I started working with a new therapist today. This person is the fourth therapist I’ve had in the last year. He’s also the first therapist I’ve seen in person since early 2020. He was recommended to me by an organization I trust, is queer and poly-allied, and although I’m a little curious about what seems to be a somewhat significant age difference, we had a good enough first session that I’m looking forward to the next one.
Those of you who are experienced in seeing therapists are already aware of what an intake for new clients looks like. There’s a lot of paperwork, followed by a lot of you telling your therapist your condensed life story while they furiously take notes. Thankfully, this new therapist stressed that he doesn’t do traditional intakes. There was no paperwork, and no note taking. I told him why I was interested in working with him, there were a few “wow”s and “holy shit”s (I try to tell myself that my life is no less normal than the average human’s, but…that’s probably false. I’ve been through some shit, and at the very least, my childhood was highly untraditional.) As I was discussing my dating life, a memory came to me that I had forgotten about. Not sure if I’d blocked it from my memory or if time just greyed the mental picture.
The very first human I dated was this guy named Chris. We met in a WebTV chatroom (if you were born after 1990, Google “WebTV”). He was a chubby, bearded White dude (I bet you’re surprised) that lived at the end of one of the Metro North lines, somewhere between Westchester and Connecticut. Our first meeting was in Grand Central Terminal. That first meeting led to more meetings, and I’m not even sure that we ever acknowledged to one another that we were dating, but in fairly short order I was spending nights at his place (he lived in the basement of his parents’ house). We were both in the closet, him much more than I. He, like me, came from a very religious background. He, unlike me, was still living with his parents (I was renting my aunt’s basement, but aside from the occasional free meal and a washer/dryer in house, it was not much different from my previous and future rental arrangements).
The specific memory I recalled occurred one day during the summer or fall of 2000. The only reason I can be that specific is because we started dating around the time Mad Season by Matchbox Twenty came out and that album, to this day, makes me think of him.
We were in his car driving somewhere (he might have been dropping me at the train station to head back home, I’m not sure). All of a sudden, I heard “oh shit”. Alarmed, I looked up from what I was doing to hear Chris say “I think that’s my dad”.
“I’m gonna need you to duck down so he doesn’t see you if he notices the car.”
See, Chris’s dad was our favorite combination, a homophobe and a racist. Seeing his son driving around with a guy in the passenger seat probably wasn’t a big deal. Seeing his son driving around with a Black guy in the passenger seat was. And I’m not sure if Chris’s request was made to spare me the difficulty of having to encounter his bigoted Dad or to spare him the difficulty of having to explain to his father why he was driving a nigger around (I’m gonna go out on a limb and assume Pops used that word a time or two). Or worse. Would Chris’s dad kick him out of the house for having a Black friend? Disown him?
Without a lot of time to think, I ducked. The whole exercise took maybe three minutes. But I was insulted. And angry. Chris and I talked about it briefly after, but at the age of 24 and in my first anything resembling a relationship with anyone, I didn’t have the language or the self-worth to stand up for myself more vigorously.
Chris and I dated off and on for another few months before I broke things off, and we continued hanging out periodically for another couple of years. There was a period of time when I felt like he was definitely trying to win me back (the all-expenses-paid trip to Disney was one clue), but eventually he met someone else—another Black guy, and they got married, and I believe now have a kid or two. Chris eventually came out to his family and they sort of begrudgingly accepted his sexuality and relationship with conditions (years later, we reconnected on Facebook and he mentioned to me that they still had to sleep in separate beds when they visited his family). So his story ends well, I guess.
New Therapist must have noticed me drifting as I recounted the story.
“I haven’t thought of that incident in a long time,” I sighed.
“What comes to mind now that you remember it?”
“Lots of things…mainly how little I must have valued myself if I allowed that to happen.”
“Yeah, that was the first thing I thought,” he said.
And yes, there’s a lot of context that colors that situation. Our relative youth at that time. A much less forgiving time for people who were queer. If I was 24 now and that situation happened, I don’t think I would’ve been as forgiving as I was then.
I was very forgiving then. And that embarrasses me a little. Makes me wonder how many other little vignettes like that have happened throughout my life that I’ve repressed.
This is a weird thing to be posting on Juneteenth.