned them

Obviously, I thought as Mike and Ronnie shut their hatchback, waved, and drove off, there are gay people everywhere, living their lives.

Ways and places

That couple helped me make room in my head, years in advance, for my kid. When Izzy came out as trans, I expected she would be out and proud in a certain way once she socially transitioned. But that was the same kind of assumption I had made about Mike and Ronnie.

My idea did not spring from Izzy and what she would eventually blossom into, but my lifelong preoccupation with justice and what that looked like. Marches on Washington, Stonewall, protests, Pride, people who put it all on the line for their community. It just didn’t cross my mind at first that there are many ways to be trans, too. Many forms of pride.

It was hard for me at first to let the trans part of Izzy's self start to assume its right size and shape amid this moral panic. Luckily I remembered San Francisco and realized that Izzy does not need to resemble Mom’s Idea of Trans any more than Mike and Ronnie needed to be Bay Area Gays.

Izzy is not letting down her community. Far from it. She is figuring out who she is, on her terms. She has many parts of herself to explore.

I was talking with a close friend recently, the mom of a trans boy. After being stealth for a few years, he decided to come out at college. Everyone knows, and no one cares—that’s the dream, the world he wants. So he decided to help make that world by living it.

The elderly lady in my apartment building was named Millie. I ran into her right after I said goodbye to Mike and Ronnie. Isn’t it sad they are leaving the building, I said wistfully. Oh, she said. It’s no good to be sentimental.

— N.R.

Noa Rabinow is a health care worker, an editor at Gender Defiant, and the mom of a trans teen.

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